Dear all, The second Mental Sciences Club meeting of the term will take place at tomorrow 16:00-17:30. Gabbrielle Johnson (Claremont McKenna) will be presenting a paper on algorithmic bias. An abstract of the talk plus Zoom details for the meeting can be found below.
Proxies aren't intentional; They're intentional This paper concerns the Proxy Problem: often machine learning programs utilize seemingly innocuous features as proxies for socially-sensitive attributes, posing various challenges for the creation of ethical algorithms. I argue that to address this problem, we must first settle a prior question of what it means for an algorithm that only has access to seemingly neutral features to be using those features as 'proxies' for, and so to be making decisions on the basis of, protected class features. I argue against theories of proxy discrimination in law and political theory that rely on overly-intellectual views of the intentions of the agents involved or on overly deflationary views that reduce proxy use to statistical correlation. Instead, using insights from philosophy of language and mind, I adopt an anti-individualist approach to representational content to argue for a constitutive account of contentful proxy use. On this view, proxies are meaningfully about socially-sensitive groups when and only when they constitutively depend on discriminatory practices involving those groups. Zoom details: Join Zoom Meeting https://cam-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/98732967662?pwd=V05UbjN4c3ZMVk5NTmd4RWw1cG4vQT09 Meeting ID: 987 3296 7662 Passcode: 492797 All the best, Tom and Jessie Dr Tom McClelland Lecturer - Faculty of Philosophy Director of Studies - Selwyn College College Research Associate - Clare College Raised Faculty Builidng Room 318, tel. 01223 (7)63173 whereby.com/tom-mcclelland<https://whereby.com/tom-mcclelland> tommcclelland.org typos courtesy of dyslexia _____________________________________________________ To unsubscribe from the CamPhilEvents mailing list, or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents List archive: https://lists.cam.ac.uk/pipermail/phil-events/ Please note that CamPhilEvents doesn't accept email attachments. See the list information page for further details and suggested alternatives.
