News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:AI Recognises Race in Medical Images by drdeca on Tuesday September 14, 2021 @02:39PM (#28528974)
The following is a response to only your first paragraph:

Huh? If the distributions of bone densities among “people you would visually identify as ‘race X’ ” and “people you would visually identify as ‘race Y’ ” differ, then knowing that an individual would be someone you would visually identify as ‘race X’, gives you some amount of statistical information about their bone density.

I guess you just mean that you can’t make any high-confidence statements that are substantially different than if you didn’t have that information?

Small note on second paragraph: I don’t think the racial categories in question are even half-biblical? I mean, I know in the Old Testament there are lots of things referring to e.g. edomites, or Amalekites, etc. , but I don’t think these are really like, “races”, and I can’t think of anything that really supports the idea of a fixed set of racial categories. But perhaps I’m forgetting/missing something.

Re:AI Recognises Race in Medical Images by ceejayoz on Tuesday September 14, 2021 @03:37PM (#28529910)
> If the distributions of bone densities among “people you would visually identify as ‘race X’ ” and “people you would visually identify as ‘race Y’ ” differ, then knowing that an individual would be someone you would visually identify as ‘race X’, gives you some amount of statistical information about their bone density.

Only if they differ substantially. If they look like https://evergreenleadership.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/B..., you can't conclude much from an individual's bone density measurement, even if "people of race X have 3% more bone density than people of race Y".

Re:AI Recognises Race in Medical Images by drdeca on Tuesday September 14, 2021 @07:13PM (#28532788)
I took the word "anything" too literally.

I interpreted "conclude anything from" as "have a different posterior probability distribution" rather than "have a significantly different posterior probability distribution". This was an error on my part.

Thanks for the elaboration.