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An API for censorship, that really is something. One of our great facets as humans is the ability to sort through information and come to opinions based on it.
by kristianc 9y ago
An API for censorship, that really is something.
One of our great facets as humans is the ability to sort through information and come to opinions based on it.
We come pre-equipped with our own API for critical reasoning, honed by thousands of years of evolution, and with a training set of everything we've ever done and seen.
Why would I want to use a copy of that, that at best will only replicate human biases?
And that risks sidelining perfectly valid viewpoints? Does something have to be expressed in college-educated grammar to even be read with this in place? What are the consequences of that?
My first instinct, and I hope yours, was to push back the slider.
EDIT: I pasted the first paragraph of the Google diversity memo into it, and it got a "10% likely to be perceived as toxic" score. Make of that what you will.
- exabrial 9y agoI was thinking about doing the same thing actually with the memo. The whole thing is such a shame, the timing with this api is no doubt strange
- dvfjsdhgfv 9y agoThat's definitely a management problem. Someone thought since the product is ready we should announce it. They're not stupid and understand very well what the current climate is, but decided to announce this peculiar tool anyway. Well, they'll definitely get quite some feedback in the next days.
- kristianc 9y agoThe API for not releasing products into a media shitstorm is clearly still under development...
- ocdtrekkie 9y agoAs a friendly warning, I suspect one word in your comment might be perceived as toxic.
- chocolateboy 9y ago> They're not stupid and understand very well what the current climate is, but decided to announce this peculiar tool anyway. It's not new: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13713443 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13713443
- dvfjsdhgfv 9y agoThanks for pointing this out, the timing seemed really strange.
- frankosaurus 9y ago> We come pre-equipped with our own API for critical reasoning, honed by thousands of years of evolution, and with a training set of everything we've ever done and seen. > Why would I want to use a copy of that, that at best will only replicate human biases? Scale. Who has time to read thousands of trollish youtube comments to find the handful of insightful gems?
- kristianc 9y agoLuckily this is a problem that the market has solved for you, as YouTube has an upvoting mechanism. A similar upvoting mechanism is the reason why're you're reading this story as opposed to others.
- DanBC 9y ago> We come pre-equipped with our own API for critical reasoning, We clearly unambiguously don't. People suck at many critical reasoning tasks. Look how poor people are at assessing risk for the most obvious example.
- maehwasu 9y agoYes, that's why it's a good thing I have Google to make sure I'm doing my struggle session correctly!