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AI tools are making the world look weird

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Re: AI tools are making the world look weird

#31

Post by bitexploder »

Waterluvian wrote: post #24
psidium wrote: post #5

Can’t recommend the book that coined this acronym enough: The WEIRDest People in the World Book by Joseph Henrich. It is such an eye-opening piece that explains so much of the world around us. He’s an anthropologist that goes into the psychology of it all. Touching on points like how religion plays a part in shaping the America of today and even how humans are worst at discerning faces today because we need to discer…

> humans are worst at discerning faces today because we need to discern letters and words and dedicate brain power for that. I have absolutely nothing to back this up, but my gut tells me this risks being one of those bold claims that grows legs and runs for a while until we debunk it.

Yeah, has that Malcolm Gladwell knowledge porn vibe. A book that empowers its reader with secret knowledge of explanation that all fits together a little too neatly and loses nuance or is often just plain wrong.

Re: AI tools are making the world look weird

#34

Post by maxbond »

YurgenJurgensen wrote: post #16
simonw wrote: post #2

WEIRD here stands for "Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, Democratic".

I’ve seen a massive uptick in the use of ‘weird’ as an insult (charitably because all the old insults get you shadowbanned on social media, less charitably because conformism is what the mainstream values more than anything), so the author isn’t even pretending to hide their agenda here.

WEIRD is not pejorative in TFA. There's no problem being WEIRD. I am WEIRD. What's alleged in TFA is that AI, as it's currently deployed, is implicitly chauvinistic towards perspectives other than WEIRD. This sort of thing has historically been a problem with AI/ML and automation in general. The classic example is cameras deploying autofocus features that fail on non-white faces (which has happened several times).

Poorly considered automation can create frictionless experiences for some and Kafkaesque experiences for the rest, where systems refuse to accept your atypical name, your atypical style of speaking is flagged as an indicator of fraud, etc. Automating processes involving people necessarily makes assumptions about those people, and such assumptions are often brittle.

For example, it's easy to imagine a resume filtering AI being implicitly prejudiced against people from Fictionalstan, because it was only trained on a few resumes from Fictionalstan and most of those happened to be classified as "unqualified". This is a danger anytime you have a small number of samples from any particular group, because it's easy for small sample sizes to be overwhelmed by bad luck.

In general I think these types of issues are best viewed as software bugs. It's a clearer and more actionable perspective than as ideological issues. If the software isn't serving some of our end users properly, let's just fix it and move on.

Re: AI tools are making the world look weird

#35

Post by Terr_ »

Waterluvian wrote: post #24
psidium wrote: post #5

Can’t recommend the book that coined this acronym enough: The WEIRDest People in the World Book by Joseph Henrich. It is such an eye-opening piece that explains so much of the world around us. He’s an anthropologist that goes into the psychology of it all. Touching on points like how religion plays a part in shaping the America of today and even how humans are worst at discerning faces today because we need to discer…

> humans are worst at discerning faces today because we need to discern letters and words and dedicate brain power for that. I have absolutely nothing to back this up, but my gut tells me this risks being one of those bold claims that grows legs and runs for a while until we debunk it.

I'm struggling to think of any way to test the hypothesis which is (A) practical and (B) accurate.

For example, suppose you sampled a group today and found an inverse-correlation between "good at recognizing many faces" and "good at recognizing written text"... That still wouldn't show that one facility grew causing the other to shrink, because maybe people are just born (or early-development-ed) with a certain bias.

Re: AI tools are making the world look weird

#36

Post by cortesoft »

psidium wrote: post #5

Can’t recommend the book that coined this acronym enough: The WEIRDest People in the World Book by Joseph Henrich. It is such an eye-opening piece that explains so much of the world around us. He’s an anthropologist that goes into the psychology of it all. Touching on points like how religion plays a part in shaping the America of today and even how humans are worst at discerning faces today because we need to discer…

> women there tend to prefer to be 2nd wives of a better man rather being the only wife of a lower-ranking man

This seems like a bit of a tautology; how are they 'ranking' these men?

Re: AI tools are making the world look weird

#37

Post by barnabyjones »

I have saved instructions for Gemini to translate queries into the local language then retranslate the output back to English, when asking about non-English speaking countries/cultures. It seems to work fairly well, but I think it's just due to the different content trained in that language; obviously there would be more in depth discussion of Indonesian cuisine in Indonesian. Whether the country is rich or democratic shouldn't really affect the output.

Re: AI tools are making the world look weird

#38

Post by cortesoft »

psidium wrote: post #25
derefr wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One of the wildest claims in there is the one that the north of Italy is more developed today because it was part of the Holy Roman Empire while the south wasn’t. About a thousand years separate these and he finds effects still. I would note that the north and south of Italy have very different geography and climate. Which can be upstream of all sorts of things, culturally. The geography of Italy's two halves suppo…

Yes, your point and other points around the web I’ve seen make his argument about north and south Italy very controversial to say the least. He does have data to back it up, where he presents distance to nearest church as a predictor for how well a population will fare, and south Italy didn’t have the churches that north the Italy had

This would only work as evidence if church placement was random. Could be a correlation with a different cause.

Re: AI tools are making the world look weird

#39

Post by cortesoft »

coherentpony wrote: post #21
felipeerias wrote: post #17

There is undoubtedly a real effect here, but IMHO one problem with the original article is that it treats the US as the only reference point. On the one hand, this reflects the US dominant position in world affairs and the fact that probably most of the training materials come from there. But on the other hand, there are some outlier results that are left unexplained. For example, ChatGPT is even more aligned with Ja…

> For example, ChatGPT is even more aligned with Japan than with the US I have no expertise in this field. Is it actually even more aligned? Or is it simply aligned with the elements of Japanese culture and/or media that are exported to the West?

I think the comment is basing it on the graphic from the article.

Re: AI tools are making the world look weird

#40

Post by cortesoft »

YurgenJurgensen wrote: post #16
simonw wrote: post #2

WEIRD here stands for "Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, Democratic".

I’ve seen a massive uptick in the use of ‘weird’ as an insult (charitably because all the old insults get you shadowbanned on social media, less charitably because conformism is what the mainstream values more than anything), so the author isn’t even pretending to hide their agenda here.

I think they chose the WEIRD acronym to challenge the western centrism. For most of the readers of the book, the culture described by the WEIRD acronym is not only the normal culture, but is in many ways considered universal.

By calling it WEIRD, the author is trying to drive home the point that the vast majority of people in the world are NOT in that culture that many westerners feel is 'normal', which would make it 'weird' in the sense that it isn't actually the norm.

Now, I have a lot of problems with the book and his arguments, but I don't think there is anything sneaky or nefarious about the word choice, it is very up front and straightforward as to the reasoning behind it.

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