Comment by nathan_compton
Comment by nathan_compton a day ago
Really classic "rationalist" style writing: a soup of correct observations about statistical phenomena with chunks of weird political bullshit thrown in here and there. For example: "On a more contemporary note, these theoretical & empirical considerations also throw doubt on concerns about ‘algorithmic bias’ or inferences drawing on ‘protected classes’: not drawing on them may not be desirable, possible, or even meaningful."
This is such a bizarre sentence. The way its tossed in, not explained in any way, not supported by references, etc. Like I guess the implication being made is something like "because there is a hidden latent variable that determines criminality and we can never escape from correlations with it, its ok to use "is_black" in our black box model which decides if someone is going to get parole? Ridiculous. Does this really "throw doubt" on whether we should care about this?
The concerns about how models work are deeper than the statistical challenges of creating or interpreting them. For one thing, all the degrees of freedom we include in our model selection process allow us to construct models which do anything that we want. If we see a parole model which includes "likes_hiphop" as an explanatory variable we ought to ask ourselves who decided that should be there and whether there was an agenda at play beyond "producing the best model possible."
These concerns about everything being correlated actually warrant much more careful understanding about the political ramifications of how and what we choose to model and based on which variables, because they tell us that in almost any non-trivial case a model is at least partly necessarily a political object almost certainly consciously or subconsciously decorated with some conception of how the world is or ought to be explained.
> This is such a bizarre sentence. The way its tossed in, not explained in any way,
It reads naturally in context and is explained by the foregoing text. For example, the phrase "these theoretical & empirical considerations" refers to theoretical and empirical considerations described above. The basic idea is that, because everything correlates with everything else, you can't just look at correlations and infer that they're more than incidental. The political implications are not at all "weird", and follow naturally. The author observes that social scientists build complex models and observe huge amounts of variables, which allows them to find correlations that support their hypothesis; but these correlations, exactly because they can be found everywhere, are not anywhere near as solid evidence as they are presented as being.
> Like I guess the implication being made is something like "because there is a hidden latent variable that determines criminality and we can never escape from correlations with it, its ok to use "is_black" in our black box model which decides if someone is going to get parole?
No, not at all. The implication is that we cannot conclude that the black box model actually has an "is_black" variable, even if it is observed to have disparate impact on black people.