That example (https://research.google.com/bigpicture/attacking-discriminat...) isn't particularly compelling.

As their example shows, there're two traditional approaches: maximize profit and group-unaware.

* Maximizing profits gets the most profit, but treats people differently based on their group.

* Group-unaware treats everyone the same regardless of their group, but can generate far less profit.

The example presents two alternatives: "demographic parity" and "equal opportunity". Presumably the authors would argue that these may be superior choices because they generate nearly as much profit as profit-maximization while having a plausible argument for being socially responsible.

This seems a bit off.

Fundamentally, we might say that there're 2 kinds of discrimination: fair and unfair. For example, it might be fair to discriminate for objective reasons, but it'd be unfair to discriminate for non-objective reasons (e.g., bigotry).

The advantage of profit-maximization is that it takes full advantage of fair-discrimination while fully avoiding unfair-discrimination; the drawback is that it does discriminate.

The advantage of group-unaware is that it fully avoids all discrimination; the drawback is that it sacrifices fair-discrimination, causing it to yield the lowest profits.

The two alternatives proposed in that example seem to get the best of both worlds because they're basically just cloning profit-maximization, but with slight concessions to plausible-sounding criteria for equality to dodge perceptions of unfair-discrimination.

Here're the tricks:

* In "demographic parity", everyone has the same odds regardless of group. This would appear to be the same thing as profit-maximization if the risk/rewards were the same, but since it ignores them, it ends up being basically "profit maximization, but ignoring different risk/rewards".

* In "equal opportunity", both groups get the same true-positive rate. This again seems to sacrifice some of the risk-vs.-reward information, but with a slightly different skew.

So for the privileged group (Orange) vs. the disadvantaged group (Blue):

* Profit maximization: $32,400 from 50 vs. 61

* Group-unaware: $25,600 from 55 vs. 55

* Demographic parity: $30,800 from 52 vs. 60

* Equal opportunity: $30,400 from 53 vs. 59

To me, that looks like 3 ways to discriminate, all yielding roughly the same profit and thresholds -- using either of the 2 proposed alternatives gives up a little bit of the profit in exchange for a pleasant-sounding rationale.

What I dislike about this is that it seems entirely superficial. The proposed alternatives engage in roughly the same level of fair-discrimination (and none of them engage in unfair-discrimination, which wasn't given in the example at all) to generate roughly the same level of profit.

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> The conversation on this subject by lay folks is rife with statistical ignorance, and Google has done good work communicating and clarifying the conversational starting points. This is a hard issue because it takes ethical trade-offs and forces you to specify mathematically exactly how you want to handle inequality, which is a subject that most people haven’t thought through rigorously, and would rather hand-wave away with virtuous sound bites.

That's exactly what this looks like!

In this case, the virtuous sound-bites are "Demographic Parity" and "Equal Opportunity". They both worked out to be mostly the same as simple profit-maximization, but if someone in a disadvantaged group protests that they're being discriminated against, they'd probably find it difficult to follow the math far enough to sustain their complaint.