I hope to god that one day we will all see this nonsense for what it is: absurdly hilarious.
I'm just honestly super exhausted by any of the insanity right now, not even only regarding this topic. It's just complete black-and-white thinking these days, no matter about what it is. Extremes only. The stronger your opinion the better, how else would you feel like you exist? Almost no one with a rational, centered overarching perspective. Twenty years ago 50% of the current population would've been considered as possibly having BPD.
Is it? To me it feels like it's getting worse and worse, but that might be my bubble.
"Candidates must be from one or more of the following equity-seeking groups to apply: women, persons with disabilities, Indigenous peoples, and racialized groups"
Twitter is so idiotically designed that it just makes things worse and worse.
With Twitter, they don't distinguish between positive engagement (retweets, positive replies) and negative engagement (critical quote tweets, critical replies)... their algorithm just stupidly sees the engagement and amplifies the tweet.
There's no wonder that a lot of the most extremist politicians (on the right and left) built their followings on Twitter.
I don't mean to make it political, but the last president of the united states was able to build a massive following almost exclusively through one political platform... (which he later got banned from)
For some reason, YouTube's decided to jump on the same bandwagon by removing dislikes (if there is no feedback from dislikes, then people will stop clicking them).
Some people feel that wokeness is ruining the world. I can't really speak to that position because my political initialization was on the other side of the cultural gulf in America.
The way I have come to understand transgender issues is very much shaped by the political left, but also by a religious upbringing (Catholic, Jesuit). On the left, I am told that this is a human rights issue. I am inclined to believe that transgender people have a hard time in life. I am also inclined to believe that it is not a mental disorder, and I came to these conclusions through conversations with transgender people I have worked with in the past, as well as through what I learned in my psychology classes in high school and college.
I am a white male who was born that way, but I definitely know what it feels like to be ridiculed, to not belong and to feel that there is no right place for me in this world. I have been abused, made to feel small, ostracized and bullied. Those experiences have given me a pretty deep understanding of what suffering is, and how it can be caused. It has also softened me and made me pretty empathetic to others who feel they don't belong in this world.
As an example, I was once at a comedy show where a comedian made a transgender-adjacent joke. The humor of the joke was all in a stupid pun, and I thought it was pretty funny because I like stupid puns. But there was a transgender woman in the audience who got immediately angry. I don't remember exactly what she said, but it was something along the lines of "That's not funny, I'm sick of people like you shouting at me in the street!!". If I had to go though my life having people shouting at me in the streets of NYC because of how I looked vs how other people thought I should look, I may have responded in the same way. I thought the joke was funny, but for her it touched on some deeply painful memories of abuse, dragged them to the surface, and activated a lightning-quick temper. Perhaps if I'd been abused for as long as she, and in the same way, I wouldn't have thought the joke was funny either.
I understand people don't like being corrected, or told that they're wrong or that they're hateful. I don't think that is a productive way to bring about change; and yet, I have found myself picking fights with my parents, and getting generally nasty when they have failed to understand some value I have learned that I did not learn from them. That is obviously a bad thing, because the message they come away with is "what a jerk!" or "those damn lefties!". What I'd rather have people come away with after they hear me speak is something quite different. It was only after raging at my parents enough times that I decided I just wouldn't talk to my parents about politics. There is more right about my parents than there is wrong about them; they are getting older and their bodies will decline until they die. Most likely it will happen to them before it happens to me, at a time when I am able in body and mind, so I intend (even though I sometimes fail) to spend the rest of our time together as peacefully as possible.
I offer this earnestly in good faith. Sometimes the message gets muddied in the delivery, or because I get upset when I perceive (or sometimes, misperceive) that someone is being uncaring for those who are already suffering enough. I think I react that way because of my own history of abuse.
I am also open to hearing the other side of this story. I have attempted not to misrepresent $OTHER_SIDE's view of things. I am only speaking to why I have such strong feelings about this issue. I am sure others have equally strong feelings on another side, and I am open to hearing what that sounds like, provided the viewpoint is offered with respect.
We can be empathetic without placating some really tyrannical trends.
I can understand the concern about powerful organizations imposing a viewpoint surreptitiously via a widely-used piece of software. That is definitely a reasonable fear, and if we allow concentrated power (MSFT here) to behave in that way, then we are in for trouble.
I'd argue that we wouldn't end up with tyranny, but rather feudalism. There are other powerful organizations that can push their own viewpoints, surreptitiously and overtly. It then becomes a game of who has the most resources and control over the flow of information. But while I prefer "feudalism" to "tyranny", I don't disagree that if propaganda was the aim here, it would be a bad thing.
I don't agree that GitHub's aim was to impose a viewpoint. I believe the aim was to avoid putting this tool in the middle of a very politically charged issue. For example, how do we know GitHub didn't make this decision like this: "We don't want 8 genders popping up in a <select>, because that will offend the 50% of the country who only believes there are two". We are seeing some evidence of this (and the other 50%) in this thread.
Finally, maybe they are trying to prevent people from spamming their learning model with politically-charged content. If that were the case, you could argue that they are just trying to prevent their programming tool from becoming a political warzone, with competing sides trying to train their viewpoints into the model. I admit I know very little about ML in general and Copilot in particular, so you'll have to bear with me if that sounds naiive. In any case, social media is an example of a tool that has become a political battleground, even though that wasn't the initial purpose. If preventing Copilot's politicization is GitHub's aim (and I have no evidence that it is), then I'd say that's a reasonable thing to want for product if you don't want it to become unpleasant-to-use before long.
So we have three hypotheses:
1. MSFT believe there are more than two genders, and want to impose that viewpoint
2. MSFT believe there are only two genders, and want to impose that viewpoint
3. MSFT wants to avoid having politically-charged content in their code-generation tool.
How can we point to one of these being more correct than the other?
I don't have any evidence to support any of the three. But 1 and 2 each make three assumptions (MSFT has one viewpoint on issue X; this viewpoint is Y; they want to impose it). Hypothesis 3 makes two assumptions (Gender is politically charged; let's avoid that in our product). That's all I can think of this late at night. I could be missing something.