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Surprising to see such a long article that doesn't touch on the modern issues surrounding gender. You're much better off just letting the user tell you which g
by brian-armstrong 10y ago
Surprising to see such a long article that doesn't touch on the modern issues surrounding gender.
You're much better off just letting the user tell you which gender they prefer to be identified by. This is such a personal issue, and so key to one's identity, that having the computer guess is just a bad idea.
edit: As icebraining pointed out, the article does address this point.
- pythia__ 10y ago>having the computer guess is just a bad idea Not necessarily. If you approach this strictly from a business perspective as a commercial software developer, statistical guesses (not just about gender) that, for example, delight 70% of your users at the price of upsetting 3% can be worth it.
- emmab 10y agoDo people really care if you use "they" instead of (s)he? I suspect most don't even notice.
- thescribe 10y agoIf you have the ability to use he or she, like with this algorithm it's a nice touch.
- icebraining 10y agoOr a constant annoyance. http://www.robot-hugs.com/cognitive-load/ http://www.robot-hugs.com/cognitive-load/
- brian-armstrong 10y agoAlthough I think your post is also wrong on an ethical level, which would supercede any business arguments, I'll engage the one you've presented anyway. Upsetting users by misgendering them won't just upset those users, it also has the potential to upset their friends and family. You're not just upsetting them, you're upsetting their network. That 3% starts to look a lot bigger. And if we consider market trends, facebook actually expanded their gender identifying process, rather than simplifying it. Facebook has probably more data than any other entity for the purposes of guessing, and yet they chose to allow users to self-identify anyway. That would suggest it's not a business-correct decision.
- edko 10y agoThere doesn't necessarily have to be any offence, and this doesn't necessarily have to be about pronouns. Suppose A/B testing on your site shows that female users are more likely to buy your product with a given display alternative over another, while males prefer the opposite. If you guess wrong, you would not be offending users by showing their least likely preferred alternative; you would just be reducing your chances of making a sale.
- pythia__ 10y ago>I think your post is also wrong on an ethical level Do you actually mean the argument in the post or the post itself for presenting it? >You're not just upsetting them, you're upsetting their network. Right, this would be a valid concern to an amoral profit maximizer. It would have to be balanced against the potential profits from bad publicity and, more deviously, the benefits of a good "redemption story" of changing the functionality at the upset users' request. As for Facebook, it is an activist business with the power to shape social trends, so it is hard draw conclusions from its particular case.
- thescribe 10y agoI'm curious if Facebook cares about the long list gender box for advertising and demographic purposes. I cynically expect them to not trust what you fill in there.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- PhasmaFelis 10y agoWell, assuming that the amount of "delight" on success is comparable to the amount of annoyance on failure. I suspect that most users won't notice or care if the system guesses their gender correctly instead of using gender-neutral terms; but when you misgender a user, they will definitely notice, and they may be extremely annoyed, they may think it's funny and then tell all their friends about how stupid your service is, etc. It doesn't seem like a wise trade-off. Relatedly, deliberately choosing to piss off a subset of users at no major benefit to yourself because you've decided there's not enough of them to affect your bottom line is kind of a dick move, even if it doesn't actually impact your financials directly. That's not a good habit to get into.
- bigkm 10y agoOh but when I have trouble calling your company because they changed the gender of my record that's ok then. Edit: I get passed around between call center people because they think I'm fraudulent because of software guessing this bullshit
- diN0bot 10y agoI completely agree. Pronouns, just like names, are simply references. It's how you refer to someone. You wouldn't assume you could look at someone and guess their name. Why assume you can guess their pronoun (from their appearance or name)? NOTE: name+pronoun references != identity. Gender identity is a spectrum, and can't map 1-to-1 to low-bit pronouns.
- thescribe 10y agoPronouns that are just like names are worthless, since they are a placeholder for a name. Also, if I could look at 99.7% of someones and guess their name I'd call it an amazing heuristic.
- jolux 10y agoThey're not just placeholders though, because as you've pointed out tautologically (and perhaps by accident) that would be worthless. They're also an abbreviation, a label, etc. If you're saying the value in pronouns is that you can guess someone's pronoun by looking at them, you're misguided. Alternatively, you can just use they/them/theirs all the time, and you'll always be right.
- toast0 10y agoDirect input is helpful, but if you're integrating with a user's existing data, they may not have noted it (I don't have a gender field in my phone's contacts, and I probably wouldn't fill it out anyway), but a good guess on gender may help sentences feel more natural. Eg: Brian sent you a message, call him back? You could put 'them' or 'Brian' again, or maybe just 'call back', but I have high confidence that you prefer male pronouns.
- brian-armstrong 10y agoBut what do you think you're getting in return for the risk of being wrong? What's the reward?
- toast0 10y agoMore natural sentence structure. Writing to avoid gendered pronouns can be awkward.
- umanwizard 10y ago"they/them" works wherever "he/him" does, and is gender-neutral.
- brian-armstrong 10y agoNot really. Just use they/them. It's perfectly ok in modern English
- edko 10y agoI agree. However, some people change their given name to match the gender they identify with. In such cases, if the data about their gender preference were missing, this paper can also be useful.
- tvladeck 10y agoI'm very good friends with one of the authors (Cameron Blevins) and some context here is helpful: He is an expert at applying computational tools to historical records. For example, his thesis at Stanford is about using information about the expansion of the postal network to map the westward expansion in the US. For him, the interest here is mapping names to gender conditional on a specific era, not about doing so today when you have the option of asking the person.
- icebraining 10y agoHas it been updated? I see a paragraph that does just that: http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/9/3/000223/000223.html#p7 http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/9/3/000223/000223.h...
- brian-armstrong 10y agoLooks like I accidentally an entire paragraph. Yikes. Well, I feel pretty stupid now.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]