If fairness is impossible then it has to be fine to do (minimally, at least) unfair things because there is no other option.

Another possibility is that the poor definition of what is fair is used in some contexts.

Again, this is a problem with global versus local context.

Just a made up scenario. You have 2 gallons of water and two people. You give each one gallon of water, which should be enough to survive. One lives and one dies. Why? The water was split fairly.

For example one could live in the hot desert in which more water is required, and the other lives in a temperate environment where either less water is required, or water can be gathered from this environment.

But just think how messy it is to compute fairness in a situation like this. Suddenly it's looking like a NP style problem. People on the other hand typically want cheap and easy solutions.

And if the people who end up on the wrong end of those decisions push back, what are you going to do? Shrug, cite the "impossibility of fairness", and tell them to suck it up? That's a short road to a very unpleasant backlash. Fairness is deeply important to most human beings.

How does that make the impossible possible? If fairness is impossible we have to somehow deal with some amount of unfairness. That does not depend on having a good proposal for dealing with unfairness.

The people who have been fucked over will eventually take what they think should be theirs by whatever means they think appropriate. That's how you end up with Trump and even worse.

Sure. Grant that that's terrible. Or substitute even worse outcomes. That doesn't mean we can require fairness if fairness is impossible. I think people are assuming I'm making a broader case than I've meant to...

Buy a gun or vehicle? Because if you are at the mercy of insane, irrational, and potentially violent actors there is nothing other than force which can guarantee safety. They will call it unfair that their victim fought back and that three or more on one went to the one. Because fairness is a solipsistic, narcissistic standard that cannot be objectively defined. It is more a rhetorical device than anything logic related as you can argue any standard as fair or unfair.

> it just boils down to saying that it is fine to do unfair things to get results you want

A more responsible take:

We have to acknowledge that there are tradeoffs and that reasonable stakeholders with accountability should apply relevant standards to certain contexts. Again, this is possible in-the-box and post-box without having to manipulate or funge data (not to diminish the importance of data processsing).

Just because satisfying everyone is impossible doesn't mean we can't make things better. And knowing what these tradeoffs are can allow for more nuanced conversations.

> "Impossibility of fairness" is the main argument for discrimination against Asians

This is just a ridiculous statement. Main argument from whom? Discrimination in what contexts?

> This is just a ridiculous statement. Main argument from whom? Discrimination in what contexts?

"impossibility of fairness" is to support the argument that it is fair to discriminate against races if it means that we can get the racial distribution we want. College admission does this all the time. When companies does this in black box models we don't see what they do, but we know for a fact the effect of such policies on the processes we have more insight in, such as college admission, and the end result is discrimination against Asians.

Wrapping that in a flowery language doesn't change anything. Why not just admit that you support discriminating against races to improve diversity numbers, because that is exactly what the statement is about?

> "impossibility of fairness" is to support the argument that it is fair to discriminate against races if it means that we can get the racial distribution we want.

That is not at all what it means. That paper is purely talking the tradeoffs between individual and group fairness. The discussions on how to balance different group fairness measures is still an active topic of research and not something I commented on at all.

In general: What AI ethics papers on algorithmic fairness have a predetermined racial distribution to reach or suggest so?

> Why not just admit that you support discriminating against races to improve diversity numbers, because that is exactly what the statement is about?

Have you read that paper? Seems like you are driving these ideas to a political lens that I or that paper didn't suggest at all (and a completely invalid one I might add).

edit: I can't reply to the response but that person must be referring to a different paper. And I have never read an algorithmic fairness paper that dictates which fairness tradeoffs are correct or that it is fair to always upend group fairness over individual fairness.

> Fairness is possible if you don't care about diversity distributions, or at least the paper gives no argument why fairness doesn't work then.

in particular, this statement completely discards the idea of different definitions of fairness and how they relate.

> Have you read that paper?

Yes. They say that you can't get the diversity distribution you want without discriminating against races. Fairness is possible if you don't care about diversity distributions, or at least the paper gives no argument why fairness doesn't work then.

> That paper is purely talking the tradeoffs between individual and group fairness

Exactly, we must discriminate against individual Asians in order to get the distributions we want. Too many Asians on campus? Discriminate against Asian individuals to get more "group fairness", yes that is what it means! I just clarified the point, but we are saying the same thing.

Can you link to the paper you read? My search only revealed https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.01195 which has no mention whatsoever of the old fashioned idea of "races".

It is a dog whistle, the groups they talk about includes race, and based on how such people act it is obviously a paper made to encourage racism. By having published that paper now the racists can motivate their racism by saying "Fairness is impossible, I have to be racist here, just see this paper!", I don't think that such behaviour should be encouraged and I don't want racist dog whistles to get any support.

Otherwise the paper is pointless. Fairness is still possible as long as you disregard unrelated groupings, just look at the individuals relevant traits and evaluate those so fairness isn't impossible at all. Fairness is only impossible if you want some race or group to get a certain number of spots and they wont get those with a fair distribution, in that case you made fairness impossible since you added an extra requirement, but that isn't what most people mean with fairness. The only reason to add that requirement is that you want to treat a specific group unfairly, and the most salient such group are Asians in college.

You think a paper that talks about different groups is "pointless" unless it's specifically addressing one country's racism issues?

I think you should seriously take a step back and consider this from an outside point of view.

By which I mean, to a non American your obsession seems very very strange.

Yet I am the one who ate downvotes. Some very political stuff going on.

More fundamentally it comes to down to deep problems in social choice theory. For one thing you can't aggregate people's utility functions which makes it impossible to prove that any distribution of wealth is more or less optimal, just, or however you want to frame it. You're left with the weak libertarian argument that "any voluntary fraud-free transaction improves the world" because you can show that it raises the utility function of the participants.

It's not only about discriminating against races in trying to impose diversity but also discriminating against genders and sexual orientation. Maybe religion, too.