> I am simply pointing out that treating past data as a future predictor and acting accordingly on the assumption that the social structure doesn't change as a result of your actions is a conservative political action; not a neutral one, and certainly not an objective one justified by "math".
That doesn't actually mean anything. All action and inaction has consequences. There is no neutral.
An algorithm is objective because it's falsifiable. If you're trying to predict e.g. whether someone will pay back a loan then every time the algorithm tells us to make the loan we can see if it was right. We can also take a random statistical sample from the times it says not to make the loan and do it anyway to find out what happens then. And if the algorithm made bad predictions then we can improve it.
Now suppose we have a nice algorithm. Best available information. Prediction accuracy very good. It says the risk of John not paying back the loan is higher than the value of any reasonable interest the lender could charge.
There is now an obvious objectively correct answer to the question of whether the lender should typically loan John the money, if the lender wants to stay in business. It isn't "neutral" because nothing is. But it is unaffected by John's race.
> A social construct is often as real as it gets.
We made it, we can unmake it.
The low income housing people proved that concentrating poverty is dangerous. You put all the low income housing together and it becomes a slum. You put one or two low income units in each of several middle class neighborhoods and they don't.
Grouping a vulnerable population together has the same danger. It draws an imaginary line around them, separating them from everyone else, concentrating their shared troubles and isolating people who need help from people who could provide it.
Grouping humans by "race" is poison, even if you're trying to help.
> You're looking at it the other way around. If someone arbitrarily makes up a group (say, race), and based on that arbitrary bias creates a social structure where that group is discriminated against and marginalized from power, fixing this bias is correcting an unfairness.
You didn't create the groups but you're choosing which ones to care about. There are so many different groups that meet those criteria that you'll never meet someone who isn't in at least one of them. And they correlate and half-correlate and complement each other. You can't balance that.
But you also can't balance it because humans are not a fungible commodity. They're not equivalent. If you have fifty white coal miners, ten black doctors and three white CEOs, and you just average their salaries and say "white people have an advantage" because the CEOs each make a billion dollars, the coal miners are going to disagree with you and have a legitimate point.
Let's even pretend we can balance humans to see how quickly absurdity follows. So the problem we want to solve is that there are a higher proportion of low income black Americans than white Americans. OK, so we either need fewer low income black Americans or more low income white Americans. Possibility: Eject some low income black Americans. Nope, violates our principles and the US constitution. (But the fact that it would otherwise be effective should make you suspicious.) Next possibility: Get more low income white Americans. There are millions of low income people in eastern Europe who would like to be US citizens, so we let them. Hurray! Racial disparity in America solved!
If what we really care about is "balance" then that is an actual solution, but it's also so obviously ridiculous that it demonstrates how that can't possibly be the real problem.
And if it is to be a real problem then it also demonstrates why you can't solve it. Because the opposite of that is what has been happening. A large proportion of existing white American families immigrated here after the abolition of slavery. They, at a minimum, had enough wealth and education to afford passage (in the early days) and gain American citizenship (in modern times). So they've been bringing up the average the whole time. You're trying to balance an open system.