Shockley created the transistor, formed the pioneering and archetypal start-up in Shockley Semiconductor, which led to Fairchild and eventually formed Intel. How was is possible for such a brilliant man to hold views on race that were so distorted and peddle discredited pseudo-science with such conviction after winning the Nobel Prize?
I'm sorry but no. I don't believe this at all. What are the chances of say, you finding a dataset maliciously labelled by racists and how would you uncover that? Would you ask every software engineer how he felt about Black Lives Matter as he tagged images? It's more likely that there is malicious intent in a company where 2% of software engineers are African-American than not.
I find it baffling and dispiriting that you, as a Black person, believe this is more likely to be an "error" than an act of deliberate racism. It's getting silly, now. A white racist programmer has done this on purpose because he finds it hilarious. The chances of a computer equating monkey and man, given the correct datasets, are close to nil. There's a blindness - a wilful ignorance - to look away and show good faith. Why is that?
As someone who worked on ml based classification I can totally see a man being misclassified as a monkey on occasion. If you have man and monkey in the output vector, it will happen on from time to time.. If you find a way to achieve 100% accuracy, go claim your Nobel prize..
But that's not what happened, is it? The algorithm hasn't miscategorised men, it has miscategorised Black men. I'd argue the AI has done its job, with a high degree of accuracy. It found what the programmers were looking for when they wrote the code. It was meant to be an insult, and was highly effective. Lack of outrage on HN is as expected; the authors are quite possibly in the comments holding their sides with laughter.
Those are baseless accusations based on poor understanding of ML.
This behaviour is counterproductive. It is not susceptible to sway me towards your point of view, but instead discredit you and those holding similar opinions.
I am not here to "sway" you. Your hand-wavey dismissal is absurd, given the history of race in Silicon Valley. William Shockley was an out-and-out white supremacist. He goes on to form Shockley Semiconductor which begets Fairchild which becomes Intel. He set the culture. It is patently obvious that this outcome is likely written in code, and for you to dismiss this probability is absured. You have not discredited my position in any way, nor even attempted to challenge it. How on earth would you know if my understanding of ML is "poor" or otherwise? The joke in the code was to associate Black Men with monkeys. It is a trope that goes back hundreds of years. The joke is: "Look, even computers think Black men are primates" and that this position is objective, logical.
Actually I now must strongly depart from your argument of intentionality here, and reiterate something I said before. I was about to respond to the person below, but they're more-or-less right. I don't know how intentional any of the programmers were here, so I'm not going to speculate on that.
But I will absolutely insist that this racist outcome is possible -- even likely -- absent any bad intentions from the programmer(s) who did it.
ALSO: I'm 99% sure of the following:
A black team of programmers working on "distinguishing humans from monkeys" would never let the mistake of "black and not white people identified as monkeys" out the door.
That's the point here. I'm not saying it wouldn't have happened somewhere in the process, I'm saying that you or I (if we don't work on the inside) would NEVER have seen it because it would have been noticed and fixed before then.
Why wouldn't you assume intentionality as more likely than not given the disturbing history of race in Silicon Valley? The position you hold out of the gate is unlikely and your assumptions of good-faith are misplaced. William Shockley, who invented the transistor and essentially set up the Valley and it's culture, was an outright white supremacist. You see his legacy in the hiring percentages. The probability is that this was done on purpose. Your position is dangerous, in all honesty, because it sets up the idea that there is a logical similarity between Black Men and monkeys. "Look! Even a computer thinks so!" - and that we must modify outcomes so spare Black people's feelings. Note that the alleged error wasn't in distinguishing humans from monkeys as you state in error, but Black Men specifically.
Primarily because my way is more forward looking and gets better results in the future, which is more important than punishing the past.
As I said before, I'm not here to smoke out old (or even current) racists individually. I don't think it's a valuable practice to "witch hunt" (even when the "witches" in this case are absolutely real and do exist.)
