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Google+ names policy discriminates against American Native Indians

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Re: Google+ names policy discriminates against American Native Indians

#41

Post by hyperpape »

tarblog wrote: post #22
harshreality wrote: post #5

Obligatory: patio11's Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-b... (was dead, now live, if dead again it's in google's cache) However, until Google's (and Facebook's) absurd name restrictions (or even the idea that "proper" "official" names exist at all for humans) start seriously affecting their real customers (advertisers), they will not give a shit . An…

I dislike when lists are written in such a way that the reader must mentally negate all of the statements the author is making. It's more difficult for me to quote or remember out of context correctly. I also feel like I learned a lot less than if the author had told me the things that are common problems and how to fix them or offered a model of names that is less-bad than the one most websites use.

That's the thing. I don't know if there is "a right way to do it." Maybe names are a domain that is hard enough that you can't propose the right way to handle them--you just have to know the problems that can arise, do your best for the users you expect to have, and be prepared to rework if you need to.

The problem with the google+ real names policy isn't that their algorithms aren't smart enough (though it seems that they could use some work). The problem is that they're too arrogant to recognize that their algorithms are unreliable and indifferent to the ways that this unreliability is bad for users.

Re: Google+ names policy discriminates against American Native Indians

#42

Post by mcv »

Google's stupid name policy is probably their worst idea ever.

Interestingly, it's somewhat undone by one of their other bad ideas: merging Youtube and Google+ accounts. Because nobody had a real name for their Youtube account, and suddenly Google creates a bunch of Google+ accounts that nobody asked for and are obviously pseudonyms.

Re: Google+ names policy discriminates against American Native Indians

#43

Post by mcv »

chaz wrote: post #25
tarblog wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dislike when lists are written in such a way that the reader must mentally negate all of the statements the author is making. It's more difficult for me to quote or remember out of context correctly. I also feel like I learned a lot less than if the author had told me the things that are common problems and how to fix them or offered a model of names that is less-bad than the one most websites use.

It's satire. 12. People’s names are case sensitive. 13. People’s names are case insensitive. Edit: Let me explain ... I was responding to the parent post, and that it wasn't meant to be a logic list of rules. Individual points may be true, but the overall tone of the list and post uses humor to explain the complexity of names. 32. People’s names are assigned at birth. 33. OK, maybe not at birth, but at least pretty c…

It's not satire. They are both bad assumptions, bound to be false somewhere. Don't let your code rely on either of these assumptions.

Re: Google+ names policy discriminates against American Native Indians

#44

Post by hyperpape »

chaz wrote: post #25
tarblog wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dislike when lists are written in such a way that the reader must mentally negate all of the statements the author is making. It's more difficult for me to quote or remember out of context correctly. I also feel like I learned a lot less than if the author had told me the things that are common problems and how to fix them or offered a model of names that is less-bad than the one most websites use.

It's satire. 12. People’s names are case sensitive. 13. People’s names are case insensitive. Edit: Let me explain ... I was responding to the parent post, and that it wasn't meant to be a logic list of rules. Individual points may be true, but the overall tone of the list and post uses humor to explain the complexity of names. 32. People’s names are assigned at birth. 33. OK, maybe not at birth, but at least pretty c…

Case sensitive and case insensitive sound like they're the only two options, but they're not.

Take SQL as an example: are programs case-sensitive or case-insensitive? Neither!

Re: Google+ names policy discriminates against American Native Indians

#45

Post by raverbashing »

chaz wrote: post #25
tarblog wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dislike when lists are written in such a way that the reader must mentally negate all of the statements the author is making. It's more difficult for me to quote or remember out of context correctly. I also feel like I learned a lot less than if the author had told me the things that are common problems and how to fix them or offered a model of names that is less-bad than the one most websites use.

It's satire. 12. People’s names are case sensitive. 13. People’s names are case insensitive. Edit: Let me explain ... I was responding to the parent post, and that it wasn't meant to be a logic list of rules. Individual points may be true, but the overall tone of the list and post uses humor to explain the complexity of names. 32. People’s names are assigned at birth. 33. OK, maybe not at birth, but at least pretty c…

"It's satire"

Absolutely not!

Case sensitivity varies amongst countries.

One very simple occidental example: in France names are usually written LASTNAME Firstname

So if you type Lastname and your DB doesn't normalize the capitalization of names you won't match

So for the last name the search is case insensitive but for the first name not so much.

Another example is Turkish, where there are two capital I's, one with a dot, one without.

And not alphabets have a notion of case.

