It's fine if you don't want to have a racial bias yourself, but it doesn't mean you need to ignore the fact that (in this hypothetical) the vast majority of Chinese are highly ethnocentric.
...?! Did you really write that?! Do you really believe that? WTF, man! Do you realize how that would sound in any other context? A few steps down this line and you'd use machine learning concepts to justify natzy ideas or stuff like that.
And who are you to say if the machine's output (ie, mindset) is to be trusted?
Machines are much less prone to bias than humans, that's for sure.
(1) pick a set of goals we deem worthy
(2) use machine learning to find patterns of actions that push things towards our goals - that's why I think we should move as much as possible in reinforcement learning, and figure out ways to use RL for data-science too, both supervised learning and time-independent unsupervised learning are really dangerous and biasing tools, and I think they're sort of dead ends on the road to true-AGI
There's no such thing as "seeing the world for how it is". Looking for patterns in data using a tool/machine trained on data (that will be inherently biasedly selected) will just lead you to find the patterns that confirm your f up world view, out of the infinity of patterns that there always are in everything...
We need to figure out how to manipulate the world in order to shape it into the patterns that we'd enjoy more.
There's a sort of "Chinese perspective" in applied machine learning nowadays (which is probably not originating in China, but being associated with "ML empowered surveillance and social scoring" is easier labeled like this) that I think is very wrong and extremely dangerous... we should grow up out of it quickly, because later on properly purging it from our cultures will be a violent endeavor... Heck, I even hope we as species get a Mars base up as a backup if this conflict of world views goes hot because there's a high chance it will be very very hot, like in nuclear hot...
[1] Assuming they don't already, which is a huge assumption.
Presumably this will be harder for them to do.
And would it be wrong for banks or loan programs to optimize on such pattern recognition if it were found that ethnicity could improve their forecasting? Or for software companies to forecast employee effectiveness on similar pattern recognition?
edit: Here are some studies. I would have put them in a reply but I'm being rate limited. Any one is sufficient on its own, but all are interesting.
http://www.unz.com/article/race-and-crime-in-america/
http://2kpcwh2r7phz1nq4jj237m22.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-c...
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10940-011-9134-...
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289611...
http://www.jstor.org/stable/591624?seq=1#page_scan_tab_conte...
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289609...
HN is not the place for this.
Not for spreading "The Bell Curve" 90s research and unsourced white nationalist propaganda.
You use technical terms like "sufficient" and "replicated", as though you actually understood how science worked, but then link to a pile of crap scholarship published in third-rate journals by cranks and racists. It's annoying. And dangerous. Worse, you appear to be completely unaware of the distinction between correlation and causation, and what policy implications that has. Kindly get a clue.
They actually do correlate to race, beyond that which income accounts for, but you'd kind of expect that if law enforcement was racist against blacks and was perceived as such: policing is less effective in black communities both because of police attitudes toward blacks and vice versa. (Racial profiling—literally law enforcement targeting people based on race—obviously exacerbates this.)
Quote Rev. Bayes till you're blue in the face, but profiling amounts to holding a group responsible for the actions of bad individuals.
Do you know what will happen with such an optimization? The pattern will be reinforced and you will end up with something like a civil war. At some point, your company will suffer because people will be busy shooting each other.
The movement towards fixing discrimination did not emerge because old folks were bad and the new folks are better people, it emerged because people recognized the issues it creates. It adresses the same issues that anti-competitive practices of the monopolies create: destruction of the market for short term gains of a single company.
What they are is illegal.
GP: "What if the data actually shows 95% of Chinese people will break US law when given the chance?"
You: "Did you know there used to be Japanese internment camps?"
I think this is an interesting article that discusses what "racism" means in society today:
I have not studied rationalism or humanism at all and don't have much opinion on anti-discrimination or anti-anti-discrimination. The issue that sometimes boils over on mostly homogeneous countries like China is that people conflate many different things together. A distinction needs to be made, rather than blurred, on ethnic background, nationality, current government, their culture, or something else. (This is an assumption.)
Say what you will about 'The Chinese,' but please make it clear who and what you are talking about. A communist party member is very different from a middle class worker who holds a Chinese passport, or someone who has resided outside of China for decades. or a second generation immigrant with a Chinese-sounding last name. The above people probably have very different views on ethnocentrism or loyalty to 'the motherland' and should never be lumped together by proxy and acted on with uniform policy. This isn't racism because there are many other things at play, and discriminatory outcomes might defined by consequence. But such levels of ambiguous smearing can cause the same kind of prejudice from applying abstract, ill-placed fears more broadly than deserved.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Takeo_Yoshikawa#cite_note-Time...