site banner
PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   26426 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 18, 2024

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

7
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Another scary AI is Becoming Racist article from the media.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/mar/16/ai-racism-chatgpt-gemini-bias

The title is pretty comical. As AI tools get smarter, they’re growing more covertly racist, experts find

Hummm...seems problematic.

It goes on about how ebonics is judged harshly by the AI models. Without doing comparisons to other low status language markers such as WV dialects. The title implies that the smarter and more predictive the model becomes the more secretly racist it becomes.

There is also this gem-

"In response, groups like OpenAI developed guardrails, a set of ethical guidelines that regulate the content that language models like ChatGPT can communicate to users. As language models become larger, they also tend to become less overtly racist.

But Hoffman and his colleagues found that, as language models grow, covert racism increases. Ethical guardrails, they learned, simply teach language models to be more discreet about their racial biases.

“It doesn’t eliminate the underlying problem; the guardrails seem to emulate what educated people in the United States do,” said Avijit Ghosh, an AI ethics researcher at Hugging Face, whose work focuses on the intersection of public policy and technology.

“Once people cross a certain educational threshold, they won’t call you a slur to your face, but the racism is still there. It’s a similar thing in language models: garbage in, garbage out. These models don’t unlearn problematic things, they just get better at hiding it.”

It ends on this note from Avijit Ghosh https://evijit.io/assets/pdf/Avijit_CV.pdf

“Racist people exist all over the country; we don’t need to put them in jail, but we try to not allow them to be in charge of hiring and recruiting. Technology should be regulated in a similar way.”

He almost says the quiet part out loud. This is coming from someone that earned their phd LAST YEAR and moved to the USA in 2019. He is a quick learner, getting on that Gender Identity and Racial Equity grift right out of the gate! Much easier than working for a living.

His peer reviewed conference publications.

Perceptions in pixels: analyzing perceived gender and skin tone in real-world image search results WWW ’24

Bound by the Bounty: Collaboratively Shaping Evaluation Processes for Queer AI Harms AIES ’23

When Fair Classification Meets Noisy Protected Attributes AIES ’23

Queer In AI: A Case Study in Community-Led Participatory AI FAccT ’23

Subverting Fair Image Search with Generative Adversarial Perturbations FAccT ’22

FairCanary: Rapid Continuous Explainable Fairness AIES ’22

Algorithms that “Don’t See Color”: Comparing Biases in Lookalike and Special Ad Audiences AIES ’22

When Fair Ranking Meets Uncertain Inference SIGIR ’21

Building and Auditing Fair Algorithms: A Case Study in Candidate Screening FAccT ’21

Public Sphere 2.0: Targeted Commenting in Online News Media ECIR ’19

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats