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posted by Fnord666 on Monday February 11 2019, @12:25PM   Printer-friendly
from the who-watches-the-watchers dept.

Submitted via IRC for chromas

Trust but verify: Machine learning's magic masks hidden frailties

The idea sounded good in theory: Rather than giving away full-boat scholarships, colleges could optimize their use of scholarship money to attract students willing to pay most of the tuition costs.

So instead of offering a $20,000 scholarship to one needy student, they could divide the same amount into four scholarships of $5,000 each and dangle them in front to wealthier students who might otherwise choose a different school. Luring four paying students instead of one nonpayer would create $240,000 in additional tuition revenue over four years.

The widely used practice, called "financial aid leveraging," is a perfect application of machine learning, the form of predictive analytics that has taken the business world by storm. But it turned out that the long-term unintended consequence of this leveraging is an imbalance in the student population between economic classes, with wealthier applicants gaining admission at the expense of poorer but equally qualified peers.

[...] Financial aid leveraging is one of several examples of questionable machine-learning outcomes cited by Samir Passi of Princeton University and Solon Barocas of Cornell University in a recent paper about fairness in problem formulation. Misplaced assumptions, failure to agree on desired outcomes and unintentional biases introduced by incomplete training data are just some of the factors that can cause machine learning programs to go off the rails, yielding data that’s useless at best and misleading at worst.

"People often think that bad machine learning  systems are equated with bad actors, but I think the more common problem is unintended, undesirable side effects," Passi said in an interview with SiliconANGLE.

[...] Like most branches of artificial intelligence, machine learning has acquired a kind of black-box mystique that can easily mask some of its inherent frailties. Despite the impressive advances computers have made in tasks like playing chess and piloting driverless automobiles, their algorithms are only as good as the people who built them and the data they're given.

The upshot: Work on machine learning in coming years is likely to focus on cracking open that black box and devising more robust methods to make sure those algorithms do what they’re supposed to do and avoid collateral damage.

Any organization that's getting started with machine learning should be aware of the technology's limitations as well as its power.


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  • (Score: 2) by VLM on Monday February 11 2019, @03:21PM (3 children)

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Monday February 11 2019, @03:21PM (#799528)

    Luring four paying students instead of one nonpayer would create $240,000 in additional tuition revenue over four years."

    A slight tangent of your arguement is that implies $240K of government backed student loans and as current trends continue, that means around $120K of taxpayer liability for defaults.

    So there is justification for massive government involvement in this seemingly internal scheme.

    Also under the four person solution, the government would be producing 3.5 future bartenders waitresses and baristas for 0.5 available education jobs, or if the supply is limited the government would produce only 0.5 future baristas for 0.5 education jobs. That 3.5 underemployed grads would be a lot of welfare and obamacare expense for electricians, coders, similar high paying jobs, to pay for via taxes on their high non-uni-grad wages.

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  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by bobthecimmerian on Monday February 11 2019, @03:34PM (2 children)

    by bobthecimmerian (6834) on Monday February 11 2019, @03:34PM (#799535)

    I'm completely in favor of skipping college unless you have a clear career path lined up that makes the investment worthwhile. There is nothing wrong with being an electrician, plumber, or similar. But as a general thing keep in mind supply and demand: going to tech school is only the smart move when the number of people going is relatively low. If enough people become electricians and plumbers, the average electrician and plumber will be as screwed as the average auto mechanic or short order cook. Even high quality software development will be commodotized eventually - it might take a few generations, though.

    Supply and demand takes focus away from the whole idea that anyone with a work ethic deserves a decent standard of living, and puts that focus towards competing with everyone else to get a bigger piece of a limited pie. And the pie is only limited because the bulk of the profits go to owners instead of the hardest and brightest workers.

    • (Score: 2) by VLM on Monday February 11 2019, @04:33PM (1 child)

      by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Monday February 11 2019, @04:33PM (#799570)

      I would agree with your observations generally, with some fine tuning, that it takes a much higher IQ to be an electrician than perhaps a school teacher, which limits supply, and you can't ship an electrican's job to India quite as easily as shipping an accountants job or a software dev. Also its interesting that the Electrician's union is about as effective as the Medical Doctor's union at gate keeping admission into their apprenticeships such that pay remains high. Depending strongly on location and exact spot in the business cycle, it might be easier to get into med school than to become an apprentice sparkie.

      There are justifications based on lab gear capital costs for a nuclear engineer's education to cost $200K per person; nobody can explain why a philosophy or math degree requiring no more than paper and whiteboard should cost $200K other than corruption. I can justify mentally a couple kilobucks to get access to the microwave electronics test lab when I was a kid; hard to justify kilobucks of tuition to learn sociology 101 or Diff Eqs. DiffEqs required maybe one dollar of paper and whiteboard ink per victim, at most, aside from the foreign grad student associate prof who didn't speak English and only got about $1K for teaching the class... the rest of the money disappeared somewhere...

      Its interesting that I know of several electricians who went to the local CC to learn how to run their small businesses after they became master electricians and started hiring guys to work for them. How to be a crappy wanna be accountant costs like $75 at the CC but $50K if you want to learn the same stuff and be labeled as a MBA afterwards. Of course the electricians have more experience actually running a profitable business, which makes it even funnier.

      There's nothing really wrong with education as an idea, but the implementation of the system as a meal ticket and source of meal tickets is so awful it needs to be burned down can't be fixed without a reboot. Ditto health care, interestingly enough. And maybe real estate certainly properly development. Banking too. Well this list is getting depressingly long.

      • (Score: 2) by bobthecimmerian on Tuesday February 12 2019, @07:10PM

        by bobthecimmerian (6834) on Tuesday February 12 2019, @07:10PM (#800256)

        I'd argue that a good teacher - the kind you would actually want educating children - is almost certainly capable of becoming an electrician. And you can't export an electrician's job overseas, but if there are dozens nearby you won't pay that much anyway. As you said, like physicians they have effectively set up a guild system to protect their income ('guild' is my term for it, I don't know if you would call it that).

        But to jump back to education, I think a stellar education should be a top priority for all children across the country, almost completely without regard to expense. However, I would not tie education or education plans to economic advantages. The Democratic Party promise that education opportunities will fix the shrinking middle class is a lie or at best a stupid mistake. It won't, other factors are driving wages downwards and the same supply and demand factors will prevent most of the people going into code/nursing/trades/etc... from jumping a few notches on the income ladder.