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Part of my code makes Copilot crash

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Re: Part of my code makes Copilot crash

#331

I encountered this some time ago because I was working with grammatical gender. Unlike many of these comments, though, I do not take exception to it. Bias in ML is well established, and it's okay if, when we don't have solutions, we just disable it. If your autocomplete was capable of spitting out suggestions that made you feel isolated or kept poking you in the eye about aspects of your identity, you might feel a bi…

"Reducing Bias" is a really strange way to put it, considering that bias usually means delibeaterly ignoring or contradicting aspects of reality/data (the classic example in ML textbooks is fitting a straight line to non-linear data), which is what Copilot is quite literally doing here.

Gender is, in actual material fact, binary, and extremely strongly correlated with sex. Building a crimestop into an ML model is just teaching the machine human biases and delusions.

Re: Part of my code makes Copilot crash

#332
post #120
post #16

> Copilot crash because the word “gender” A metaphor for our times.

I worked on a video game in the late 2000s, and one of the bits of code I did was the code for filling the seats in the stadium with people. One of the artists cobbled together like 5 low poly man models and 5 low poly woman models, and you could just about tell the difference, and I put some code in there to ensure the genders were evenly distributed. (The 2 genders, I mean. Man, and woman.) Looking back, I don't ev…

No post body was provided.

Re: Part of my code makes Copilot crash

#333
post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get the whole discussion. There are just many different models of gender. Its like particles vs waves. In one model, there are only two genders, in another five. There are those who say gender is culture and sex is real, and those who say sex is constructed, too. Some models describe reality better than others, some are useful, some are harmful. But nobody can or should stop you from thinking about reality wi…

>>Nobody can or should stop you from thinking about reality with the model of your choice. While I agree with you, that is very much the game that is being played here. We have competing world views and one way to help a world view dominate is to play a linguistic war. That was the point of Newspeak in 1984 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak ). If you control the language such that competing ideas are instantly…

The whole point of (post-)structuralist philosophy, which informs the left-wing view on this, is that all language is already newspeak. (And since it follows that you can't choose not to play, you may as well play to win.)

> Western society was starting to get to the point where it taboos were being shed and ideas could win based on their merit.

Name a year that things were actually better. (In the 40's, before the civil rights movement? In the 80's, when queer people were still regularly oppressed and excluded from participation in society? Did ideas "win on their merit" when police beat up people in gay bars?)

Re: Part of my code makes Copilot crash

#334
post #122

So I've just tested it, and I can confirm, yes, copilot refuses to give suggestions related to gender. Now I know a lot of people are calling this absurd, but looking more closely, there are two PR nightmare scenarios. 1. Copilot makes a suggestion that implies gender is binary, a certain community explodes with anger and an entire news hype cycle starts about how Microsoft is enforcing views on gender with code. 2.…

This is similar to the stupid branch rename saga. It is certainly pointless, but not doing it could be disastrous.

Re: Part of my code makes Copilot crash

#335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

> such a group is a very small minority They got "master" changed to "main" in Github.

You beat me to it, as stupid as it is, you don't want to deal with this small minority.

People on the other side who complain about this being an "intrusive, misguided attempt at preventing discrimination" should take the time to talk to them and say hey, this is not about you.

Re: Part of my code makes Copilot crash

#336
post #122

So I've just tested it, and I can confirm, yes, copilot refuses to give suggestions related to gender. Now I know a lot of people are calling this absurd, but looking more closely, there are two PR nightmare scenarios. 1. Copilot makes a suggestion that implies gender is binary, a certain community explodes with anger and an entire news hype cycle starts about how Microsoft is enforcing views on gender with code. 2.…

Those aren’t the only options. You can just let it suggest what it is going to suggest. Copilot is a product for adults who should be able to comprehend what machine learning is. Anybody who throws a fit about it will only be exposing themselves as a fool.

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Re: Part of my code makes Copilot crash

#337

Aren't we missing the forest for the trees here? We're zeroing in on how silly is it for copilot to trigger its content filter on the word "gender". To me the real issue is that copilot has a content filter in the first place. It's unwelcome and unnecessary.

You can know a town by the thickness of the fence around the backyard.

If you have to deal with those kind of people, you're willing to sound silly just to protect yourself.

Re: Part of my code makes Copilot crash

#338

Aren't we missing the forest for the trees here? We're zeroing in on how silly is it for copilot to trigger its content filter on the word "gender". To me the real issue is that copilot has a content filter in the first place. It's unwelcome and unnecessary.

I don't think it's silly. Whatever Copilot says, is said by Microsoft too, by extension. And so, it makes sense for Microsoft to not make themselves liable for whatever people make their product spit out. Especially after happenings like this: "Microsoft's AI Twitter bot goes dark after racist, sexist tweets" https://www.reuters.com/article/us-microsoft-twitter-bot-idU...

> Whatever Copilot says, is said by Microsoft too, by extension.

Whatever text I write in Word, is written by Microsoft too, by extension?

