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Nice interactives. The framing seems flawed since all preference is referred to as a "bias". > Small individual bias can lead to large collective bias. There
by crackercrews 5y ago
Nice interactives. The framing seems flawed since all preference is referred to as a "bias".
> Small individual bias can lead to large collective bias.
There are many reasons people might want to live near some other people who are similar to themselves. Some are purely practical, like language and food. It is not clear how much of the total preference is rooted in these sorts of practical realities as opposed to "bias" that would not exist in an ideal world. Referring to all preferences as biases strikes me as sloppy.
- civilized 5y ago> Referring to all preferences as biases strikes me as sloppy. It would be sloppy if it were not deliberate. I noticed nobody was accused of gentrification in this simulation.
- zamfi 5y agoBias is the mathematical term for consistent behavior in one direction of an engineered system. The polygons are not people, they are trivial mathematical agents with explicit bias, they do not have preferences. It is absolutely deliberate and not sloppy.
- crackercrews 5y ago> The polygons are not people, they are trivial mathematical agents with explicit bias The author is clearly talking about people: > So, fellow shapes, remember it's not about triangles vs squares, it's about deciding what we want the world to look like, and settling for no less.
- zamfi 5y agoSure, the author is trying to make an argument about people by showing what happens in systems of simplified agents. That doesn’t change the fact that the polygons are not people. Crash test dummies are also not people, despite usefully standing in for people in crash tests.
- crackercrews 5y agoI was trying to be generous. Perhaps I overshot.
- zamfi 5y agoI'm fairly certain they're using a mathematical meaning for bias. Yes, all preference in this case is "bias" because it affects the system in a consistent way. If you're an engineer, you're probably already familiar with this form of bias: a system that always exhibits a preference for some type of inputs, for example, a computer vision system that always categorizes green-tinged images as "cats", is exhibiting bias, not "preference" -- as in this simulation, there's nothing personal going on, it's literally just numbers in a matrix.