[gotoeleven]

"Models are not just descriptions of data, which is why overfitting is not considered success." The degree to which a model is overfit is a measure of how accurate the model is, but that doesn't make it any more or less than a description of the data.

I get what everyone's goal is here, it would be shitty to build and rely on a bunch of racist models. But the nonsense in this article is dangerous--again models are descriptions of what is and this weird glorification of them as some sort of source of normative judgement is bizarre. Models have to be used carefully with understanding of the limitations of their structure and the data that went into them. That doesn't make any particular modeling technique racist.