*not*

Re: Part of my code makes Copilot crash

#339
post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s a zealous push by a small but extremely vocal fringe to impose their very particular worldview onto emerging AI/ML models like this. They refer to it as “eliminating bias”, but it’s really just an attempt to mold these new technologies into conformance with one very specific set of ideological commitments. Proponents view it as some kind of obvious universal good, and are confused when anyone else is appalled…

> They refer to it as “eliminating bias”, I don't think, e.g. being able to handle black faces correctly is some sort of massive ideological commitment. So let's not pretend that the entire concern of bias in AI is irrelevant, no matter where you stand on gender. > conformance with one very specific set of ideological commitments You know-- let's just talk about basic respect and dignity: if someone strongly wants to…

> I don't think, e.g. being able to handle black faces correctly is some sort of massive ideological commitment.

But tend people tend to insult everybody that does not care so much about such a topic as racist.

Re: Part of my code makes Copilot crash

#340
post #327
post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In terms of how much difference it makes to someone going to dinner with them in a casual social context? Yes, it probably is. Anyone can date whomever they want based on whatever criteria they want. But if someone wants to be called "he" despite not being born with a penis-- what's the big deal? Are you being harmed so much by complying? > > if they don't like us referring to their race or features in a certain wa…

Quoted post unavailable.

Sometimes your spade is broken enough that it's hard to use as a spade, or so bent from use that it'd be more reasonable to call it a pickaxe

The social meaning of a "man" or "woman" encompasses a large swath of things. Generally people's mental models of those concepts includes both physical and mental ideas. The issue is, this is not very constant. Some people will inevitably fail to possess some characteristics (like lacking large muscles, or having small breasts). We typically allow these exceptions without questioning it too much. Genitalia, of course, is the exception. In my experience, it is typically regarded as the fundamental cornerstone of gender. The question is, is that really accurate? We assign labels to make sense of the world. So, we tend to stick things in the categories where they fit the most (important) attributes. After all, we don't measure the genetics before calling something a dog, we typically see it bark, wag it's tail, play fetch and decide it's probably a dog, even if we haven't seen it before. If someone looks like a girl, acts like a girl, has had genital recontruction surgery, has a fashion sense, wears makeup, and generally is just another regular person on the street, then for any social interaction they are just like any girl. There is one situation where this isn't true - if they are sexually involved with someone who has the intent of having children. For that purpose, they, like any infertile woman, can't provide children. I can sympathise with a hatred for people trying to force falsehoods on me - I personally have been the annoying atheist friend quite a lot. However, to take that birth genetalia are a cornerstone of gender uncritically doesn't seem very useful, since then the labels "man" or "woman" tell you nothing about how they might act - you may meet a woman, who is perfectly ordinary in every way, who then reveals that she is trans. If birth genitalia is to be the cornerstone of gender, you now have to include someone who looks and acts as any woman would in your definition of "man". To me this seems like it makes the term meaningless, and it makes far more sense to just classify that person as a "woman". Genetalia itself isn't really important to social relationships outside of sex, so for situations outside of sex classifying by it also seems somewhat useless.

The other, much more (imo) defensible argument you expressed was relating socialization. In my experience it is true that socially, boys are conditioned to be more aggressive while girls are often punished for being aggressive. This definitely leads to a difference in how far they are willing to push to fulfill their own needs. However, assertiveness, to an extent, is a useful trait for anyone to have. Imo it shouldn't be seen as a "masculine" trait, but rather a trait men tend to have, since being able to clearly communicate needs and boundaries, and push back when those needs and boundaries get ignored, is an essential skill for anyone, but one that women might be less practiced in due to often receiving higher backlash for doing so.

Of course, there are non trans women who possess that capability. However, in your experience dealing with trans women, has that made your experience in interacting with them closer to an angry man, or closer to any other aggressive woman? It probably varies case by case. From what I've heard the looks of a woman come with the social pressures of a woman, so I'd wager that an aggressive trans woman, on average, wouldn't differ much from an aggressive non trans woman, simply because, so long as they are perceived as women, their anger is taken extremely seriously on several issues (sexual crimes and harassment) and somewhat less seriously on everything else. My personal theory is that this is due to the assumed threat of physical violence with men, while women are often seen as being incapable of/unlikely to commit violence, leading to two lopsided power dynamics rather than one even one. Regardless, I think that basing our definition of gender off of genitalia or genetics doesn't provide a super useful mental model for socialization, which I believe to be the primary good use of gender as a concept.

Sports are one area in which I think you're wrong. If growing up on testosterone were a major contributor to advantages, we'd expect to see a lot more trans athletes at the top of the women's league, the way you anecdotally noted we do with buisness. They have been allowed to compete for quite some time now, so the fact that only recently have the media made a circus about a trans athlete in the olympics suggests to me that they likely do not possess any significant advantage - in my personal experience, I saw someone who could previously do 20 pushups when completely unfit struggle to do 1 a year after starting hormones, so I find it kind of hard to believe they retain any significant advantage, given enough time

We can say that we are humans, or evolved monkeys, or extremely processed stardust; all can be correct, but laws only apply to humans, and no one gets out of jail by claiming to be an inanimate object.

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