> I am simply pointing out that treating past data as a future predictor and acting accordingly on the assumption that the social structure doesn't change as a result of your actions is a conservative political action; not a neutral one, and certainly not an objective one justified by "math".
That doesn't actually mean anything. All action and inaction has consequences. There is no neutral.
An algorithm is objective because it's falsifiable. If you're trying to predict e.g. whether someone will pay back a loan then every time the algorithm tells us to make the loan we can see if it was right. We can also take a random statistical sample from the times it says not to make the loan and do it anyway to find out what happens then. And if the algorithm made bad predictions then we can improve it.
Now suppose we have a nice algorithm. Best available information. Prediction accuracy very good. It says the risk of John not paying back the loan is higher than the value of any reasonable interest the lender could charge.
There is now an obvious objectively correct answer to the question of whether the lender should typically loan John the money, if the lender wants to stay in business. It isn't "neutral" because nothing is. But it is unaffected by John's race.
> A social construct is often as real as it gets.
We made it, we can unmake it.
The low income housing people proved that concentrating poverty is dangerous. You put all the low income housing together and it becomes a slum. You put one or two low income units in each of several middle class neighborhoods and they don't.
Grouping a vulnerable population together has the same danger. It draws an imaginary line around them, separating them from everyone else, concentrating their shared troubles and isolating people who need help from people who could provide it.
Grouping humans by "race" is poison, even if you're trying to help.
> You're looking at it the other way around. If someone arbitrarily makes up a group (say, race), and based on that arbitrary bias creates a social structure where that group is discriminated against and marginalized from power, fixing this bias is correcting an unfairness.
You didn't create the groups but you're choosing which ones to care about. There are so many different groups that meet those criteria that you'll never meet someone who isn't in at least one of them. And they correlate and half-correlate and complement each other. You can't balance that.
But you also can't balance it because humans are not a fungible commodity. They're not equivalent. If you have fifty white coal miners, ten black doctors and three white CEOs, and you just average their salaries and say "white people have an advantage" because the CEOs each make a billion dollars, the coal miners are going to disagree with you and have a legitimate point.
Let's even pretend we can balance humans to see how quickly absurdity follows. So the problem we want to solve is that there are a higher proportion of low income black Americans than white Americans. OK, so we either need fewer low income black Americans or more low income white Americans. Possibility: Eject some low income black Americans. Nope, violates our principles and the US constitution. (But the fact that it would otherwise be effective should make you suspicious.) Next possibility: Get more low income white Americans. There are millions of low income people in eastern Europe who would like to be US citizens, so we let them. Hurray! Racial disparity in America solved!
If what we really care about is "balance" then that is an actual solution, but it's also so obviously ridiculous that it demonstrates how that can't possibly be the real problem.
And if it is to be a real problem then it also demonstrates why you can't solve it. Because the opposite of that is what has been happening. A large proportion of existing white American families immigrated here after the abolition of slavery. They, at a minimum, had enough wealth and education to afford passage (in the early days) and gain American citizenship (in modern times). So they've been bringing up the average the whole time. You're trying to balance an open system.
> An algorithm is objective because it's falsifiable. If you're trying to predict e.g. whether someone will pay back a loan then every time the algorithm tells us to make the loan we can see if it was right.
I'm sorry, but that's just mathematically wrong in the presence of feedback: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10874683 When you have a dynamical system with feedback, you can have a perfectly predictive model that is is both wrong and unobjective.
> Grouping humans by "race" is poison, even if you're trying to help.
I agree. But I am not trying to group them. I am trying to undo the damage of the grouping.
> You didn't create the groups but you're choosing which ones to care about. There are so many different groups that meet those criteria that you'll never meet someone who isn't in at least one of them. And they correlate and half-correlate and complement each other. You can't balance that.
That's true in theory. Which is why you go to historians and anthropologist who seriously study this stuff and ask them. It turns out race and women are pretty much the big ones, not just in the West but in most societies (though not all).
> If what we really care about is "balance" then that is an actual solution, but it's also so obviously ridiculous that it demonstrates how that can't possibly be the real problem.
Let's say you have a headache. One solution is for me to kill you. Hurray! Problem solved! Headache gone! This shows that your headache couldn't have possibly been a real problem. WAT?
