[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?”.

[Enginerrrd]

There are some very real effects that need to be acknowledged in order to design a good system. Here's a hypothetical example I gave in a similar thread here a few months back. It's loosely based (Though not too far removed from reality!) on some real-world systems that failed to address this:

Suppose you are designing a facial recognition system for police to use in the field while investigating a recent crime to see if anyone with a criminal history is nearby.

(Data taken from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_St...) Because blacks are over-represented in the US criminal justice system (40% of the prison population vs 13% of the population) and because part of what defines "black" is the outward appearance of certain facial features, a facial-recognition algorithm which is trained to recognize criminals, with a cost function based on prediction accuracy alone, and facial features as input parameters is likely going to have false positives that over-represent blacks.

It's very important to consider this when you develop a training set. The developer error (who mostly failed to understand Baye's theorem here) might work something like this: They take 100 innocent people's faces at random. (On average it will have only 13 blacks) Then take 100 random criminal faces from inmates. (On average it will have 40 blacks.)

Then mix up the groups into your training set and assign a prediction score 1 or 0 depending on whether or not your classifier has correctly predicted whether or not a face was in the criminal group. Then, based on no other feature than race, your neural net can get better performance based solely on guessing more often that black people are criminals. That's not a good thing. In fact, if it's looking at a black face from its training set, the odds are nearly 2 to 1 that it's one of the criminals, even though the odds that are at least 2 to 1 against a random black person having a criminal history.

The likelihood of being falsely identified as having a criminal history is much greater based on the only variable of being black. And this type of thing has happened several times already in production systems!

Conversely, the same system, trained on the same data in the same training set, can get higher performance than random by simply guessing that any non-hispanic white person does NOT have a criminal history.

Thus, it's pretty important to correct your training set to reflect the correct Bayesian prior, and the underlying structures that sometimes go by the label "structural racism" or "institutional racism" are essentially exactly that reality in this case.

[hello_marmalade]

This is a really good illustration of why it matters to be aware of what your sample sets are, especially in the case of using machine learning / automation in regards to things that have a very high likelihood of impacting human rights.

To be honest, I don't think our understanding of these systems is mature enough for us to be just throwing them out into our societal systems right now. There needs to be a lot more testing because the possibility of unethical results is pretty damn high.

That said, I still think that the concept of structural racism is a bad way to look at this problem, as it's simply one form of a common error when looking at sample sets.

[weberc2]

I’m not challenging the importance of minimizing those errors, especially with respect to healthcare. I’m challenging how meaningful or useful such a broad, vague, overloaded, and inflammatory definition can be, if indeed I’m understanding the definition properly.

[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.

[weberc2]

I do think of it as a religion—one that is state sponsored and masquerades as science.

[travisoneill1]

They even make up math. I had a sociology prof in college teach us that to mathematically determine that there is a difference between groups, the difference between the means had to be greater than the range in either group (not even any reference to sample size). I replied that by this test you couldn't even determine that there is a height difference between men and women, and the prof said that in fact you can't and that it was a good example of this test.

[bransonf]

That professor was wrong or your understanding is.

There are plenty of statistically viable ways to determine differences between groups. Even a simple T-test is usually sufficient.

The difference of means does not have to be more than the range in either group. Standard deviation is what’s important here. You use a test statistic to determine the relative value of the real mean within a confidence interval. It’s whether these intervals overlap that you can determine a significant difference between groups.

[travisoneill1]

I know that the professor was wrong. That was the point of the comment. That a professor in a so called science class could get the math so comically wrong.

[roflc0ptic]

Sociology is way more rigorous than you’re making it out to be. Studying people is hard, but it’s making good faith effort in that direction, reproducibility crisis notwithstanding.

Take the “Sokal 2.0” affair, where some profs sent obviously bogus research to various journals. Notably, while they were able to get “rape culture among dogs at the dog park” (or maybe it was racism, easy to look up) published in a gender studies journal, they couldn’t get published in sociology journals. Sociology has standards. The absurdities committed by gender studies as an institution don’t falsify racism/other forms of oppression. They might be wrong, but you’re certainly not right.

[LegitShady]

>Sociology has standards.

Mostly political and much of it unreproducible. Desperate political academics using non science to argue their opinions and right and citing each other into fake legitimacy.

Garbage studies garbage standards garbage journals from people who couldn't hack it elsewhere.

[dang]

Please don't take HN threads on generic ideological tangents. They are boring and repetitive and therefore off topic here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[LegitShady]

It wasnt an unrelated tangent. It's directly related to the drivel in op.

[dang]

Tangents are always related at some point. The problem is not where they start, but what they lead to. If they start from drivel but lead to hotter drivel, like internet ideology wars, HN gets much worse. Please just avoid generic ideological battle here.

[LegitShady]

Fair enough, although I think it's unavoidable when you're talking about what I think to be essentially made up terms.

[weberc2]

It is odd that your comment was “ideological battle” but not the original article. I guess the original was sufficiently jargon-laden.

[whatismypass]

It's talking specifically about racial discrimination that results from <long list of interrelated things>. I don't think that means "any kind of error" and I don't think white people are racially discriminated against for having higher meth usage.

[weberc2]

You really misunderstood me. I didn’t claim anything about white people; I gave a hypothetical scenario. And that hypothetical scenario wasn’t about white people facing discrimination for higher meth usage, only that such an inequitable distribution of meth usage seems to satisfy TFA’s definition for structural racism. The fact that it seems implausible to say so suggests the definition is not especially useful.