Re:600k Images Removed from ImageNet After Art Project Expos...
by AstralStorm on Tuesday September 24, 2019 @01:16AM
(#21056784)
The main question remains: what price do you want to pay for procedural fairness, why is it even a major goal?
Most people would probably opt for utility mixed with representational fairness of some degree even when it means law applies to some degree differently to groups and special cases.
Justice is not fairness. It has an institution called motive. (Which is often overly simplified or ignored.)
It incorporates elements of fairness. And it is hard to train. Not everyone can be Solomon, for example.
Say in your example of criminality, if black people were more predicted by the classifier, it isn't racist if it accurately reflects the base distribution. There's a line to be crossed here, and to me it's if that application starts to significantly (where the boundary lies here is up for debate), and directly affect the non-criminal portion. I'd say that if the misclassification error is similar across racial lines, then there is no issue.
Additionally, I don't quite agree with the "making racial biases worse" argument either. The way I see it, we already use racial heuristics in law enforcement. With automated, replicable tasks, we can at least quantify the degree of bias and correct for such.