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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   35549 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 19, 2022

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Anybody smart enough to build bleeding-edge AI systems is smart enough to understand why if you try to predict the likelihood of a criminal repeating a crime, it will always say that black people are more likely to repeat (it's because black people are more likely to repeat).

An alternative explanation is that doublethink required to simultaneously believe in the party line and in the reality required to do your job doesn't actually work very well and tends to devolve into believing in the party line only. Imagine that you're a bright young guy working on a Google's image classifier. To generate the thought that the classifier might confuse black people for apes so you must specifically check that it doesn't, you must believe that black people tend to have certain ape-like facial features. That's a very dangerous thing to believe, your woke peers would be very unamused if you just blurt it out or inexpertly wink-wink nudge-nudge your way to suggesting that you need to check for that etc. If you have a lot of wrongfact beliefs you have to watch your every word to avoid committing a social suicide. Accidentally releasing a classifier that does in fact mistake black people for apes on the other hand is relatively safe: it's not your personal fault and who could have thought and it's probably bias in the training data anyway. So in a highly ideologized environment people just naturally fail at their jobs instead of trying to maintain a bag of forbidden beliefs.

This example doesn't work - black people are dark, apes have dark fur, image classifiers often pick up on easy-to-detect features like color.

More generally I'd question how important the party line/reality conflict is - many genuine smart people believe in wokeness and will probably continue to indefinitely. E.g. OpenAI is clearly woke yet manages to put out a great product.

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