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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

#251

Post by forapurpose »

johnhess wrote: post #190
labster wrote: post #147

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 embar…

> Google likely spends more money on editorial control for issues of racism than for any other thing that doesn't make money. Is there evidence to this effect? There are a lot of things Google spends money on.

Good point; it's loose speculation, if even that, and I'm surprised to see it get so much attention.

I'd add that it does make money. Making your customer experience pleasant is an essential money-maker. If people are loudly saying racist things in your restaurant, the financially essential decision is to exercise editorial control before you lose your other customers.

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

#252

Post by danso »

laylao wrote: post #242
naasking wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'd think the author would argue that these racist biases should and could have been caught before going into production I think people who believe this significantly underestimate the difficulty of solving these problems.

I'd argue that most of the 'algorithms are evil' crowd don't even understand the problem to begin with since many of them do not come from a technical background.

How much does the average driver have to understand about automotive and mechanical engineering before they can form a reasonable criticism about defective/fatal design?

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

#253

Post by aperrien »

oh-kumudo wrote: post #146
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. 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.

What steps would you suggest taking to fix these historical problems?

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

#254

Post by perl4ever »

forapurpose wrote: post #250
MichaelGG wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, Google does not try to mirror content. It tries to provide the best results for users. Results the user wants to click on and are relevant. Searching for "professor style", nobody wants it to return a minority professor style. Even she doesn't, at scale. If she and others did, they'd be Googling "professor style", not clicking, then Googling "professor style for black women" and results would improve/personalize.…

> Ditto for "black girls": either your looking for porn or for stock photos. What other intentions do you have with such a query? Consider the possibility that the user is a black girl, or her parent. Generally, I'm careful not to assume I can anticipate the perspectives of everyone else.

Do white boys ever enter the query "white boys" into a search engine? I assume some HN users could speak to this...

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

#255

Post by oajannajjha »

danso wrote: post #252
laylao wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd argue that most of the 'algorithms are evil' crowd don't even understand the problem to begin with since many of them do not come from a technical background.

How much does the average driver have to understand about automotive and mechanical engineering before they can form a reasonable criticism about defective/fatal design?

criticism follows understanding, so the only honest answer is “quite a lot”

i realize this isn’t widely appreciated or accepted in the age of critical theory, when social desirability leads people to complain about everything in the guise of “fighting oppression,” but it’s a simple real-world fact that no one solves problems from a position of ignorance

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

#256

Post by labster »

danso wrote: post #236
naasking wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'd think the author would argue that these racist biases should and could have been caught before going into production I think people who believe this significantly underestimate the difficulty of solving these problems.

I think that's likely. But the people tasked to solve these problems aren't always given the right priorities. Detecting/classifying the faces of dark-skinned humans is inextricably more complicated than it is with light-skinned humans. It requires significantly more training data, more computational power, and more testing time to reach the same accuracy as a light-skin-only camera and classifier. We would deride Ub…

This is very true. I suppose a mirror isn't quite the right analogy for Google, either. It's like film, a snapshot of what it thinks life is like. And for film, there are lots of technical problems for filming black actors, the likes of which had been solved 60 years prior for white actors[0]. It's very possible that the algorithm, captures a version of reality that doesn't show people of color in a good light.

And yes, these problems should be solved, and Google should use its editorial control to do the right thing. I believe it has done so, though perhaps not proactively enough. But these are hard problems, ones that are still not solved in other industries. Web search is still a young industry.

[0]: https://mic.com/articles/184244/keeping-insecure-lit-hbo-cin...

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

#257

Post by perl4ever »

fipple wrote: post #189
labster wrote: post #147

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 embar…

Google can amplify the result though. Just like a population that votes 51% Republican and 49% Democrat can have a 100% Republican legislature if divided into equally representative districts, Google can amplify society’s latent racism by making a model that is more racist than the training data.

This is a good point, but I also think that any search engine is inherently an amplifier, so it's simplistic to say they should just fix it somehow.

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

#258

Post by rspeer »

dmreedy wrote: post #141
Hyva wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 idea…

The quip by Babbage is clever, but Babbage was too early and didn't know what we know. He could not anticipate the digital abstraction, error-correcting codes, compressed sensing, and machine learning.

Modern computing systems have components that produce output that's "better" than their input, at every level. Because we have information theory now, we know it is possible for a machine to produce good output even when some of its input is bad.

Google, incidentally, has aimed to do that for its entire existence. From the first time the Google search engine was deployed, its job was to take in the messy Web, full of misdirection and spam, and show you the useful pages you were looking for. And we can keep hoping for Google to keep doing this as the threats to information become more insidious.

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

#259

Post by oh-kumudo »

aperrien wrote: post #253
oh-kumudo wrote: post #146

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. 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.

What steps would you suggest taking to fix these historical problems?

I think should AA be applicable, it should only concern with one's socioeconomic status, not ethical background.

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

#260

Post by philwelch »

forapurpose wrote: post #246
philwelch wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's more sinister--Google accurately reflecting the gist of the content and information available on the web, or Google carefully scrubbing it to better reflect a chosen set of cultural sensitivities?

> Google accurately reflecting the gist of the content and information available on the web I wouldn't assume that Google's search results reflect anything but an attempt to bring you back by showing you results you find valuable, and to monetize your visit. > scrubbing it to better reflect a chosen set of cultural sensitivities? Google (and any other mass market vendor) removes a lot of things that people don't want…

"Social norms" can be either descriptive or prescriptive. Descriptive norms are norms that reflect society as it is, and Google doesn't need to do anything about them, because the society that produces millions of web pages with cute pictures of puppies or helpful information about what not to feed your dog for every single web page with dog porn will result in a SERP that is overwhelmingly weighted towards that information.

Conversely--haven't these same people been telling us for years that we live in a racist society? So why are they surprised that a search engine of a racist society's web pages returns racist results?

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