When Data Science Destabilizes Democracy and Facilitates Genocide
fast.ai
fast.ai
Probably the clearest example is in the section on stereotypes. Again, the problems are solidly identified but the understandings of their causes are lacking. The implication of surprise that an algorithm with real-world data would associate being a doctor with being a male and being a nurse with being a female is highly suspicious. There’s plenty of reason to assume a social bias feedback loop as discussed in the beginning of the article, but the argument that this is a result of bias rsearch is unsound. This correlation is consistent in the statistical data, in all societies and cultures on Earth. Again, there’s plenty of reason to argue the results correlate with societal gender bias, but not researcher gender bias. Big difference. The race/skin color correlations argues in the article do have sound arguments for researcher bias.
It literally says: “It’s not that data can be biased. Data is biased.” Know how your data was generated and what biases it may contain. We are encoding and even amplifying societal biases in the algorithms we create.
Edit: to clarify, your claim is that Word2Vec data isn't biased even though there is a link right there showing how it is? Why do you think that?
If you use that data in a system then you reinforce that bias.
This article is completely correct of course. But there is zero hope that it'll be taken seriously at all.
Just the other day, here on HN someone seriously proposed the idea that hate speech doesn't lead to violence against minorities[1]. I pointed at the Rwanda genocide, and got voted down (a lot), because the OP claimed that 10% of deaths didn't prove my point. Then I pointed out that was at least 60,000 deaths, and that was downvoted too.
Enough people clearly want to ignore things which disagree with their world view that there is zero chance that this destabilising behaviour will stop.
I was simply justifying my downvote.
This doesn't mean, of course, that you're wrong about genocide, ethics, Rwanda, etc. It means that if you want to post about these things you're responsible for separating out the dross that people will otherwise react to. The contrast between the magnitude of those topics and the pettiness of I-was-right-on-the-internet only calls attention to the latter.
But I think YCombinator needs to take this problem seriously. The Sam Altmann piece made it completely clear he has no idea how some of the ideas he thinks are bad are promoted and grow on HN.
The fact we can't talk about how ridiculous downvoted on that post are means it just keeps happening. I think there is complete blindness about how completely outrageous that is, and how it reinforces the negative stereotypes of silicon valley.
I probably could argue the point better, but honestly I don't think arguing about it is the point.
Really, all the moderation team here could read this article.
HN's mandate is the gratification of intellectual curiosity. Intellectual curiosity is playful, wants to learn, wants variety. It is more fond of trinkets than of causes. Its relationship to More Important Things is itself curious: it inevitably touches on larger topics, yet if we were to swap priorities and put More Important Things first and curiosity second, it would kill the site. It would turn it into a fundamentally different thing, and you can't do that to something alive without killing it.
So the question is not "are there more important things in the world", it's "does a site dedicated to intellectual curiosity have a right to exist, even though there are more important things in the world". I think it does, because there is room for many kinds of website. This is just the kind of website that HN is.
If you accept that, you need to understand that such a site, simply by being interesting, comes under constant pressure to be something else. From a moderation viewpoint it's our job to protect it for what it is and resist the pressure to turn it into something else, even when we know the something elses are more important. Often we personally agree with the very things we moderate. That sounds weird if not impossible, but sheer quantity has a way of changing a person and you get pretty good at it after a while.
When you say "some of the ideas he thinks are bad are promoted and grow on HN" I don't know what ideas you're talking about. But if you mean ideological ideas, yes, they certainly crop up here, but I don't believe they're growing here. I think they're floating around everywhere. They also damage intellectual curiosity and so there's an easy argument that they don't belong on HN. Convincing everyone else of that of course is not so easy.
I'm not arguing about putting "most important things first".
I think that intellectual curiosity is very important. But I think that people are using the HN rules to push agendas, they are good at it, and I don't think that is the same as "intellectual curiosity".
Take that Rwanda thing. It's pretty clear that the parent comment isn't just indulging in "intellectual curiosity". They are playing the whole "escalation of opposition" game: "oh, maybe hate speech doesn't lead to violence" -> "there aren't enough studies showing it does" -> "it's not really a problem" -> "you are a problem for opposing hate speech".
Even in this very thread we see this same behavior:
Justifying downvote: "you told people to look up a topic but did not provide any link as a recommended starting point" (which is fine) https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jlg23
But then: "I am actually very familiar with the topic and I am thus aware that one can find many, seemingly contradictory, sources" (Oh, look at that! Someone who rejects clear evidence which doesn't agree with their views) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15947869
When you say "some of the ideas he thinks are bad are promoted and grow on HN" I don't know what ideas you're talking about. But if you mean ideological ideas, yes, they certainly crop up here, but I don't believe they're growing here.
I think the Damore essay is a good example of something which would be an upvoted comment here.
Or quotes like this: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DOfLPY5VAAAw7cC.jpg:large (which was on the Naomi Wu story.)
It's impossible to prevent everyone from ever posting awful things to HN in the first place. This is a public, anonymous internet forum. Of course people are going to post such things, and of course it takes time for the community immune system, including downvotes and flags and moderation, to react. But it usually does. You can't judge HN fairly without taking that into account.
I know that people capture these screenshots and pass them around on Twitter and whatnot. I also know that when the original posts eventually get flagged or otherwise dealt with, the people passing the screenshots around never mention that, never update, and most of all never apologize for publicly claiming that HN—and even we personally—endorse the most horrible stuff. That's how political battle works: concede nothing, correct nothing, distort every available data point for maximum effect. It doesn't seem very compatible with intellectual honesty to me, but that is for each person's conscience to decide.
That last link seems like cherry-picking. Why a screenshot? Why not a link to the comment on HN? Likely it was flagged and/or downvoted, which is how the community signals that a post is unacceptable. In other words your example, correctly examined, probably indicates the opposite of your claim.
Actually at the time the push-back was downvoted. And yes, I agree that it was likely flagged, hidden and then deleted.
But that isn't the point.
The point is that people did think it was acceptable to write that here, and others agreed with it.
The traditional forum response has been to hide that type of behavior from the rest of the site population. But on HN, people turn on "show dead", and then respond to it just as though it was there. We've seen similar kinds of behavior on Reddit, where poisonous behavior was pushed into subreddits in the belief that would protect the rest of the site. I don't think there is any argument that theory failed.
This is a public, anonymous internet forum. Of course people are going to post such things, and of course it takes time for the community immune system, including downvotes and flags and moderation, to react. But it usually does. You can't judge HN fairly without taking that into account.
I no longer believe that to be true, and that Rwanda example shows what I'm talking about.
Yes, the top level comments are vaguely ok most of the time, a couple of days after they are off the front page. By that point no one is reading them and the damage is done. The slow process of downvoting, flagging and moderation just doesn't work anymore.
I don't know what the solution is, but I'm sure that right now HN is doing more harm than good.
> But then: "I am actually very familiar with the topic and I am thus aware that one can find many, seemingly contradictory, sources" (Oh, look at that! Someone who rejects clear evidence which doesn't agree with their views) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15947869
Woha. I agree with your conclusion wrt Rwanda (or at least what I think your conclusions are - you never elaborated).
My point is: If you want to communicate, make it easy to be understood. Please provide a link "the wikipedia article[0] is a good introduction".
Telling people to ~"just do the research" only warrants one answer "I did, you are wrong. Your turn."
Nobody has to invest more time into a response to a comment than the original commenter if the original does not contain a single reference/verifiable fact.