
Teaching yourself about structural racism will improve your machine learning - joker3
https://academic.oup.com/biostatistics/advance-article/doi/10.1093/biostatistics/kxz040/5631851
======
ralusek
I think beyond not feeding race in as a _feature_ to any model, this stuff is
mostly nonsense. If you include race as a feature, then I think it's likely
that the model will become racist, because race is so highly correlated to
behaviors and patterns which are in large part the consequence of all sorts of
things, including historical racism, that a model could easily mistake race as
a causal factor. If you don't feed race in as a feature, however, the outputs
are hardly racist. My impression has been that by and large the argument
_actually_ being made is that "we have been trying to correct for historical
injustices by actively using race and gender as mechanisms for advantaging
minorities and women, and an unbiased model is not properly accounting for
these particular objectives."

Take something like a bank loan. If you had a model at a bank which took
credit score, income, wealth, and collateral into account, black Americans
would have loans rejected at a higher rate than white Americans. Is this model
racist? No, this model doesn't even know what race is, all it knows is credit
scores, income, wealth, and collateral. Does the fact that black Americans
used to be slaves in the US, or were kept out of certain housing markets,
contribute towards the fact that black Americans, on average, have lower
credit scores, income, wealth, and collateral? Of course. But is this model
racist? Literally not at all. It is completely unbiased, and exactly what the
model _should_ be. If the case you're making is that you think that there
should be a national effort to correct for historical injustices that were
done by the state by actively discriminating by race, that is a _completely_
different discussion.

Having all of our decision-making apparatuses factor in the infinite pile of
historical injustices that may have contributed to an individual's particular
circumstances is not the way to go. Keep models simple and limited to what is
relevant for that particular criteria. Fix injustices further upstream, or you
make the whole system a convoluted nightmare.

~~~
chongli
_If the case you 're making is that you think that there should be a national
effort to correct for historical injustices that were done by the state by
actively discriminating by race, that is a completely different discussion._

That _is_ what proponents of the structural racism model are doing. Here's an
example I took from the book _Weapons of Math Destruction_ :

When people are convicted of a crime, they undergo a number of personality
tests, including the LSI-R (Level of Service Inventory - Revised). This is a
highly detailed questionnaire that asks about prior convictions, whether the
prisoner had accomplices in their crimes, whether drugs or alcohol were
involved, etc.

It does not ask about race.

What it does ask about are things which highly correlate with race, such as
the number of police encounters (no criminal suspicion necessary), the number
of friends/family/neighbours who have committed crimes, etc. If two first-time
offenders have committed identical crimes but one of them grew up in wealthy
suburbs and the other grew up in the rough inner city, they will receive very
different scores on the LSI-R.

So what do they use the LSI-R for? They feed it into a model which assigns the
offender a recidivism risk score. Then they use that risk factor directly when
determining the person's sentence, restrictions, parole eligibility, etc.

So now we're not even talking about historical injustices, we're talking about
_ongoing injustice_ based on historical injustice. It's a vicious cycle, or a
negative feedback loop, if you will. This is a serious problem!

Edit: Just to add another piece of the puzzle, the reason wealthy suburbs vs
rough inner cities correlate so highly with race is a direct result of the
historical racist practices of redlining [1] and white flight [2]. Now combine
that with grinding poverty (also a result of redlining and segregation) and
the war on drugs, and the result is high-crime neighbourhoods in the inner
city. Those high crime neighbourhoods attract highly increased police
presence, which leads to more convictions, which leads to more patrols, etc.
This is another vicious cycle which feeds into the above statistical model.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight)

~~~
ralusek
I assume that the LSI-R is something that is actually trained based off of how
much those factors actually predict the rate of recidivism, though, no? If
friends/family/neighbors who have committed crimes is an accurate predictor of
recidivism, the fact that black Americans in the inner city have more
friends/family/neighbors who have committed crimes does not make the model
racist. They're either good predictors or they're not. A black kid in the
inner city with friends/family/neighbors who have committed crimes very likely
_does_ have a higher rate of recidivism than a white kid in the suburbs, and
if this weren't true, but was being predicted by the model, then this would
simply be a bad model. If it turns out that there are many black kids who
happen to live near neighbors who've committed crimes, but actually do not
have a higher rate of recidivism, then the model is as racist as it is using a
poorly correlated indicators of recidivism.

