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YouTube blocked chess channel after mistaken detection of racial slurs

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Re: YouTube blocked chess channel after mistaken detection of racial slurs

#291

Post by userbinator »

whatshisface wrote: post #48
lwouis wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You kid but i've received 2 pull-requests on my open-source project, which only goal was to replace "Blacklist" with "Blocklist" in the app preferences. I don't receive many PRs. This is a real trend.

Funny thing is, since nobody ever submits PRs to change it in the opposite direction, even one person going around on GitHub would be virtually guaranteed to eventually change all of them.

since nobody ever submits PRs to change it in the opposite direction

Then perhaps that's something the "opposition activists" should start doing...

Personally, if I had a GH account (which I don't), I might be inclined to change the "master" branch to "slave" just to fuck with the PC police.

Re: YouTube blocked chess channel after mistaken detection of racial slurs

#292

Post by Fogest »

ttt0 wrote: post #283
onethought wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If someone tries to dismiss an opinion by calling someone a "privileged white male" how would that be any better than dismissing someone's opinion for being black? Context matters... if you are in the position of privilege and saying things that you can only say because of your position. Then I can see why some people would dismiss it. The difference is: if you try to dismiss someone in a minority position for sayi…

Not in this context. When "let's not base our judgements on race" is responded with "you're a privileged white male", we're never going to reach any agreement. It's simply not going to happen.

Yeah this is exactly the kind of idea I am getting at. How can someone ever try and understand other peoples point of view if they are told "you don't understand" anytime they try and understand.

Whenever my opinion is dismissed using my race/gender/or perceived privilege it instantly creates divide. It naturally is going to make me feel more correct in my views and more correct avoiding those kinds of people. This is exactly why we see such a huge divide now in America. People are unable to discuss stuff. And this is also probably partially due to the fact that often times people don't actually have any stats to back up what they think. Often times people are just following trends now and copying what their favourite woke influencer does. I find little people I engage with actually grasp what they are talking about and just regurgitate the same lines over and over.

I've got to the point where I barely ever comment on any political sounding reddit post because I know the conversation is going to go nowhere and be filled with name-calling. And I hate that I feel like this. I want to be able to converse with people and try and understand their point of view. But unfortunately I just feel constantly attacked.

Hell I mod a couple subs over there. If I make a comment that sounds conservative leaning upset banned users will go post it on subs I mod on acting like I am a "racist mod". Now I have to delete my reddit history often and use alts a lot more. Nowadays you can barely say anything without offending someone.

Re: YouTube blocked chess channel after mistaken detection of racial slurs

#293

Post by throwaway_1301 »

Retric wrote: post #268
Sebb767 wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 500 * 60 * 24 * 365 = 262800000 hours per year / 1.3x playback speed / 2,000 hours of work per person per year = ~101,077 people to watch every uploaded video. When you have people watch the video at that fast speed and instantly make a decision, you might as well keep the algorithm - the failure rate won't be too different. Additionally, these people need holidays, managers, infrastructure and an actual flag will…

People often watch YouTube videos at 2x speeds, it’s part of their app to select 1.25, 1.5, 1.75, 2x because you can generally listen to most speakers at that speed just fine. Let alone 11 hours of ocean waves etc. Only averaging 1.3x assumed significant overhead and going back to re listen to segments, have an escalation queue for flagged videos, and randomly assigning multiple people to the same videos to ensure pe…

[disclaimer] I work at Google, all opinions are my own. I don't deal with Youtube but have had exposure to moderation operations. It is not an easy task.

Google already has more than 10k people working on this: https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/expanding-our-work-agai... . If 100 people solved the issue, it would have been solved.

You are incorrect about your assumptions in many respects. Let me list out a few:

1) There is a big difference between watching a 15 min video at 2X for fun vs watching 8 hours of videos a day while having to follow laid down policy with complexity. Videos are not taken down only for one reason and there is a lot of complexity involved with edge cases. Humans are not robots and this is not a task we are inherently good at. Give it a shot yourself for a day and see how easy it is.

