Hacker News Reader

Comment by simonw | Hacker News Reader

WEIRD here stands for "Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, Democratic".

I’ve seen a massive uptick in the use of ‘weird’ as an insult (charitably because all the old insults get you shadowbanned on social media, less charitably because conformism is what the mainstream values more than anything), so the author isn’t even pretending to hide their agenda here.

Could you explain the agenda to those of us like me, who missed it anyway?

It’s pretty simple. ‘West => weird = bad.’

Not everyone in the west is educated

I heard a congressman in a town hall meeting last night call a colleague "crazy liberal" - a psychotherapist called in and said don't use that word "crazy" - language is being perverted here

That is crazy.

unprofessional and divisive, for sure

We've been here before. The ‘Goldwater Rule’ says that “it is unethical for a psychiatrist to offer a professional opinion unless he or she has conducted an examination and has been granted proper authorization for such a statement.”

Maybe I should have elaborated further. Her point was that the term "crazy" is in itself destructive and counterproductive. Although I use the term all the time, gotta fess up to that. So now I am naval gazing too.

The etymology was begging to be looked at, so I did. My understanding from undergrad was that it came from Greek "akrasia" as I recall but it's worth looking at:

https://www.etymonline.com/word/crazy

The use of language by leaders in the US lately sometimes seems reckless and inflammatory, even shocking and provocative, and I'll stop there before getting flagged for who knows what.

The idea that “mainstream” values “conformism” seems like a relic of the 1980s. Have you looked around at public figures in the news? There’s less Debbie Boone and more Dennis Rodman going on. The freaks are flying their flags out there for everyone to see.

There are no ‘freaks’ flying flags. There are highly polarised groups signalling their in-group identity, each backed by their own billionaires.

WEIRD is not pejorative in TFA. There's no problem being WEIRD. I am WEIRD. What's alleged in TFA is that AI, as it's currently deployed, is implicitly chauvinistic towards perspectives other than WEIRD. This sort of thing has historically been a problem with AI/ML and automation in general. The classic example is cameras deploying autofocus features that fail on non-white faces (which has happened several times).

Poorly considered automation can create frictionless experiences for some and Kafkaesque experiences for the rest, where systems refuse to accept your atypical name, your atypical style of speaking is flagged as an indicator of fraud, etc. Automating processes involving people necessarily makes assumptions about those people, and such assumptions are often brittle.

For example, it's easy to imagine a resume filtering AI being implicitly prejudiced against people from Fictionalstan, because it was only trained on a few resumes from Fictionalstan and most of those happened to be classified as "unqualified". This is a danger anytime you have a small number of samples from any particular group, because it's easy for small sample sizes to be overwhelmed by bad luck.

In general I think these types of issues are best viewed as software bugs. It's a clearer and more actionable perspective than as ideological issues. If the software isn't serving some of our end users properly, let's just fix it and move on.

> The classic example is cameras deploying autofocus features that fail on non-white faces (which has happened several times).

I'm a Caucasian living in Asia and the facial recognition systems that they recently required all banking apps to use struggles massively with my face.

I fully agree with you here that this isn't systemic racism, it's just a bug. It only becomes racism if they don't put any effort into fixing it.

When a member of a group says that a term used to refer to them is pejorative, is it now an acceptable response to simply say ‘no it isn’t’? That hasn’t been the case for decades.

Keep in mind that I am also WEIRD. Please help me to understand by referring to the specific part of the article where WEIRD was used in the pejorative.

Are you saying that self-hating westerners aren’t real? It’s an entire industry at this point.

No, I never said that. To be perfectly clear: if you want to argue that a text says X, you need to provide evidence from the text. Everything I see you commenting in this thread appears to be based your preconceptions around this acronym, nothing you've said even indicates you've read the article.

Read it or don't, it's your business, but if I ask you for evidence from the article and your response is to try to put words on my mouth (on an irrelevant tangent, at that), I'm going to write off your argument entirely.

You know, are you seeing it as pejorative or just want to silence the whole idea? Because people who came up with WEIRD acronym were ... WEIRD. They were literally talking about themselves and about weakness of studies that were made.

WEIRD isn’t insulting to be because it’s simply descriptive of you take the terms themselves.

However. No one gave them the right to speak for everyone, and in regular parlance “weird” isn’t a super nice thing to say about someone. They could’ve chosen something else like WESTED “Western, Educated, Stable, Technologically-advanced, Economically Developed” but didn’t. And they don’t get to choose how people will react when they’re called weird.

The claim at issue isn't, "I find the term WEIRD insulting." As you say, everyone is entitled to feel that way. It's "the term WEIRD is intended by the authors of TFA as an insult and reveals their agenda as being 'anti-west' [1]". I can understand how someone would find it insulting, but in the article we are discussing, it is descriptive and not pejorative.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45298741

Another acceptable response is "take a break, go touch grass".

There is too much victim mentality going on nowadays, and we continue rewarding that behavior so I am not surprised.

I think they chose the WEIRD acronym to challenge the western centrism. For most of the readers of the book, the culture described by the WEIRD acronym is not only the normal culture, but is in many ways considered universal.

By calling it WEIRD, the author is trying to drive home the point that the vast majority of people in the world are NOT in that culture that many westerners feel is 'normal', which would make it 'weird' in the sense that it isn't actually the norm.

Now, I have a lot of problems with the book and his arguments, but I don't think there is anything sneaky or nefarious about the word choice, it is very up front and straightforward as to the reasoning behind it.

> challenge the western centrism

The authors had a perfect opportunity to use Chinese models to see if their trend held up. Instead, they treated ChatGPT as the “default”. Sound familiar?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com