> An algorithm is objective because it's falsifiable. If you're trying to predict e.g. whether someone will pay back a loan then every time the algorithm tells us to make the loan we can see if it was right.

I'm sorry, but that's just mathematically wrong in the presence of feedback: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10874683 When you have a dynamical system with feedback, you can have a perfectly predictive model that is is both wrong and unobjective.

> Grouping humans by "race" is poison, even if you're trying to help.

I agree. But I am not trying to group them. I am trying to undo the damage of the grouping.

> You didn't create the groups but you're choosing which ones to care about. There are so many different groups that meet those criteria that you'll never meet someone who isn't in at least one of them. And they correlate and half-correlate and complement each other. You can't balance that.

That's true in theory. Which is why you go to historians and anthropologist who seriously study this stuff and ask them. It turns out race and women are pretty much the big ones, not just in the West but in most societies (though not all).

> If what we really care about is "balance" then that is an actual solution, but it's also so obviously ridiculous that it demonstrates how that can't possibly be the real problem.

Let's say you have a headache. One solution is for me to kill you. Hurray! Problem solved! Headache gone! This shows that your headache couldn't have possibly been a real problem. WAT?

> And if it is to be a real problem then it also demonstrates why you can't solve it.

I studied history in grad school. And one of the constant things in history is that people will always explain why the problem can't be solved. You can go online and read some of the extremely elaborate, pseudo-intellectual explanations why letting women vote would be disastrous, why slavery is good for blacks, and why women should never be allowed to practice law or medicine. Yet social action solved all three. I could try to explain why your reasoning is wrong but it would take too long. In short, you think that the solution must necessarily solve the proximate cause without studying the ultimate cause, and you're wrong about what constitutes the main effect. The "open system" accounts for a very small portion of the problem.

One of the advantages to studying history is the perspective you get about things that today seem natural and immutable to us, and then you learn that things haven't always been like that. The social structure in society is constantly changing. The only question is do we want to help direct the change as much as we can, or act like incurious beings, that just let things happen to them without understanding them. I always find it curious (though not really; it is a known and familiar phenomenon, which happens over and over) how it is the people who are otherwise the most curious about nature and technology become primitive and unquestioning when it comes to human society. All of a sudden the model is either too simple, or too complex, and we certainly cannot change it. Which is funny because people had never flown (on wings) before the invention of the airplane, yet people have completely changed the social structure over and over, through political activism.