Algorithmic racism

A couple of years ago, when reading an article on photography, I had an "aha" moment.  Because, the article answered a question that had been bugging me for the longest time ever since I came to this country.

What was that problem?

In the photographs back in India, I seemed less dark than in the photographs here in the US.  How could it be that cameras were making me less dark in India and more dark in the US?

Turns out that cameras are racist bastards!  Ok, it is not the machine that is racist.

Think about those old days of roll film.  Exposure to light is what is recorded on the film, right?  Apparently those were calibrated with respect to the fair-skinned folks. It was the narration of a simple incident in that article that helped me understand how I was able to understand my own relative darkness and lightness.

The article said that in the shooting of the movie "In the heat of the night," Sidney Poitier had to have a whole lot of extra light on him in order for the film to properly record his image when he was standing with the white characters.  It made Poitier extra sweaty from the heat, but it worked with the storyline anyway--it was all in humid Mississippi.

Aha!

I was extra dark in the US because I was in mixed company, with whites.  I then looked at a few photos with fellow brown-skinned, and ... you get the point.

That calibration apparently continues with the digital imagery as well.

Think of how much bias exists in that simple aspect of life, photographs, that we don't think about.  Not that the photo technologists were intentional about this.  Not at all.  Now, think about computer software that looks into very many aspects of our lives.  And about artificial intelligence that learns through our responses, which are products of explicit and implicit biases.

And then read this essay that asks "Is your software racist?"

The examples there will/should worry you. I leave it up to you to follow up on the details there.

I want to end this post with this exciting footnote.  The computing expert who is quoted there (and he is working with ACLU on these issues) is, get this, Suresh Venkatasubramanian.  Yes, not only an Indian-American but a Tamil-American.  Yay!

Stop the presses. Faculty are political!

Students have no idea how they make me feel great via their comments in class or in their papers.  One noted in her paper that she did not care for the ideas when they were expressed by "an extremely conservative" professor but is apparently receptive to those same ideas when she hears them from me.  Another found that in my blog I criticize Obama and Faux News.

These two comments are not anything new.  Years ago, one student wrote in a long letter of appreciation that she really didn't know about my politics even after having known me throughout her undergraduate years.  Which is exactly how it ought to be; my political philosophy ought to be irrelevant and immaterial to students.  Right?

It is one thing when biologists have political preferences; after all, mitochondria are not influenced by political views.  But, in the humanities, the social sciences, business, and a gazillion other things that universities offer, well, it is pretty much all politics.  Rare will be a business faculty with uber-left leanings, and perhaps rarer will be a sociologist with ultra-right political views. Yet, we pretend that our "research" is all objective.  Ha!

In October Russell Roberts, a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, tweeted that if told an economist’s view on one issue, he could confidently predict his or her position on any number of other questions.

The people rose in protest with tweets, blog-posts, and position papers!

As Mr Roberts suggested, economists tend to fall into rival camps defined by distinct beliefs. Anthony Randazzo of the Reason Foundation, a libertarian think-tank, and Jonathan Haidt of New York University recently asked a group of academic economists both moral questions (is it fairer to divide resources equally, or according to effort?) and questions about economics. They found a high correlation between the economists’ views on ethics and on economics. The correlation was not limited to matters of debate—how much governments should intervene to reduce inequality, say—but also encompassed more empirical questions, such as how fiscal austerity affects economies on the ropes. Another study found that, in supposedly empirical research, right-leaning economists discerned more economically damaging effects from increases in taxes than left-leaning ones.
That is worrying.

Seriously?  They needed to do research on this?  It shows what pretentious lives economists lead believing that their thinking is not political and is only--and nothing but--scientific!

 even if economics is not uniquely ideological, its biases are often more salient than those within chemistry. Economists advise politicians on all manner of important decisions. A reputation for impartiality could improve both perceptions of the field and the quality of economic policy.

For Brutus is an honourable man;
So are they all, all honourable men

Muslim immigrants in Europe

It was always easy for Europeans to critique the race issue here in the US; after all, how much tensions can be expected in homogenous countries that are nation-states, eh!

Until now.

As European countries take in immigrants who are less and less like them, well, it turns out that differences can pose challenges. As this NY Times essay points out, "The familiar old arguments against immigrants — that they are criminals, that their culture makes them a bad fit, that they take jobs from natives — are mutating into an anti-Islamic bias that is becoming institutionalized in the continent’s otherwise ordinary politics. .... What is so striking about these forms of prejudice, which go beyond ordinary anti-immigrant feeling, is that they are taking root in otherwise enlightened, progressive states — states where the memory of the Holocaust has often led to the adoption of laws against anti-Semitism and racism. "