Because what that ends up doing is: every e.g. white person who's never said the n-word, or who has black people in their family, or has one black friend etc etc etc now subconsciously but completely lets themselves off the hook in any way. They get to think of themselves as superior because we've now defined racism as essentially a binary.
The above situation is mentally easier for many people (perhaps you as well) to deal with, rather than considering how deep this all goes.
Look, one wild thing you realize as a black person is that nearly everybody everywhere is to some extent surrounded by racism is that most everybody has some of it subconsciously internalized, and you don't fix it until you think about it directly, in yourself and others. I'm not a huge fan of "oh everybody's a little racist" because whoever says it is usually doing something dumb like excusing behavior -- but it's FAR closer to the truth than "if we smoke out the hidden but self-consciously racist people all will be fixed."
(so I suppose I'm saying -- yes, pay attention to what you are suggesting we pay attention to -- but also understand that it is almost CERTAINLY nowhere near sufficient to fix the problem.)
Yup. Though I would refine it a bit -- it's the "rush to excuse" that's the most dangerous. I don't much worry about the deliberate racist programmer as much as I worry about subconscious deliberate-or-not biases creeping in.
This perfectly analogizes to most everywhere else; angry open n-word saying racists are usually powerless losers.
More problems come from the larger combination of the rest of the "racism" spectrum, whether apathetic, or racist-but-quiet, or harbors latent biases that they may not know about etc.
(And here I do feel like I have to say, the answer isn't "SMOKE THEM OUT AND EXPOSE THEM" on the personal level, it's just taking the utmost care in the work you do)
In this case, it's not the rush to excuse that is dangerous, it's the rush to accuse that is dangerous. Innocent until proven guilty is a fundamental principle of justice. You have not demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that this is in fact the doing of a racist, so anyone coming up with plausible alternative explanations is only doing so to prevent the discussion from devolving into a witch hunt where the guilt of the accused is simply assumed and our biases and perceptions stand in for evidence. Repeat the witch hunt scenario often enough and eventually you end up with a boy who cried wolf scenario and now you've lost your credibility even in cases where you do have evidence to back up your claims.
When people are careless in making accusations that's incredibly damaging to society. You as a black person should know how divisive and damaging false allegations can be, since that was a tool racists used to instill racial hostility in society. Let's not repeat those mistakes. I'm not saying racism doesn't exist or that we shouldn't do anything about it, but knowing in your heart of hearts that this must have been an act of deliberate racism is simply not enough. We need a smoking gun, or else it's best to withhold judgment.
The fact that no one thinks the mislabeling by the AI is acceptable should be enough. That shows you that no one would defend a person who deliberately designed this. The 'rush to excuse' is not because society doesn't want to condemn racism, but because most of society still cares about fairness and not making false accusations.
If you follow who is saying what, I don't think you and I fundamentally disagree - or at least are not THAT far apart on this - I (the black person here who is still saying yep, my black opinion is important) have also been strongly suggesting that we not automatically attribute these problems to intentional racism.
So to clarify -- the "rush to excuse" that I'm saying is dangerous is really "the rush to insist that there is definitely no bias in play," NOT the "the rush to accuse individuals of being racist" -- and I suppose the fundamental problem I see going on here is that people can't seem to distinguish these two things, even though they are very different.
I'm going to keep saying this: the biggest problem is not smoking out hardcore racists who openly hate, the biggest problem is getting much of the non-black tech populace to even begin this conversation without the hypersensitivity kicking in (fully acknowledging that, while I'm not a fan of the terms "SJW" and "woke" and such, there also absolutely exists a naive liberal left that presently makes this conversation harder because they lean too hard into their particular direction)
And now I'm very curious as to the reasoning behind the downvotes. Again, I'm fine with you disagreeing with me, but I must insist that discussion is more valuable than blind downvotes when you do have the rare occasion of an actual real life black person here giving their opinion.
