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Re:‘What Do You Think Is the Most Important Problem Facing T... by fao_ on Tuesday February 28, 2017 @07:57AM (#13753381)
"""There is some model for "justified" that you have, and the data either lets you justify welfare or does not (and tells you the degree to which it is so, if your thinking process is worth anything)."""

Your mistake is assuming the data is objective in the first place, and doesn't, a) contain the societal bias at the time it was written, b) contain the bias of the authors that made the study, and c) contain any inherent bias in the metrics used.

Re:‘What Do You Think Is the Most Important Problem Facing T... by TeMPOraL on Tuesday February 28, 2017 @08:28AM (#13753543)
Of course the data may be biased. But as I said, reality has to add to a coherent whole (that's basically an axiom of reasoning without which we may as well pack our bags and go back to living in caves) - so with enough data, an AI should be able to filter out the bias.
Re:‘What Do You Think Is the Most Important Problem Facing T... by fao_ on Tuesday February 28, 2017 @09:45AM (#13754047)
You assume that all of the biases will eventually cancel out. This is not necessarily correct, especially in the case of societal bias -- an example of this is racism, where everyone went out of their way to find reasons why PoC were inferior to white people; we know this to be false (At least, the majority of the world does. America is still having some problems with this), but still have hundereds of years of biased data to the opposite effect, because of societal attitudes. This trap falls hand in hand with the fact that large amounts of scientific data is not being published (Example, clinical research: [1][2][3])

All the AI knows is the training set. This is given a necessary bias by the researchers in the process of creating the AI. The best an AI can do is exaggerate the biases that it learned from the training set (Which is, after all, the main point of using AIs -- to exaggerate favorable biases to produce data that the researches believe is valid).

[1]: www.badscience.net/2009/10/and-now-nerd-news/ [2]: https://www.researchgate.net/topic/Negative-Data-in-Science [3]: http://www.nature.com/news/half-of-us-clinical-trials-go-unp...

Re:‘What Do You Think Is the Most Important Problem Facing T... by Arizhel on Tuesday February 28, 2017 @12:21PM (#13755441)
>(At least, the majority of the world does. America is still having some problems with this)

The rise of far-right politicians in Europe indicates that America is not alone here.

Re:‘What Do You Think Is the Most Important Problem Facing T... by coldtea on Tuesday February 28, 2017 @04:48PM (#13758330)
>But as I said, reality has to add to a coherent whole

External reality might. Reality of what people want, what we think is best, etc, doesn't.

And even the external reality part is close to impossible to access and convey to others whether it "adds to a coherent whole" in all situations or not.