Your indicator for whether or not a model is racist cannot simply be that the
model produces outputs that are delineated by race in such a manner that is
unpalatable. So long as the model is actually not using race as a means of
predicting outcomes, though, any behavior that is racist would simply be due
to including poor features.

~~~
chongli
I think you’re still missing the point. Whether the model is accurate or not
is beside the point. A completely accurate model may indeed show a higher
recidivism risk for an inner city kid compared to one from the suburbs. If
it’s used in sentencing or other life-affecting decisions then it’s going to
_amplify_ historical injustices.

People commit more crimes when they have less opportunity. People have less
opportunity when they grow up in high crime neighbourhoods. This is a negative
feedback loop which was started by slavery and accelerated by segregation and
redlining.

It’s not enough to use a hands-off approach. To correct the problem requires
an active push in the opposite direction, to restore opportunity and break the
cycles.

Edit: Think of it this way. You and some friends are playing Monopoly,
drinking a few beers and having a great time. An hour and a half into the game
(we all know games of Monopoly can last 4 hours or more), you discover one of
your friends has been cheating. Now what?

He says "Sorry everyone! I'll stop cheating now and everything will be fine."

Is that true? Of course not. The proceeds from cheating may have been used to
acquire the orange properties and maybe even put houses up on them. Every time
you and the other friends land on those properties you end up paying rent to
the previously cheating friend. Rent that he should not be collecting because
those assets were acquired by cheating.

This is what it's like to have historical injustices continue to perpetuate
into the future.

~~~
hello_marmalade
Yes, but you can't build it into your model. In this example, you would end up
with a result of putting people back into these communities who have a high
level of recidivism. You are actively _not_ avoiding an actual issue because
of perceived racial injustice when the issue is not racial.

This is the problem with processing our world down racial lines. You're trying
to correct for a _historical_ injustice. The fact that race factors into the
circumstance of why people are where they are right now doesn't change the
fact that those variables lead to recidivism. It's not racist. It's accurate.

If you want to fix the problem, then you need to fix the underlying issues,
which tend to be economic. Those economic issues stem from an issue that
affects all races, and therefore splitting it across racial lines only serves
to reduce the possibility of actual change.

All you're doing when you try to account for historical injustice is slapping
a band-aid on a deeper issue.

(Edit: Grammar)

~~~
chongli
I agree with you when it comes to the model: the model should be as accurate
as possible. The big question is what to do with the model. The way it's being
used now, the model is kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy. A prediction of
high recidivism risk leads to a longer sentence which increases the likelihood
of recidivism. This creates a feedback loop which increases real recidivism
risk and the model changes to reflect that. If your goal is to reduce crime in
society, then this may be a flawed approach.

~~~
hello_marmalade
Yes but that's not about race, that's about how we deal with crime as a
society. These things aren't being unfairly applied to minority communities
and that's the point. The system would be working the same way for a non-
minority community, and it does, where the economic situation is similar.

That's why the racial angle is a waste of everyone's time and energy. It's not
the relevant issue. The more relevant issue is how we deal with crime
prevention. Currently, we go with a punishment approach rather than a truly
rehabilitative one. This also has a lot to do with economics, and lobbying and
private prisons and so on. It's much more complicated than 'everybody's
racist'.

~~~
chongli
The purpose of the term _structural racism_ , instead of just _racism_ , is to
distinguish the theory of historical racism and its downstream effects from
the category people who hold views of racial superiority.

Besides that, there are plenty of people around today who actually are racist
and they are major proponents of punishment-based approaches. If you try to
switch to rehabilitation and intervention, they will resist you. They hold
views that some races are innately of lower intelligence and have higher
criminal tendencies. You aren't going to counteract that pressure by saying
"the racial angle is a waste of everyone's time."

~~~
hello_marmalade
Yes, but what relevance does structural racism have to the _model_?

That's only true only if you believe the majority of people are racist. I
don't.

There's also a number of ways that you don't even have to interact with that
argument. You can show that the end results. It's not like we don't already
have the studies and statistics that show how to resolve these issues. You can
easily say to someone who thinks that way 'ok sure, you go on believing that,
but even if you do believe that, there are still better ways to resolve this.'

Also most people are actually pretty receptive to new information if you are
capable of packaging it well, and acknowledging their biases without judging
them for it.

~~~
chongli
It doesn't take a majority of people in anything to create a problem. It only
takes a concerted effort by a minority and complacency from the rest.

But besides this, we have too many people fighting a tug-o-war over the term
racist. Some people want to apply the word to everyone. Other people think it
should only apply to literal Nazis.

But again, that's a distraction. The membership in the Nazi party was around
8.5 million in 1945, yet the population of Germany was around 90 million at
the time. That's right, less than 10% of the population were Nazis, yet they
controlled everything.

