#standardized testing
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Hypothetical AI election disinformation risks vs real AI harms
I'm on tour with my new novel The Bezzle! Catch me TONIGHT (Feb 27) in Portland at Powell's. Then, onto Phoenix (Changing Hands, Feb 29), Tucson (Mar 9-12), and more!
You can barely turn around these days without encountering a think-piece warning of the impending risk of AI disinformation in the coming elections. But a recent episode of This Machine Kills podcast reminds us that these are hypothetical risks, and there is no shortage of real AI harms:
https://soundcloud.com/thismachinekillspod/311-selling-pickaxes-for-the-ai-gold-rush
The algorithmic decision-making systems that increasingly run the back-ends to our lives are really, truly very bad at doing their jobs, and worse, these systems constitute a form of "empiricism-washing": if the computer says it's true, it must be true. There's no such thing as racist math, you SJW snowflake!
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/02/aoc-algorithms-racist-bias.html
Nearly 1,000 British postmasters were wrongly convicted of fraud by Horizon, the faulty AI fraud-hunting system that Fujitsu provided to the Royal Mail. They had their lives ruined by this faulty AI, many went to prison, and at least four of the AI's victims killed themselves:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal
Tenants across America have seen their rents skyrocket thanks to Realpage's landlord price-fixing algorithm, which deployed the time-honored defense: "It's not a crime if we commit it with an app":
https://www.propublica.org/article/doj-backs-tenants-price-fixing-case-big-landlords-real-estate-tech
Housing, you'll recall, is pretty foundational in the human hierarchy of needs. Losing your home – or being forced to choose between paying rent or buying groceries or gas for your car or clothes for your kid – is a non-hypothetical, widespread, urgent problem that can be traced straight to AI.
Then there's predictive policing: cities across America and the world have bought systems that purport to tell the cops where to look for crime. Of course, these systems are trained on policing data from forces that are seeking to correct racial bias in their practices by using an algorithm to create "fairness." You feed this algorithm a data-set of where the police had detected crime in previous years, and it predicts where you'll find crime in the years to come.
But you only find crime where you look for it. If the cops only ever stop-and-frisk Black and brown kids, or pull over Black and brown drivers, then every knife, baggie or gun they find in someone's trunk or pockets will be found in a Black or brown person's trunk or pocket. A predictive policing algorithm will naively ingest this data and confidently assert that future crimes can be foiled by looking for more Black and brown people and searching them and pulling them over.
Obviously, this is bad for Black and brown people in low-income neighborhoods, whose baseline risk of an encounter with a cop turning violent or even lethal. But it's also bad for affluent people in affluent neighborhoods – because they are underpoliced as a result of these algorithmic biases. For example, domestic abuse that occurs in full detached single-family homes is systematically underrepresented in crime data, because the majority of domestic abuse calls originate with neighbors who can hear the abuse take place through a shared wall.
But the majority of algorithmic harms are inflicted on poor, racialized and/or working class people. Even if you escape a predictive policing algorithm, a facial recognition algorithm may wrongly accuse you of a crime, and even if you were far away from the site of the crime, the cops will still arrest you, because computers don't lie:
https://www.cbsnews.com/sacramento/news/texas-macys-sunglass-hut-facial-recognition-software-wrongful-arrest-sacramento-alibi/
Trying to get a low-waged service job? Be prepared for endless, nonsensical AI "personality tests" that make Scientology look like NASA:
https://futurism.com/mandatory-ai-hiring-tests
Service workers' schedules are at the mercy of shift-allocation algorithms that assign them hours that ensure that they fall just short of qualifying for health and other benefits. These algorithms push workers into "clopening" – where you close the store after midnight and then open it again the next morning before 5AM. And if you try to unionize, another algorithm – that spies on you and your fellow workers' social media activity – targets you for reprisals and your store for closure.
