Models are not just descriptions of data, which is why overfitting is not considered success. They are an attempt to generalize patterns from a given datatset. What patterns they generalize is of interest to several research fields, including fairness, domain adaptation, and robustness. A useful but incomplete resource is below.https://fairmlbook.org/
gotoeleven|5 years ago
I get what everyone's goal is here, it would be shitty to build and rely on a bunch of racist models. But the nonsense in this article is dangerous--again models are descriptions of what is and this weird glorification of them as some sort of source of normative judgement is bizarre. Models have to be used carefully with understanding of the limitations of their structure and the data that went into them. That doesn't make any particular modeling technique racist.