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Comment by mdp2021 | Hacker News Reader

mdp2021

Now for a small elephant which entered the room: the article recites that it would be

> worth mentioning that the white-box / black-box terminology is in itself part of a long history of racially coded terms in science; researchers have pushed to change "blacklist" to "blocklist," for example

Very plainly, the idea of "black-box" comes from the clear, basic and original, notion and experience that

"in the dark, you cannot see".

So, back to the point: we need transparency in AI, because we need insight as much as we can gather, because there appears to be a drought, an arificial scarcity, of good sense, of [un]common sense. We need every boost of good, [un]common sense very direly.

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I guess it's the hill I'll die on, but these "white vs black" and "master slave" are inherently racist just make my head turn every time.

blacklist came from BEFORE slavery in America.

> According to the Henry Holt Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins the word "blacklist" originated with a list England's King Charles II made of fifty-eight judges and court officers who sentenced his father, Charles I, to death in 1649. When Charles II was restored to the throne in 1660, thirteen of these regicides were executed and twenty-five sentenced to life imprisonment, while others escaped.

Thinking that blackbox is racist is approaching insane level of mind-bending "everything is about race".

I think the concern is not that the word _is_ racist in origin, but that people whose lives have been irrevocably altered by racism and slavery may _perceive_ them as such.

An idea doesn't have to be true to cause someone suffering.

While of course one will do every reasonable attempt not to offend another part gratuitously, and also noting that the problem of misperception should call for a correction in the perception itself (and more contextually, if "«alter[ation]»" has been caused there should be investments in treatments), if you allowed events to affect innocent structures you would arrive at absurdities such as "avoid that formerly common gesture because it is now the signature of controversial group G". Which would also be a form of foolish treason, empowering that contemptible part - they have now modified your culture - that should have instead been relegated in its narrow place.

I largely agree with you, and would refer those with the concern I described to an idea I met in Brené Brown's writing:

"To make the world safe for feet, one might try to cover it entirely in leather, which is an insurmountable task. However, if you put the leather on your own feet..."

My goal wasn't to argue the concern was objectively correct, just to point out that it was different from what was being critiqued.

A society cannot exist if any perceived slight and irrational thoughts are cause for change. Otherwise where is the line drawn? Do black coffee, black sabbath, yin and yang need to change as well? Maybe we can replace the word "black" with "dark", that way we truly have a departure from words that can be _perceived_ as offensive.

The law in Texas that it’s illegal to teach classes was instituted specifically to punish the Germans. Now it’s wielded against native Spanish speakers in a predominantly Spanish speaking large region. Like bigger than Vermont region. Bigotry is kind of a taking turns thing almost it seems. Like the Irish…

The real issues around data bias get completely crippled by the article writers' need to make everything about culture wars. Many computer vision systems have literally nothing to do with humans, e.g. one of the most common use cases in CV at this point is defect detection in manufacturing.

The data bias issue is about having way more samples of class X than of class Y, or class Y sharing an unknown but correlated feature (medical images with labels have this problem) that the developer doesn't identify, or any other number of "biases", like all the images being too bright, or taken with a camera that isn't identical to the one that's going to get deployed in production, etc., etc.

There are real issues that can be fixed / engineered / understood in terms of producing reliable output, and xAI absolutely helps with that! But for whatever reason journalists don't seem to understand that these systems need normal engineering safeguards, like any automated system, and bring it back to one poorly engineered model to talk about Big Bad Racist AI always denying loans based on race.

W/r/t to the term "black-box" being racially coded, I regard that as cheap virtue signalling and a little insulting to the people it's meant to "protect". It's not a hill I'm going to die on, but I don't view that behavior as part of an actual solution towards an equitable society. I've noticed that in my line of work, "black-box" often gets used to describe a process that isn't understood thoroughly by the end-users or stakeholders. I once heard a VP complain that an ARIMA model was a black-box. Had a good chuckle at that.

Black box was actually a literal non-reflective black box inside an airplane that housed secret tech.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_recorder#:~:text=The%20....

> actually

Of course it was, but the expression stands because of the opacity implied by 'black'. The [original] box contains secrets - it may even be rigged -, or anyway very complex technology, state of the art, just developed or evolved, especially difficult to understand - you do not know how it works. It is black, and that "black" is significant in many ways.

(And of course, a "flight recorder" is not the same thing: it is a specific function - not of the most esoteric - of the original pack of potential embedded technologies, which inherited the name. The radar, for example, becomes "mainstream", while the recorder remains "boxed" because you want it protected for "emergential witnessing".)

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