"Eventually, this error was fixed. But how many other such errors are hidden in Google? We have no idea."
Huh. This is like somebody demanding their mirror be altered when they don't like what they see in it.
Relevant both to AI and culture war., fairness, and ethics. The author's choice of examples is interesting, another well-known example of surprising results is the images that pop up if you search for "American scientist". Just like the author's examples are taken as evidence of right wing (using the term loosely) bias, that example was taken as the opposite.
It is easy to see where this is coming from - mentions of an "american scientist" is commonly a mention of an "african-american scientist". For cultural and historical reasons, ethnicity of scientists is important, nationality not so much.
For that matter, google just "scientist" and see if you think the image results are anything remotely representative for scientists. I had to scroll down to find an image of Einstein, and it is of course the one where he sticks his tongue out.
But it is a dilemma. Also accurate and technically unbiased algorithms may - and often will - give results that are suprising, deemed undesirable, and thus interpreted and condemned as bias. And our unwilingness to accept reality is perhaps the first hurdle we need to overcome.
About not being an a*hole. RIP McCain, and well written.
https://quillette.com/2018/08/31/i-sold-my-soul-on-twitter-now-im-trying-to-win-it-back/
My curiousity was piqued by the reference to somebody being chastised, allegedly for tweeting:
“I don’t agree with [Ben Shapiro] on much, but he’s a genuine person who once helped me for no other reason than to be nice.”
Curious, I followed the link to Vox. Interestingly, the quote isn't complete, it went on:
"He doesn’t bend the truth. His intentions are good"
You can see why that is somewhat more provocative? Then Vox follows this with a list of links to Shapiro's works, presumably to demonstrate the curvature of veracity.
One allegation is that he called Obama a "philosophical fascist". That seemed curious, so I looked. What the linked article acutally says is this: "Obama's Philosophically Fascist State of the Union Address"
So his speech is (according to Shapiro) "philosophically fascist", but Obama the person is not, and Shapiro even states in so many words that of course, he's not calling Obama a nazi.
In any case, this is not Shapiro's proudest moment, and perhaps Vox is right in pointing it out. But what is notable, is that everybody slightly misrepresents the person they're criticising.
One thing that I think he is missing: AI is trying to solve problems which we otherwise cannot solve. The old nuts and bolts methods simply don't scale. If we don't get AI, we will continue to have traffic accidents, release dangerous criminals on the public, or treat patients with the wrong medicines. Without AI, people are going to die.
But of course, we do need to be very careful, and prepared for failures.
https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity18/presentation/mickens
Great keynote about AI, ML, IoT, society and security. Thought provoking and hilariously entertaining.
All right. New here, so bear with me if I breech some kind of protocol or etiquette.
So adding some sciencytechy stuff which is also moderately politically uncorrect: I hear much complaining about gender bias in medicine, and in particular in how medical research overwhelmingly is directed at men and typically male diseases.
Then I find this claiming the exact opposite:
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/08/government-medical-research-spending-favors-women.html
And even this, from 1994:
https://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/96jun/cancer/kadar.htm
Assuming these are correct (and they look thorough and easily verified to me), why does everybody have the wrong impression? Is it just because there are strong communities which push the opposite view for ideological reasons? And are people reluctant to contradict them out of fear of shaming, or perhaps out of a sense of chivalry?
Joined Aug 2018
