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by roytries 1948 days ago
> My suspicion is that the concern with machine learning over racism is rooted in two things. The first is just the general modern trend of accusing anything you don't like of being racist, because everybody hates racism and wants to fight it. And the second is the fear on the part of people who make a living fighting racism that machine learning might actually put them out of a job.

I don't get to how you go from this statement, to then again explaining exactly how racism is embedded in algorithms. By using the biased data we have in the real world...

1 comments

It isn't the data that's biased. If you're hiring a computer scientist and disproportionately few black people have a degree in computer science, the data is not lying about who the qualified applicants are and the algorithm can't change that.

To fix that you have to cause more black high school students to go to college and study computer science and then wait two generations until their proportionality in the installed base of qualified computer scientists reaches parity. There is no magic wand that makes it happen overnight.

But concentrating on the places where it can't be solved instead of the places where it can will make it take even longer.