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Google Has a Striking History of Bias Against Black Girls

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Re: Google Has a Striking History of Bias Against Black Girls

#141

Post by dmreedy »

Hyva wrote: post #115
mlazos wrote: post #32

I’m always amazed how often the “surprise” that digital technology is in fact not unbiased and robotic in nature keeps getting written about. Algorithms that optimize for click through rate for ads and search relevancy will inevitably be a reflection of ourselves and all of the shitty things various people believe. >> What we know about Google’s responses to racial stereotyping in its products is that it typically de…

> I’m always amazed how often the “surprise” that digital technology is in fact not unbiased and robotic in nature keeps getting written about. Algorithms that optimize for click through rate for ads and search relevancy will inevitably be a reflection of ourselves and all of the shitty things various people believe. What you just observed and described is that technology _is_ unbiased and robotic. The bias is in the…

Indeed so. I'm always reminded of Charles Babbage's self-reported interactions on the subject of his Difference Engine:

'On two occasions I have been asked, — "Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" In one case a member of the Upper, and in the other a member of the Lower, House put this question. I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.'

But I think the problem is more subtle than you give it credit for. The software may be working as written, but 'intention' rarely maps cleanly to execution. The behavior of a complex system is a multidimensional shape; stretching it one way or another along some axis according to your intention for its behavior can easily have unanticipated, and often unobservable effects along other axes that you were not minding. So it may be an intention that the system optimize for click-through rates for ads, while at the same time not consciously intended to be biased against, for example, race, but also not deliberately crafted to avoid this behavior. This may functionally be the same thing as intending it to be racist, but it has different implications for who's guilty and how things get fixed.

Re: Google Has a Striking History of Bias Against Black Girls

#142

Post by narrator »

jacobreg wrote: post #117
narrator wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Political correctness and affirmative action are based on the idea that pretending the world is an ideal version of itself will eventually make it that way. In reality though, the world is a complex place and the ideal pretend version can only be implemented in a carefully controlled environment such as a movie, a theatrical presentation, a video game or a situation where all participants agree to or are pressured in…

>Political correctness and affirmative action are based on the idea that pretending the world is an ideal version of itself will eventually make it that way. That is the opposite of how it works. Affirmative action is accepting that the world has bias against certain groups, and attempting to take that into account. Political correctness is about realizing that certain groups have been marginalized or traumatized and…

The proof that a group has been marginalized is that their numbers are not representative of their presence in the population. Thus, we pretend that the ideal world exists by adjusting those numbers in situations where merit selection is the criteria in the hopes that the numbers will converge by themselves. We don't interview each participant to ask them how they were traumatized, we only look at the statistics. People from strong well adjusted minority families that value education and have protected their kids from most of the harsh realities that poor minority families are subject to receive the same special treatment with affirmative action. The reason that the inequity exists is immaterial means that we don't even have to check if a bias exists, we just assume that since the world is not ideal that the numbers need to be fixed first and then the rest of it will follow.

At least that's the way it works in reality. Maybe this reality is politically incorrect too and you are saying that we need to implement meta-political correctness in which the means of creating an ideal world must be hidden to instead pretend that the implementers know the exact and particular circumstance of each person they are selecting based on facts other than merit and are weighing all of them appropriately in correcting injustice. By pretending that this ideal world in which knowledgeable administrators skillfully and in each individual case correct injustices, this will somehow make it become a reality.

Re: Google Has a Striking History of Bias Against Black Girls

#143

Post by uncletaco »

jimrandomh wrote: post #124

I tried replicating the searches described in this article, in an incognito window. Most of the searches described inthe article are quite dated; they're also spread over a significant amount of time. None of the searches I tried came out the way the article described. There was no porn in the results for "black girls"; the third result for "professor style" was a black man, and there was a black woman further down o…

> I have continued to search for black girls on a regular basis, at least once a month, and I can report that Google had changed its algorithm to some degree about five months after that article was published.

Under the heading "Where are black girls now?" she notes that she doesn't see porn in the results anymore and after I googled black girls I got similar results to what she shows in the picture directly under that, where the first link is black girls code.

Re: Google Has a Striking History of Bias Against Black Girls

#144

Post by ithilglin909 »

jacquesm wrote: post #104
themgt wrote: post #42

A Google search for "American inventors": https://i.imgur.com/qw5kfQp.png A Google search for "American women scientists": https://i.imgur.com/o6mxG56.png Can the media stop doing this thing where they p-hack reality for proof of racist/sexist conspiracies?

