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Comment by Bostonian | Hacker News Reader

It would make as much sense to say that sites allowing straight men to filter for "cisgender" women automate homophobia and transphobia. People should be allowed to filter mates for any reason without guilt. Not wanting to date people of race X does not mean you think people of race X do not deserve equal rights, which I think is a better definition of racism (or perhaps racialism).

I am Indian-American and not in the dating pool (I'm married). If I were dating, I would not want to waste time on dates with women who don't want to date Indian-American men.

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Americans have been brainwashed to conflate preference for prejudice.

Well... no.

The academy over here does tend to train weaponization of outrage and has actively attempted to replace traditional ideas of morality with oppressor-oppressed dichotomies to varying results. This article is one of those results.

Because it then creates a victim class which can use that "victim" status to for change and gain power for their position. That is the way America works now.

Isn't the article more about algorithmic sorting that you don't have any control over, vs e.g. filters? Or another way of looking at it, the service filtering you rather than you filtering the service.

It doesn't seem like you are talking about the same thing as the author, but I didn't read it that closely so may have missed something.

There is at least something potentially interesting there, if an algorithmic sorting approach is responsive to a social bias, there are obvious mechanisms by which it could end up amplifying that bias, rather than just representing it.

Personally I didn't use an ethnicity filter (was there one?) a long time ago when I was using dating sites. But there are a lot of legitimate non-racist cultural reasons why someone might!

For instance, if one wants a lot of extended family around, being very involved with your family, Indian culture is phenomenal (I'm only adjacent to that via my in-law's spouse, and they treat us as their own too). It's rare to find White Americans -- at least on the West Coast whose families are so close-knit. Of course, some people probably don't want that and would rather visit every few weeks and be at arm's length from their families.

Obviously other examples abound, such as races that may serve as a proxy for religious belief, useful for the devout.

My gut reaction is similar. If you ignore the victim focused narrative of the article, I think there is still a reasonable case to be made that some users could be served better.

Some users may be more or less open minded than the predictive model on dating sites.

It seems like the best practice would be to give users a choice over how much screening the model does.

I think the problems are specifically due to the nature of it being online and automated.

If someone has preferences that’s fine; that doesn’t prevent them from interacting with people outside their preferred races. Maybe they’ll meet someone who surprises them. Maybe they won’t. But at least people get a chance and it happens organically.

But imagine it’s the future, you’re Minority A and the social default is to just block you entirely with no chance whatsoever, and oh 99% of people not in your demographic use online dating primarily. Your pool of potential candidates is unfairly tiny and all because society just decided one part of your personality (your race) is a deal-breaker.

Offline these things just aren’t as big of problems. But it seems like if we’re not careful they could become big problems.

And yet, to deny that there's a difference in social ramifications for saying, "No blacks, fats, or femmes," to someone's face in a bar, versus only swiping right on people who could be mistaken for your twin/parent, is to deny reality. The point is that the technology makes a qualitative difference.

>I am Indian-American

What caste? That is to say, what was your ancestors' equivalent experience of racism? Persecutor or persecuted? This is relevant because you seem to have brought up your identity to lend credence to your argument as a person of color. I think it's fair to fully unpack that.

> What caste? That is to say, what was your ancestors' equivalent experience of racism? Persecutor or persecuted?

This seems strange: to label entire people as either the victims or perpetrators of racism solely based on their caste.

Yes, that is expressly what caste entails.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10764522/

>The Indian caste system is one of the oldest systematized and institutionalized forms of oppression, having been in existence for over 3,000 years (Thapa et al., 2021).

https://www.hrw.org/reports/pdfs/g/general/caste0801.pdf

>In much of Asia and parts of Africa, caste is the basis for the definition and exclusion of distinct population groups by reason of their descent.

Using one's status as a person of color to legitimize carrying water for racism doesn't work if someone is upper caste. They've essentially seen all the benefits of their ancestral form of racism; their arguing for it carries no moral weight. I would say the same of someone from a noble lineage in Europe if they were to make the same statements.

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