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Re:In Amazon Go, no one thinks I'm stealing by deialtrous on Sunday October 28, 2018 @07:45AM (#18320222)
>so they weren't targeted because they're white, they were targeted because they proved to be the highest risk.

Which is precisely why blacks are "profiled" or "targetted" even by computers. And yet the media tells us this is because "AI is racist" and because of the "legacy of colonialism" and absurd nonsense like that.

Re:In Amazon Go, no one thinks I'm stealing by fossuser on Sunday October 28, 2018 @07:54AM (#18320241)
That’s a jump that is a problem.

The issue is that the pattern matching reinforces the problem based on race when race is not the cause. There are lots of historical reasons someone could be be a bad credit risk for example, but it isn’t because they’re black or some other race.

You want the algorithm to account for cause not correlated patterns that reinforce racial divisions and then perpetuate the inequality.

Re:In Amazon Go, no one thinks I'm stealing by deialtrous on Sunday October 28, 2018 @08:52PM (#18324173)
You simply want race to not be the cause. But all available evidence says it is. When people try to "fix" the evil racist computers by restricting the algorithm from using race, it simply finds proxies for race like "number of liquor stores per capita".
Re:In Amazon Go, no one thinks I'm stealing by fossuser on Sunday October 28, 2018 @10:33PM (#18324585)
That’s because race is correlated with everything since racial divisions have a long history and share a lot of circumstances.

It’s not because of the color of someone’s skin. It’s not even clear where racial lines are drawn and previously distinct “races” have disappeared into the general “Caucasian” label depending on time period.

Your comments are why it’s a problem - people are unable to understand the difference and overfit to patterns in the data. Our learning shares a similar problem to ML.

When you don’t correct for this it hurts people of that race and helps to perpetuate the imbalance - reinenforcing the historical data and increasing inequality.

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Re:In Amazon Go, no one thinks I'm stealing by zimpenfish on Tuesday October 30, 2018 @11:13AM (#18337296)
> It is abundantly clear

https://www.cell.com/ajhg/pdf/S0002-9297%2818%2930363-X.pdf

"Genetics demonstrates that humans cannot be divided into biologically distinct subcategories."

"Most human genetic variation is distributed as a gradient, so distinct boundaries between population groups cannot be accurately assigned."

etc.etc.

Re:In Amazon Go, no one thinks I'm stealing by deialtrous on Tuesday October 30, 2018 @03:49PM (#18340656)
https://mathildasanthropologyblog.wordpress.com/2009/11/01/l...

You can only make that claim by examining a single locus. When you examine multiple loci, human populations are clearly separated into distinct groups. The fact that this oft repeated myth is so commonly addressed that it is a named fallacy should be an indication that it warrants a little investigation into its accuracy. Here's a handy graph to help visualize how Lewontin's claim is dishonest and false: https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S03069877090053...

If you want to argue about the science, please research the subject first. There's no way anyone could do even a cursory bit of research and not come across this as it has been beaten to death, resurrected, and re-beaten to death.

Re:In Amazon Go, no one thinks I'm stealing by zimpenfish on Wednesday October 31, 2018 @05:08AM (#18344186)
I appreciate that it's a Claim To Authority but I'm going to take the collective word of the American Society of Human Genetics in 2018 over an anthropology student's blog post from 2009 without an astonishing amount of evidence to the contrary.