alt Hacker NewsTalking about this in terms of exploration/exploitation may be a bit misleading, because from a pure exploration-exploitation perspective, biases wouldn't be a problem if the groups were secretly all identical. If they are, you are "right" to spend zero effort on exploration, your initial inaccurate model that the X are better doctors than Y, will produce no worse results than the completely accurate model.
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Isn’t exploration vs exploitation about the decision-making process, not about the actual reality in the world around you? It doesn’t matter if they are secretly identical or not. The exploration/exploitation trade-off is in the person making those decisions.
Of course it does, if you start filtering people out at random then you have pointlessly introduced the possibility of randomly filtering out the best candidate.
I think this is implied by your comment that the issue is framed improperly, but just to point it out explicitly: the reason that this is a problem is because it would lead to segregation, inequality, and injustice in a society where the biased selection mechanism is used.
Even if it happens to be “optimal” in this case at assigning employees to positions based purely on the information available and their likelihood to succeed, biases can present other issues.