> Why didn't you just ignore it and keep scrolling?
Doesn't work like that. If people who retain the values and views that formed the West (e.g. deep inquiry into all topics regardless of orthodoxy) abdicate all responsibility for weighing in when we see these values being attacked, how exactly is that going to help the cause?
> Should we stop studying all forms of bias in computing?
Loaded question. Studying how ML systems reflect data is fine; but when ML systems give us results that accurately reflect real world data, but that we don't like based on our progressivist / ultra-liberal priors, there's a problem.
Statements an ML system can trivially tease out of a data set, like "women are more likely to do career X" or "this group is more likely to commit murder" or "this person is more likely to be hired for this position". When this reveals an uncomfortable truth that has been pre-ordained as offensive regardless of its basis in reality, we have a choice between rejecting the facts based on our priors, or updating our thinking to reflect reality. Sadly, the trend has been to do the former, and to punish anyone doing the latter.
Just go look at what Amazon had to do with their ML-based resume sorting system. It revealed that the best resumes (sorted by likeliness to be hired) were of Asian and White presenting males; which we all know to be true for their hiring, because we all know that that is the current demographics of the industry in general. Of course, such a system cannot be allowed to operate, even though the humans which continue to do the screening in its place will continue to apply the same selection rubric they have before. Nothing is solved, nothing is learned. It just gets chalked up to "systemic bias" without actually investigating any of the reasons for this (such as IQ distributions, access to technology, and whatever raw factors dictate people's individual and aggregate interests toward career selection).
Ehh, I think there's a good chance the translation algorithm is guessing the likely gender correctly the vast majority of times here. I could see some improvement, though; it suggests
he is a hairdresser
he is a secretary
he is a florist
which are all professions that are far more likely to be women than men, so I'd certainly like to see those adjusted to default to female. Most of the other ones reflect the real world pretty closely, though.
> real and valid societal concerns
These are not real concerns unless you are living in such luxury that you have absolutely nothing else to spend your time being worried about. Bear in mind, we're talking about the translation being "biased" here; we're not talking about the real world and real biases in careers.
> Progress is made by suggesting improvements to things across the board
Modern-day "progress" is a bludgeon being used to destroy Western cultures so they can be remade in a form that permanently privileges the financial elite. Not interested.
Anyone who finds themselves offended by something like this truly needs to take stock of themselves, their life, and their situation. Here we are in the age of wonders, where a computer can translate text in other languages for you at the click of a button, and all some people can think of is that they are mad that it's not perfectly gender-diverse.
I cannot fathom having this mindset. You have to seriously have nothing else wrong with your life to make this into a bone of contention.
In the sense that people with rhinovirus symptoms usually say "I have a cold", yes.
It seems it's best to think of "cold" and "flu" as totally informal terms with a wide range of possible meanings. I've had Actual Real Influenza twice and both times it knocked me on my ass for a week, lost weight, etc. yet I hear people saying "I have the flu" when they have mild symptoms and only miss a single day of work. Hard to take such a wide range medically seriously.
Hahaha, of course they aren't. Really, you should be able to calculate how much they paid for your facilities need (square footage of your workspace, connection, IT equipment, etc) and it should be directly reflected in your salary.....
What legal culpability do they have accepting payments for organizations that run websites that allow people to exercise their constitutionally protected rights to free speech?
> Don't take a job serving the public if you only like some people and not others.
Seems like this logic doesn't apply to payment processors, web hosts, and anyone else who doesn't want to deal with free speech that they find offensive. Bake the cake, right?
> A future where there are a lot more of 'them' than 'us'? Fine with me. Is that fine with you?
Not in the slightest, no. I prefer the average IQ of the world to not drop by a standard deviation - you think we'll get out of climate trouble when most people are functionally illiterate?
Well, we might, in the sense that we might lose the ability to manufacture things that produce significant carbon.....
The car problem is solved when I have a wide selection of used electric cars in the $10k price range that I can work on in my own garage. That's still a decade out.
