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It is pretty offensive and misguided at minimum to argue that having more black people in your neighbourhood will depress housing prices. I think that's the w
by version_five 4y ago
It is pretty offensive and misguided at minimum to argue that having more black people in your neighbourhood will depress housing prices.
I think that's the wrong lens to look at this through. I'm happy to concede your statement about it being offensive is true (although I think from a purely statistical perspective, correlations with poverty, etc probably make the assumption correct. Before 2015 or so when we all lost it, it would only be racist to say there was a causal relationship between race and price, not a correlation). Anyway, that's all an aside.
It's the purging of a dataset, a toy dataset in this context, for a reason of political correctness, that I don't support. If you look hard enough at anything, you can probably find a way to call it racist or some similar slur. If we start applying this lens to tools like scikit learn, we go down a path I don't agree with, that's completely performative in terms of actually addressing any wrongs, and is a continuing distraction from what could be useful work. Debating if and how racist this is is immaterial imo to whether or not we should erase everything doesn't align with modern hypersensitivity about political correctness
- micromacrofoot 4y agoYou're missing the fact that there are a lot of reasons the data itself is actually bad... another commenter shared a reasonable analysis: https://medium.com/@docintangible/racist-data-destruction-113e3eff54a8 https://medium.com/@docintangible/racist-data-destruction-11... So even if you want to ignore the fact that the data was outright used to discriminate in the past, the data itself is actually flawed in several ways...
- skfingngihg 4y agoI’m sure we can find flaws in any number of the included data sets, but we’re not excluding those, right? Why are people singling out this one dataset?
- micromacrofoot 4y agobecause this one is flawed and comes with some racist presumptions made by the people that originally correlated the data (the presumption being that black people moving into a neighborhood decreases property values... a particularly white-biased correlation without causation)
- threeseed 4y ago> If you look hard enough at anything, you can probably find a way to call it racist or some similar slur. Which is such an insane premise that it's hard to take the rest of your point seriously.