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Users You Don’t Want

themacro.com

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Re: Users You Don’t Want

#171

Post by philh »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #166
thaumasiotes wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What if babysitters of one race didn't want to sit babies of another race? Should they be forced to? I have a hard time seeing where you think this is a tricky question. Let's imagine a terrible person, so terrible that there are no moral issues with just making them do whatever we want. We've got a racist white babysitter who hates black children. Fortunately, we know better than they do, so we're going to... shut…

You're missing the option of "kick them off the platform entirely".

Now suppose the supermajority of babysitters are racist.

If they all leave the platform, it shuts down. Nobody gets a babysitter. If they all pretend not to be racist, you get black kids being looked after by closet racists.

It's not obvious to me that this is better than the situation where babysitters are allowed to be racist, and black people have more trouble finding a babysitter than white people. There are certainly arguments that it's better, but I don't think it's a slam-dunk either way.

Fortunately, we don't live in a world where the supermajority of babysitters are racist. But we do live in a world where the supermajority of babysitters are unable to accomodate developmentally-disabled teenagers.

We can shut down the babysitting service, or we can make the service pretend to acccomodate DD teenagers while failing to actually take care of them. I'm not convinced that "force babysitting services to actually successfully accomodate DD teenagers" is even an option.

Re: Users You Don’t Want

#172

Post by geofft »

m4chth1s wrote: post #140
geofft wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would that argument not apply to "It's 1960, and I don't want to seat black customers at my fancy restaurant because it's statistically likely to be less profitable than seating white customers"?

I've never worked in the restaurant industry, but, I've heard from people who have that it's STILL extremely common for black customers to be considered undesirable. I.e. a server will get upset at a host(ess) if they get "too many" black customers assigned to their tables. Why? Servers claim that black customers - on average - tip less. I don't know how prevalent this belief on the part of servers is. And I don't kn…

I don't think there's a line between machine learning and bias. In the example I gave (black Americans in the 1960s), I'm pretty confident that any working machine-learning algorithm would conclude that this population is economically disadvantaged and therefore a less-profitable target market. Such a conclusion would also reinforce structural racism.

And that's the way we treated this in the 1960s. The government didn't ask Woolworth whether they had legitimate economic reason to refuse to seat those black college students, or whether their objection was based on them being college students, or because they only ordered coffee and not a meal, or anything else. As long as the effect of your policy was that you were discriminating on race, it became illegal. It doesn't matter whether you had valid reasoning based on race and economic status being correlated, or you were a card-carrying Klansman. A good-faith policy that discriminated on race is still illegal.

It seemed to work pretty well, and I don't think many of us regret the loss of ability of restaurateurs to make these particular economic decisions. The fact that we can now offload these decisions to algorithms (which aren't likely to be "racist" in the conventional sense) instead of humans shouldn't change things.

Re: Users You Don’t Want

#173

Post by geofft »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #167
thaumasiotes wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There can be a really fine line between statistics/machine learning and "bias"/"racism". There's no line. Learning and bias are the same thing.

The question is whether the bias is actually justified by experience.

Should it be legal to discriminate against a race if you have data indicating that they're economically disadvantaged?

Re: Users You Don’t Want

#174

Post by geofft »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #160
geofft wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmmm. That idea is definitely appealing, but the "platform" argument has some serious negative side effects that I think the government should legitimately be able to regulate. What if babysitters of one race didn't want to sit babies of another race? Should they be forced to? This isn't a hypothetical example—Airbnb has this exact problem.

> What if babysitters of one race didn't want to sit babies of another race? Should they be forced to? I have a hard time seeing where you think this is a tricky question. Let's imagine a terrible person, so terrible that there are no moral issues with just making them do whatever we want. We've got a racist white babysitter who hates black children. Fortunately, we know better than they do, so we're going to... shut…

OK, maybe not babysitters in particular, but in general society seems to have decided that's the right thing to do. If you have a racist white chef, you force them to serve food to black people, even though they could poison it, spit in it, etc. If you have a racist white teacher, you force them to teach and discipline black schoolkids. If you have a racist white taxi driver, you shut black people alone with them in their car for long periods.

Re: Users You Don’t Want

#175

Post by [deleted] »

madgar wrote: post #146
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, except with airline seat space, the 1-sigma chunk of the bell curve is outside what (comfortably) fits.

I'm not sure if you're arguing about data or personal comfort. Over half the adult human population is 5.5 feet or under if you recall that women exist and are half the people

[deleted]

Re: Users You Don’t Want

#176

Post by AnimalMuppet »

madgar wrote: post #146
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, except with airline seat space, the 1-sigma chunk of the bell curve is outside what (comfortably) fits.

I'm not sure if you're arguing about data or personal comfort. Over half the adult human population is 5.5 feet or under if you recall that women exist and are half the people

I don't forget that women exist. My impression was that they averaged taller than that. But even if they don't, you seem to forget that, if women average 5'4", that still leaves many women at taller than 5'6".

