horrified

If an entity needs to cooperate to survive, it is selfish to cooperate. I feel like the author, like many other critics of economic theory, have not fully understood economics.

Also, the selfish gene metaphor was misleading in the sense that it is of course nonsense to ascribe any kind of motivation to genes. I think it was useful to break a common misconception, that evolution would work for the benefit of the individual.

I think you would find a LOT of conspiracies in the history of communism.

But there actually ARE conspiracies. Practically every political group is scheming how to gain power and get their demands implemented.

"say you're training a model to detect criminality based on facial structure. This has come up as a real world example, papers have been published on this topic. What does a "good" dataset look like?"

I don't think anybody who is respected says "here is this data set of criminals, we have trained the algorithm on it, and therefore it is proven that such and such facial features predict criminality". I mean yeah this mistake has been made over and over again (even before the invention of computers), but it has long been debunked.

Also presumably "black skin" is a good predictor for criminality - in the current day, the crime rate is higher for black people. The algorithm only detects that, it doesn't interpret it. It is up to the humans who use the algorithm to interpret it. If you interpret it as "black people have a genetic disposition to criminality", you are wrong. But it wouldn't be the fault of the algorithm. What is insanity, but basically what the "AI ethics" people demand, is to tweak the algorithms to make them pretend the prevalence of criminality is not higher in certain populations.

"But when such "bugs" aren't prioritized because people don't think they are bugs, you have to debate whether or not they are bugs at all!"

Nobody says they are not bugs. You are creating an imaginary problem here. You really think, say, researchers at Amazon said "let's make it so that women are ranked down by the algorithm"? Likewise I don't think anybody says "the algorithm should rank black people worse for crime".

It is also not a novel idea to look out for bias int he algorithms, delivered to us by the woke crowd. The whole field is about treating bias - a machine learning algorithm is all about training some bias.

Thanks for the further background information. I have to say it doesn't really make it better for me. The "angry people" are of course correct that you can also create bias in other ways than data sets. But are they implying that people generally deliberately introduce such biases to uphold discrimination? That seems like a very serious and offensive claim to make, and not very helpful either.

The whole way to think about issues is backwards in my opinion. I would think usually when you train some algorithm, you tune and experiment until it roughly does what it wants you to do. I don't think anybody starts out by saying "let's use the L2 loss function so that everybody starts white". They'll start with some loss function, and if the results are not as good as they hope, they'll try another one. In fact the usual approach will lead back to issues with the data set, because that is what people will test and tweak their algorithms with. If the dataset doesn't contain "problematic" cases, they won't be detected.

But overall, such misclassifications are simply "bugs" that should get a ticket and be fixed, not trigger huge debates. I think it is toxic to try to frame everything as an issue of race.

Well LeCunn quit Twitter, so it is "one down". That is what I meant by successful. And Gebru's "arguments" weren't even arguments, just "whatever you say is wrong because you are white and don't recognise our special grievances".

I personally agree with what he said when he said it is a difference between a research project and a commercial product. No actual harm was done when the AI completed Obama's image into a white person. You could just laugh about it and move on.

Horrible story :-( And once again the grievance strategy was successful.

Doesn't make sense as a dark pattern, people will just reverse the sale and cause increased workload for Tesla. Why make such a bad faith assumption?

Surely they were able to sort it out with Tesla (some other comment here mentions Tesla refunded it without a fuss), so why is it even news?

I'm actually also not a fan of Google anymore, but I can at least relate to the "don't be evil" issue. It simply wasn't well enough defined, as different people consider different things "evil".

(I'm the OP) It's not about Trump it is about the stated intent to amplify certain news outlets (they link to the New York Times as a "factual voice that needs to be amplified") and tone done or censor ("deplatform") others. I don't want my Browser to do that.

Since they positioned themselves against free speech and advocate certain ideologies, they have lost me forever. Good riddance.

I never worried about the performance of Firefox. It was good enough, and I miss some features like tags for bookmarks. But a betrayal of their original mission is unforgivable. Yes, other browsers belong to evil corporations, but at least they never claimed to be good to begin with.

From Wikipedia: "The slave patrols' function was to police enslaved persons"

How can their function have been to "police" slaves, when policing hat not yet been invented and only evolved from those slave patrols? And how did governments keep order before slavery made the invention of "police" possible?

In any case, what does it matter what it evolved from?

"Systemic racism" is also wishy-washy.

Your only reply is an ad hominem and misrepresentation of what I said. It is not about being scared of black people.

It wasn't the subject, but if anything, it seems black people are scared of white people. Isn't that what BLM is all about? It is literally about Black people being scared of being shot by white policemen.

If abductions are not an issue, couldn't lost kids simply ask strangers for directions?

Unless you talk about the wilderness.

Actually when I let my kids go outside alone, I usually give them a phone. I live in a big city. Reception could be a problem in the countryside.

When you are about to get mugged or murdered, it doesn't matter what caused it. You just don't want to be murdered. I can feel pity with people whose life circumstances turned them into criminals, but I have no immediate way to help them and I still don't want them to murder me.

Black people are also a part of society, they are not just passive participants, by the way.

I have read a bit about the situation in the UK, and it seems a major problem is gang culture. The "stop and search" strategy is actually a measure against gang activity, not simply a racist pastime. Whether it is the best approach can be discussed, but people should come up with better strategies to prevent gang crimes and people growing up to be drafted into gangs, not simply cry "racism".

Maybe "white people" somehow caused gang culture to appear (maybe!), but now that it exists, it is not so simple to get rid off, and imo also too simplistic to say "white people are to blame, so they should fix it". There are a zillion problems in the world. Even white people were not put on earth with silver spoons in their mouths. If you see a problem you care about, work on improving it. Blaming white people does nothing (except harm).

I think there are more black people in the US than people live in Switzerland, for example. If everything else is so racist, they could work together and build their own black subcountry with better services. Like they could offer health care to their black peers. No need to wait for white people to provide it.

But what scenario do you want to prevent? I think in case of abduction, the backpack would likely be left behind.

But how does that fit in the context of a person committing suicide, in response to someone mentioning harassment from BLM? Sure you can discuss why people get angry, but in this context it sounds like victim blaming to me.