~~~
hello_marmalade
What I'm saying is that the focus on race is counterproductive because it's
thoroughly irrelevant to the solution. If you have one group blaming minority
failure on their race, and another group saying that the failure is because of
racism, the conversation revolves around race. We look to racially based
solutions, and miss what's right in front of our nose. We assume that the
issue is racial when it's not. That's what I mean by distraction.

The topic should be 'How do we fix crime, recidivism, and poverty?'. Pointing
out historical injustice does absolutely nothing. There is no reasonable thing
to do if that's your focal point, because the only ways to 'resolve' it is
what? Reparations? Making decisions about jail time and release based on race?
It's illogical. You'd end up putting people with high levels of recidivism
back into a community, only serving to repeat the cycle, because you never
actually look at the real problem. The things that cause that recidivism. The
things that are _actually_ causing it _right now,_ instead of the reasons that
it happens to be black people. If history were different, it could have been
_anybody_. It could have been white people, brown people, any color, any
ethnicity. It explains why the people in this situation are black more often
than they are not, but it does not explain how we _fix_ the problem.

It is an absolute waste of time, and the real issue is that while we screw
around talking about pointless grievances people will continue to go to jail,
and die, because we're still not talking about _the problem._

Edit: I realized that this wasn't quite a response to your last post, but the
relevancy is that you will only get complacency if you're focusing on things
that can't really be fixed, or that essentially blame others, but what you can
do is draw parallels, and essentially say 'Your issues are my issues too, and
we can and should work together on them,' which is also true.

------
bransonf
I did research briefly in a lab studying heart rate variability. HRV is a
really interesting statistic in predicting heart health outcomes, and very
interesting is the racial difference in HRV.

Basically, African Americans exhibit much higher heart rate variability,
meaning their nervous system is much quicker to react to stimuli (quicker time
to fight or flight response, for example) and this still isn’t well understood
in the field.

A naive understanding is that racial physiology is just different. And plenty
of people will stand by this. However, self reported stress scores offer some
insight into the difference.

High stress African Americans with High HRV lived as long as Low stress, low
HRV White/Asian Americans. Most likely, the process by which the nervous
system regulates itself is heavily influenced by life course events.

Medical science, in my experience, lacks in quantifying these social factors,
and too often underplays their significance in determining physiological
differences. Humans are incredibly dynamic systems, and the case can be made
that we adapt to stimuli in order to survive. It’s certainly possible that the
physiological difference we observe in different racial populations is due to
survival based on this principal.

It’s only recently that I’ve seen research trying to get at these
social/physiological mechanisms, but as far as funding is concerned, hard
biological sciences are more interesting. Everyone just wants to edit the
genome and call it a day, but I think we could get much further if we
understood how life events lead to physiological ailments later in life.

~~~
dadarepublic
Thank you for mentioning this.

>quicker time to fight or flight response

If cops are more likely to stop you because of your skin color (also further
increasing the chances of further abuses), that would probably have an impact
on your physiology over time.

[https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2018/04/the-
stop...](https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2018/04/the-stop-race-
police-traffic/)

~~~
bransonf
Interestingly enough, I transitioned to gun violence research, which is what I
do now, after wondering something along these lines.

If you live in a neighborhood where gun violence is a common occurrence, do
you still get startled when you hear gunshots? If so, this would have a
physiological effect, because it breaks your rhythm in an abrupt way, and does
so at the frequency of hearing gun shots.

Obviously this is highly theoretical, but if true it would mean that just
being in the proximity of violence puts you at an extra health risk, one that
very few people would assume.

~~~
dadarepublic
From personal experience myself and with friends, the level by which you are
"startled" is in direct proportion to the proximity of the gunfire.

e.g. Hearing gunshots in the distance, you recognize they are gunshots, take
note, but continue on your way. Hearing gunshots on your block or within a
group you are in, you take immediate notice and react accordingly. But in
either case, any time you hear them, is a reminder that the underlying fear
never leaves.

------
kryogen1c
> 4\. Conclusion "...grounding one’s work in an understanding of structural
> racism will improve model accuracy..."

It is not an interesting result to say models not modeling reality are less
accurate; the cogent discussion is to what degree systemic racism exists IN
reality. This is textbook begging the question.

> Acknowledgements: Conflict of Interest: None declared.

> Funding: Whitney R. Robinson is supported by the National Institute of
> Minority Health

I am not familiar with standards of conflict declaration, but this looks like
a pretty clear conflict of interest to me.

------
opwieurposiu
This paper fails to account for (or even mention) genetics. To expand on the
breathing capacity example, consider the case of the sherpas.

[https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2017/05/28/5302041...](https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2017/05/28/530204187/the-
science-behind-the-super-abilities-of-sherpas)

------
ThrustVectoring
The real problem is that there are mutually exclusive desiderata from your
models.

1\. If you have two people with identical relevant behavior and different
races, you want the model to score them identically.

2\. Each race should receive a comparable distribution of scores.

3\. The scores should be as accurate of a predictor of ground facts as
possible.

Relax the first desiderata and your model is now either explicitly or
implicitly (via irrelevant proxy variables) using race to determine results,
opening you up to racial discrimination lawsuits. Relax the second desiderata
and your model is now creating disparate impact across racial groups, opening
you up to racial discrimination lawsuit. Relax the third and you're leaving
accuracy, and thus money, on the table.

------
dublin
Disparate impact of results is NOT proof of racism. People are complicated -
and some racial correlations are perfectly valid - at least until enough
members of a racial group decide to change them...

------
jkingsbery
"Conflict of Interest: None declared."

In an article about structural racism, I would have expected more here.