If you're driving an Amazon delivery van, algorithm watches your eyeballs and tells your boss that you're a bad driver if it doesn't like what it sees. If you're working in an Amazon warehouse, an algorithm decides if you've taken too many pee-breaks and automatically dings you:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/17/revenge-of-the-chickenized-reverse-centaurs/
If this disgusts you and you're hoping to use your ballot to elect lawmakers who will take up your cause, an algorithm stands in your way again. "AI" tools for purging voter rolls are especially harmful to racialized people – for example, they assume that two "Juan Gomez"es with a shared birthday in two different states must be the same person and remove one or both from the voter rolls:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/eligible-voters-swept-up-conservative-activists-purge-voter-rolls/
Hoping to get a solid education, the sort that will keep you out of AI-supervised, precarious, low-waged work? Sorry, kiddo: the ed-tech system is riddled with algorithms. There's the grifty "remote invigilation" industry that watches you take tests via webcam and accuses you of cheating if your facial expressions fail its high-tech phrenology standards:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/16/unauthorized-paper/#cheating-anticheat
All of these are non-hypothetical, real risks from AI. The AI industry has proven itself incredibly adept at deflecting interest from real harms to hypothetical ones, like the "risk" that the spicy autocomplete will become conscious and take over the world in order to convert us all to paperclips:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/27/10-types-of-people/#taking-up-a-lot-of-space
Whenever you hear AI bosses talking about how seriously they're taking a hypothetical risk, that's the moment when you should check in on whether they're doing anything about all these longstanding, real risks. And even as AI bosses promise to fight hypothetical election disinformation, they continue to downplay or ignore the non-hypothetical, here-and-now harms of AI.
There's something unseemly – and even perverse – about worrying so much about AI and election disinformation. It plays into the narrative that kicked off in earnest in 2016, that the reason the electorate votes for manifestly unqualified candidates who run on a platform of bald-faced lies is that they are gullible and easily led astray.
But there's another explanation: the reason people accept conspiratorial accounts of how our institutions are run is because the institutions that are supposed to be defending us are corrupt and captured by actual conspiracies:
https://memex.craphound.com/2019/09/21/republic-of-lies-the-rise-of-conspiratorial-thinking-and-the-actual-conspiracies-that-fuel-it/
The party line on conspiratorial accounts is that these institutions are good, actually. Think of the rebuttal offered to anti-vaxxers who claimed that pharma giants were run by murderous sociopath billionaires who were in league with their regulators to kill us for a buck: "no, I think you'll find pharma companies are great and superbly regulated":
https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/05/not-that-naomi/#if-the-naomi-be-klein-youre-doing-just-fine
Institutions are profoundly important to a high-tech society. No one is capable of assessing all the life-or-death choices we make every day, from whether to trust the firmware in your car's anti-lock brakes, the alloys used in the structural members of your home, or the food-safety standards for the meal you're about to eat. We must rely on well-regulated experts to make these calls for us, and when the institutions fail us, we are thrown into a state of epistemological chaos. We must make decisions about whether to trust these technological systems, but we can't make informed choices because the one thing we're sure of is that our institutions aren't trustworthy.
Ironically, the long list of AI harms that we live with every day are the most important contributor to disinformation campaigns. It's these harms that provide the evidence for belief in conspiratorial accounts of the world, because each one is proof that the system can't be trusted. The election disinformation discourse focuses on the lies told – and not why those lies are credible.
That's because the subtext of election disinformation concerns is usually that the electorate is credulous, fools waiting to be suckered in. By refusing to contemplate the institutional failures that sit upstream of conspiracism, we can smugly locate the blame with the peddlers of lies and assume the mantle of paternalistic protectors of the easily gulled electorate.
But the group of people who are demonstrably being tricked by AI is the people who buy the horrifically flawed AI-based algorithmic systems and put them into use despite their manifest failures.
As I've written many times, "we're nowhere near a place where bots can steal your job, but we're certainly at the point where your boss can be suckered into firing you and replacing you with a bot that fails at doing your job"
https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/15/passive-income-brainworms/#four-hour-work-week
The most visible victims of AI disinformation are the people who are putting AI in charge of the life-chances of millions of the rest of us. Tackle that AI disinformation and its harms, and we'll make conspiratorial claims about our institutions being corrupt far less credible.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/27/ai-conspiracies/#epistemological-collapse
Image:
Cryteria (modified)
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg
CC BY 3.0
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en
#pluralistic#ai#disinformation#algorithmic bias#elections#election disinformation#conspiratorialism#paternalism#this machine kills#Horizon#the rents too damned high#weaponized shelter#predictive policing#fr#facial recognition#labor#union busting#union avoidance#standardized testing#hiring#employment#remote invigilation
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Remember seeing something about GPT-4 doing well on standardized tests? It turns out it may have memorized the answers.
other examples that look like memorization
#gpt4#standardized testing#memorization#from 100% to 0% when it hadn't seen the answers before#this is why you never test on your training data#AI hype
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In Houston this year, 28 schools have had their libraries removed and replaced with ‘disciplinary centers’. So sure, as if most students don’t view school as a kind of prison already, this will help that along. We have a big problem with education in this country. Most schools are forced to teach students to be able to pass standardized tests, because if they don’t, the school will lose funding. By forcing kids to all learn the same stuff regardless of their personal interests, schooling becomes a chore, something to be avoided, and the moment they stop being forced to learn, they WILL stop. This is how you create a permanent uneducated underclass, which is why dark political forces that thrive in ignorance are doing everything they can to ruin education. Like in Houston.
