domain:freddiedeboer.substack.com
AI companies should be afraid of causing disparate treatment. It’s wrong, even when it makes more money. But an unregulated market doesn’t have much reason to care about right or wrong. Until we find a better way to draw the line, disparate impact is going to remain useful.
Modern AI tools have been compared to magic oracles, we ask it a question and it synthesizes vast amounts of information to give us an answer.
What this regulation will achieve isn't restricting the AI from having a disparate impact, it is restricting the AI from synthesizing that information and then telling the truth. Certain categories of question are impossible to ask, or impossible to get a correct answer about, without risking disparate impact.
Consider: take /r/rateme and turn it into a prediction algorithm. Go through the thousands upon thousands of posts and figure out how to spit out an approximation of how Reddit would rate your pictures, without posting your pictures to Reddit. Useful tool, now instead of embarrassing myself asking a bunch of strangers to rate my pictures, I can just do a couple clicks on an online tool and it will spit out what Reddit would have told me anyway. Advances for privacy! I can run the test iteratively, and use different pictures for an online dating profile, or even different haircuts or physique choices edited in, based on the output, and figure out how to make myself more attractive.
But, such an algo would either instantly cross the line of acceptability, or it would need to be dishonest. Because it can't give black people lower ratings, it can't give Asian women higher ratings and Asian men lower ratings, it can't give trans people lower ratings. It's not even clear, based on the angles used to wedge queers into civil rights law intended to protect women, that it can ding effeminate men or butch women. It can't ding you for wearing a yarmulke, even though I can guarantee you that wearing a yarmulke will lower your dating odds. It would be impossible to create such an oracle and not have a disparate impact. So, we've created a tool to grow our knowledge, but that field is permanently restricted, some areas of knowledge must remain unknowable under Colorado law.
cae_jones
4hr ago
My original proposal was to give money to people who work 30 hours a week and get paid less than $30/hour. Because if we're doing payouts to random people, actual workers should get it, not people who took out ill-advised student loans and may often be quite privileged.
Umm. Unless that 30h/week is the maximum, I fall into both groups. And while my home is ... unflattering, I do own it and the land its on, which makes my <$14/h paycheck go pretty far.
Biden already refunded most of my college debt in the first round, which ... made me kinda uncomfortable. As much as I'd like a raise, and maybe a big pile of money to fund personal projects, something about getting pander cash handouts from both parties ... makes me want to quote HPMoR Quirrell's reply to Hermione when she told him he was evil. I think something that ends in me wanting to quote Voldemort says something about either myself or the scenario; I'm just not sure which.
OK, OK, so I'm going to try and rationalize all this pandercash on the grounds that I'm probably going to be trying to recruit blind people for accessible gamedev work, so much of it will get redistributed to blind people with less economic power than me. ... Still feels sketchy.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
5hr ago
Oh, that's easy: As long as you have an okay baseline of fitness, it's the absolute perfect casual social sport. If you're a beginner, you can go for easy routes and get help from the more experienced (and vice versa if you're experienced). If you're competitive, you choose hard route and repeatedly do it in a rotation with a similarly competitive friend. If you're a talker, you just do a minimum amount of climbing and otherwise watch the others and talk with the ones currently on a break. If you're a nerd, you choose a weird-looking route and theorize on how it ought to be done. And the best part, all these people can go together simultaneously without being in each others way.
Now compare soccer. I like it as well, but it generally goes best with a fixed group of friends on a similar level of fitness, experience and inclination. It's better for closer bonding, but for a casual round it happens too easy that somebody feels like they aren't fitting in.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
5hr ago
Maybe I'm sleep deprived on duty because I took you seriously for a moment and was going to go on a diatribe about that lol.
But surprisingly enough, there are Hindus who consume beef. More commonly in Southern India.
