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Facebook apology as AI labels black men 'primates'

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Re: Facebook apology as AI labels black men 'primates'

#281

Post by throwcommonsns »

wpietri wrote: post #278
throwcommonsns wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, coding tests are not the "literacy tests" you have described, and if they were, why would some minorities be performing even better than Caucasians on them? Coding tests examine the type of work actually required to be done on the job (as coders), and they have been correlated with post-hire performance successfully. Someone who is not familiar with efficient data structures will not write scalable code and will…

I didn't say coding tests were literacy tests. You also seem a lot like somebody who has not hired people, which would explain your poor understanding of how hiring actually works. Since my comments here don't seem to be making any sense to you, I'm not seeing the point in trying again.

Why are you assuming that I haven't hired anyone before? And any reasonable observer would agree that you are falsely equivocating the literacy tests of yester century with the modern day objective hiring practices of FAANG companies.

Re: Facebook apology as AI labels black men 'primates'

#282

Post by overgard »

throwthere wrote: post #257
overgard wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't the kind of slur that you can just run a dictionary search for. There are totally valid contexts to tag a gorilla in a picture if it contains gorillas. I'm sure there are other words it could also mistakenly classify with that might be insulting on accident but arent slurs (maybe tagging an athlete as a statue, for instance, like "that quarterback is a statue in the pocket"). This tech isn't perfect so you…

Oh boy. People who know basic ML think "Oh, it was unintentional, just a basic misclassification, it happens." Guess what? You're still calling people slurs on your website, even if you did it accidentally.

I'm not saying it's not bad, but I think as adults we should all be able to differentiate between an accidental insult and an intentional one.

Re: Facebook apology as AI labels black men 'primates'

#283

Post by wpietri »

throwcommonsns wrote: post #279
wpietri wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. Long ago I learned that it was rarely worth my time to try to argue online people out of their ignorance. A rando with a throwaway account, a strident tone, and a fair bit of ignorance on the topic is almost a guarantee that that's no point. If you're interested in knowing something about the topic, you'll do some work. If you aren't, no amount of me spoon-feeding you summaries of serious scholarly works will cha…

What distinction does a throwaway account make on an otherwise-anonymous online forum? No need to take discussion offline. Within the next decade, I am in confident the pendulum will swing the other way, and the people who are able to vocalize their opinions now in public will be the ones needing throwaway accounts.

That's another very ignorant question. You can look up the literature on it. (Heck, you could have just followed a link in my bio to get a start.) But again, I'm not spoon-feeding you.

Re: Facebook apology as AI labels black men 'primates'

#284

Post by sinyug »

wpietri wrote: post #266
sinyug wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Facebook, like a lot of tech companies, has long had problems with diversity in engineering. If that is the case, why is it that Google voice nav routinely butchers the names of places and roads in India in spite of having thousands of Indian engineers on staff? Could we blame the intractability of the problem, or just plain old incompetence, before we blame every single problem in the world on racism and lack of '…

Given that the goal of racism is to structure society, and given how well that succeeded in America, I don't think it's unreasonable to ask whether it's at play in pretty much any situation where we see racially biased outcomes. But it is an excellent question why Google Maps is still terrible at Indian place names even though they have plenty of people internally who not only could help, but would be delighted to. T…

> structural inequity despite it being pervasive in America since its founding

America is not unique in this. And African-Americans are not the only people in the world who were enslaved. What is unique is that America and Americans are so good at controlling narratives and sucking oxygen out of rooms that other stories and catastrophes are forced into irrelevance.

Re: Facebook apology as AI labels black men 'primates'

#285

Post by [deleted] »

wpietri wrote: post #283
throwcommonsns wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What distinction does a throwaway account make on an otherwise-anonymous online forum? No need to take discussion offline. Within the next decade, I am in confident the pendulum will swing the other way, and the people who are able to vocalize their opinions now in public will be the ones needing throwaway accounts.

That's another very ignorant question. You can look up the literature on it. (Heck, you could have just followed a link in my bio to get a start.) But again, I'm not spoon-feeding you.

[deleted]

Re: Facebook apology as AI labels black men 'primates'

#286

Post by darepublic »

wpietri wrote: post #261
oreilles wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't a problem with diversity. Everybody knows how to pronounce Malcom X. And it's not like just because a google engineer was black that he was like "oh, let's try and see if Malcom X is pronounced correctly because he's black and I'm black too". This only happens in white people's brain.