You are missing the point: there is no reason why an innocent query such as 'black girls' should bring up a bunch of porn. And Google seems to agree with this because they have since tweaked things so that that no longer happens.

No, the point is that the author selectively presents information that bolsters the point she wants to make.

I'm pretty certain that if she searched for " girls" -- white girls, asian girls, etc. -- with safe search turned off, a good number of the results would be NSFW, because the internet is 75% porn (and 25% cat videos).

Re: Google Has a Striking History of Bias Against Black Girls

#145

Post by fipple »

The world is an unfair place with a striking history of bias against black girls, and Google is built with trillions of data points from this world. Society thinks that black women's hair is ugly and white women's hair is beautiful, and Google, with the power of their machine learning, reflects this unpleasant societal truth back to the user.

Re: Google Has a Striking History of Bias Against Black Girls

#146

Post by oh-kumudo »

narrator wrote: post #83
ryanmonroe wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I think Google is responsible in 2018, now that they offer extremely tailored results. Duckduckgo, maybe not. But if Google is going to say "we're going to show you listings for restaurants in SF in your simple 'restaurants' search because we know you live in SF," I think they should also say "we're going to show you results for LGBT resources when you search for 'gay men' because nothing about your query indicates…

Political correctness and affirmative action are based on the idea that pretending the world is an ideal version of itself will eventually make it that way. In reality though, the world is a complex place and the ideal pretend version can only be implemented in a carefully controlled environment such as a movie, a theatrical presentation, a video game or a situation where all participants agree to or are pressured in…

> Political correctness and affirmative action are based on the idea that pretending the world is an ideal version of itself will eventually make it that way.

Agree. It hides problem rather than fixes it. And since it is often enforced in a top-down manner, communities that outside of the PC spectrum felt being deprived of their opportunities, this very resentment is further diving the society.

Re: Google Has a Striking History of Bias Against Black Girls

#147

Post by labster »

I think the thesis is wrong here. Google has a striking history of removing bias against black women.

People make content for the web. People are racist, and make lots of racist assumptions in their writing. Society is racist. This results in Google's algorithms reflecting the corpus they scanned, and the searches that are made. But the search is just a reflection of us, and how terrible we all are.

Google gets embarrassed by the results, and exercises editorial control over search -- which leads to them actively removing racist systemic biases. Sure it's reactive and not proactive, but it's movement in a positive direction. Google likely spends more money on editorial control for issues of racism than for any other thing that doesn't make money.

Re: Google Has a Striking History of Bias Against Black Girls

#148

Post by na85 »

yongjik wrote: post #59

This is a much harder problem that it looks to a casual observer. Just imagine what kind of people would type "black girls" to Google search. Not "black girls outfit", not "black girls social bias", just "black girls". I'll bet at least 50% of the searchers are looking for porn. So even if Google had infinite resources, its choices are: (1) act as a moral authority and deny pornographic contents to those who are look…

I wish the article had included screen shots of search results for "white girls" and "Asian girls".

Would there be any less porn? I strongly doubt it.

Re: Google Has a Striking History of Bias Against Black Girls

#149

Post by ggggtez »

SkyMarshal wrote: post #130
jimrandomh wrote: post #124

I tried replicating the searches described in this article, in an incognito window. Most of the searches described inthe article are quite dated; they're also spread over a significant amount of time. None of the searches I tried came out the way the article described. There was no porn in the results for "black girls"; the third result for "professor style" was a black man, and there was a black woman further down o…

How do you know the algo/search results weren't tweaked after these critiques went public but before your tests?

Obviously they were. The point the parent post is making is that some of these results are old (like, 10 years old). Of course the algo would have changed, and the article even says that it did.

But if no one is searching it, then of course it's just going to be semi-random results.

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=US&q=%22three%2...

The top related query? "Three white teenagers". It's obvious almost no one searches this term unless they've read the article.

Re: Google Has a Striking History of Bias Against Black Girls

#150

Post by CaptSpify »

2muchcoffeeman wrote: post #111
frahs wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, it's like the restaurant example. If I search for "restaurants", it shouldn't give me restaurants in Shanghai because that's the city with the largest population. It should give me Northern California, since that's where I live and Google knows that. Similarly, Google might reasonably infer that if someone is searching for their own race, sexuality, or religion, they're probably more interested in information o…

How would google infer that you’re looking for information about your own race and gender? Ideally it should know nothing about me!

Ideally, you are correct. In reality, however, I'm willing to bet that Google could pick you out of a lineup.
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