Anki is just a slice of Piotr Wozniak's ideas, and the algorithm it uses isn't as good as that implemented in his own software, SuperMemo. And besides: it doesn't do incremental reading, which is lights-out amazing: https://super-memo.com/supermemo18.html
I'm interested in incremental-reading, but the video he has really doesn't sell it for me [1]
It seems like you skim through an article, extract a few facts, and add them to your memorization schedule. Would it really help you summarize the article, or help you synthesize the arguments and follow the logic leading to a conclusion?
Spoiler alert: basically incremental reading is like using save states when playing a game with an emulator. As one might save their game state before and after a challenging section in a game, when you find a difficult to understand/explain idea, incremental reading makes it easy to pause and synthesize that idea before moving on. Yes at the end also it’s good to summarize the ideas to yourself and simplify that explanation, and then use SuperMemo to memorize that explanation. Incremental reading is hard to explain why it is so useful, I’ve been using SuperMemo every day for 15 years and I still feel like I am learning new things
"Consumer choice" is not how you stop hostile all-pervasive monopoly machine learning algorithms. The number of times I've heard from smart people: "Don't use Google"; "Don't use Amazon"; "Microsoft are evil" (true) - now "Don't buy it". Running into the hedgerows and away from the mainstream of digital life is not an option for all but a tiny fraction of people. "Just get an Android phone!" is an even worse idea.
I have to disagree - privacy requires openness. Indeed, "just get an Android phone" from Google, OnePlus and several other major manufacturers is a viable solution - they allow you full control over the device without their permission.
You don't want Google? No problem, blow the ROM away and install Lineage without GApps, you can even mess with MicroG if you're reliant on some app that needs Play Services.
Apple became the biggest corporation in the world because they worked out how to build humane interfaces into the technologies that shape the future. That you believe Grandma will be just fine nerding around with system internals, or will care what ROM is(!) shows just how far out of touch so many hackers really are. I'm sorry, but no: Android is not a solution.
Of course! I'm not suggesting it's a solution for everyone at all. Just realize that Grandma will never have privacy like that.
Corporations and governments combine to basically make privacy a niche thing for tinkerers only, you simply cannot mass-market the development attitudes nor technical and opsec skills needed to achieve a real degree of privacy on the user side.
It's impossible to have privacy just for you in a society that otherwise doesn't have privacy. Think Facebook: even if you don't share much details, you friends certainly do. They will post your photos together and happily tag you on them, they will write how you hung out together, they will geo-tag your shared commutes, etc. Even if you don't share too many details with Apple/Google/Amazon/etc, your mobile carrier certainly does. Your Facebook/Twitter/TikTok does. Everyone around you does.
The solution to this problem does not lie in a technical plane, nor does it in digital escapism.
In terms of avoiding CSAM detection they give you no more control than Apple. If you use Google’s Photo Library, your photos have already been scanned.
I want an option that is "grandma" compatible. In other words, it isn't really viable if you can't just buy it off the shelf, or have to dig into settings to opt out. Right now if I go to Best Buy (or insert your favorite retailer here), I can't buy hardware off the shelf that won't send my data to a remote server by default.
Well, almost. Both of them have their "fuck the user" quirks. Oneplus spent a goodly amount of time exfiltrating private data to their own servers until they got caught and Google has a bad habit of disabling features like HDMI-out to force you to buy their other products like Chromecast.
You’re not running away from a mainstream digital life by buying a different computer, that’s just FUD. I’m nearly all Linux run and this has not decreased my ability to have a mainstream digital life…whatever those qualifications are, which seem to be specifically tied to software Apple allows you to use. These companies only want you to think life will be worse off by not buying their products.
Meanwhile in the real world, my brilliant friend, who cares about privacy, called me in a panic because she couldn't work out how to shift/right-click a video in her browser to download it to her hard drive, and you believe Linux is a viable alternative to the vast majority of ordinary people?