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chat, I may be cooked.
#hand jumper#sayeon lee#ryujin kang#webtoon#sayjin#this is about the ISS by the way#standardized testing
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I had the absolute displeasure of taking the brand new digital SAT with 1 and a half time. They make you sit until the end of your allotted time for each section with nothing to entertain yourself and it’s hell. I was stuck in the testing room for 6 hours. I did appreciate the extra time for the math part, but for everything else it was unnecessary for me.
I swear all of us in there bonded over it being horrible. I really don’t get why they don’t design it so you can’t just move on to the next part when you’re done. It would have saved me literal hours and some of my sanity because I started writing fan fiction in the annotation feature and carving my pencil with a thumbtack I found on the floor to pass the time. Such a simple design change and it’s all fixed. There are plenty of other standardized tests test let you go at your own pace, even if I hard time limit has to be set at least let people move on early.
Because it was honestly incredibly unpleasant and I’m not even sure if it was worth it. But hey they gave us pizza afterwards though
#accommodations#sat test#digital sat#standardized testing#actually autistic#autistic rant#rant post#rant#school#testing
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Please wish me luck on the ACT tmrw
Gn!! (Im so nervous I’m gonna puke)
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hey there! so i have a question about one of your older posts - ofc feel free not to answer, i’m just curious. it starts with ‘pour one out for the stories you won’t ever find again’ or something similar
so basically, in that post, you mention something like ‘stories in standardised tests that you could only read for a few minutes, but those minutes lasted longer than you’d think’ or something similar
so i’m from africa, and during school, i… don’t think we ever got anything like stories in our tests. i didn’t go to public school (but private school and public school curriculums are rlly similar where i live, tbh) but our tests (end of year exams) were always something like: a comprehension (usually a news article as a source - one year we got an opinion piece about cancel culture), analysis of some poems, writing an essay abt a play, writing a summary, visual literacy (usually a comic), writing a few short pieces like an email or open letter, and an ‘editing’ section (language/grammar skills). i also took an extra subject that my school called advanced program english, and we never got any stories there - just poems, plays, etc.
i am,,, literally so sorry for such a long and detailed ask, i’m just so intrigued about the stories you mentioned? like, what kind of stories were they/what were they abt? did you analyse them, or like edit for grammar mistakes? and do you know if this a common thing for schools around the globe, or if it’s just the usa/certain parts of usa that put stories in their tests?
again i’m so sorry, this such a weird thing to ask about, i’m just. curious ajjdjdjjjhh but like feel free to ignore, ofc. no pressure.
"Older post" is maybe pushing it, lol. It's from two months ago.
United States standardized tests usually include reading sections to test critical thinking skills. If you google something like "ACT short stories," or look at an SAT practice test, there will be some short stories included. This is also true for state level standardized testing that covers elementary through high school.
We did also have writing sections, and other kinds of writing did happen, but there were usually at least two or three stories in the reading section.
A portion of this story, cutting off at about the “America—America—where was America?” is one that really stuck with me. It was abridged for testing purposes.
(I'm not going to address the many, many problems with American standardized testing here.)
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-fae
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Today was finally the last day of CTPs (Child Torture Program)
@dafantasyqueen knows the pain of the CTPs lol
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i need suggestions
what are the most maliciously compliant, chaotic things i can do to entertain myself during and after a standardized test, subtly and without getting caught? so far me and my friends came up with:
embroidery (i've actually done this one before)
get a sick new tattoo
Stare at the proctor until they get uncomfortable
Cough at a regular interval
Games such as chopsticks and rock paper scissors
Text each other with the calculators (not actually sure how to do this)
Highlight an entire sheet of paper
Stare at the proctor and every time they make eye contact make. a random facial expression and write something on your paper
contact fellow testers via morse code
paint nails
bring like 80 pencils and put another one on my desk every time the teacher looks at me
origami
#test doesnt allow talking btw#id also like to avoid distracting people who are actually taking the test#standardized testing#school
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We had state mandated testing today. We were SUPPOSED to write a 5 paragraph essay on caves. I wrote a five paragraph essay on why standardized testing is harmful to Neurodivergent students. All my friends say I'm gonna fail. I say, I may fail, but at least I failed with a purpose 🤠
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By: Frederick R. Prete
Published: Apr 18, 2023
In a recent article for FAIR Substack, David Ferrero argued convincingly that school programs designed to view their subject matter through an “ethnic studies”— rather than an “ethnic histories”— lens can be “reductive, tendentious, divisive, and doctrinaire.” He also pointed out that this narrow approach, which includes indiscriminate references to putative ‘racial’ groups (“black”, “Asian”, “white”, etc.), is antithetical to the ideal of bridging our “ethnic and religious differences in the service of forging a shared civic identity.”
