Yes, but that doesn't mean representative of all minorities. Very few Black people and Native Americans, for instance, even if Asian people are represented well.

This is immaterial. What about blind folks or quadriplegics or folks with chromosomal defects. Adding a black person to a team and expecting them to somehow fix anything beyond what they are trained at working on is unfair and unrealistic.

I mentioned before but this is the team that created the PULSE algorithm that made Obama look like a white guy from Arizona - https://cdn.telanganatoday.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Au...

When the rationale is that having someone with an experience of being disadvantaged might be particularly inclined to help build a less biased system, one hardly refutes it by pointing out there are a lot of [not very disadvantaged] minorities on the team.

But one might earn some pedantry points with the argument.

What's the chance that a black engineer on an ML team doing work like this isn't also from the 'corporate(or educated) class'.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23697472

Black cops shoot black men all day long. I don't see why black ML folks are going to be completely immune to all of the pressures that have allowed the domain to get to its current state. While I'm sure many would accept the challenge, it's waaay too much to ask or expect of them.

Yes absolutely this issue needs diverse perspectives and the priorities they bring, but it will fail without objective standards to ensure that technology in the field reliably meets our expectations.

> Yes absolutely this issue needs diverse perspectives and the priorities they bring, but it will fail without objective standards to ensure that technology in the field reliably meets our expectations.

It sounds like we mostly agree. It certainly doesn't hurt to have someone who's been the subject of unfair profiling before to get his spidey sense going at the implications of the system, but it isn't a cure-all.

Yep!

Sure, and in some cases that does matter. But it seems unlikely that the PULSE model was biased towards white people because of latent racism, given that 3 of the 5 researchers who built it weren't white.