> I’d bet you that few cars run by fossil fuels will be sold in Europe or North America in ten years from now
Pipe dream. I'd take that bet. You'll have to weasel out with creative definitions of "few".... not everyone lives in the city, man.
Remember selecting more than one of something, and then being able to drag-and-drop it somewhere, or right click it and perform actions on the whole list?
Remember tables with sortable column headers, in every app?
Oh man. The web sucks so hard, and the kids working on it now are so used to it they don't even know how hard they've been fucked over. To think that in 2021 people still have to think about how to wire up a data table to some backend, thousands of people writing their own version of that every year....
I want to go to the alternate timeline where a major distro actually picked up the GNUstep ball and ran with it, and built out a full desktop based around WindowMaker. It's still faster and more fun than most modern desktops.
Mine as well, friend. I simply choose to live in a way where I believe this is also the likely outcome. You can pretend that this is an overdose of 'hopium' if you like, but I prefer to simply call this honest optimism.
> In your eyes, am I one of those 'woke' people, who never created any value?
I don't know you, but if you spread climate doom all over the place, you may be cancelling out the value you've created in more material ways. The morale of a nation matters.
Put it this way: I have literally met people who say they do not want to have children because they fear for the climate future. There are even articles in publications like the Guardian, Time, etc. that advocate for people to lower their carbon footprint this way. Meanwhile, in other nations where nobody cares about climate, the birth rate dwarfs our own; what does that mean for the future?
National morale is at an all-time low and this is in no small part due to people being sold a story at every angle that they have no future, no reason to hope, no salvation. Just consume, live in the pod and eat bugs, and hang on to watch the lights go out. Do you think that creates or preserves value?
> How is it that immigrants and especially their kids are a fundamentally unassimilable mass
I didn't say this, but since you are perturbed, I shall address it for you, so that you can understand my own perturbation.
First, I come from the perspective (as a non-American) that the culture of my country, as it existed over the last hundred years or so, has value. It is a culture which proved itself capable of taming a wild land, from pioneers to industrialists to a post-industrial technological civilization. This was a mighty undertaking which cost many lives, all of which were spent in the name of a better future for their descendants. I am the inheritor of such a legacy, having descended from people that made their way West in the 1600s. I have the "privilege" of being the descendant of countless generations of farmers, most of whom did not own their land, going back to time immemorial.
Second, I come from the perspective of someone who is married to a child of immigrants, from a vastly different culture. This gives me a broadened base of understanding, I think, having visited her ancestral homeland several times and seeing the rapid pace of change there as Western ideas and methodologies are picked up, adapted, and even improved upon there. I am not against immigration, I am not against other cultures, and I am not against change in my own nation - within limits.
I would like to introduce the concept of "cultural carrying capacity": the rate at which new people can be introduced into a culture and be effectively absorbed by it. This absorption doesn't have to imply total assimilation; but it does imply the primacy of the host nation's original culture, in the form of its languages, its religions, its values, and its control over the great national project and destiny. This is not to say that such things should be unchanging, but rather to say that if I wish for the stability and continuance of my culture over time, preventing all of this from being deconstructed is a basic necessity.
If a nation brings new people in at a rate below the maximum carrying capacity, it will do fine. This rate is slow enough that new immigrants are able to integrate; they're forced to learn the language, their new friends and coworkers are primary native, and their lifestyle adjusts to be virtually indistinguishable (in public) from the locals. They retain their traditions, language, ritual, religion, etc. within their family and maybe with some fellow immigrants, but by and large they're the same as anyone else. Their friends are a diverse group; their political concerns are based on policies and projections, not group affiliation; their goals and desires can be expanded to include the nation at large, not just their identity group. This is the ideal case.
If you bring people in at a rate higher than the carrying capacity, this effect is diminished or stops altogether. People are able to find insular bubbles of their original population, they can continue to speak their first language, they don't need to adapt to the local area more than is required by law and interaction with institutions. They may form a political block, elect their own representatives, and force institutions to cater to their language and cultural needs.
