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Comment by stcredzero | Hacker News Reader

Indeed. The roots of the words prejudice are well known to most English speakers. It's supposed to denote "pre" judgement. Judgement before actual evidence.

Regarding impact: It could well be argued that current-day impact is the result of prejudice operating in the past. The interaction of society, economics, and demographics are complex. Hopefully, we'll just muddle through, somehow.

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Right... But isn't "judgement before actual evidence" all ML algorithms do? They try to statistically evaluate something about a set's members based on other features, because actual evidence of what we want to find out is missing. In my opinion this means that we either: 1) ignore the problem during the algorithm design phase and analyze the output with caution, or 2) decide that any statistical classification of human beings is "unfair" or even illegal (because it will have to discriminate people based on some properties that we know about them - be it race, or height or whatever) I don't see any middle-ground, since "prejudice" in my opinion is an unavoidable effect of ML algorithms as we know them.

In many respects all ML does is evaluate all the evidence before it. It cuts both ways.

Evidence is not binary. "Prejudice" can be "premature judice".

> Hopefully, we'll just muddle through, somehow.

This is not a good enough answer for the people who are actually being hurt, now. For these people, it's not an abstract problem.

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