You realize that the person I'm quoting isn't white, right? Let's separate the general case from the specific. Generally, we know that representation in the people who make things changes what they make. This is obvious and undeniable. For example, look at ASCII vs Unicode. The Chinese invented movable type 500 years before Gutenberg, so it's not like the idea of printing non-roman characters was novel. In the age of…

Considering the adversarial attacks that image recognition systems are vulnerable to, perhaps even a well trained system could be induced to produce inappropriate results of one sort or another. Perhaps the training set and algorithm for the model should just be publicly available so that people can scrutinize the data and figure out incrementally how to avoid most biases or guffaws to a generally accepted level.

Re: Facebook apology as AI labels black men 'primates'

#287

Post by ummonk »

mrpopo wrote: post #169
throwcommonsns wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a contrarian take that may get me downvoted and unfairly labeled, but I encourage critical thinking instead: I've struggled with people telling me that these FAANG companies have "diversity problems," as a person of color myself. A majority of software engineers are female and male immigrants from East Asia and South Asia. These population centers are some of the most diverse regions of the world. The enginee…

> These population centers are some of the most diverse regions of the world. South Asia and SE Asia, maybe. But East Asia (NE China, Korea, Japan) has actually one of the most ethnically "pure" populations in the world.

This is so ridiculously ignorant.

Re: Facebook apology as AI labels black men 'primates'

#288

Post by ummonk »

wpietri wrote: post #262
throwcommonsns wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a contrarian take that may get me downvoted and unfairly labeled, but I encourage critical thinking instead: I've struggled with people telling me that these FAANG companies have "diversity problems," as a person of color myself. A majority of software engineers are female and male immigrants from East Asia and South Asia. These population centers are some of the most diverse regions of the world. The enginee…

Nobody is saying they don't count toward diversity. What people are saying is that the conspicuous exclusion of less favored racial groups does not get erased because they have some people from other groups. Put more frankly, the success of recent immigrants does not erase America's long history of brutality and exploitation toward blacks and Latin Americans. The latter is a problem that we have to solve regardless.…

> Put more frankly, the success of recent immigrants does not erase America's long history of brutality and exploitation toward blacks and Latin Americans.

But given that America was far more brutal and exploitative towards Chinese immigrants than towards Latin Americans, why are Latinos so prioritized by these initiatives to favor certain racial groups?

> And I think it's worth noting that some of the immigrants have brought their own biases with them, such that caste discrimination is now also a problem in Silicon Valley: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/10/27/indian-...

Ironic that in a discussion about diversity, you believe in a prejudiced stereotype about a major ethnic group in Silicon Valley. Casteism is pretty much a nonissue in Silicon Valley, if only for the simple reason that most Indian-Americans tend to be ignorant about the castes of most other Indian-Americans.

Re: Facebook apology as AI labels black men 'primates'

#289

Post by wpietri »

sinyug wrote: post #284
wpietri wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given that the goal of racism is to structure society, and given how well that succeeded in America, I don't think it's unreasonable to ask whether it's at play in pretty much any situation where we see racially biased outcomes. But it is an excellent question why Google Maps is still terrible at Indian place names even though they have plenty of people internally who not only could help, but would be delighted to. T…

> structural inequity despite it being pervasive in America since its founding America is not unique in this. And African-Americans are not the only people in the world who were enslaved. What is unique is that America and Americans are so good at controlling narratives and sucking oxygen out of rooms that other stories and catastrophes are forced into irrelevance.

America is not unique in this. But America's history is uniquely relevant to the problems in America. Where Facebook is based and the tech industry is centered.

Re: Facebook apology as AI labels black men 'primates'

#290

Post by sinyug »

wpietri wrote: post #289
sinyug wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> structural inequity despite it being pervasive in America since its founding America is not unique in this. And African-Americans are not the only people in the world who were enslaved. What is unique is that America and Americans are so good at controlling narratives and sucking oxygen out of rooms that other stories and catastrophes are forced into irrelevance.

America is not unique in this. But America's history is uniquely relevant to the problems in America. Where Facebook is based and the tech industry is centered.

> But America's history is uniquely relevant to the problems in America. Where Facebook is based and the tech industry is centered.

Sure it is. But if Facebook, Google and other American companies want to indulge their Americentric proclivities to the detriment of everyone else, they should voluntarily withdraw from the rest of the world.

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