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Comment by fwip | Hacker News Reader

I hate headlines/framings like this.

> It’s convention that you want your p-value to be less than 0.05 to declare something statistically significant – in this case, that would mean less than 5% chance that the results were due to randomness. This p-value of 0.2442 is way higher than that.

You can't get "ChatGPT isn't racist" out of that. You can only get "this study has not conclusively demonstrated that ChatGPT is racist" (for the category in question).

And in fact, in half of the categories, ChatGPT3.5 does show very strong evidence of racism / racial bias (p-value below 1e-4).

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Author here. This is a good point. We'll soften our language

There’s another thing you have to consider.

The Bloomberg article was more like “based on existing case law, will you lose a lawsuit?” Bloomberg concluded that the answer was yes, you will lose the lawsuit. Nothing you’ve done will change that answer.

Your stats expert witness will testify that it is possible that it is not racist, it could also be X, Y, or Z. If this was the only witness maybe you’d have some chance of winning. But your HR director and CEO and others are going to forced into admitting that X, Y, and Z are not at all things that they would select for in their hiring practices. So the jury will be left thinking that there aren’t any other reasons you added this tool to your hiring process. Case closed, you lose.

Please don't cower to people who call everything racist. It's pure nonsense

Unfortunately, there's no good way to say that a p > 0.05 is a failure to reject the null hypothesis (which does not imply the null hypothesis is correct) without making nonstatistican readers bored.

Statistical writing is hard.

“Bloomberg didn’t show that ChatGPT is racist” is probably the best you can do for the headline. (They didn’t do that either.)

Ok, we've put that in the title above. Thanks!

If someone has a better (i.e. more accurate and neutral) title to suggest, we can change it again.

They put it correctly in the article tho:

> Using Bloomberg’s numbers, ChatGPT does NOT appear to have a racial bias when it comes to judging software engineers’ resumes.2 The results appear to be more noise than signal.

Which in most contexts means the same as "does appear to not have a racial bias", but not in statistics. One of the reasons why communicating results in research accurately is incredably hard.

They also said "that there was, in fact, no racial bias", which is a bit stronger than "no evidence of racial bias". In a context where words like "significant" are overloaded, it makes sense to me to be extra careful with phrasing.

I basically had the same comment. The issue is that they are responding to bloomberg's flawed analysis. The article focuses on the already-determined metrics correctly, but this discussion already started on the faulty premise that name-based discrimination is the primary metric for determining racial bias in chatgpt.

But we can be sure the training data isn't racist.

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