Is this to the detriment of the locals? It depends on too many variables to name. What is clear, however, is that if you bring your culture with you and set it up here, you will also most likely set up the problems with your culture, as well. The mitigations in place to prevent violence and crime in the local population which have evolved over decades or centuries may not apply or work. Disruption in business, in organized crime, in politics, and within the leadership of institutions becomes the name of the game, never actually decreasing as long as the influx of new cultures is constant.
If we become a nation of people who hail from nations where corrupt politics are and have been the normal state of affairs for centuries, we should not be surprised when our own politics become corrupt. The same goes for whether fathers stay with their families, whether violence is used as a way to settle personal disputes, whether bribery is part of how law enforcement operates, and whether nepotism is the standard mode in business. We all know that there are many countries where all of the above are the normal state of affairs; we also all know that the West somehow threw off much of this, and was engaged in a cultural project of moving away from such venal operations, before the 1965 Hart-Cellar Immigration Act....
One need only look at the countless examples of cities like Minneapolis, formerly a safe midwest city full of White people, now the violent home to the largest number of Somalians outside their home country. It happens slowly, and then all at once... each step of the way lubricated by everyone's unwillingness to say what everyone is secretly thinking. Somehow, along the way, it becomes more beneficial to find ways of hiding the truth by changing the statistical rubric than it is to actually confront the situation at hand.
Now, consider that different cultures have different values around families and reproduction, as well. Immigrant families may have a far higher birth rate than the host population who have stabilized over time, particularly in the West where sex ed and birth control have been mainstays for 3 generations or more now.
If you bring people in at a multiple of the rate of the carrying capacity, as has been suggested (Canada to 100 million people by 2100 is a number serious people are suggesting, for example) the result will be the complete replacement of the host population with a conflagration of new cultures. Some people will do well in this vain, others will not. Some areas may be peaceful, some may be embroiled in total race war, or gang warfare between the fading vestiges of the native organized crime and newcomer gangs. The result is essentially unpredictable and unmanageable.
I have no problem with immigration, friend, but I do want the culture that built my nation to continue to have a strong, permanent presence. I do not want the high-trust culture my ancestors sacrificed to build frittered away so that we can check a diversity box on some form; I do not want to be told my ancestors were evil, and watch their statues be torn down, and watch their legacy be wrecked by someone high on Marxist idealism that knows nothing of what it actually takes to build upward. Yet, those people are more protected by the institutions our ancestors built than I would be if I tried to counter-protest them.
Alas, nobody in power feels this way, even though a massive section of the population does. Democracy has failed us, because it refuses to address this need. The result may be anger that spills over into violence, or it may be a slow and whimpering defeat. I think the latter looks more likely at this stage; the pathological altruism my people are famous for, a game-theoretical advantage in isolation, will be our undoing in the long run.
Doesn't work like that. If people who retain the values and views that formed the West (e.g. deep inquiry into all topics regardless of orthodoxy) abdicate all responsibility for weighing in when we see these values being attacked, how exactly is that going to help the cause?
> Should we stop studying all forms of bias in computing?
Loaded question. Studying how ML systems reflect data is fine; but when ML systems give us results that accurately reflect real world data, but that we don't like based on our progressivist / ultra-liberal priors, there's a problem.
Statements an ML system can trivially tease out of a data set, like "women are more likely to do career X" or "this group is more likely to commit murder" or "this person is more likely to be hired for this position". When this reveals an uncomfortable truth that has been pre-ordained as offensive regardless of its basis in reality, we have a choice between rejecting the facts based on our priors, or updating our thinking to reflect reality. Sadly, the trend has been to do the former, and to punish anyone doing the latter.
Just go look at what Amazon had to do with their ML-based resume sorting system. It revealed that the best resumes (sorted by likeliness to be hired) were of Asian and White presenting males; which we all know to be true for their hiring, because we all know that that is the current demographics of the industry in general. Of course, such a system cannot be allowed to operate, even though the humans which continue to do the screening in its place will continue to apply the same selection rubric they have before. Nothing is solved, nothing is learned. It just gets chalked up to "systemic bias" without actually investigating any of the reasons for this (such as IQ distributions, access to technology, and whatever raw factors dictate people's individual and aggregate interests toward career selection).