[ramtatatam]

I'm not native English speaker and I find this sentence from the article weird:

> Because the frightening thing is that even if you remove those specific variables, if the signal is there, you're going to find correlates with it all the time, and you either need to have a regulator that says, “You can use these variables, you can't use these variables,” or, > I don't know, we need to change the law. As a data scientist I would prefer if that did not come out in the data. I think it's a question of how we deal with it. But I feel sensitive toward the machines, because we're telling them to optimize, and that's what they’re coming up with."

So is he saying that he is worried optimisation throws results that are not what he would like to see?

[pesmhey]

Race is an incredibly sensitive topic in America. The best analogy I can come up with for the author's statement is this:

You're looking to pick the fastest runners out of a group of people. You run an optimization algorithm to pick out the fastest in that group. Nothing about this optimization accounts for the fact that 1/3 of the people in the group have been being shot in the foot with a gun prior to your optimization. The data will show that they are poor runners without addressing the crime previously committed. In fact, many people would consider it a second act of crime.