2) Your overhead does not consider any additional complexity in terms of languages, specialty, regional expertise etc. This is not a simple problem either. Sure maybe you can hire 1000 reviewers in lets say Indonesia but you cannot find a native Kswahili speaker there. Its not cheap to setup an office for 2 people in Kenya. Scale this to the world which has 193 countries and 6,500 languages.

3) People dont work without any management overhead. You need frontline reviewers. Then you need a layer of experts above them. The you need managers to take care of the operations. The managers to manage those managers. Then recruiters to hire those people. Then HR to deal with their issues.

4) Turnover is a big deal. Very few people in the world can watch beheadings 40 hours a week. An even smaller proportion can handle child safety material. What happens when those people need to take time off? You need additional people. If you want a humane operation then you might have to get them to work only 2 hours a day.

Here is some more reading if you are interested in understanding this from the moderators / reviewers view: https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/16/21021005/google-youtube-...

It continues to amaze me how some of the smartest and technically savvy people on HN either do not recognize or refuse to admit how complicated a problem planet scale moderation is.

Re: YouTube blocked chess channel after mistaken detection of racial slurs

#294

Post by AnthonyMouse »

onethought wrote: post #266
Fogest wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is obviously associating racism with something not intentionally racist. But does it not strike to you at all problematic, at the moment, that 'black' is a synonym of 'bad' and 'white' of 'good'? Does it not occur to you that it might improve our language to change that? Honestly, lately I feel like the opposite is the case. Everywhere I go anywhere online all I see is white people being shit on. I see incredibl…

I don't really agree that if you're in the social majority you can be upset about racism against your empowered majority position... it just doesn't make sense. That said, if you're white in China/India/Kenya/etc... 100% there is a heap of racism directed at you and I feel for you

> I don't really agree that if you're in the social majority you can be upset about racism against your empowered majority position... it just doesn't make sense.

It makes sense for two reasons.

The first is that a huge amount of the "anti-white racism" is directed by "white people" against others nominally in the same group, implying that they aren't actually in the same social group and correspondingly that the targets don't have a majority. As evidence of this, notice that people can be canceled over petty nonsense, e.g. Gina Carano. How could this happen if there was actually a social majority which should nominally be exerting pressure in the opposite direction and winning?

The second is that there are plenty of contexts where the majority doesn't even exist on paper, e.g. only 40% of California is "white" so a "white person" who lives in California is a minority. That state is also the place where a disproportionate amount of the attacks happen. And the same is true of many major US cities, e.g. New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Houston.

Re: YouTube blocked chess channel after mistaken detection of racial slurs

#295

Post by throwaway_1301 »

Veserv wrote: post #218
dehrmann wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Setting this case aside because it's sloppy reporting based on what another classifier found, this is a hard problem. Youtube gets too many videos and comments for humans to manually review them. Flagging helps, and Google likely uses ML more complex than just text and classifier (who is commenting, is the post trending, patterns in comments, etc.) When things do reach manual review, remember that humans make mistake…

Youtube actually could manually review literally every video. [1] In 2019, users only uploaded on average 500 hours of video per minute. This is ~30,000 hours per hour. If you had people manually watching every video at 1x speed for their entire duration, you would need 30,000 reviewers for each 8 hour shift. Even if we assume that a fully-burdened reviewer costs Youtube an astronomical $80,000/yr, that only amounts…

Youtubes revenue is not its profit. It has significant expenses in terms of paying creators, hosting and bandwidth costs and the cost of all the engineers it takes to run the systems.

In addition you do not factor in significant complexities like the ones below:

You are incorrect about your assumptions in many respects. Let me list out a few:

1) There is a big difference between watching a 15 min video at 2X for fun vs watching 8 hours of videos a day while having to follow laid down policy with complexity. Videos are not taken down only for one reason and there is a lot of complexity involved with edge cases. Humans are not robots and this is not a task we are inherently good at. Give it a shot yourself for a day and see how easy it is.

