&gt; Schneier is discussing an unpleasant fact; unbiased algorithms often discover that things we previously attributed to bias were actually unbiased predictors. But we don&#x27;t like to admit this, so we instead make silly statements like the above.<p>There is a legitimate question as to whether an algorithm is actually unbiased. It could be quite accurate or there could be a bias, e.g. because the algorithm penalizes drug convictions and drug convictions have an unjustified bias due to racist or sexist enforcement.<p>The problem is it isn&#x27;t a simple question to answer. And people are going to want to choose their answer based on their politics.<p>But that can&#x27;t work. We can&#x27;t let a black box take discriminatory inputs and expect it to produce a just result. We also can&#x27;t just assume that every unequal outcome had an unjust cause, or we&#x27;ll end up e.g. causing loans to be given to uncreditworthy people and wrecking the economy (see also housing crash).<p>Which means that Schneier is wrong about quotas but exactly right that what we need is transparency. Because <i>if</i> there <i>is</i> unjustified bias then we need to understand why so we can prevent it, and if there <i>isn&#x27;t</i> then we need to understand why so we can accept it.