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YouTube blocked chess channel after mistaken detection of racial slurs

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Re: YouTube blocked chess channel after mistaken detection of racial slurs

#431
post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't care if what you watch is good or bad for you . I care if what you watch turns you into a threat to me . Based on the past few years, it looks like maybe 20% of the general population is suggestible enough to endanger the rest of us.

The problem is that the other guy is saying the same thing you are. The radical left and the radical right both think each other's points are dangerous. And the moderates are pointing at both sides and claiming the same thing. From their respective viewpoints, they're in the "right", just as you think you are. There's a slippery slope here, and I feel it's one so large that we can't even tell we're already sliding on…

> The problem is that the other guy is saying the same thing you are.

The other guy is also claiming that Trump won the election, global heating is a hoax, COVID-19 is a hoax, Obama is a Muslim from Kenya, and his wife Michelle is a man.

> And the moderates are pointing at both sides and claiming the same thing.

Sorry, this just isn't so.

Your answer boils down to this: "There is no truth. If one person says Michelle Obama is a transsexual man, and the other says she isn't, then both truths are equally good."

Re: YouTube blocked chess channel after mistaken detection of racial slurs

#432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do a thought experiment and imagine that there was a negatively tinted term in software engineering with %YOURCOUNTRY% or %YOURNATIONALITY% or %YOURPHENOTYPICTRAIT% in the name. E.g., if you’re from the US, “American pointer dereference” or something like that. (A bit far-fetched; to really resonate the experiment should include some invented cultural baggage which is difficult to do on the spot.) I want to think I p…

> A bit far-fetched; to really resonate the experiment should include some invented cultural baggage which is difficult to do on the spot.) I'll give you a concrete example from the world of finance. In options there are two main forms of exercise. You can have options which can be exercised at expiry and options that can be exercised at any point.[1] When the economist Paul Samuelson started to work on Wall street h…

Seems relevant. How did you feel about that term? Did it trigger slight unease deep down?

I do suspect that the fact that the US doesn’t have a recent history of being oppressed might discount it a little (if one is considered a dominant power, one can afford the luxury of taking some mild negging in stride).

On the other hand, in case of e.g. “blacklist” — it meaning a list of people or entities to deny service — color of skin being unalienable phenotypical trait — history of black skin color used as basis for discrimination and oppression (and indeed denial of service) not long ago (or even now) — it could be a little trickier.

I have no personal experience with either case, though, so who am I to judge.

Re: YouTube blocked chess channel after mistaken detection of racial slurs

#433
post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that the other guy is saying the same thing you are. Then I hope I win. Cause the other guy really likes firearms and believes Bill Gates is some sort of satanic reptilian timelord. Facebook's new governing body are interesting, but I fear will be troublesome in other ways. I don't see that model making anyone happy because I believe true impartiality is impossible. The honest and less bureaucratic app…

Essentually you are saying: "The other side is wrong, and my side is right." It's not really a nuanced point about the broader issue of speech.

I'm not on either side. I don't even live in the United States.

But one side, the Republican side, is batshitinsane and believes things that are provably untrue - Obama is a Muslim, climate change is a Chinese hoax, COVID-19 is the flu, that sort of thing.

The Democrats are just run-of-the-mill, low-energy centrist politicians.

Re: YouTube blocked chess channel after mistaken detection of racial slurs

#434
post #50
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You kid but i've received 2 pull-requests on my open-source project, which only goal was to replace "Blacklist" with "Blocklist" in the app preferences. I don't receive many PRs. This is a real trend.

A lot of language-fixing slacktivism easily becomes a trend because it's highly visible and requires no genuine effort. It's complete bullshit, though. This particular bullshit is awful since it trivializes all this historic pain to some inane game of word association. There's no point arguing, though, just drag your heels until they get bored and go off on some other crusade.

"Presentism" is the technical term for this

Re: YouTube blocked chess channel after mistaken detection of racial slurs

#436
post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is obviously associating racism with something not intentionally racist. But does it not strike to you at all problematic, at the moment, that 'black' is a synonym of 'bad' and 'white' of 'good'? Does it not occur to you that it might improve our language to change that? Honestly, lately I feel like the opposite is the case. Everywhere I go anywhere online all I see is white people being shit on. I see incredibl…

I don't really agree that if you're in the social majority you can be upset about racism against your empowered majority position... it just doesn't make sense. That said, if you're white in China/India/Kenya/etc... 100% there is a heap of racism directed at you and I feel for you

And actual, "legal", government sponsored and media-cheered systemic racism:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broad-Based_Black_Economic_Emp...

That's stage-2. I.e. after the "minority" becomes the "majority". Then different excuses and "historic" racism is used to justify persecution against a minority.