2rafa
5hr ago
A lot of becoming President/PM/etc is pure luck; being a competent political operator, sure, but being in the right place and right time. There could certainly have been a Jewish President of the US by now (and probably any time from the 70s onward), it didn’t happen for a variety of reasons but none are on the level that they precluded it from happening, they were just headwinds. Parliamentary systems elect more outsiders because leaders are chosen by MPs or by parties, rather than by the public, which is why you have more women and minority PMs than Presidents. Still, even that’s not prescriptive.
Harlequin5942
5hr ago
not have any particular beef with others
To be fair, the Hindus don't have a beef with anyone else, or even others, or even alone.
2rafa
5hr ago
There’s no way the Pope would excommunicate arguably the world’s most powerful Catholic (other than or perhaps even including himself) even if he had done something to warrant it.
Disclaimer: There are enough far-left women that they can be counted as "normie" in a certain sense, but I don't think it's the kind of women the OP wants to know about. Also, I dislike & avoid them too much, so it would just read like a dunking. For the female version, I'll give an amalgation of my wife, her sister, their friends & some mothers we're friends with:
A portrait of a female normie blue triber
- Works in a predictable, OK paying, probably administrative or middle-management position with a decent work-life balance (somewhere around 75% part-time or so)
- Always been an A or high B student in school, studied precisely what she wanted but that is not necessarily connected to her current work (if sucessful she moved too far up into management, if not she might have ended up in something else entirely)
- Will quickly and easily learn whatever tools are considered appropriate for her job, fast & reliable worker, but would never develop a new tool herself
- Has a husband who is further right than her, but not TOO much; He may at most vote center right, be vaguely into some of the more plausible political conspiracy theories, or in the worst case shudder libertarian
- Used to be much further left, but mellowed out sometime when she became a parent
- Still agrees with the far-left on some policies though, her values didn't chmight be surprisingly cautious of racism/misogynism/rape claims but would never challenge them publicly
- Spiritual but not religious, will still go to family-focused social events organized by the church
- Involved in vaguely pro-social volunteer work, if church-related mostly some inoffensive modernist reform style one
- Thinks most adult hobbies, in particular the male-coded ones, are a childish waste of time
- watches TV in the evening because her husband likes it, but by herself prefers reading
- Favorite authors: Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen and Irvin D. Yalom
- Spends free time in the afternoon meeting old friends in a coffee shop, otherwise spends free time in the evening reading pedagogy guides
- Signs her kids up for a rotation of afternoon hobbies "for their own benefit", but is then worried that she is putting too much pressure on them
- High social intelligence, much more critical than she publicly lets on
- Thinks everyone should be free to live their love whatever way they like, but would feel deeply insulted if their partner started talking about polyamory
- Absolutely thinks abortion should be available, but very conflicted about the appropriate month limit
- Used to think primarily women are being discriminated against, now thinks primarily families are being discriminated against
- Might even agree that men are currently on-net discriminated against, but definitely thinks you're being a wuss for complaining about it
- Very careful to keep her lefty street cred
- Personally knows rich people and knows how much they sometimes spend on unnecessary shit, so is not very receptive to claims that we can't afford this or that social program
- But also very self-conscious about being more pragmatic than the far-left however, so quite receptive to claims that something is mismanaged, abused or wasted
- Thinks she is not elitist, but would never date anyone without a university degree (but obviously only because they would have nothing in common!)
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
5hr ago
Technically he didn't. MBps is megabytes per second, not megabits.
sun_the_second
6hr ago
This calls for the IQ bell curve meme. Left and right extremes: "well I can't know what the author wanted to say, I'm not a mind reader". The middle: "obviously D, the text and the answer both say 'productive'".
Unironically though: yes, we are unfairly giving kids low marks. Interpretive questions call for free-form answers, not multiple choice (as noted by other posters).
2rafa
6hr ago
There are a number of dynamics in US politics that have made it hard for a Jewish Democrat to become President. Not impossible by any means, but difficult because of the nature of the Democratic base and the historic constituencies that made it up. The best shot would probably be as a business Republican with heartland appeal, and as Mark Levin quipped, there is something kind of intrinsically Jewish about Donald Trump. He’s a sleazy Queens slumlord who took on Manhattan and became president of the most powerful country on earth. He has chutzpah.
