Quantifying fairness

A bit more technical than usual, but definitely worth reading: “Reflections on Quantitative Fairness”

A couple of less-technical excerpts

Much communication consists of taking one or another of these fairness concepts as obvious or axiomatic and asserting the violation of that principle as a political or moral gotcha. Formalization should not be regarded as a panacea in these debates but perhaps it can help to cement the points that:

• a lack of clarity can conceal a debate with real content and stakes
• differences in priorities and understandings of fairness are actually unresolved and in principle unresolvable without trade-offs

and

As statistical thinkers in the political sphere we should be aware of the hazards of supplanting politics by an expert discourse. In general, every statistical intervention to a conversation tends to raise the technical bar of entry, until it is reduced to a conversation between technical experts. As a result, in matters of criminal justice, public health, and employment, the key stakeholders, whose stakes are human stakes, and who typically lack a statistical background, can easily fall out of the conversation.

So are we speaking statistics to power? Or are we merely providing that power with new tools for the marginalization of unquantified political concerns? What is the value of this quantitative fairness conversation to a person or community whose concerns will not be quantified for another decade, if ever?

That is: it’s worth trying to be clear about what the actual question is, but we have to be careful in doing that not to push out the people who know the answer.