Hacker News Reader

Comment by raverbashing | Hacker News Reader

Most of the "algorithmic transparency" people are activist members of big NGOs

The truth doesn't matter, what matters is getting more government money, and more regulation to get more financing, etc

NGOs are big business, and be assured, they don't care about fairness one bit more than Meta

One big company says things should be secret, another says that things should be transparent, and your conclusion is that both are equivalent and therefore any attempt for transparency is meaningless. I don't buy that logic. A party being biased doesn't mean that its stance on every issue is automatically wrong; at the very least, it's possible as an individual to have a mutual interest with a company.

"Algorithmic transparency" sounds good on paper but it is bound to be as disappointing as people were when shuffling songs was truly random

And you can always claim it's biased towards one side. So, which one is which then?

I don't think I have the same understanding of what the word "transparency" means. To me, transparency means "show me what you're doing", not "change what you're doing based on what I tell you". If Meta is truly not doing anything with their algorithm to intentionally favor one side, I don't understand why you're claiming that this would lead to them needing to change the bias.

I'm completely confused about your analogy to song shuffling. I disagree with your characterization that permuting a list randomly isn't "truly random" in the way that selecting an item from a list randomly is, but even ignoring that, I'm completely unable to figure out what you think the equivalent of that is for an LLM.

You phrase this as a "gotcha" but I don't think you understand that NGOs and nonprofits are the exact kind of entity that would naturally be involved here.

Algorithmic transparency is a deeply unprofitable and difficult task, with people from all sides screeching at you thinking you're biased against them. Governments obviously shouldn't be involved (unless you're a fan of state-controlled media), and so the only people that will take this on are people that care enough about the impact of social media on society to give up careers in the private sector.

If you care so much, you can always join one of these NGOs! You won't. I guarantee you they are not as biased as you think they are, and they certainly don't hold a "shadow ban this guy" hammer.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com