2) Your overhead does not consider any additional complexity in terms of languages, specialty, regional expertise etc. This is not a simple problem either. Sure maybe you can hire 1000 reviewers in lets say Indonesia but you cannot find a native Kswahili speaker there. Its not cheap to setup an office for 2 people in Kenya. Scale this to the world which has 193 countries and 6,500 languages.

3) People dont work without any management overhead. You need frontline reviewers. Then you need a layer of experts above them. The you need managers to take care of the operations. The managers to manage those managers. Then recruiters to hire those people. Then HR to deal with their issues.

4) Turnover is a big deal. Very few people in the world can watch beheadings 40 hours a week. An even smaller proportion can handle child safety material. What happens when those people need to take time off? You need additional people. If you want a humane operation then you might have to get them to work only 2 hours a day.

Here is some more reading if you are interested in understanding this from the moderators / reviewers view: https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/16/21021005/google-youtube-...

It continues to amaze me how some of the smartest and technically savvy people on HN either do not recognize or refuse to admit how complicated a problem planet scale moderation is. If it was a problem that could be solved by spending a few tens of million dollars a year, it would have been solved.

Re: YouTube blocked chess channel after mistaken detection of racial slurs

#296

Post by Fogest »

onethought wrote: post #266
Fogest wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is obviously associating racism with something not intentionally racist. But does it not strike to you at all problematic, at the moment, that 'black' is a synonym of 'bad' and 'white' of 'good'? Does it not occur to you that it might improve our language to change that? Honestly, lately I feel like the opposite is the case. Everywhere I go anywhere online all I see is white people being shit on. I see incredibl…

I don't really agree that if you're in the social majority you can be upset about racism against your empowered majority position... it just doesn't make sense. That said, if you're white in China/India/Kenya/etc... 100% there is a heap of racism directed at you and I feel for you

I believe you 100% can. If someone's opinion based on solid facts is being dismissed by calling them a "privileged white male" I definitely believe that is very racist. They are making assumptions based on negative stereotypes to dismiss what someone is saying. Even if you don't agree that it is racist you should at least agree it is not productive at all in a conversation. The only objective with a comment like that is to be rude and dismiss them. It's not going to bring anything positive to the conversation. It's not going to help the other side understand how they feel or what they think. All it does is create more divide and more hate.

When someone calls me these names without even knowing my race, gender, or status it's pretty rude. Is it going to make me agree with them more? Is it going to make me support any of their causes more? Nope. It's going to increase my dislike for that "side". And if you get hammered with that enough it is going to create hate.

In my opinion I think the current woke landscape is actually creating more racism. I think it is counter-productive.

Does someone who is vegan yelling and screaming blocking you from getting a burger make you want to join their side? Or would it make you want further hate them and want to oppose them? Would a vegan sitting down and having a no namecalling conversation with you be more effective? I would think so. This is the exact same concept.

Also just because someone is a white male for example absolutely does not imply their status. I think that dismisses how much work someone may have put into life to get to where they are. That person doesn't know how hard they worked to get where they may or may not be, yet they are making that assumption.

Re: YouTube blocked chess channel after mistaken detection of racial slurs

#297

Post by thelock85 »

Fogest wrote: post #213
m1gu3l wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

List me some “racist things being said about white people” you have seen on the internet so we can all see...

Why? I don't have anything to prove to you. Anytime I have chosen to engage with someone who has given a response like yours and chosen to give sources and examples I am met with a ignorant response saying something like "you can't be racist towards white people". It's just not worth it for me to engage like that anymore. How about bringing a discussion to what I said rather than asking for random proof of what I sai…

> If someone tries to dismiss an opinion by calling someone a "privileged white male" how would that be any better than dismissing someone's opinion for being black?

It would depend on the content and context of the opinion itself, no? Why not just ask the dismissing person why they say that? We’ve come to the point where we generalize and characterize instead of understanding, then simply disagreeing.

> Yet in today’s society we know which one would be acceptable. As long as it’s shitting on a white person or a male you’re good to go.

