I'm glad to see a representative actually know things like this. Too many of our representatives are technologically illiterate.
Also, I have to say I considered it hyperbole to be outraged about the Gorilla. It seems pretty obvious that it was just a mistake with the data, not intentional. It is a good warning for things to watch out for, but there wasn't really anything racist about it.
Iirc there are even physical reasons why it is more difficult to identify black faces than white faces. Is that then racist, if an algorithm struggles more with identifying black faces?
Is great technical understanding required before one can evaluate whether a program that labels black people as gorillas is functioning appropriately?
>Iirc there are even physical reasons why it is more difficult to identify black faces than white faces. Is that then racist, if an algorithm struggles more with identifying black faces?
So you're saying that black people are innately similar to gorillas, and an algorithm can't be blamed for failing to distinguish them? -
If you're trotting out that grand old "black people all look the same" thing, then yep, that's racist too. Black people tend to have different points of variation in facial features (jaw, chin, ear, and brow shape instead of eye and lip shape and color for white people). Inability to differentiate one face from another means not tracking the correct identifying features, which means racist algorithmic design.
No, I am not "saying".
My comment was in response to praise of AOCs alleged technical understanding, not of her ability to judge the gorilla algorithm.
And you don't seem to understand what algorithms do. A simple algorithm could count pixels in an image. If most pixels are white, it could say "human", if most pixels are "black", it could say "gorilla". It would be a verify bad classifier, that would only work in a number of cases. For that algorithm, you could say a black person would be more similar to a gorilla. But nobody would "be saying" black people are similar to gorillas, just that the algorithm would be more likely to classify them as such.
Are you saying people would use the "authority" of such an algorithm to claim black people are gorillas?
"If you're trotting out that grand old "black people all look the same" thing"
I didn't - stop imagining so many things. I am not a photographer. I think there were issues with the lighting and contrast. Physical issues. Other commentator claims it is just because film equipment was calibrated that way.
Even then I would dispute the "racist" label. There are many different looking people on the planet. Just because you can not account for all of them, it is not racist.
I am inclined to call your attitude racist, because you assume everybody is surrounded by the same mix of people (like in the US), and maliciously chooses to ignore certain types. That overlooks the reality of people who are not surrounded by an even mix of people of all types.
Unless there is some physics based reason it is orders of magnitude more difficult to do feature detection against black skin, then yes something racist is going on. The tools/cameras that we've designed have historically been metered and measured on their ability to detect white features/skin. This was a holdover from film that translated to digital photography. (Some info from an NPR interview https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2014/04/16/303721251...). The tools that perform this feature detection contain this same biases and reproduce it in the data that they collect. If an algorithm struggles more with identifying black skin, it's because the data that was used to the produce the algorithm contained unexamined racial bias that was never corrected for in a serious way.
It seems to me many US citizens think the whole world is like the US. It isn't. There are many countries where there are not as many "races" living together as in the US.
I think it's an important point. For example, if I were a writer and I would write a novel, I would perhaps only feature white people in it. But not because I have anything against black people, but simply because I don't really know any black people and would therefore be hard pressed to write about them. Doing that wouldn't make me racist - I would simply write a novel from "my" world. It would in fact probably be impossible to write a novel that accounts for all possible human experiences.
Edit: would it even have been possible to calibrate chemical film to work equally well for black and white skin? What if it would have been necessary to have different film rolls for white and black skin, for optimal result. Would those have been racist film rolls? Or what about makeup for different skin tones? Is that racist?
No it doesn't. You just made that up.
Either way, it should be clear to anyone with any semblance of a moral imagination that having a group of people receive worse treatment and outcome on the basis of their race is immoral and should not be happening. Call it racism or call racialized bias, if it results in a disproportionately high murder rate for that group by the police, a disproportionately high poverty rate, a disproportionately high imprisonment rate, then it is a bad thing. It doesn't matter how pedantic you want to be about it.
> It seems to me many US citizens think the whole world is like the US. It isn't. There are many countries where there are not as many "races" living together as in the US.
Not having many different racial groups living together does not mean that a nation has not significantly benefitted from or perpetuated massively destructive, often times genocidal projects on racialized grounds. (See the european scramble for africa, the colonization of India and of south east asia to name the first three that come to mind out of so many examples).
If the unit of analysis you're using for a society is an individual, then it is hard to grasp the way modern racism operates. This is why the term 'systemic racism' is applied and used readily. It is a helpful term for understanding the ways that people of a certain race (usually non-white) receive non-equal treatment by societal structures.
It's fine to strive for preventing it. Google surely learned from the Gorilla mistake and improved their algorithm. But it is too much to blame them of racism for that error, and demand all such errors are prevented. That is simply impossible.
You now think of the simple example of "white vs black", but there are many, many more facets to it. There may be races that are not even discovered yet. You may now have accounted black people in your algorithm. Have you included Tibetan monks, Inuit, native Americans? People with facial deformities? Bad lighting? It is simply impossible to take into account all possibilities, because you can not predict them all. You can only try to improve your algorithm as much as possible. You can't demand perfect algorithms.