I couldn't find a data source for average (better, median) population height and distribution for the US that combined both genders. Do you have a candidate handy?

Re: Users You Don’t Want

#177

Post by hacknat »

mathattack wrote: post #71
ryandrake wrote: post #16

Been through this at medium sized companies struggling to sell. This kind of customer is alluring but poisonous. Company: We sell Product X! Toxic Customer: I don't want Product X, I want Product Y. If you're willing to bolt Product Y onto one of your menus I will pay you this stack of money for it! Company: $$$! Bam! The company just went from being a product company to a custom engineering service. You will have to…

The big challenge is that this type of technical debt can be hard to see. But "We promised our VC 50% growth, and we're only at 35%, and this gets us to 60%" is very easy to see.

I think this is the main reason that, pretty much, only technical founders seem to succeed at finding good exits (I know there are exceptions), they're very aware of this issue.

I have worked with non-technical founders who just don't understand that concept of a mythical man-month and technical debt. Unless you've lived through it, it just sounds like engineers whining, not a valid business liability. All the non-technical founders I've worked with fall into the trap of catering to their board at all costs.

Re: Users You Don’t Want

#178

Post by fennecfoxen »

makomk wrote: post #156
fennecfoxen wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there's a big difference between what people can afford to pay for hotel stays and what they can afford to pay to live somewhere ... which means that the capital associated with "people living somewhere" is poorly allocated, and would be more profitable utilized as a nice hotel space. Capital utilization isn't just about the raw duty cycle of someone using that capital. You don't markedly improve your organization'…

Only if you assume that the best utilization of scarce resources is the most profitable one. Filling the same number of people's needs about as well at about the same price using several times the real estate, meaning that other people can't find anywhere to live, is less efficient for any definition of efficiency other than "what capitalism decides". People actually having homes is not the equivalent of running SETI…

> Only if you assume that the best utilization of scarce resources is the most profitable one

Well, the best utilization is the one with the highest utility. In an efficient market that's the same as the most profitable, by definition. The usual caveats apply: no two individuals can ever agree how to measure utility, a free market won't be efficient unless there are no barriers to entry (city zoning may be a barrier to entry), transaction costs are low (the cost of moving from one apartment to another in the rental market is high), and property rights exist and are enforced (including both the obvious property rights and the ones that would apply to all the externalities like neighborhood character but don't exist and won't be enforced for a variety of good reasons)

So yes, caveats. Obviously. There's a moral character to some of these things. One can argue that people living in houses in a big city is morally superior to people vacationing in those houses. (Is that a thing you'd like to argue? Please do explain why, if it is.)

But to the point before: is AirBnB a rent extractor? Pointing out that caveat apply to the measuring of capital utilization in the abstract is not a strong argument in and of itself. Do they apply here? If they apply, would you care to quantify the impact in dollar figures for a typical city? (I recognize this can be hard for moral injuries, but it's not always clear when the injury ceases to be financial and becomes moral.) And even if these caveats apply, how do they apply to making the case that AirBnB actually extracts economic rents? The main thing it seems to be doing is lowering transaction costs associated with doing a short-term rental, and they do have competitors (HomeAway, Wimdu, Tansler, FlipKey, just plain Craigslist, etc, not to mention that the homeowners face competition from substitutes in the form of hotels) so it's not quite obvious that they're the ones collecting on this economic rent.

Re: Users You Don’t Want

#179

Post by Dylan16807 »

geofft wrote: post #173
Dylan16807 wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question is whether the bias is actually justified by experience.

Should it be legal to discriminate against a race if you have data indicating that they're economically disadvantaged?

Society's answer to that is a resounding "sometimes".

Re: Users You Don’t Want

#180

Post by Dylan16807 »

philh wrote: post #171
Dylan16807 wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're missing the option of "kick them off the platform entirely".

Now suppose the supermajority of babysitters are racist. If they all leave the platform, it shuts down. Nobody gets a babysitter. If they all pretend not to be racist, you get black kids being looked after by closet racists. It's not obvious to me that this is better than the situation where babysitters are allowed to be racist, and black people have more trouble finding a babysitter than white people. There are cert…

> If they all leave the platform, it shuts down.

If a platform can only sustain itself on the business of strong racists, maybe it should reconsider if it's doing good in the world.

>Fortunately, we don't live in a world where the supermajority of babysitters are racist. But we do live in a world where the supermajority of babysitters are unable to accomodate developmentally-disabled teenagers.

Being racist is discrimination, while not wanting to handle DD teenagers is because it's a totally different sort of job. I mean, a 10 year old with dyslexia is still getting a babysitter here. Because that's not a very different babysitting experience.

The two situations don't make a good analogy because of that.

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