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A comment on How Elon Musk and Y Combinator Plan to Stop Computers from Taking Over. Parent comment

Re:How Elon Musk and Y Combinator Plan to Stop Computers fro... by TeMPOraL on Friday December 11, 2015 @07:41PM (#10721181)
It's a hairy problem. Not understanding statistics goes both ways - and from what I've seen, it usually leads to overestimating the value of human input. People are quick to distrust or reject machine's judgment when it disagrees with their biases and generally, it's much easier to debias a machine (or code it properly in the first place) than to debias humans.

While I agree that humans may enshrine their prejudices in code which will later will turn hard to adjust, again what I fear more is a reverse scenario. A machine can be perfectly fair and people won't like it, because it fails to apply the biases they want. People often apply counter-discrimination to compensate for what they believe is unfair treatment.

A mandatory class in statistics and applied probability theory could maybe help the next generation to accept that what is fair may not look so at a first glance.

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Re:How Elon Musk and Y Combinator Plan to Stop Computers fro... by johncolanduoni on Friday December 11, 2015 @11:54PM (#10721836)
> A mandatory class in statistics and applied probability theory could maybe help the next generation to accept that what is fair may not look so at a first glance.

To be honest, I don't think this will help much since most people won't interested in it and will forget what they learn as soon as the class is over. Also, being an expert in statistics can help you better understand reality, or it can help you present data in a way that confirms your biases (even unintentionally). It's sort of like sophistry, except not quite to that degree or moral ambivalence.

edit: If you want a good example of this, see Scott Alexander show how parapsychology can actually come up with some pretty good statistics while appearing to check off all the right boxes with regard to experimental design: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/28/the-control-group-is-ou...

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