White men are getting shat on but still represent or control nearly all economic and political interests (at least in U.S. and it’s empire). I’m really curious to why you feel this way? It’s not like women and Black people have been getting a pass in exchange. I just think social media has made it easier for white men to be (or feel like) targets of vitriolic, but protected speech. Welcome to the club.

From my perspective, it seems in finance, real estate and politics, going along with the “privileged white male” perception (even if an untrue of the person in question) still seems like the best way to take advantage of markets and institutions. And I suspect that’s why, given a megaphone and platform, everyone else is piling on.

Re: YouTube blocked chess channel after mistaken detection of racial slurs

#298

Post by Fogest »

richiebful1 wrote: post #285
Fogest wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the last couple years especially I feel like I am walking on eggshells when talking to people. Especially when talking to people I don't know as well. It feels so easy to offend someone these days and I'm getting sick of it. I've been having to unfollow a ton of podcasts recently because no matter how far from being related to politics some podcasts are, they just love to make sure a chunk of the episode is devote…

I understand that reckoning with racism is uncomfortable, but I don't understand how that 99 percent invisible episode is a personal attack on you. If anything, it's a reminder that well intensioned design (saving downtown) can have consequences (increased policing of Black men). I have seen and listened to a lot of race-conscious content over the last few years. As a white man, I can't say I've taken any of it as a…

It's not that it is a personal attack, it's more that I expect more talk about the actual architecture and infrastructure behind the topic versus making it a political topic.

I didn't notice them providing any statistics in regards to the racial issues. All I noticed was anecdotal evidence and an incredibly biased account of a single police encounter that happened back in 2014. They are using one guys story and a single incident involving police in order to talk about the negatives it had on other races. These are bold claims with little backing given.

This is why I don't like when podcasts like this try and tackle these issues. Because they end up being incredibly biased and one-sided. They didn't provide the whole story on the police incident, nor did they provide any other points of views or statistic on the racial issues they mentioned.

I like hearing well-researched and articulated pieces about racial inequality. What I don't like is hearing a biased opinion/anecdote filled podcast episode about it.

It seems every Podcast I listen to now always has some weird need to make it political. This never used to be the case even just a couple years ago. Now we even see sporting programs taking sides in politics and it just seems so unnecessary.

I often spend too much time deep into the weeds on these kinds of topics much like I am now. Sometimes I just want to consume some media without politics being involved. However it rarely seems like I am able to anymore. Even TV shows I watch now are starting to feel ruined and lack the good script writing they used to in favour of shoehorning whatever current PC thing is trending.

Re: YouTube blocked chess channel after mistaken detection of racial slurs

#299

Post by Fogest »

boatsie wrote: post #289
Fogest wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because of how policed the online world feels with what you say it often feels like it applies in public. However I have yet to work/interact with anyone who seems as far gone as the permanently offended Twitter users seem to be. I swear not a day goes by anymore where I don't here about Twitter going after another person trying to cancel them. We see people losing their jobs simply for sharing a more conservative vi…

You also can’t defend anyone from getting canceled, as that makes you the “ism” as well. You must be anti-whatever“ism” or they will come after you as well.

Yes exactly. Either you're "with" the mob or you're getting mobbed. The word police and thought police are in full force on sites like Twitter and reddit now.

Re: YouTube blocked chess channel after mistaken detection of racial slurs

#300

Post by gher-shyu3i »

ipiz0618 wrote: post #200
waterhouse wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You joke (I think), but given what happened to the "master" branch on GitHub, it seems likely that some people will try to push the point, and, if they make enough noise, it's likely that the organizations involved will eventually cave (not the chess grandmasters (!), but the administrator types). I googled a bit and turned up a couple of news articles: https://apnews.com/article/184386cc09be6c69535919402a13fa3f and…

A quick search shows it has already happened. https://twitter.com/magnuscarlsen/status/1108662247860199424

I don't know how people don't see the irony. This is introducing race into a non-racial game.
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