Axiomatic perspective on fairness, and the power of discussion

Sorelle Friedler, Carlos Scheidegger and I just posted a new paper on the arxiv where we try to lay out a framework for talking about fairness in a more precise way. 

The blog post I link to says more about the paper itself. But I wanted to comment here on the tortuous process that led to this paper. In some form or another, we've been thinking about this problem for two years: how do we "mathematize" discussions of fairness and bias? 

It's been a long and difficult slog, more than any other topic in "CS meets X" that I've ever bumped into. The problem here is that the words are extremely slippery, and refract completely different meanings in different contexts. So coming up with notions that aren't overly complicated, and yet appear to capture the different ways in which people think about fairness was excruciatingly difficult. 

We had a basic framework in mind a while ago, but then we started "testing" it in the wild, on papers, and on people. The more conversations we had, the more we refined and adapted our ideas, to the point where the paper we have today owes deep debts to many people that we spoke with and who provided nontrivial conceptual challenges that we had to address. 

I still have no idea whether what we've written is any good. Time will tell. But it feels good to finally put out something, however half-baked. Because now hopefully the community can engage with it.