People have "gamed" image recognition algorithms, adding some noise to make them yield completely silly results. The algorithms are simply not perfect yet.
"Not having many different racial groups living together does not mean that a nation has not significantly benefitted from or perpetuated massively destructive, often times genocidal projects on racialized grounds"
Ugh, spare me. If you want to go down that route, consider that many people in Africa also benefited from slavery (black tribes selling their enemies as slaves). And my country (Germany) was not even involved in the slave trade, or much of colonization. Yes, if you look down far enough in history, you will find violence and all sorts of ugly things. The PoC you are trying to protect might only be alive because his ancestors killed off their neighboring tribe, women, children and all. I don't think it even makes sense to somehow try to disentangle that. Just treat the people living today in a fair way.
But it doesn't really matter, as I said. Nobody who was around back then is still alive today.
It's also important to remember that when comparing the magnitude of atrocities, both things were still atrocities.
I don't think the brief colonial episode simply explains the wealth of my country (or many others) - especially as in between it had been completely destroyed.
But that's also, again, besides the point. History was complex. All sorts of people made war with each other, murdered and enslaved. Including people in the African continent. That's what humans were and are. Maybe those warmongering people simply earned their exploits, "fair and square" so to speak - we may not like it, but who is going to take it away from them, and on what grounds?
But the theory that wealth is only a result of exploitation is completely wrong. Our wealth in the modern world is mostly the result of technological progress, not of exploitation.
The fact that your nation lost stolen wealth does not absolve it of the crime of theft friend.
> But the theory that wealth is only a result of exploitation is completely wrong. Our wealth in the modern world is mostly the result of technological progress, not of exploitation.
I did not say that, you are straw manning my argument. I am saying that THAT wealth creation, incontrovertibly, was exploitative.
"The fact that your nation lost stolen wealth does not absolve it of the crime of theft friend."
As I said, the winners of the war decided on the punishment. Can anybody ever be absolved of anything, really? And again, the nation is one thing, the people in it are another thing.
At some point you just have to accept what happened.
What if I was the son of a murderer, and you therefore would be of the opinion that I (the son) have no right to be alive. Would you expect me to voluntarily commit suicide, so that you can feel satisfied? That's absurd.
" I am saying that THAT wealth creation, incontrovertibly, was exploitative. "
What wealth creation do you mean - technological progress?
Funny enough, the descendants of the African slaves who were brought to the US are now better off than the descendants of the people who remained in Africa.
You could spin it endlessly. If the US hadn't been colonized, presumably technological progress would not have been huge in America. But more importantly, there would have been no allies to win the war against Germany. Hitler might have won the war. Perhaps there would not even have been a french revolution and no democracy.
What then - does that mean we Germany are entitled to the whole of Europe, because the nazi expansion was only stopped because of ill gotten colonial gains (existence of the US)?
Did the people that were alive then give back their ill-gotten gains to the exploited, or did they retain and pass on their advantaged position to their heirs who leveraged them for further gains?
Mind you, I'm not saying that they would have given their ill-gotten gains back to the exploited. I'm just saying what in fact happened.
Yeah, that's gonna be a yikes from me dawg.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
Your nation quite literally carried out a genocidal project against non-white people so at this point I'm not even sure what you're arguing.
But also, I don't feel guilty for the deeds of my nation, as they happened before my birth. I feel we have a duty to learn from history to prevent bad things from happening. That's it.
If you really want to go down that route - you are aware that the USA was taken away from native Americans, who died by the millions?
> If you really want to go down that route - you are aware that the USA was taken away from native Americans, who died by the millions?
Of course and I believe those people are owed reparations both for their historically poor treatment and for the continuing violence they face (see standing rock)
So the nation "Germany" is paying what the winners of the war decided.
Apart from that, who is "the nation" who is supposed to apologize, and in what way? Are Germans who hid Jews in their attics also to apologize? What about the queer Germans who were imprisoned in the concentration camps, and then returned to a free life in post war Germany? You don't really know anything about the individual Germans, so who are you to dish out universal blame? What about Nazis who emigrated to the US - does that mean the US should also apologize for the genocide of millions of Jews?
Yes sometimes crimes of nations can also be disentangled, and things stolen can be returned. But it is also not a card blanche for arbitrary demands, forever. There was in fact also a history before WWII, it was not just a bunch of people turning evil out of the blue. When do you stop - with Adam and Eve?
I feel a responsibility to all people, and Germans maybe are raised more sensitive to some issues than others. But that's about it. Maybe if I was sitting on a huge pile of nazi gold, I'd think different. But I am not. So maybe address your blame to the people who actually got rich.
"I believe those people are owed reparations"
But how much? Are you planning to leave the US, to give them back their land? Somehow I don't think so? How much would be enough, to acquit you of your guilt?
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
Maybe you would be interested in something like term-limits for Congress?