[nerdponx]

I suspect this is a "tank vs sky" problem. The article says that the bright areas of bone are not the most important for predicting race. What if it's some features of different hospitals and x-ray setups?

Also did they release their code and anonymized data? If not, it's impossible to tell if this is a bug.

If I got this result in my work, I would check it 10k times over because it defies belief. Even allowing subtle skeletal differences in different ethnic groups, the differences in this case are not in the bone and at least sometimes not visible to the human eye. Unless there is an undiscovered difference in radio-opacity across ethnicities, the result doesn't make sense.

[nerdponx]

Replying to my own post because I can't edit it anymore.

Apparently this is a known and persistent affect across a variety of other medical images, tests, and scans. Not just for a "race" but for ethnic groups in general, as well as biological sex. So this might actually just be an "AI hit piece" that otherwise confirms an unpalatable but persistent and strong effect in the literature. The causes seem to be badly understudied, in part due of the obvious need for delicacy and respect around such topics.

This result is tremendously implausible to me, but I am finding quite a few articles documenting similar phenomena across things like retina scans and brain MRIs.

[TMWNN]

>This result is tremendously implausible to me, but I am finding quite a few articles documenting similar phenomena across things like retina scans and brain MRIs.

As prometheus76 says, perhaps you will one of these days be able to mentally resolve the inherent contradiction in the above sentence.

[nerdponx]

What is the value of being a smug jerk, especially if you plan to be wrong?

If your prior belief points strongly in one direction, it is completely rational to require strong weight of evidence in order to update it to point to the other direction.

And yes, it's a completely reasonable prior belief for a person who is not already versed in medical imaging literature.

I often find that people who study this literature have bad attitudes like yours. You should be grateful that there are people out there who value intellectual honesty enough to acknowledge when a result is a result and to change their beliefs. Instead I get two different people showing up to insult me.

[prometheus76]

What you are experiencing is cognitive dissonance. Take your time. It's never fun.

[nerdponx]

I don't see the value in insulting people about this. I wrote a longer response here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31421346 but it applies equally well to your post.