[mercurialmaven]

"software that is more likely to falsely punish people of color does support the continued dominance of white people in a real, material way."

The statement is at best extremely misleading, and at worse, mostly false. It also represents a juvenile, immature, and myopic perspective on reality.

I would suggest reading "Wealth, Poverty, and Politics" or "Discrimination and Disparities" by Thomas Sowell. He has been debunking the "inequality of outcome therefore racism" logical fallacy for decades.

[aeturnum]

Where did I say that unequal outcomes must, necessarily, be caused by racism? What is misleading about what I said?

It seems like you're reading a specific thing I said about a specific scenario and universalizing it in a way you imagine I might universalize it. I'd love to hear a critique of what I actually said, or we could talk about our views of society in a wider way, but I can't respond to this combination of generally dismissing what I said and attacking what you imagine I might think.

[mercurialmaven]

I stand at least partially corrected. I am not familiar with biases in facial recognition software but it looks like a real thing in some cases, caused for instance by lack of diversity in training data sets.

[monocasa]

Software that's way more likely to fail you literally because of darker skin sounds way more like "inequality of opportunity" to me.

[mechanical_bear]

It’s more likely to fail because…physics. The sensor on your webcam is only so big, and can only capture so much light. Darker faces require more lighting to capture details. Photography isn’t racist, it’s physical limitations that come into play.

[aeturnum]

> Photography isn’t racist, it’s physical limitations that come into play.

I wanna pull this apart a bit because I think it's a good opportunity to talk about how systemic bias gets started. Digital sensor evolution is path-dependent. Technologists developed photo-sites that have "enough" dynamic range for most uses before moving on to increase the resolution on a sensor. What exactly is "enough" depends on your test data.

The sensor on a webcam is only "so big" as you say - but how that sensor balances resolution and photo-site count depends on what conditions they consider acceptable. We could build web cams that would see more pigmented faces better - there is no fundamental limitation in the technology itself. It's that a series of decisions have been made over years of development, generally without people thinking specifically about race at all, and we've arrived at a status quo that has adverse outcomes for people with different skin tones.

There was a similar process that happened with film photography[1]. Not that film, as a technology, is unable to capture dark skin - but that the development standards that were tested and distributed were designed for lighter skin.

Like, I agree that the webcams we have aren't intentionally 'racist.' But I do think that the status quo that has led everyone to accept this balance of dynamic range and resolution is reflective of valuing people with lighter skin more.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/25/lens/sarah-lewis-racial-b...

[MengerSponge]

A closely related story that will also resonate with you: early microphones were tuned for male voices, which led to truly a lot of harm to women. It's just a matter of physics, as people are fond of saying. Mediocre technologists make mediocre products that were only validated for people like them.

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/a-century...

[monocasa]

A) The major issue is not the sensors, it's the lack of emphasis of ML training data for darker skin.

B) Even if it were simply physics at play, requiring the use of a system known to have physical constraints against darker skin causing failing grades purely on that metric is still pretty racist.