Google employees call for removal of rightwing thinktank leader from AI council
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
People laughed at Musk for his AI doom rants, me included, but if this is how it's going so far ... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
https://twitter.com/KayColesJames/status/1108768455141007360
https://twitter.com/KayColesJames/status/1108365238779498497
I'm getting the impression that you believe that having that opinion on that topic should disqualify someone from any important role. Am I correct?
The Klans members have been removed from public office for the most part, and forced to live in the shadows. I think the social movement to become more inclusive requires us to expand beyond just shunning racism, but also expand towards shunning homophobia, transphobia, and islamaphobia.
I think "ThreadOfRain" has a good point above: if one speaker is publicly and openly transphobic, perhaps that would be reason enough to disqualify them (akin to how we disqualify other public speakers for being racists). I don't know much about this particular "Kay Coles James" person however, so I dunno whether or not those tweets have a greater context. But it doesn't look good IMO.
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I'd like to think there are plenty of conservative speakers who aren't Transphobic, who would likely be a better rolemodel to fit on the AI Council.
Wouldn't that also disqualify those who who call for her removal or is that an acceptable type of bigotry?
Unless racism is rooted out and specifically shunned, it will continue to exist. That's the main lesson from the civil rights movement. Today's battleground is Transgender people and Homosexuality.
> Wouldn't that also disqualify those who who call for her removal or is that an acceptable type of bigotry?
Just from a utilitarian perspective: what are we gaining by allowing transphobia to propagate in society? In my eyes, transphobia offers nothing of benefit to our society, so we should shun it and clamp it down.
Just as racism doesn't offer anything good to our society, transphobia doesn't seem to offer any real benefits. So lets get rid of it.
I have no idea who this lady is other than what was posted in the article. I read the tweets posted above and I see it as being a big leap to being transphobic by definition. Her concerns/points are valid and that view is shared by a lot of women. Many take those concerns not because of someone who is transgender, but those would would/might abuse the equality hospitality for their own ill reasons.
https://twitter.com/KayColesJames/status/1108365238779498497
> If [The United Nations] can change the definition of women to include men, they can erase efforts to empower women economically, socially, and politically.
This is already an issue in that the author of the post refuses to call a Trans-woman a Trans-woman... but instead prefers to call them a man. So the Twitter post is already implicitly transphobic.
Note: Transgender people are natural. The village of Salinas in Dominican Republic more or less proves that a genetic basis for transgender exists. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/09/2...
The scientific understanding of gender, transgender, and sex has greatly improved in just the last 30 years. Unfortunately, the old concepts of male and female are now outdated in the face of modern science.
https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/ambiguous-gen...
These are the bodies that the creator have given us. Yes, I'm religious, and I do believe that we must accept the bodies and the facts-of-the-bodies that we were created with. By studying sexuality and gender, new medical understandings have come about. There is more than just Male (XY) and Female (XX), there's a spectrum in between due to medical mysteries (from chromosome mutations, like Klinefelter syndrome XXY chromosomes... to the "guevedoce" (Translation: Penis at 12) born-females who turn into males at the age of 12ish.
There's just a lot of weird medical stuff and mysteries that happen in this world.
Its hard to argue with how God created us. It seems like the best plan moving forward is to accept these ambiguous gendered people and study them... and accept them for how they are.
"Redefining of sex" was stated right before the use of man not gender. As I understood it sex does not equal gender given the new belief. If they are the same to my understanding there has been no link to sex chromosomes mutations and trans. Those mutations are at best 1.2% of the total population and vary in severity. Even that entire 1.2% probably doesn't fully represent the trans community.
I don't think she was making statement at all that transgender doesn't exists in nature. Her tweets read to have more to do with one many women see as a valid concern men transitioning (or just saying they are with no intent to truly do so) to being a women to take advantage of a situation that may cause harm to women identified at birth.
Can you elaborate on how a transwoman can harm ciswomen? Because I'm personally not seeing any way to answer that question specifically without making some kind of trans-phobic assumption.
"Economically and Socially harm" is the one I'm most interested in. I can maybe see an argument for sports, but that's barely an economic or social issue IMO. The tweet says "Economic, Social, and Political" harm, which is quite a powerful statement!
> "Redefining of sex" was stated right before the use of man not gender
Honestly, I haven't kept up with the internet on this whole thing. I'm mostly working off of psychology that I've studied roughly 15 years ago in high school. So forgive me if I'm not fully remembering all medical details of transsexuals.
I too don't really understand the "sex vs gender" words. But I don't really care too much about those details.
> Those mutations are at best 1.2% of the total population and vary in severity. Even that entire 1.2% probably doesn't fully represent the trans community.
USA has 300,000,000 people. Even a 0.1% statistic becomes 300,000 people. If a small class of people are living an uncomfortable life, and all we have to do to make them feel better is call them "she" or "he" (or whatever they prefer... whether or not they have Adam's apples or whatever), I'm more or less willing to give that to them.
Its basically no cost to me, or anybody really. And it improves the lives of hundreds of thousands of people.
Now, it seems to me that you're trying to tell me that treating transpeople with respect has a social cost. What I'm trying to do is get you to tell me what that social cost is exactly, because I'm frankly not seeing it.
Because I consider that an unfair advantage.
Where is the line?
Two studies: https://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/primer/traits/athleticperformance and https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3993978/
The heritability of a trait is generally considered an estimation of the importance of genetic factors to that trait. For example, the heritability of athletic status (regardless of sport) is estimated to be 66% (4). Height, which is critical for success in some sports, is highly heritable, with about 80% of the variation due to genetic factors (5). Body type (having mesomorphic or ectomorphic somatotype) is also highly heritable (6). These somatotypes are classically associated with power or endurance athlete status, respectively (7).
Costa et al. (8) recently reviewed the existing family and twin studies related to specific endurance and muscular strength phenotypes. Aerobic endurance, as reflected by VO2max has a heritability of about 50% (9). Heritability estimates for muscular strength, and power range from 30 to 83%, depending on the specific muscle and type of contraction (8).
As a personal opinion, the reason why sport is split on gender is because of the spectators. You get more women to watch sport if you have a women sport team. You do not get more short people to watch sport by splitting the teams based on height. Thus we split on gender. It has nothing to do with fairness and everything to do with money.
https://twitter.com/KayColesJames/status/1108365238779498497
> If they can change the definition of women to include men, they can erase efforts to empower women economically, socially, and politically.
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> Where is the line?
If the above tweet were closer to the line, maybe we could split hairs on the issue. But it seems like clear cut transphobia to me.
With regards to disqualifying criteria, you might find this interesting:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/20/magazine/trump-government...
How much do you know about the Heritage Foundation? Do you like their output?
The basic point seems to be that independent of her opinions (e.g. "The Equality Act is overreach because...") -- the content of what she disseminates (as exemplified in the tweets above) is plainly hysterical and disconnected from reality.
It's funny because she's a black woman.
You don't think that's a little hypocritical given that they have likely been involved in far more surveillance than Google ever has.
I don't wake up every day to spy on people. If you do, you're a bad person in my book.
If your client is Cisco -- then you work for Cisco (at least in part). It's as simple as that.
Which is not to say Google has clean hands, just that you should consider Ccisco’s involvement as well.
A backdoor by mistake is incompetent, not evil.
Building censored search products and collecting the amount of consumer data that google does without clearly informing consumers is evil, and it's clearly intentional.
Cisco may not be perfect, but I've yet to see evidence that it's blatantly evil
I'm quite sure this article is going to be unbiased...
If you're going to make claims like this then you need to provide evidence.
Because all I can see from the article is mostly a regurgitation of what was in the letter.
-FTFY