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Comment by morgante | Hacker News Reader

> unless you consider invasive personalized ads a benefit.

I do. I'm much happier that my Facebook includes ads for New Relic and MailChimp than condoms and sports.

More generally, I don't understand how algorithms or profiles can be prejudiced. If they're inaccurate, there is a strong economic incentive to improve accuracy over time. If they're accurate, I think that should be defense alone—if your history suggests you are likely to default on a loan, companies should have every right to not loan you money.

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The algorithms are usually statistical which by definition makes them prejudiced. Targeted ads only mean targeted to some group that they believe you belong in. Maybe some day each person will be exactly profiled but it's not the case right now.

The other issue is that humans are much more permeable to their environment than we would like to admit ourselves. We are influenceable. Ads invade our environment constantly for that reason, their goal is to influence us into buying something. They can take us to directions that we want to avoid. What if a fat person is trying to lose weight ? Ads have measured that this individual is likely to buy cake and present him with delicious assortiments everywhere he goes. It's beneficial for the companies but what about that individual ?

The algorithms can only be accurate to who you are, not what you want to become.

What if a fat person is trying to lose weight ? Ads have measured that this individual is likely to buy cake and present him with delicious assortiments everywhere he goes. It's beneficial for the companies but what about that individual ?

Conversely, what if the algorithms have decided that the person is a good lead for a local gym, and those ads push him or her into losing weight?

We're all influencing each other, constantly. In a way, banner ads and such are some of the most honest ways of going about it, since they're clearly delineated as such.

The algorithms can only be accurate to who you are, not what you want to become.

If aforementioned fat person searches for "weight loss" and Google starts showing ads for that, haven't the algorithms been accurate to what (s)he wants to become?

I don't think the issue is whether ads should prompt them to lose weight, or they shouldn't. I think the crux of the issue is that we (humans) are ceding this judgment (which have political and societal ramifications) to the ad matching algorithm. Some people (myself included) find that bothersome.

Of course not every example of a targeted ad is going to be controversial (like advertising merchandise of a sports team that I like versus the one that is just popular in my area) but its problematic that we don't have any sort of machinery in place to control/modify the examples that are politically/societally important.

At least if that machinery were in place, then we could transfer the agency of decisions to the humans that run google, rather than the algorithms that are just running in the background.

> The algorithms are usually statistical which by definition makes them prejudiced.

Okay, maybe they are "prejudiced" if by prejudiced we mean making decisions based on statistical heuristics. I still don't see how that's a problem if they're rooted in fact.

> The algorithms can only be accurate to who you are, not what you want to become.

Actually, the best advertising is aspirational. It's easy to sell a fat guy a cake, but it's even better to sell him on the prospect of no longer being fat (ie. a gym membership).

It's a problem because it's illegal in many countries, including in the US. Whether you think it's morally justified or not isn't the problem -- the fact that it's illegal is.

With these laws in mind, is an algorithm that says "people who tend to purchase cosmetics are better drivers" illegal? Is an algorithm that says "people who tend to purchase cocoa-butter-based skin creams tend to have worse driving records" illegal? Should their be some sort of test put in place for these algorithms to make sure they're giving out legally-okay results, just like government officials test the gas pumps to make sure they're pumping fairly?

It really throws a wrench in the algorithm, because there are a million little unidentifiable things that are correlated one way or the other with race, gender, marital status, etc.

It's not always about your history - it's about your profile, and the history of people who have similar profiles to you, as determined by the rules of the algorithm.

For example, it's a fact that on average, women drivers (at least in the UK) are less of an insurance liability than male drivers. As a result, if a man and a woman both applied for the same insurance with identical driving/insurance history, and otherwise identical profiles, the woman would get cheaper insurance. This was ruled illegal by the European Court of Justice in 2011.

There is a distinction to be made here between brute utility and morality. If a person commits a crime and serves the time for it and lives beyond the point where that crime has to be reported when applying for a job - should that previous conviction alter their likelihood of getting hired? Society as a whole may decide that it should not, yet the processes which determine the chances of hiring will not reflect the decision made by society as a whole. There will be a very large number of conflicts of this type, on the one hand businesses want to maximise profits and on the other society as a whole wants to impose certain moral and economic values upon those businesses. This is part of a more general tension between different structures within a society. The difference here is that before the conflict was less obvious because the agents involved could hide their motivation, when we are using machine agents for decision making we can easily query them and observe their bias objectively. So rather than creating discord between the various motives of society, it is really only making them more visible. Which I would say is a good thing.

If people are fine with college records from 20+ years ago influencing the likelihood of getting hired but want companies to ignore criminal convictions, or ban IQ test, I'd rather go with a machine making the decisions.

Current process seems purely political with massive rents extraction ($100k for a degree, loan guarantees), almost naked votes buying (subsidies, "free" plan for whatever). And moral arguments are used mostly for cover (non-dischargeable debts?).

Perhaps we can sidestep those problems, or at least escape from them for a while.

Part of knowing what college a person went to is a proxy for knowing their likely SAT scores which is a proxy for an (illegal) IQ test. So it's a moderately effective workaround. Of course, college can be gamed in a lot of different ways (family money, connections, hustle) that do not relate specifically to IQ or to job performance (and others that, of course, do).

> Perhaps we can sidestep those problems, or at least escape from them for a while.

But we can't. Any decision we make -- even one based purely on data -- is a political one, because we can choose to change the data by changing society. If you say we should make future decisions (which affect lives and future data) based on current correlations only, you're executing a conservative political policy of maintaining the status quo. If you program computers to just take into account existing data (and not, say, desired future outcomes for society), you're programming conservative computers.

I'm pretty sure we can sidestep degree requirements and the associated mess with a better candidate screening technique. Why not?

Also, the computer programs take into account the desired outcomes and the information they can obtain experimentally (through A/B testing for example), not just existing data.

>I'm pretty sure we can sidestep degree requirements and the associated mess with a better candidate screening technique. Why not?

Because feature-learning problems in the setting of nearly-unlimited sets of possible features are very hard.

I Think that the most important question in this problem is What about Freedom?.

Yes, The personalized ads can help you to find solutions to problems that algorthms detect of your profile/information, but what is the cost? Freedom, you can say that you have the choice, but they take your information and control your choices.

People should stop enlarging the scope of freedom this much.

If you want more choices of ads, you just have to look for it. Nithing prevents you from CHOOSING to see more ads. There is a limited number of ads a website can show you, if it is random, you will have as much choice as if it is not, but companies will make more profit.

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