~~~
eranima
A bias is not the same thing as a conflict of interest.

------
whatismypass
This post was on the front page 10 minutes ago but now it can't be found
anywhere. It's pretty disappointing that it has been removed solely on the
basis of being about race or being controversial. Race and racism are a part
of society and it presumably made it to the front page because it's a topic
that enough people found interesting to vote for...so why remove it?

~~~
Digit-Al
It hasn't been removed. I can see it at position 43 at the moment, but it is
showing as flagged for some reason.

------
corporate_shi11
People of every race find success in technology and in America more broadly.
Many of these people's ancestors came to America with nothing. Those groups
which find more success than average generally have a cultural focus on
education and other behaviors associated with responsible action. Groups that
don't succeed generally do not share these qualities.

It is these cultural differences which cause most of the group disparity in
America, not "structural racism", yet the "critical race theorists" (race
hustlers and grievance mongers) and their followers ignore these major factors
and replace them with straw men.

In order to fix a problem, it's important to understand the actual causes. The
sociologists and other assorted race hustlers will only divide us and lead us
astray.

------
weberc2
The definition for structural racism according to the article:

> Structural racism refers to “the totality of ways in which societies foster
> [racial] discrimination, via mutually reinforcing [inequitable]
> systems...(e.g., in housing, education, employment, earnings, benefits,
> credit, media, health care, criminal justice, etc.) that in turn reinforce
> discriminatory beliefs, values, and distribution of resources,” reflected in
> history, culture, and interconnected institutions (Bailey and others, 2017).

I think I might be misunderstanding, but given this includes “culture”, is
this so sufficiently broad such that hypothetical scenarios such as this (no
idea if this is accurate) would be captured “white people are culturally more
likely to use crystal meth than other racial groups, ergo they are victims of
(a certain kind of) systemic racism”?

It seems like this is just a catchall for any kind of error associated with a
racial group, and the article is merely cautioning against such errors. If so,
it begs the questions “why not just say so?” and “why use such a loaded term
like systemic racism?”.

~~~
LegitShady
Modern sociology in no way resembles a scientific study and is heavily
politicized. A bunch of nonsense political "researchers" citing each other in
drivel papers desperate for relevance.

It's now leaking into other fields. I remember when I first heard stem be
changed to steam to include "arts" a laughed at how inclusive and utterly
useless it is.

~~~
pvarangot
Postmodern sociology is revisionist towards trying to see society only through
a lens that is also easily probable to be statistically sound, this is because
of how more quantitative socioeconomic theories failed to predict very big
crises or events in society. It can be argued that asking for scientific rigor
in sociology to the same extent as in other human sciences raises the bar too
much because to validate some theories the experiments are either impossible,
prohibitively expensive, or so massive that they would bias the whole of
society.

Also, I think it would marvel you knowing how much things you would call
"scientific study" are also heavily politicized.

If this bothers you to a big extent I would recommend you try to find comfort
in thinking about postmodern sociology as a religion different than yours.
They won't be bothered by it and it will probably fit your mindset in a more
soothing way than thinking about them as scientists. It's not that they are
trying to publish their findings in ACM TOPLAS or something, they have their
own community and books and kinda like it.

~~~
LegitShady
If it was treated as religion instead is science I would be open to that, but
the papers churned out by "experts" today become policy tomorrow that effect
everyone.

~~~
pvarangot
Religions dictate and have been dictating policy since forever we had
governments and even before that. It's what people understand and mostly
everyone seems to be ok with it.

