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A YouTube chat about chess got flagged for hate speech

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Re: A YouTube chat about chess got flagged for hate speech

#362
post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The amount of slippery slope argument and strawmanning on HN when it comes to topics like this is pretty embarrassingly Daily Mail-ish.

The slipper slope has already happened, we are already at the point where words that had no bad connotations and didn't offend anyone are changed. Continuing to change words like that is just pushing constant frustration and costs billions in lost hours changing and fixing old build systems, of course people push back against that!

These are problems coming from single entities trying to retroactively predict outrage. There is no grassroots activists trying to change white/black in chess. There was no grassroots actvists trying to change master/slave - it came from inside github.

Language doesn't change unless the population/community changes it. I think the bigger story here is the misuse of AI where a human moderator would've made a better decision.

Re: A YouTube chat about chess got flagged for hate speech

#363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm? I don't think an algorithm has to give "correct" answers, it just has to be precisely defined. For example, one could say "For this problem, a greedy algorithm yields decent but suboptimal answers." Merriam-Webster online says: "a procedure for solving a mathematical problem (as of finding the greatest common divisor) in a finite number of steps that frequently involves repetition of an operation" and "broadly :…

Algorithms solve problems. Wrong answers are not solutions to (i.e. do not solve) a given problem. Hence, algorithm implies that it provides correct answers within the parameters of the problem.

Disagree. We see this phenomena all the time: Right solution, bad input data. Right solution, wrong problem. Worlds turned to grey goo by replicators working to some technically correct algorithm.

Re: A YouTube chat about chess got flagged for hate speech

#364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, generations of black chess pieces have been discriminated in the past. We should make sure the black wins just as much as white, let's just use a coin flip to decide who wins ahead of the game.

There is a whole lot of joking dismissal of systemic racism going on in these comments. Are you making the point you intended?

Jokes are generally downvoted on HN, except of course when they come from illuminated edge-lords or the anti-woke! Hilarious, you see?

Re: A YouTube chat about chess got flagged for hate speech

#365
post #5

Well. The speech police started changing "blacklist" and "whitelist" in programming context, even when those had no racist history; maybe it's time to change it in chess. (After all, white always goes first, that is not very PC.) Rename "black" and "white" to "second player" and "first player".

The speech police didn't do anything. I stopped using those terms because they're not descriptive.

Re: A YouTube chat about chess got flagged for hate speech

#366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought of this and realized it'd actually be a fun game. Both players write down their next move and then move simultaneously once both are ready. To avoid race conditions, if a player moves a piece that is to be taken by the opponent's move, then that player has saved that piece with that move. That creates an interesting dynamic where you may not wish to take the most valuable piece if you predict the other play…

How would two pieces moving to the same square be resolved? Both lost, or ... ? Regardless of the specifics, it would create a very complicated (but potentially interesting) dynamic when moving any valuable piece within a contested region.

You gamble with how many points you have left. Let's say each player starts with 40 points (most games take about 40 moves). You spend anywhere from 0 to however many points you have left to move a piece. If it's early on and there's no chance of conflict, bet 0. If it's an important piece in a crowd, spend more. If there's a conflict, whoever spent more wins that spot.

It might add an element of subterfuge to the game.

Re: A YouTube chat about chess got flagged for hate speech

#367
post #21

We need a word or phrase for this phenomenon, where we attempt to substitute human pattern recognition with algorithms that just aren't up to the job. Facebook moderation, Tesla Full Self Driving, the War Games movie, arrests for mistaken facial identification. It's becoming an increasingly dystopic force in our lives and will likely get much worse before getting even worse. So it needs a label. Maybe there's a ten s…

> It's becoming an increasingly dystopic force in our lives and will likely get much worse before getting even worse. So it needs a label. It's not just something that happens to us, it's something we do. We need to do better rather than accepting it as inevitable, and let future generations worry about what the best name for it was. > Maybe there's a ten syllable German word that expresses it perfectly? That being s…

> Urteilsfähigkeitsauslagerungsnekrose

Post-reason-delegation necrosis?

But English is always a bit awkward for this sort of thing.

Re: A YouTube chat about chess got flagged for hate speech

#368
post #5

Well. The speech police started changing "blacklist" and "whitelist" in programming context, even when those had no racist history; maybe it's time to change it in chess. (After all, white always goes first, that is not very PC.) Rename "black" and "white" to "second player" and "first player".

In Shogi aka "Japanese chess", while for some reason in English, the players are Black and White, in Japanese, they are 先手 (sente, literally first hand/before hand) and 後手 (gote, literally second hand/after hand). Black is first, BTW.

It would be easy to choose a narrative that casts the first player in the bad light as well.

Chess is a game of war, isn't it? So whoever goes first is the aggressor.

So if Black goes first, that can also play into certain racial biases people have.

Re: A YouTube chat about chess got flagged for hate speech

#369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a whole lot of joking dismissal of systemic racism going on in these comments. Are you making the point you intended?

They’re not dismissing systemic racism, they’re mocking some radical proposed “solutions”.

[deleted]

Re: A YouTube chat about chess got flagged for hate speech

#370
post #337
post #21

We need a word or phrase for this phenomenon, where we attempt to substitute human pattern recognition with algorithms that just aren't up to the job. Facebook moderation, Tesla Full Self Driving, the War Games movie, arrests for mistaken facial identification. It's becoming an increasingly dystopic force in our lives and will likely get much worse before getting even worse. So it needs a label. Maybe there's a ten s…

"Totalitalgorithms" (Totalgorithms?) captures the spirit of these algorithms. They seem like bugs but they're actually undirected, organic features of a total technocratic political system that is rapidly coming to dominate life in our modern societies. The filters will be tuned but not fixed because they aren't broken. They're part of what Tocqueville described as 'soft despotism': "Thus, After having thus successiv…

Algorithmic totalitarianism resonates strongly.

It's not a human rights violation if it isn't a human doing it!

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