Re: YouTube blocked chess channel after mistaken detection of racial slurs

#437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think Youtube necessarily needs to be broken apart, but they are a natural monopoly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly The cost to a competitor is in getting a user to switch. Think of it in terms of paying users: how much would you have to pay someone to switch from Youtube to your site? Multiply the average by the number of users, and that's the advantage Youtube has over competitors.

YouTube doesn't really fit the definition of a natural monopoly, particularly because there's nothing fundamentally stopping other services from popping up. YouTube's status as an effective monopoly doesn't come from some sort of scarcity of the means of production. > The cost to a competitor is in getting a user to switch. Only if we're assuming that users and uploaders will only ever use exactly one service at any…

> YouTube's status as an effective monopoly doesn't come from some sort of scarcity of the means of production.

The problem here is in the network effect, not in scarcity.

Re: YouTube blocked chess channel after mistaken detection of racial slurs

#438
post #150
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of language-fixing slacktivism easily becomes a trend because it's highly visible and requires no genuine effort. It's complete bullshit, though. This particular bullshit is awful since it trivializes all this historic pain to some inane game of word association. There's no point arguing, though, just drag your heels until they get bored and go off on some other crusade.

In the last couple years especially I feel like I am walking on eggshells when talking to people. Especially when talking to people I don't know as well. It feels so easy to offend someone these days and I'm getting sick of it. I've been having to unfollow a ton of podcasts recently because no matter how far from being related to politics some podcasts are, they just love to make sure a chunk of the episode is devote…

Christ, I'm going to vent, so I'm sorry but, I'm so sick of this bullsh!t argument.

Eggshells?

If you're with someone you know or you don't know and you make a perceived or actual faux pas in their eyes.

Say ..... "sorry" .... "I didn't know that. Tell me more".

How hard is that?

I try to be pretty inclusive, but I'm nowhere near perfect and you know what, when I might have got it wrong this is what I do. And I'm not special for doing so. It's called interacting like a normal human being with another human being.

And you know what, it opens the space for understanding and debate and the chance to reject if you really believe it is wrong.

And as for you unfollowing podcasts because of mentions of priviedge and so forth ... well ... I wonder why that would be recently. Do you unfollow all topics which make you uncomfortable? Do you complain about cancel culture and then cancel podcasts you don't like?

I'm going to be harsh here because your post is very representative of many I see so maybe it needs to be said.

You feeling like you're being attacked everywhere you go is your problem, not those you think who are doing the attacking.

Re: YouTube blocked chess channel after mistaken detection of racial slurs

#439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nudity is banned on television, youtube, facebook, twitch, and any public place in the US. None of those had significant outcry when it was banned, and people bat an eye so little at that status quo that I apparently had to write this comment to remind you.

Whenever nudity is banned I remember there being an outcry. I also think banning nudity is dumb, so maybe it's just an issue of confirmation bias.

Please feel free to point us to the evidence of HN howling with outrage about the chilling consequences of our digital overlords succumbing to activist and advertiser presssure to ban porn (and presumed porn) on their platforms. When Tumblr banned porn, the general reaction was "lol, they're not going to have any audience left" and the one person that raised it as a speech violation (as opposed to a bit of a shame for kinky people) was downvoted to nothingness.[1]

Compare and contrast with how this thread, instead of focusing on "lol, algorithms and context!" has turned into questioning whether the real problem is advertisers signalling they don't want to attach their brand to racist videos (and let's not get started on how angry much of HN was when companies decided to manually enforce policies against hate speech). It's difficult to conclude that most US "free speech" advocates don't believe that banning [perceived] racial hatred is somehow more dangerous to humanity than banning [perceived] adult content (which parallels Supreme Court rulings on what speech does and doesn't deserve protection). Given the respective consequences of racial hatred and pornography, I see this simultaneous presumption in favour of the former and against the latter as very hard to justify.

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26218476

Re: YouTube blocked chess channel after mistaken detection of racial slurs

#440
post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You didn't correct me on anything. You called me privileged based on a weird assumption you somehow drew from what I've said. Regardless of what my current status may be or what you think it may be it's not very relevant. Because that would ignore the rest of my life which you also have zero idea about. You're again making assumption. You don't know if I've had an easy life or a really hard life. You don't know anyth…

I fully understand that having the metaphorical blinders taken off can be quite upsetting. However the plain explanation is that a large number of us here on HN have grown up in the most prosperous nations in the history of the world, many of us have had great privileges in the availability of education and no systemic bias against us for any inborn trait. The greatest privilege of all being the ignorance of our own…

Very well said!
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