While I am in complete agreement with Ferrero, I would go even further. I believe that there is a fundamental conceptual flaw in using current racial categories in any academic analysis. These categories have become so hopelessly ambiguous that they are virtually meaningless, and they now function as terms of convenience, used only when they serve a political agenda. This is true throughout academia, but is most evident in discussions about academic achievement.
In biology, “race” is a taxonomic term, and like all biological terms, it can be ambiguous. Sometimes it’s used as a synonym for subspecies. Most often, however, it refers to a group of organisms that is biologically or geographically distinguishable from other groups within a species but is still able to reproduce with them.
On the other hand, when referring to humans, most contemporary scientists consider ‘race’ a social construct based on societal definitions without any inherent physical or biological meaning. That point of view is based on the understanding that there is more genetic variability within human racial groups than between them. In other words — to paraphrase the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins — whereas human sex is binary (there are only two), race is a spectrum.
Ironically, despite the fact that most academics consider human racial categories to be socially constructed, they continue to use them enthusiastically as if they represented well-defined, homogeneous groups of people. Think of the controversies over college admissions, disparities in academic achievement, or ethnic studies curricula.
The problems with grouping students in terms of contemporary racial categories are most evident — and most instructive — in how we interpret their academic performance, especially on standardized tests like the ACT. I’ve argued (here, here, and here) that racial categories are virtually useless in explaining student performance differences because the categories are largely arbitrary, often contrived, and always confounded by self-reporting biases and socio-economics. Nonetheless, a race-based narrative continues to dominate our discussions despite the fact that thinking in those terms perpetuates a host of inaccurate, deleterious stereotypes.
The ACT is a standardized test that predicts the likelihood of student success in the first year of college. The overall score is based on the results of four, multiple-choice subject tests, English, math, reading, and science. The number of correct answers for each subject test is converted into a scaled score and averaged. Thirty-six is perfect.
In 2022, approximately 1.35 million students took the ACT. Overall, the average score was 20, about one point lower than the average between 1990 and 2021. In terms of the ACT’s racial categories, the highest 2022 scores were earned by students identifying as Asian (25), White (21), and Two or More Races (20). The next three groups were Hispanic/Latino, Prefer Not to Respond/No Response, and Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander (18). The two lowest-performing groups were American Indians/Alaskan Native, and Black/African-American (16).
This ranking by race has remained virtually unchanged for a decade, and when viewed in terms of these categories, the ranking seems to support the divisive and inaccurate belief that the test is racially discriminatory. However, there are two problems with viewing the scores in this way. First, it’s impossible to know exactly how students sort — or choose not to sort — themselves into racial categories, and there is no way of knowing the ethnicity of those in the Two or More Races (first introduced in 2012), or the Prefer Not to Respond groups.
Second, the categories, themselves, have always been somewhat arbitrary. For instance, in 2012, the ACT separated the so-called, Asian-American/Pacific Islander category into two cohorts that turned out to be completely different in their test performances. In that year, there was a 13% increase in the number of students in the Asian group, and a 12% decrease in the number of Pacific Islanders who met the ACT’s College Readiness Benchmarks compared to 2006. That remarkable divergence has continued. Since 2012, the Asian group’s ACT scores have steadily improved while all other groups have steadily declined. This clearly demonstrates that the original Asian-American/Pacific Islander group was a demographic of convenience with little external validity and which masked dramatic within-group differences. Further, because the two newly created groups are so diverse, it would be virtually impossible to determine precisely why the group performances are so different. Assuredly, the same thing would happen if any of the other racial categories were similarly subdivided.
Then, in 2006, the ACT began analyzing student scores in terms of Postsecondary Educational Aspiration (what students planned to do after graduation). This parameter included seven categories: Vocational-Technical Training, Two-Year College Degree, Bachelor's Degree, Graduate Study, Professional-Level Degree, and two which I won’t consider here, Other and No Response. When the data are considered in terms of these categories rather than race, a very different picture emerges.
In 2006, 2012, and 2022, across all racial groups, ACT scores were 31-51% higher for students aspiring to a professional-level degree compared to students planning on vocational-technical training, and scores were 12-17% higher for those aspiring to a graduate degree compared to a bachelor's degree.
The effects of postgraduate aspirations have been even more dramatic within racial groups every year since 2006. For instance, in 2022, students in every category who aspired to a professional-level degree had ACT scores averaging 47% higher than those planning on vocational-technical training. The largest differences — 53% and 61% — were in the Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander and Prefer Not to Respond/No Response groups. The smallest (but still significant) difference — 35% — was in the American Indian/Alaska Native group.
