• Eric Loomis pled guilty to driving a stolen vehicle & fleeing police
  • Before sentencing, the court looked at an ML assessment (COMPAS) of his likelihood to reoffend. Loomis was rated a high risk
  • COMPAS was not trained for sentencing, but for resource allocation after release
  • COMPAS is biased in favor of whites. Loomis is white
  • The court sentenced him to 8 years in prison, in part because of his high risk rating

Fair?

  • Houston SD purchased an ML tool (EVAAS) to evaluate teachers' effectiveness. The system is proprietary
  • Houston fired 25% of teachers with ineffective scores, based solely on their scores
  • There is no process for teachers to inspect, challenge, or correct their data or scores
  • Known errors cannot be corrected because of how the model normalizes: fixing one teacher's data has the potential to change all other teachers' scores

Fair?

  • MSU uses cookies, ML, and third party datasets to score possible students who visit their site
  • The scores favor those:
    • likely to accept an admissions offer to MSU
    • applying to majors the school is already strong in
    • wealthy out-of-state students
  • The scores are used to determine who to focus recruitment efforts on, not who to accept

Fair?

What's Fair?

Mariah A. Knowles

Tue, Dec 6, 2022

image: Diana Ejaita for Vox

When we say something is fair...

Fairness is a conclusion

Fair amounts to Good, Justified, Okay, Fine, Morally Acceptable, ...

Fair amounts to 👍

Fair is a thick evaluation, colloquially

Fair amounts to 👍 + some set of morally relevant criteria

...

Problem 1: Fair covers a range of moreorless related concepts, some competing

Problem 2: It's easy to talk past each other

  1. Technology creates risks
  2. We have responsibilities w.r.t. those risks
  3. One type of risk is:
    People will be subject to an environment
    that runs afoul
    of fair terms of social cooperation

Some Fair Terms

  • Malice
  • Respect for Individuals
  • Acceptable Social Arrangements
  • Deception
  • Acceptable Judgment

We ought not hold malice towards other groups

We ought to respect others as individuals

Power and Freedom ought to be distributed justly
&
Harms and Goods ought to be distributed "equally"

We ought not deceive others

We ought not judge others on things outside their control
&
We ought not judge others on things that bear no relevance to the outcome

...

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