
Is your software racist? - dsr12
https://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2018/02/07/algorithmic-bias-software-recommendations-000631
======
anonytrary
More like "Does your software use math to establish statistical correlations
in data, and does that make you angry?"

Relevant excerpt:

> [A Microsoft researcher] said that omitting variables like gender and race
> in different algorithms isn’t always the solution to countering bias. In
> some cases, like medical predictions, these variables could be important to
> accuracy. And there can be other variables, like ZIP codes, that can
> correlate with race and introduce bias into models that don’t explicitly
> include race.

~~~
jrs95
Yeah, this has way more to do with limits in software implementations than
anything else imo. But of course the implication in some of the language in
this article is that we wouldn’t have this problem if we just got rid of the
white men.

I have a different suggestion. Let’s just give control of the software
development process to the HR department and see if they can eliminate these
issues and effectively deliver products at the same time.

------
jimmywanger
Take this example.

Black people are 37.8% of the prison population[0] and 12.3% of the general
population[1].

They also have 72% of babies being born out of wedlock[2], compared to 29% of
white-non hispanic babies[2].

Both those factors correlate to higher probabilities of crime in the future[3]
and higher incarceration rates[4]

So they are ~3x overrepresented in the prison population.

So no. Even if you drop race, black people will generally be more highly
targeted by any sort of fair algorithm. There is no thing as a racist
algorithm or racist data. There can be racist systems and policy causing this
data to be generated and can be looked for and targeted by algorithms, but
even without taking race into account, just dealing with the current
algorithm, the software is accurate and doing its job.

Most modern science was caused by people questioning the status quo and
challenging political orthodoxy.

[0][https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_race....](https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_race.jsp)

[1][https://www.google.com/search?q=percentage+of+blacks+in+amer...](https://www.google.com/search?q=percentage+of+blacks+in+america&rlz=1CAHPZR_enUS781US781&oq=percentage+of+black&aqs=chrome.2.69i57j0l5.5520j0j1&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8)

[2][https://www.google.com/search?q=percentage+of+blacks+in+amer...](https://www.google.com/search?q=percentage+of+blacks+in+america&rlz=1CAHPZR_enUS781US781&oq=percentage+of+black&aqs=chrome.2.69i57j0l5.5520j0j1&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8)

[3][http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-
meter/statements/2013/jul/...](http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-
meter/statements/2013/jul/29/don-lemon/cnns-don-lemon-says-more-72-percent-
african-americ/)

[4][https://familyinequality.wordpress.com/2011/10/20/single-
par...](https://familyinequality.wordpress.com/2011/10/20/single-parents-
crime-and-incarceration/)

