The "B" variable measures how integrated a neighborhood is, and that snippet seems to be saying that its existence is the "ethical problem" that led them to purge the dataset. How is any of that different than what I said?
And the transformation itself is non-invertible, so it's not possible to recover the original values for about 7-8% of the rows in the dataset. The commit diff links to a thorough investigation of the data[1] in which the author takes a crack at linking up the ambiguous rows with the original 1970 Census data that supposedly went in to generating this dataset, and long story short, it looks like the original dataset's authors may have made some errors in their calculations on top of everything else.
1: https://medium.com/@docintangible/racist-data-destruction-11...
It's a ridiculous and offensive premise from my perspective.
It isn't. Bk is "number of blacks in my neighbourhood" as you put it, and the whole point of using B instead of it was so that an all-black neighborhood wouldn't count as more integrated than one with a mix of races.
I wonder if the dataset design makes more sense in the context of Boston in particular: [0].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_desegregation_busing_cr...
Can you elaborate on the problem you have with this?
(I'm just trying to not guess at your meaning.)