{"id":14155,"date":"2018-02-07T18:29:18","date_gmt":"2018-02-08T00:29:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/?p=14155"},"modified":"2018-02-07T18:29:55","modified_gmt":"2018-02-08T00:29:55","slug":"14155","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/2018\/02\/07\/14155\/","title":{"rendered":"It’s Lovely To Think Computers Don’t Look At Your Figure"},"content":{"rendered":"

Kevin Drum\u00a0assesses\u00a0<\/a>a research result:<\/p>\n

A new paper<\/a>\u00a0with access to Uber\u2019s massive database of driver records concludes that female drivers earn 7 percent less than male drivers. Why? Mostly because women drive more slowly than men.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

There are a couple of other factors as well that are tied to experience, and that\u2019s interesting enough by itself. But the authors call their result \u201csurprising,\u201d and I think that\u2019s the wrong conclusion. The proper conclusion is that in a job that pays via algorithm and has no special rewards for working long hours, the gender gap is\u00a0only<\/em>\u00a07 percent. That\u2019s what you get when there\u2019s no opportunity for discrimination.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Without knowing anything about Uber’s<\/strong><\/em> “algorithm,” I think Kevin is committing an indiscretion when he assumes an algorithm is gender-blind. The press (NewScientist<\/b><\/i>, I’m sure, although I don’t happen to have any links handy and I’m feeling lazy today) has reported several instances of machine learning algorithms returning results which are not gender-blind. This happens because the data on which these algorithms are trained reflect society’s biases, and the machine learning algorithm is incapable of compensating for such biases.<\/p>\n

I’d also like to say that it’s possible the authors of the study were surprised because, well, it makes for more publicity if you’re surprised.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Kevin Drum\u00a0assesses\u00a0a research result: A new paper\u00a0with access to Uber\u2019s massive database of driver records concludes that female drivers earn 7 percent less than male drivers. Why? Mostly because women drive more slowly than men. There are a couple of other factors as well that are tied to experience, and \u2026 Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14155","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14155","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14155"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14155\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14157,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14155\/revisions\/14157"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14155"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14155"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14155"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}