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I think "disparate impact" is a ridiculous standard. The odds that any decision process will return the same results for two groups which differ on all sorts of socio-economic axes seems unlikely.
I mean, I could get behind that some uses of ML in some fields might be unfair. For example, there might be rational economic reasons to discriminate against certain minorities. If Mormons are 10000x more likely to be killed by bears (because bears are murderist racists or something), then it might make economic sense to not hand out loans to Mormons in bear country. Even if the religion of the applicant is not explicitly present in the input data, a neural network could just learn to infer "applicant is a Mormon" from all sorts of proxies like name, place of birth and so on. If we disallow bank directors saying "no Mormons", we should also disallow such NN for consistency. By contrast, just indirectly discriminating against Mormons because their financial situation is worse (perhaps due to all these bear-related funeral expenses) would seem fine to me even though it has a disparate impact.
While it may be useful to force the market away from the economic optimum in certain situations, the idea to apply this to everything seems profoundly silly. If I (male, 40, overweight) were to post nudes on OnlyFans (not that I intend to do so), I am sure that between user rankings and their recommendation engine, I would end up making a lot less than the median OF model. That is a disparate outcome from an algorithm right there. Should I be able to force OF to push my pictures more?
Or say someone decides to run their blog in French because they have "limited proficiency in the English language". Should Google search be allowed to filter that result if people search for English language websites? That is a disparate impact right there!
"Disparate impact" and other "equity" based arguments are farcical on the face. It only ever cuts one way, and the arguments are deployed extremely selectively. They will never, ever, in a million years apply "disparate impact" arguments on which identity groups pay the most taxes or which identity groups are mostly likely to be victims of crime from outside their community. When non-whites outperform whites, they are just better than whites and should be celebrated. When whites outperform non-whites, it's racism and the thumb must be put on the scale.
Well, except when they did.
That summary honestly left me more confused about Title VII.
That was not a case where "disparate impact" was applied on behalf of whites or men. It's a case where "disparate treatment" against whites in order to remedy "disparate impact" on blacks was determined not to be acceptable.
I suppose you’re right. My mistake.
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