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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

#171

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. That is the opposite of how it works. Affirmative action is accepting that the world has bias against certain groups, and attempting to take that into account. Political correctness is about realizing that certain groups have been marginalized or traumatized and…

The proof that a group has been marginalized is that their numbers are not representative of their presence in the population. Thus, we pretend that the ideal world exists by adjusting those numbers in situations where merit selection is the criteria in the hopes that the numbers will converge by themselves. We don't interview each participant to ask them how they were traumatized, we only look at the statistics. Peo…

>We don't interview each participant to ask them how they were traumatized, we only look at the statistics.

Yes, because implementing something like that would be near impossible from a legislative standpoint. Legislation has to be spelled out and enforceable or it will do nothing.

And affirmative action is not there just to prop up the numbers. It is there to push companies to hire minority groups.

There are two reasons for this. For example, on college campuses, the supreme court has upheld that it is lawful to use race as a factor in admissions because a well rounded or diverse student body is a desirable trait that will produce better outcomes for all involved. Including the white men.

The second is that it is trying to undo the many, many years of oppression (i.e. slavery) that carries generation to generation.

Programs like affirmative action are trying to tip the scales for these descendants to give them a chance to compete. After all, they were systematically disenfranchised as a race. It makes sense that we attempt to systematically bring them back up to speed with the rest of the population.

>we just assume .. numbers need to be fixed first and then the rest of it will follow

We don't have to assume anything. It is both empirically evident (as well as just "duh") that getting a higher percentage of minorities into jobs and higher education will result in a higher percentage of their children having the opportunity to do so without something like affirmative action in the future.

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

#172
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…

> What you just observed and described is that technology _is_ unbiased and robotic. Just to get calibrated: what is an example-- real or imagined-- of technology that is biased?

[deleted]

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

#173

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…

You’re missing the point, which is that you’re dealing with a coupled system (in the physics sense). Google reflects our racism, but exposure to that racism on the first page of results makes us more racist. Google concentrates it and reflects it back to us.

(Google does this with everything else as well. What do people think of the new MacBook Pro? Searching for reviews will immediately spit back a concentrated and distilled version the first mover opinions, which will itself drive peoples’ opinions.)

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

#174

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…

I try not to get involved in these kinds of dangerous discussions but i just wanted to highlight your comparison to SafeSearch. Political correctness really does feel like having to walk around with SafeSearch on all my inputs and outputs, programmed to filter out an ever-changing and inscrutable list of wrongthink and wrongspeak from the real world. It’s so true—great comment.

I disagree, because I don't think "Political Correctness" has been sufficiently defined. I think this doubly so because of the extremism used in the OP regarding "AI goggles that block out the words that might hurt us." I see a mockery, there, and it raises my hackles. Perhaps it was unintentional.

What is "political correctness?" Are we referring right now to the alt-right manufactured bogeyman? That is my sense.

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

#175
post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This seems like a bad idea to me, especially in the context of a discussion about how to reduce the political/social influence of Google. It seems to me that there's an enormous contingent of people who wants to yell about the influence of Google and Facebook and then yell even louder about how they're not actively intervening to skew content towards their political preferences (ie increase their influence massivel…

That can happen even if everyone involved is individually logical and rational. See the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet_paradox for more. It happens even more easily if you're lumping people into a single group, but the individuals that you see speaking out about one topic are different than the individuals that you see speaking out about another. The upshot is that from your described experience you cannot c…

Oh wow, nice, I never knew this was a named phenomena!

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

#176
post #148
post #59

This is a much harder problem that it looks to a casual observer. Just imagine what kind of people would type "black girls" to Google search. Not "black girls outfit", not "black girls social bias", just "black girls". I'll bet at least 50% of the searchers are looking for porn. So even if Google had infinite resources, its choices are: (1) act as a moral authority and deny pornographic contents to those who are look…

I wish the article had included screen shots of search results for "white girls" and "Asian girls". Would there be any less porn? I strongly doubt it.

"white girls" returns stuff about the movie white girl

"Girls" is the HBO show

"Asian girls" is porn lite

"Black girls" has no porn for me. Various sites about black girls (black girls code for example)

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

#177
post #148
post #59

This is a much harder problem that it looks to a casual observer. Just imagine what kind of people would type "black girls" to Google search. Not "black girls outfit", not "black girls social bias", just "black girls". I'll bet at least 50% of the searchers are looking for porn. So even if Google had infinite resources, its choices are: (1) act as a moral authority and deny pornographic contents to those who are look…

I wish the article had included screen shots of search results for "white girls" and "Asian girls". Would there be any less porn? I strongly doubt it.

White girls not so much. But Asian girls returns lots of pic sites that aren’t porn but are suggestive.

Btw, black girls no longer returns author’s screenshot so google has changed results since this article.

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

#178
This is ridiculous.

This just means that people on the internet who write about black teenagers write about the ones who get arrested. People who create pages about "black girls" create porn content, and most people who search for "black girls" most likely are looking for porn and click on links that talk about porn.

It's amazing how people can see racism everywhere.

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

#179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn‘t this precisely why safe search was invented? I find the „unprofessional hairstyle“ example much harder - you‘d have to first classify all pictures according to minority groups, determine the mix of minority group mix located in the search locale of the user, decide whether the mix should be local, regional, national or international in this case, and then correct the bias in the results accordingly. Seems quite…

Yes, but I'm surprised that there isn't some self correction there. My understanding is that one of the primary metrics goole uses is which link you click on last after searching. If the majority of people searching are white and all people want to see people who look like them, then the top result should be white. But I expect that when black women search, they will keep scrolling until they find the picture that th…

Do you want google personalizing your search results^H^H^H^Hspying on your search and browsing history, or giving you the overall best result^H^H^H^H^H^Hmarginalizing your minority culture?

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

#180
post #153
post #59

This is a much harder problem that it looks to a casual observer. Just imagine what kind of people would type "black girls" to Google search. Not "black girls outfit", not "black girls social bias", just "black girls". I'll bet at least 50% of the searchers are looking for porn. So even if Google had infinite resources, its choices are: (1) act as a moral authority and deny pornographic contents to those who are look…

It seems a given that any search that does not include explicit "pornographic terms" should never return pornographic results.

What are explicit "pornographic terms" ?
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