OliveTapenade
6hr ago
In Spring of 2015, journalist Rod Dreher received a call from a distraught stranger. The caller said that his mother, an elderly immigrant from Czechoslovakia, was warning him more and more urgently that current events in the United States reminded her of the emergence of communism in her home country in the 1940's. Dreher was skeptical; if the world had really been going to Hell for as long as old people have been saying the world is going to Hell, we'd have been there by now. Yet, there was something about the caller's tone that stuck in his mind and made him keep asking himself, What if the old Czech woman sees something the rest of us do not? [Dreher (2020): Live Not By Lies. p. xi].
For what it's worth, having read Live Not By Lies as well as plenty of Dreher's pre-2015 work, I am extremely skeptical of Dreher's claim to skepticism here. Rod Dreher is temperamentally inclined to catastrophism, and even in 2013 or 2014 he was writing about the coming return of the Dark Ages and the collapse of Christian civilisation and so on.
For instance, here he is in 2014 saying that America is facing a "new Dark Age that our fellow Americans embrace as Enlightenment", and here in the same year approvingly quoting MacIntyre to the same effect. Here he is in 2013 asking "are we Rome?" and predicting civilisational collapse.
He presents himself as a naive ingenue who was shocked by what the communist dissidents told him in Live Not By Lies, but I think it is far more likely that he already knew what he wanted to hear, and found a handful of Eastern Europeans willing to tell him.
I don't think he was shocked. If there's anything new in Live Not By Lies (and the several years of blogging prior to it, of which it is a condensed summary), it's the analogy to the Soviet Union, but Dreher's actual diagnosis of the cultural moment has not changed. It's just saying "this is like Soviet Russia" rather than "this is like the fall of Rome".
(It is also, incidentally, what in my view makes Live Not By Lies such a tedious and intellectually sterile book - most of LNBL is just Dreher describing something in the USSR, then describing something in 21st century America which does not particularly resemble it, and then asserting that they're the same. The Russian famine of 1892 was not actually that similar to covid, for instance - not even in the sense in which Dreher asserts it, as a catastrophe demonstrating the inadequacy of existing state institutions. It goes on and on. There's a criticism of pre-revolutionary Russian aristocracy for being sexually licentious, which may well be true, but given the Soviet comparison that is most of the text, you'd think it would be worth noting that the Bolsheviks were relatively puritanical and banned pornography. But no. Or, say, I agree that the US needs a revitalisation of religion, but the enforced state atheism of the Soviet Union seems qualitatively different to the voluntary slide away from faith that we see in America. The Soviets killing clergy and throwing the rest into the gulags just doesn't seem a great analogy for the way that kids born post-1980 tend to fall away from religion. The situation is meaningfully different. I could go on for a while. At any rate, overall the book is just a series of analogies, none of which are quite successful, because, well, 21st century America is significantly different to the Soviet Union.)
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
7hr ago
There's an old joke in India that the country would be much better off if all control of governance was handed over to the very small group of Zoroastrians that constitute the Parsis.
They're known to be competent and not have any particular beef with others, and they could be as corrupt as they like without making a dent, given how few of them there are.
Unfortunately, there's even fewer now, to the point where there's hilarious advertising by both governments and their interest groups alike for the few eligible bachelors and bachelorettes left to attend a few sponsored dating events and just fucking hook up already.
So I suppose there's merit in looking at entrenched and bickering ethnic or religious groups, going fuck that and hoping someone else does better.
fishtwanger
shirking duties randomly made up by people who hate us
7hr ago
Straight out of Lovecraft...
shakes head
I'm against executive orders/overreach
How does this square with anything you said? The government gave out 167 billion dollars in free money entirely based on executive fiat.