More importantly, in 2022, students in the four (overall) lowest-performing racial groups who aspired to graduate study or a professional-level degree earned scores as much as 39% higher than students in the (overall) highest-performing groups who aspired to vocational-technical training or a two-year college degree. In other words, Black, American Native, Hispanic, and Hawaiian/Pacific Islander students with high educational aspirations outscored Asian, White, multiracial, and non-identifying students with lower aspirations.
Unfortunately, no one seems to have noticed that aspirations are more important than race in predicting academic performance on the test. I guess that doesn’t fit the popular narrative.
Over the past 15 years, educational aspirations have consistently had a greater impact on ACT performance than self-reported race. This suggests that by doing what we can to elevate student aspirations, irrespective of their race, we will benefit their academic performance. One way to do this is by teaching students that they can and will succeed if they work hard, rather than telling them that they are at the mercy of uncontrollable external circumstances. This will also give the lie to the worn out, race-based tropes about academic performance that are so psychologically damaging to students.
As a Biological Psychologist — and someone who taught standardized test prep for over a decade — I understand that the factors influencing student performance are complex and often the result of long-term trends that vary within and between groups, regardless of how the groups are defined. However, using anachronistic, ambiguous, or contrived racial categories to interpret educational performance is misleading, unhelpful, and divisive.
Racial categories have external validity only to the extent that each represents a meaningfully homogenous and distinct group of people. However, none of these criteria are met by the colloquial categories currently applied to people. Distinguishing students by, for instance, family or socioeconomic demographics, internalized cultural beliefs, personality traits (such as resilience or aspirations), school district, or ZIP code would all be more informative and useful in improving educational policy than the current crude racial categories. Further, to paraphrase Ferrero, refocusing our conversation on aspirations — rather than on our perceived ethnicity — will help us bridge our imagined racial differences, recognize our shared humanity, and encourage us to pursue our goals together.
==
@madwriterscorner You might find this interesting.
This demonstrates the problem with univariate takes, like those of Kendi, whose entire academic output sits precariously atop the fallacy of Causal Reductionism and his complete lack of interest in understanding a problem before pretending he does.
#Frederick R. Prete#FAIR for All#Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism#standardized testing#ACT test#American College Testing#antiracism#antiracism as religion#religion is a mental illness
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Harry Potter: “fantasy escapism”
Also Harry Potter: includes wizard standardized testing in their amazing escapist wizarding school
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I don't think most "political issues" are all that complicated.
Like: there's no grand mystery why someone opposes things like free School-lunch and -breakfast or SNAP(Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program); they want children to starve. Someone opposes giving kids food because they don't want kids to have food; it's pretty straightforward. And if you have a whole political party running on the position that Children Should Starve, and they support policies which increase child-starvation, that is EXACTLY what you would expect as, after all, they are The Children Should Starve Party. Yes, Im mostly talking about Republicans and Tories here, but not just.
But, while I don't think there's anything complicated or difficult to parse about these sorts of things, I DO think they can tell us something about other things. Like for instance: what a person or party which opposes free food for kids means when they defend "Meritocracy" or standardized testing.
Cuz here's the thing: if you believe that a bunch of kids should be forced to take the same test, and that this test can tell you something relevant about their fundamental capabilities, despite KNOWING that some of those kids taking that test are hungry(and tired, and thirsty, and unsafe, and need to use the toilet, and poorly-loved, and undertaught, and deprived of the time and attention to ever understand the subject in the first place, and, and, and; hunger is a proxy here for SO MANY Things), then you're not actually interested in knowing what those kids are genuinely capable of; you're just interested in using that test to validate and replicate the very inequality which made them hungry in the first place.
And if your "Principles" demand that those hungry kids should be kept hungry through overworking, underpaying jobs for the rest of their lives just because of their performance on some test they took at the age of 18, well then you actually just want people to starve!
#Politics#zA Opinions#~Meritocracy~#Conservatism#Conservative Fuckery#Aristocracy#Poverty#Starvation#Food#Standardized Testing#Psychometrics#zA's Inveterate Politicism#zA Writes#zA Posts
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does anyone know any good free ACT prep courses especially for the English and science sections 😭
im beginning to study for it and boy am I stressing because on the preACT I did really bad on the science and reading section I dont even know why 😭 pls someone send some websites or flash cards my way im begging
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I was doing a standardized test and this 6th grader next to me was draw kakashi and my stupidass though “oh my god it fucking etho” and this is why you watch the slab
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