Comment by chessturk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chessturk | Hacker News Reader

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This is so dangerous.

Society's bigotry is going to flood that bad boy so quick you might as well name it Gobbels.

I love ML. I want children to be safe. This is not the place for ML or AI or Quantum or any tech.

What needs to exist is better resources for those children, that mother grading the tests, the teachers of those children, and social services that are meant to support them. If you want to make a difference about this, look there.

Don't go building a automaton King Solomon who decides why this kid should be taken from these parents because speaking Spanish was worth -0.1 on some goddamn weight trained on data generated from a racist society.

This isn't a "spooky" correlation a cool algorithm can detect, it's a serious, layered social problem.

> Don't go building a automaton King Solomon who decides why this kid should be taken from these parents because speaking Spanish was worth -0.1 on some goddamn weight trained on data generated from a racist society.

Totally what I advocated for and not a strawman attack /s. Indeed, the chance that such an algorithm could be racist or classist and there being needs to avoid bad correlations and have appropriate controls is important.

I think there are opportunities here. Ideally ed-tech doesn't take humans out of the loop, but asks schoolteachers and administrators questions like, "Hey, are you sure students A, B, and C are being supported correctly for subject Z? Are you sure students D, E doesn't have some kind of abuse or other significant home problem? It sure looks like student F is in this subpopulation that research shows benefits from educational intervention Y. You might want to keep your eye out for that."

And then the teacher goes "Oh, crap. Now that I think about D, there were always these little things 1, 2, and 3 that seemed off... maybe this is worth a referral to social services to check on what's up."

Or "Oh, ... maybe F's struggles in reading really are a speech problem and we should handle that"

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