Joe Biden tweeted this:
https://x.com/JoeBiden/status/1795969437595500905
The Supreme Court tried to block me from relieving student debt. But they didn’t stop me.
I’ve relieved student debt for over 5 million Americans. I’m going to keep going.
But it's not just the Supreme Court he is defying. The English common law system is based on the legislative branch controlling the purse. Joe Biden is overriding both of the other branches of government to reward a small subset of the American public. This is the definition of executive overreach.
gattsuru
8hr ago
Would always be good to get a second opinion. In case you don't, the steelman/charitable version is something like:
- It's tortuous to fire, or refuse to hire, people because of their race/religion/gender/sex.
- What happens if you don't fire them, just give them specific job requirements that would any reasonable person would refuse (and might even be illegal on its own), because of their r/r/g/s? Well, now that's illegal.
- What happens if the employer doesn't give them all the worst jobs, just wink-and-nods to other employees to make that employee's life miserable? Well, now that's illegal.
- What happens if the employer just happens to hire a whole bunch of people who treat certain people like crap, and not respond to it? Well, now that's illegal. (uh, is 'not sufficiently masculine a sex?' Well, it is now.)
- Okay, what if it's a genuine coincidence, and the employer's actions to punish rude people is just insufficient? Well, now that's illegal. (wait, is 'being rude' the same thing as 'any reasonable person would refuse' to work with? Well, it is now.)
- Okay, now you've got a different problem. Anything as small as a single person being slightly rude isn't individually tortuous (uh, in theory). These aren't criminal-law illegal in the way that, say, sodomizing someone with a soap bar without their consent might be. Some of them are even (theoretically) protected the other way around: in Damore's case, federal labor law prohibits employers from acting against employees who doing a very broad definition of organizing or arguing over workplace conditions. It's only in summary that these acts can be become tortuous. But the line between grains and a heap only shows up in retrospect. Well, now employers can (and to avoid liability, must) have a neutral anti-discrimination policy that covers wide breadths of conduct, and that will be preemptively legal if it's used to fire someone.
In practice, this means that Google just sent Damore a note that said:
I want to make clear that our decision is based solely on the part of your post that generalizes and advances stereotypes about women versus men. It is not based in any way on the portions of your post that discuss [the Employer’s] programs or trainings, or how [the Employer] can improve its inclusion of differing political views. Those are important points. I also want to be clear that this is not about you expressing yourself on political issues or having political views that are different than others at the company. Having a different political view is absolutely fine. Advancing gender stereotypes is not.
Is this note pretextual? Is there any overlap between the arguments about inclusion of differing views and 'generalizing stereotypes'? Are there any First Amendment considerations? The NLRB can look at all these questions if they want to, but why would they want to here?
But you could imagine a bizarro!Googler who fits Darwin2500's parody, who wrote at length about how women suck and can't think or correctly perform leadership roles, and nothing else, or perhaps only with pretextual mentions of any speech with meaningful content. And while one of those wouldn't be too rough to deal with, a workforce with nothing but that would have a lot of people looking for somewhere else to work. It's not what the 1964 CRA was meant to handle, but it's not like it's bad as a policy.
And that's genuinely a hard problem to solve without either much more honest actors throughout the enforcement schema, or problems like Damore.
TowardsPanna
8hr ago
Stables? Stablecoins?
Physical USD won't help me.
And how could I trust the exchange? One of them just disappeared and stole my coins once.
sliders1234
9hr ago
Looks like it’s still 50% materials, banks, and telecom but I bet that is still down a ton. Often it’s 100%.
I only looked today because it was interesting. My guess is if you bought today or tomorrow on election news and you bet that she won’t be a crazy commie and are right you probably get something like a 30% 1 year return. 10-12% discount from the election. I am seeing 10-12% expected earnings growth. And if the market rerates to she is a reasonable person you probably get 1-2 turns in valuation gains from pre-election. Maybe lose a little on the currency since I am guess they have higher inflation. Of course her political bias are not mine but today they priced in she could be dangerous. I do not know if she is dangerous.
