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This makes a whole lotta sense till you remember the whole death penalty thing. Now I realize that's why the length seems off. You're responding as if the issu

This makes a whole lotta sense till you remember the whole death penalty thing. Now I realize that's why the length seems off. You're responding as if the issue at hand is whether anyone else also is assigned the death penalty disproportionately.

AnthonyMouse 3y ago
> This makes a whole lotta sense till you remember the whole death penalty thing. This is the whole death penalty thing. Speakers of AAVE are statistically more likely to commit crimes that impose the death penalty, even more likely than the African American population as a whole. LLMs operate on the basis of statistics. It has nothing to do with race or crime, it will do the same thing with any other statistical correlation. If you tell it someone is a corn farmer it will be more likely to emit output that implies they're from Iowa.
- refulgentis 3y ago
  I honestly don't know what this has to do with anything. These comments all stop short of a claim other than "makes sense, they're black!", but for some reason they're afraid to say that. And I don't think it's because of Woke Cancel Culture. I think it's because it makes absolutely 0 sense to say "sure, why not? AIs _should_ assign people who sound like blacks harsher penalties for the same crime! Blacks commit more crimes!" Is it possible you forgot it's the exact same case facts, just with some words swapped? I gotta tell you, as a white person who grew up in Low Status neighborhoods, I'm against it. Terrifying.
  - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
    > I think it's because it makes absolutely 0 sense to say "sure, why not? AIs _should_ assign people who sound like blacks harsher penalties for the same crime! Blacks commit more crimes!" If your goal was to make the most accurate predictions given incomplete data, that is in fact what you would do, because taking into account every data point, including that one, would improve predictive accuracy. And that's what LLMs do. Of course, that isn't what we want in this context, because taking race into account is bad and illegal and gets everyone's hackles up because of the history. The normal way we handle this is just by taking it out -- you don't allow someone's race to be a question on the mortgage application, and then the bank doesn't know it. You can do the same thing with LLMs -- don't tell it someone's race if you don't want it to consider that. But it has never been possible to fully remove the implications of it because they leak into everything, and that has nothing to do with LLMs. The mortgage application doesn't ask about race, but it asks about income and credit score and employment etc., all of which correlate with race. You can't not ask about those kinds of things because they're critical to knowing if someone has the capacity to make their payments. This is a really hard problem to solve for humans who can only take into account a limited amount of information. But it's not that hard of a problem to solve for computers, as I've already explained. The more information you give them, the less weight they have to put on any individual piece, including the ones you don't want considered. Whereas if you're trying to be a troll what you do is only give them the one piece that causes them to make unsavory inferences and nothing they could use to infer any other conclusion, i.e. the exact opposite of that. Which is what we see from people trying to stir up controversy.

AnthonyMouse 3y ago

> This makes a whole lotta sense till you remember the whole death penalty thing. This is the whole death penalty thing. Speakers of AAVE are statistically more likely to commit crimes that impose the death penalty, even more likely than the African American population as a whole. LLMs operate on the basis of statistics. It has nothing to do with race or crime, it will do the same thing with any other statistical correlation. If you tell it someone is a corn farmer it will be more likely to emit output that implies they're from Iowa.

refulgentis 3y ago
I honestly don't know what this has to do with anything. These comments all stop short of a claim other than "makes sense, they're black!", but for some reason they're afraid to say that. And I don't think it's because of Woke Cancel Culture. I think it's because it makes absolutely 0 sense to say "sure, why not? AIs _should_ assign people who sound like blacks harsher penalties for the same crime! Blacks commit more crimes!" Is it possible you forgot it's the exact same case facts, just with some words swapped? I gotta tell you, as a white person who grew up in Low Status neighborhoods, I'm against it. Terrifying.
- AnthonyMouse 3y ago
  > I think it's because it makes absolutely 0 sense to say "sure, why not? AIs _should_ assign people who sound like blacks harsher penalties for the same crime! Blacks commit more crimes!" If your goal was to make the most accurate predictions given incomplete data, that is in fact what you would do, because taking into account every data point, including that one, would improve predictive accuracy. And that's what LLMs do. Of course, that isn't what we want in this context, because taking race into account is bad and illegal and gets everyone's hackles up because of the history. The normal way we handle this is just by taking it out -- you don't allow someone's race to be a question on the mortgage application, and then the bank doesn't know it. You can do the same thing with LLMs -- don't tell it someone's race if you don't want it to consider that. But it has never been possible to fully remove the implications of it because they leak into everything, and that has nothing to do with LLMs. The mortgage application doesn't ask about race, but it asks about income and credit score and employment etc., all of which correlate with race. You can't not ask about those kinds of things because they're critical to knowing if someone has the capacity to make their payments. This is a really hard problem to solve for humans who can only take into account a limited amount of information. But it's not that hard of a problem to solve for computers, as I've already explained. The more information you give them, the less weight they have to put on any individual piece, including the ones you don't want considered. Whereas if you're trying to be a troll what you do is only give them the one piece that causes them to make unsavory inferences and nothing they could use to infer any other conclusion, i.e. the exact opposite of that. Which is what we see from people trying to stir up controversy.