Hacker News Reader

Comment by coding123 | Hacker News Reader

Somewhat related I was happily coding up a healthcare processing python script a few weeks ago. I was using Copilot to help speed up my work. One of the things I was doing was checking the race in the HL7 data. I had a map to different races/ethnicities. After adding this map, I couldn't get Copilot to help me ANYWHERE in the file. At all. No amount of waiting, or changing little bits to try to get copilot to create it's prompt was working. Finally I slowly undid my last few changes, and realized my copilot prompting was coming back.

I kept going back and forth and realized when my map of races/ethnicities was removed, I was able to get copilot usage.

View on HN

GPT doesn't like diversity, confirmed? Or more like Microsoft/Github doesn't want to accidentally add fetch master data and perform operations on slave data in such context :p

"Race" as a concept that is useful or even worth logging is something most developed countries do not do. What is done is logging where someone is born or where their parents came from (which I suppose is closer to ethnicity, but not if you equate it with race). From this context, it is not so strange that it looks at what you're doing and decides it should probably not have any part of it. Even if that decision is probably hard coded by whoever created the AI.

The USA census does explicitly include race, as do many systems summarizing data on people such as university student applications for DEI purposes, etc. Other countries such as UK seem to focus on ethnicity instead, but at least in USA explicit recording and processing of race is quite common.

Weird that the US keeps that BS up given their own scientists called it out as codswallop back in 1996 (late to the party, but not bad for the US (still dragging its feet on health care etc.))

    Race does not provide an accurate representation of human biological variation.
    It was never accurate in the past, and it remains inaccurate when referencing contemporary human populations.
    Humans are not divided biologically into distinct continental types or racial genetic clusters.

https://bioanth.org/about/position-statements/aapa-statement...

and ethnicity does all of that? I’m not sure that is or was the purpose of including race in the census…

Ethnicity?

The statement quoted is about race being a silly non scientific concept.

What was the purpose of the US including race in the census in the first instance - I'm guessing it was some throw back to tracking former slaves post Civil War?

Nobody above was implying that race was a scientific concept (at least not in the way it is defined in the US). And most other countries generally only include ethnicity rather than race in their censuses. Which is even worse in that regard.

However statistical socio-economic differences between racial groups remain significant. While it’s obviously very imperfect, tracking those differences without including race in the census would be quite difficult.

It’s much older than the civil war though. Race was already included in the first census in 1790. Obviously counting white and ‘other’ people separately was important because people in the ‘other’ category almost never had full civil rights even if they were technically free.

Yes, the USA does this and it is a travesty.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com