Re: Google+ names policy discriminates against American Native Indians

#46

Post by codesilverback »

voteapathy wrote: post #34
ceejayoz wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The writer leaves open the "incompetence" option, if you actually read the article. Discrimination needn't involve intentional malice, either - 50-60 year olds often face hiring discrimination from folks who certainly don't intentionally discount them.

Well, I would suspect that Google makes deliberate choices on how they set up these sorts of things. They've probably built models which demonstrate that only n percent of the global population will be affected by a certain naming policy and the differences in cost associated with modifying their databases or to accommodate such names or dealing with troll accounts versus maintaining the status quo. [Keep in mind I o…

I'm not sure incompetence is the same as "doesn't handle every conceivable edge case." As the algorithms take over, "sorry, but you are an edge case we didn't get to" is going to be a common problem.

Re: Google+ names policy discriminates against American Native Indians

#47

Post by TillE »

ebfe wrote: post #39
calibraxis wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> calling things which are not really racism racism only dilutes actual racism and victims of racism. I don't know your racial category, but people of color frequently mention how white people aggressively like to redefine racism so it doesn't include their own racism. This particular argument is common among them. Because after all, racism is one of those -isms which are a fundamental part of many cultures (like the…

That's really interesting, I'd never heard of this before. Can you give us an example you've heard of a redefinition of racism that would exclude whites from being racist?

Basically, people like to redefine racism to exclude everything less bad than the KKK and actual lynchings. A couple favorites from Reddit in particular:

"It's just a joke." - In defense of the slew of racist jokes that appear every time a POC is mentioned or seen.

"I don't hate black people, I hate black culture." - Every time a POC does something bad, or merely annoying. Mysteriously, nobody hates white culture.

Re: Google+ names policy discriminates against American Native Indians

#48

Post by vidarh »

tarblog wrote: post #22
harshreality wrote: post #5

Obligatory: patio11's Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-b... (was dead, now live, if dead again it's in google's cache) However, until Google's (and Facebook's) absurd name restrictions (or even the idea that "proper" "official" names exist at all for humans) start seriously affecting their real customers (advertisers), they will not give a shit . An…

I dislike when lists are written in such a way that the reader must mentally negate all of the statements the author is making. It's more difficult for me to quote or remember out of context correctly. I also feel like I learned a lot less than if the author had told me the things that are common problems and how to fix them or offered a model of names that is less-bad than the one most websites use.

The point is you shouldn't even try. The list is not there to get you to follow every point, but to illustrate that no matter what you think you can do to validate names, you're likely wrong, so don't even try. Think about what limitations are absolutely necessary for your specific usage instead.

E.g. if you want to be able to greet a user, ask them how they want to be greeted, rather than try to guess at which part of their name a user prefers to be addressed by and how to extract that part from their full name.

Re: Google+ names policy discriminates against American Native Indians

#49

Post by nimblegorilla »

a3n wrote: post #4

> Google, pick up your act. It's getting really old. Frankly, the fact that Elaine Yellow Horse appealed your policy three times and it was only once the media got involved that you did the right thing shows that your staff are either incompetent, or racist. ... My guess is neither. They're probably very smart people, and they may just arrogantly assume that their specification of their algorithms are correct, are co…

I'm sure the programmers who did this had no ill intentions, but when someone tells you about a broken algorithm multiple times and you ignore it then you are no longer smart.

A lot of very common names are also dictionary words (Jack, Jon, Dick, Smith, Smart, Baker, LARRY PAGE, etc...) so someone clearly sat down and figured out an algorithm to allow or restrict certain words. Whoever came up with that algorithm should have quickly realized they didn't have a good way to distinguish real names from fake names.

My vote is incompetence.

Re: Google+ names policy discriminates against American Native Indians

#50

Post by ebfe »

TillE wrote: post #47
ebfe wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's really interesting, I'd never heard of this before. Can you give us an example you've heard of a redefinition of racism that would exclude whites from being racist?

Basically, people like to redefine racism to exclude everything less bad than the KKK and actual lynchings. A couple favorites from Reddit in particular: "It's just a joke." - In defense of the slew of racist jokes that appear every time a POC is mentioned or seen. "I don't hate black people, I hate black culture." - Every time a POC does something bad, or merely annoying. Mysteriously, nobody hates white culture.

>Mysteriously, nobody hates white culture

Man, that's been the exact opposite of my experience.

Obviously unscientific, but it's interesting to compare the difference between https://twitter.com/search?q=white%20people&f=realtime and https://twitter.com/search?q=black%20people&f=realtime .

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