> And if it is to be a real problem then it also demonstrates why you can't solve it.
I studied history in grad school. And one of the constant things in history is that people will always explain why the problem can't be solved. You can go online and read some of the extremely elaborate, pseudo-intellectual explanations why letting women vote would be disastrous, why slavery is good for blacks, and why women should never be allowed to practice law or medicine. Yet social action solved all three. I could try to explain why your reasoning is wrong but it would take too long. In short, you think that the solution must necessarily solve the proximate cause without studying the ultimate cause, and you're wrong about what constitutes the main effect. The "open system" accounts for a very small portion of the problem.
One of the advantages to studying history is the perspective you get about things that today seem natural and immutable to us, and then you learn that things haven't always been like that. The social structure in society is constantly changing. The only question is do we want to help direct the change as much as we can, or act like incurious beings, that just let things happen to them without understanding them. I always find it curious (though not really; it is a known and familiar phenomenon, which happens over and over) how it is the people who are otherwise the most curious about nature and technology become primitive and unquestioning when it comes to human society. All of a sudden the model is either too simple, or too complex, and we certainly cannot change it. Which is funny because people had never flown (on wings) before the invention of the airplane, yet people have completely changed the social structure over and over, through political activism.
That doesn't actually mean anything. All action and inaction has consequences. There is no neutral.
An algorithm is objective because it's falsifiable. If you're trying to predict e.g. whether someone will pay back a loan then every time the algorithm tells us to make the loan we can see if it was right. We can also take a random statistical sample from the times it says not to make the loan and do it anyway to find out what happens then. And if the algorithm made bad predictions then we can improve it.
Now suppose we have a nice algorithm. Best available information. Prediction accuracy very good. It says the risk of John not paying back the loan is higher than the value of any reasonable interest the lender could charge.
There is now an obvious objectively correct answer to the question of whether the lender should typically loan John the money, if the lender wants to stay in business. It isn't "neutral" because nothing is. But it is unaffected by John's race.
> A social construct is often as real as it gets.
We made it, we can unmake it.
The low income housing people proved that concentrating poverty is dangerous. You put all the low income housing together and it becomes a slum. You put one or two low income units in each of several middle class neighborhoods and they don't.
Grouping a vulnerable population together has the same danger. It draws an imaginary line around them, separating them from everyone else, concentrating their shared troubles and isolating people who need help from people who could provide it.
Grouping humans by "race" is poison, even if you're trying to help.
> You're looking at it the other way around. If someone arbitrarily makes up a group (say, race), and based on that arbitrary bias creates a social structure where that group is discriminated against and marginalized from power, fixing this bias is correcting an unfairness.
You didn't create the groups but you're choosing which ones to care about. There are so many different groups that meet those criteria that you'll never meet someone who isn't in at least one of them. And they correlate and half-correlate and complement each other. You can't balance that.
But you also can't balance it because humans are not a fungible commodity. They're not equivalent. If you have fifty white coal miners, ten black doctors and three white CEOs, and you just average their salaries and say "white people have an advantage" because the CEOs each make a billion dollars, the coal miners are going to disagree with you and have a legitimate point.
Let's even pretend we can balance humans to see how quickly absurdity follows. So the problem we want to solve is that there are a higher proportion of low income black Americans than white Americans. OK, so we either need fewer low income black Americans or more low income white Americans. Possibility: Eject some low income black Americans. Nope, violates our principles and the US constitution. (But the fact that it would otherwise be effective should make you suspicious.) Next possibility: Get more low income white Americans. There are millions of low income people in eastern Europe who would like to be US citizens, so we let them. Hurray! Racial disparity in America solved!
If what we really care about is "balance" then that is an actual solution, but it's also so obviously ridiculous that it demonstrates how that can't possibly be the real problem.
And if it is to be a real problem then it also demonstrates why you can't solve it. Because the opposite of that is what has been happening. A large proportion of existing white American families immigrated here after the abolition of slavery. They, at a minimum, had enough wealth and education to afford passage (in the early days) and gain American citizenship (in modern times). So they've been bringing up the average the whole time. You're trying to balance an open system.