11–20 of 106 posts
It turned out an enthusiastic but misguided US teenager who didn't actually know the Scots language was responsible for most of the entries on it... and a bunch of natural language machine learning models had already been trained on it.
Meanwhile, speech recognition seems to work extremely well by now (I am a little bit older, so I remember when it didn't work so well).
I am also not aware of any real world cases of AI being used to detect Corona, so that seems to be an example in favour of AI. People tried to use AI, but it didn't work out. So it isn't being used for that purpose.
> Ethnic groups whose surnames were assigned in recent history for tax-collection purposes (Ashkenazi Jews, Han Chinese, Koreans, etc) have a relatively small pool of surnames and a slightly larger pool of first names. This is... not accurate. The reason the Chinese have a small pool of surnames is that their surnames are much less recent than ours, not more recent. And I don't think the Ashkenazi surnames are partic…
Starts off with an appeal to so called technical debt. A nebulous concept that more plays on debt being bad then it shows anything to actually do.
It then moves to comparing to other engineering, with the implicit idea that they have it together in ways that we don't.
Oh, and I skipped the part of statistical abuse. Because, what? Turns out special cases abound in data driven efforts. Instead of looking for ways out, we are looking to blame those that tried? That... Doesn't seem productive.
I also don't buy some of the argument. Focusing on voter purging as if that is a data science problem seems willfully ignorant. That is a blatant power grab that is just hiding behind data jargon.
> Ethnic groups whose surnames were assigned in recent history for tax-collection purposes (Ashkenazi Jews, Han Chinese, Koreans, etc) have a relatively small pool of surnames and a slightly larger pool of first names. This is... not accurate. The reason the Chinese have a small pool of surnames is that their surnames are much less recent than ours, not more recent. And I don't think the Ashkenazi surnames are partic…
https://www.familysearch.org/wiki/en/Jewish_Personal_Names has more information about compulsory adoption of surnames amongst European Jews for taxation purposes in the 18th century.
> Ethnic groups whose surnames were assigned in recent history for tax-collection purposes (Ashkenazi Jews, Han Chinese, Koreans, etc) have a relatively small pool of surnames and a slightly larger pool of first names. This is... not accurate. The reason the Chinese have a small pool of surnames is that their surnames are much less recent than ours, not more recent. And I don't think the Ashkenazi surnames are partic…
My take: Yep, if the model is used a high stakes situation, this is absolutely the case. The model should be required to undergo rigorous testing / peer review before it's released into the wild. In a high stakes situations, we have to ensure that a model is good before people get their hands on it, because people can be reliably depended on to treat the model as an oracle.
The metaphor of a "crumbling foundation" is a bad one, though. It's just unregulated; models aren't leaning on one another, and there isn't a risk of wholesale collapse.
Am I missing something here?
> Ethnic groups whose surnames were assigned in recent history for tax-collection purposes (Ashkenazi Jews, Han Chinese, Koreans, etc) have a relatively small pool of surnames and a slightly larger pool of first names. This is... not accurate. The reason the Chinese have a small pool of surnames is that their surnames are much less recent than ours, not more recent. And I don't think the Ashkenazi surnames are partic…
Yeah, that was an odd claim about Han Chinese surnames. Many have been around for thousands of years ( https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/ezine/2007-07/20/content_54412... ) and almost all are single-character surnames based on a limited set of possible sounds (~400 in Mandarin, IIRC)
That's evolution for you. Some surnames are big winners, some go extinct.
(It's also worth noting that Chinese surnames are highly concentrated in a sampling sense -- there are just a few surnames which cover large chunks of the population -- but if you made a list of names, as opposed to a list of people, the pool of names would look much larger.)