Really fascinating, but if you click through do make sure you’re ready to engage your brain. My favorite part is encapsulated by two quotes:
In his 1980 report The Need for Biases in Learning Generalizations, Tom M. Mitchell argues that inductive biases constitute the heart of generalization and indeed a key basis for learning itself.
A key challenge of machine learning, therefore, is to design systems whose inductive biases align with the structure of the problem at hand.
Essentially: since all ML reasons by induction, removing bias is not a desired goal of the field (induction is essentially the application of learned biases to new contexts). Rather, the goal of ML is to design systems with appropriate (useful / desirable) biases.
While the term “bias” here is being used in a slightly different way than we use it when we talk about “algorithm bias”, I thought it was a really interesting point. What we actually want is not unbiased algorithms, it’s algorithms that are biased in desirable ways.