On Twitter today is the day people are asking questions. There should be people answer questions in the next few days.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
9hr ago
Food security should not mean '% of all peacetime food that is produced domestically' but '% of minimum food produced necessary to avoid health problems'. Rising demand means people wanting better Australian lobster, extra grain or preferring foreign milk to domestic milk (for admittedly understandable reasons), not that China is incapable of providing enough grain or whatever is needed to sustain its population and workforce.
If grain from overseas is cut off they can buy from Russia and Central Asia instead. They can rationalize production away from wine or whatever else they grow. They can eat into stockpiles. They can rationalize consumption. The existence of significant obesity in China proves that peacetime consumption is higher than needed.
Britain imported 60% of its food in 1939 yet found ways to cope with an imperfect blockade. China can do the same because their actual food security is not the same as domestic production as a % of peacetime food consumption.
They can do all of these things way more than Taiwan can, in relative terms, which is why I maintain that food security is not a big problem for China like it is for Taiwan.
lagrangian
9hr ago
Reading the details, this strikes me as reasonable on the part of the Biden admin.
Two major caveats on what you've written:
- The news in the press release is about an additional 7.7 gigadollars for 160 kilopeople. Your figures are for the total over his entire term.
- This is, like all previous loan forgiveness by Biden, not a giveaway so much as letting people qualify for forgiveness programs for which they fell through the cracks. E.g. from here
Automatically cancel debt for borrowers who would otherwise be eligible for loan forgiveness under income-driven repayment (IDR) plans, like the SAVE Plan, or Public Service Loan Forgiveness but are not enrolled in those programs.
It's also forgiving loans for people on permanent disability. That one's a little more questionable - I imagine some "permanent disabilities" are sketchy at best. But, still not "free money for all."
I think it's important to acknowledge that this is (afaik) very much not a giveaway to all or even most loan holders, including those doing well. I'm against executive orders/overreach, and I want to see the government stop giving out loans for underwater basket weaving as much as the next Mottizan, but this is just much less crazy than it seems at a glance.
Mottizen
9hr ago
Could probably use a decentralized exchange of some sort to swap it into stables and then various ways of getting it into physical USD.
Mushguffler
10hr ago
That's kind of a Latin American thing, right? electing outsiders. Fujimori in Peru, Bukele in el Salvador, I think some others I'm forgetting. They like electing ethnic outsiders.
Forgotpassword
10hr ago
Still Catholics have been a fairly large chunk of the population for the majority of the USA's history and include quite a few successful European ethnic groups that have not experienced significant censure. The Supreme Court is 6/9 Catholic (according to Wikipedia I have no idea who's practicing/adherent)
Without having thought about it super long, like letting myself gradually pick up examples over weeks/months, I can only think of a couple areas that have been able to resist a collapsing of disparate treatment and disparate impact. Credit scores and, currently hanging by a 6-3 thread, gerrymandering.
For gerrymandering, sigh. Honestly, it might just be that the Court is tired of these cases. They get stuck dealing with them over and over again, unlike most of the areas where the disparate treatment/impact distinction is collapsed.
For credit scoring, I think it's that there is soooo much money on the line from politically-powerful interests, plus a little historical "we've been using this for so long" factor. Would credit scoring have to fall under a strict interpretation of how these concepts work according to a radical (or even the otherwise dominant party line)? I think absolutely. Is the reason why it's been able to persist that you can get a human on the stand and ask about intent, animus, whatever? Not at all. Credit scores are an algorithm. An impersonal, just simple math, algorithm, with data in that may be subject to all the complaints people want to have about, "But if your data in is biased by a white supremacist patriarchy, then of course your algorithm is going to have racist and sexist disparate impact." Note that this Colorado law calls out that they're interested in:
No, the reason credit scores are still allowed is because too many connected people would stand to lose too much money if we let the collapse of disparate treatment/impact culminate entirely in the way that it seems to be going in nearly every other domain.
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