When will this madness end? There will always be people offended by something. I'm pretty sure there are individuals claiming that NOT suggesting their pronoun deprives them of their identity, dignity or whatever.
This is getting ridiculous.
This is getting ridiculous.
ML driven automation widening wealth disparity? Eh.
ML ushering in the age of the persistent surveillance state? Eh.
ML being used to manipulate elections and hijack democracies? Eh.
ML might auto-suggest wrong gender in a text editor? STOP. EVERYTHING. THE RISK IS TOO HIGH IT MIGHT OFFEND SOME USERS.
That does not mean every instance of offense should be ignored or dismissed, does it? How about addressing specific grievances instead of this extremely vague proclamation?
There are people up in arms about Maryland's flag because the checkered pattern is a confederacy symbol which somehow triggers them. The best course of action for those people is not to change the Maryland flag but rather to get them therapy so they can learn how to live without getting offended.
I can't give you an algorithm in advance that will let you decide every political and social issue ever. That's obviously not possible.
There are heuristics, like. You can put yourself in the other person's shoes, try to empathize with them to figure out where they're coming from, and work out what their values and their reasoning is. You're a human being, a social creature whose most distinctive characteristic is extremely complex and nuanced communication. Your brain was made for this.
> There are people up in arms about Maryland's flag because the checkered pattern is a confederacy symbol which somehow triggers them. The best course of action for those people is not to change the Maryland flag but rather to get them therapy so they can learn how to live without getting offended.
I'm gonna let you in on a secret. If you treat everyone with contempt and dismissal, then every conclusion you come to about them will be contemptful dismissal.
People often assume I'm a man on reddit. A lot of the time I'll politely let them know that not everyone on reddit is a man. Are you suggesting that I ought to go to therapy instead?
Including, apparently, the fact that some people are making an effort to care about other people.
The majority of people who "care" would have no cushy job otherwise.
This applies to programmers implementing useless features, social scientists, politicians, administrators and many more.
1. People expect public organizations to not be bigoted.
2. People are generally fairly bigoted.
Therefore, if you're an organization training NNs on data produced by 2, you have to do some editing, or you're going to get in trouble over 1.
Assume there are 80% included in a game and 20% frozen out. Here it makes sense to change the rules of the game to include the other 20%.
Yes it might slightly inconvenience the 80% but the switch from not being included at all to playing the game for the 20% is huge. So, overall it might be a net positive.
Problem is when you get to a 98/2 split. Is it worth it to inconvenience such a large majority for the benefit of a very small minority. And how much are you going to change the rules?
Is it worth the reduced enjoyment/efficiency of the game?
At some point the trade off will become too much, and even moral/emotional arguments will not be enough to silence the dissent.
cf. https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...
How much revenue would Google be losing over such a decision?
Even if something only affects 2% of the population, the cost of getting it wrong may not be worth the benefits.
Trying to remove bias from a system is about trying to remove bias from a system. People tend to agree that removing bias from a system rather than intentionally creating a system that discriminates.
This would be similar to how feminist movements in languages that systematically distinguish men from women push to get the language changed so that women are referred to as men ("there shouldn't be any difference between a waiter and a waitress"), while feminist movements in languages that don't draw the distinction push to get the language changed so that women are referred to explicitly as women ("we should acknowledge that women can be waiters too").
If feminism demands one of these things, it surely can't also demand the other.
Different groups of people call themselves "feminists," and don't agree with each other about changes they'd like to see in the world.
It's kind of odd to me that people (like you apparently) don't understand.
I think they all agree that they'd like other people to change as an acknowledgement of their power.
I also think that they can't both use the same justification to argue for opposite changes. What did I miss?
"they" are different groups that might use the same label. They can absolutely use the same justification, to argue for opposite changes.
Their justification could be as simple as, "We want to be respected," and different groups of feminists disagree with each other about how best to achieve that goal.
Sure, it's even worse if you personally land in the crosshairs, but from your example it sounds like the feminists are working in different places with different languages. And perhaps the problem of gaining respect requires different solutions in different areas.
Newspeak. When I first read 1984 I thought it so farfetched as to be laughable. I'm not laughing any more.
Its perfectly straight forward to write evocative and passionate prose without concreting to a gender. It makes sense that when we build general purpose tools we encourage them to choose the neutral words more readily because it increases their accuracy without any loss of meaning.
Are you really so terrified of a world where "meeting him" is "meeting them"?
> I'm pretty sure there are individuals claiming that NOT suggesting their pronoun deprives them of their identity, dignity or whatever.
Yeah but the end result of everyone wanting to feel special is that in the end, no one will.
One time I wrote a paper in high school where I didn't use any pronouns and always referred to Abraham Lincoln as "Abraham Lincoln", just so I could pad the paper as much as possible with the full length of Abraham Lincoln's name.
"Abraham Lincoln, in Abraham Lincoln's famous Gettysburg Address, suggested that Abraham Lincoln could..."
Please do not refer to madness as "your." "This" wouldThe analog between using computers and non-binary self-identification is a strawman/woman/person/thing. Which straw<something> will be acceptable?
Also the words in question are not used to address a person. When I am speaking to a person, regardless of their gender identity, I use the second person pronouns you, yours, or yourself. These are already gender neutral. The requested gender neutral pronouns (xir/xe/ne/???) are used in the third person and lower the value of communication as there is no asexual physical presentation, people present as men or women based on their fashion and physical characteristics. Going to a restaurant and saying to the attendant that you are here to me "that xir over there" does not help them figure out which table to take you to.
Not to mention that people who feel gender neutral are still male or female (or have experienced a physical developmental disorder, humans are dimorphic after all.)
Guessing something with a 50% probability of being wrong is not a useful feature.
If I'm writing an email about my investor I know who that is and what gender they are. Getting "them" as completion option is almost never what I would wan't in that case.
(Above I even used "they" subconsciously, because It was just an example and I don't actually have an investor to talk about here.)