[tanana]

It appears that you make the false assumption that the data itself are unbiased and are always factually correct. This is untrue. Data does not appear magically in a dataset. It is the interpretation of the world by humans and may therefore carry the original bias, intended or not, of humans. This is why analysts have to think about what the data means whenever they do their analyses. I would say that is their ethical responsibility.

[listenallyall]

> think about what the data means

of course they do that, that is literally their job.

But to reverse-engineer the biases that may or may not exist in an original data set -- please explain how this should be accomplished, because I don't see how someone could accurately quantify the amount or degree of race/sex/age/religion/nationality-ism without introducing additional "bias" based on that person's own opinion.

> Data does not appear magically in a dataset.

Right, so why isn't the boss, or exec, or department head, or 3rd-party, who sourced the data responsible for de-biasing the data before even handing it off to the the data scientist, so s/he can just do the job of data science-ing, and not political science-ing? You're putting a whole lot of "ethical responsibility" on just one person -- ironically, the one least likely to be good at interpreting human emotional tendencies -- within a much larger ecosystem.

[tanana]

That's the point, it is very difficult to correctly interpret analyses. That's why you don't take conclusions for granted, and work from the basis of what you think is biologically relevant. There is usually a whole phase preceding the actual analysis. You can visualise potential relationships in directed acyclic graphs, to try and see where bias might be introduced. However, that phase is very often skipped by medical researchers.

I never said the analyst was the sole person bearing the responsibility. You are right that just as much as responsibility must be expected from those that designed the information model, those that collected the data but also the person who ultimately analyses it and prepares it for whatever kind of dissemination. Everybody involved has to take their individual responsibility so that we achieve collective responsibility.