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"...such a statistical association is, well, meaningless..." Good point, but it's even worse than meaningless. It's stereotype-reinforcing. That particular inf

"...such a statistical association is, well, meaningless..." Good point, but it's even worse than meaningless. It's stereotype-reinforcing. That particular inference, that the role in society is such-and-such, so presume that the subject is male, is to be fought at every turn. I would much prefer the awkwardness of "he/she" when the machine is uncertain rather than some "this is just the way things are" presumption.

JoeAltmaier 9y ago
But be honest, language has this odd 'gender' thing going on. Orthogonal to any interests about equality of the sexes. Not saying its right or helpful, but its there and a responsible translation algorithm has to take it into account.
- braindongle 9y ago
  Agreed. I edited my comment to add what I think would be a reasonable way to handle it. "he/she" is just silly for humans to say, but is seems appropriate when the text is coming from a machine and there is uncertainty.
  - JoeAltmaier 9y ago
    Good solution!
  - ghaff 9y ago
    Singular they seems to be the general approach that people are moving towards. It's now accepted in AP style under some circumstances--the some circumstances being basically if you can't figure out a way to cleanly write around it. And AP style is one of the stylebooks a lot of organizations look to for their own house styles. He/she has always been pretty awkward and silly. But in the eyes of at least some people, it also has the failing that even after all that it still assumes binary genders.
  - graeme 9y ago
    Makes it hard to paste though. Then again, so does an error in gender. But, I don't think he/she is viable because a major use case is people pasting quickly on their phones. You can see this because the app has automatic clipboard copy built in.
  - damnyou 9y ago
    Not everyone is a he or a she. I'm not, for example.
    - braindongle 9y ago
      In the context of this thread, I thought: if I don't want the machine to presume male or female, than what do I want it to do? he/she was what I came up with, but this does not address non-binary gender or fluid gender, weaknesses which were on my mind. Curious, I looked for guidelines and the best I could come up with was this, which seems helpful if you know the person in question, but not so much if you're referring to someone completely unknown: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-person_pronoun#Transgender_pronouns https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-person_pronoun#Transgend... I welcome advice.
      - damnyou 9y ago
        Sure, I'm glad you asked. Singular "they" has a long history of being used as a generic pronoun, before a bunch of white men decided in the 18th century to try and prescribe "he." Singular "they" is making a comeback, though, and in this case it would be appropriate.
squeeeeeeeeeee 9y ago
Social Justice Warrior spotted.
- blattimwind 9y ago
  Might be but not his point. The point here is simply that Google's algorithm is translating texts and applies a statistical bias, i.e. the algorithm introduces systematic errors into translations. This results in objectively poor performance of a translation system.
- dang 9y ago
  Could you please stop posting ideological flamebait to HN? Two of your last three comments have been that—this is bad. The other of the three was quite good, so if you stick to posting civilly and substantively, you'll be fine. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Stranger43 9y ago
And you just hit on one of the major problems with practically all of google's algorithms, in a social context, as pretty much everything Google ever does is measuring popularity(and for the most advanced of their algorithms popularity within "subculture"), and it's not like Facebook is really doing anything more sophisticated then ranking popularity and putting people in boxes either. Which mean that can only ever be an agent of reinforcing existing "cultures" and never really evolve into an agent of exploratory learning. Now it might not be a big problem in the real world that google's algorithms essentially exists as Kuhn paradigm enforcers, locking people into a bubble of accepted dogmatic knowledge(as traditional journalism plays/played the same role is), if it were not for the fact that just about everyone pretends the opposite is true for modern machine learning.
- candiodari 9y ago
  Isn't this a serious stretch ? I mean, sure there currently is an algorithm limitation that "turns it into a popularity contest". (I strongly disagree with that wording, but I sort of see what you mean if I squint strongly) This is a bug. Plain and simple. (Also as someone who speaks French I would like to point out that the counter on "English speaking person programs a language related thing that gets gender wrong" has long since crossed the 6 digit mark. Maybe language apps should be written by people whose native tongue is a complex language like French or German (I am sure there are others, just examples)) So unfortunately this is a fundamental bug that will take serious research to solve, and it's unlikely to be solved really quickly (let's say ... a year, two tops), but it's a bug that will be solved. It's like "energy is too expensive to just have cheap global travel without airports" type bug. It's a bug, it's currently beyond our capability to fix, but it WILL be fixed. The other claims you make are too far fetched to even respond to. All of Google's algorithms, bubble of accepted dogmatic knowledge (I would even contend that Google by itself is responsible for 20-30% of the worldwide IQ rise seen during it's existence). > just about everyone pretends the opposite is true for modern machine learning. Nope. That's not pretending. That's simply true. However when you request such a machine algorithm "do the same those guys do", and "those guys" are a racist/sexist/... society, then it will come up with slightly off-color conclusions on occasion. Humans, in my experience, are much worse.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
Bromskloss 9y ago
> It's stereotype-reinforcing. Isn't it simply _necessary_ to do such things? Don't we all have to assume the common case whenever someone leaves some detail out, which is of course done all the time? If someone says "they are kicking the ball between each other", I'm going to assume that the ball is round, as is typical for the occasion. That is "stereotype-reinforcing", but could we even avoid it? Would we want to?
- braindongle 9y ago
  It certainly can be difficult to work around gendered language. The point is to think about it and avoid it when you can. You never met your daughter's surgeon: "I'm sure the surgeon did all he could to help her." "I'm sure the surgeon did all that could be done to help her." Maybe the former expresses your intent better (for some reason?), but why not use the latter? This, of course, is quite aside from what a machine should do in ambiguous cases. In those cases, I just wanted to put a vote in for things like he/she (or: he or she) coming from machines rather than statistics-based presumptions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-neutral_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-neutral_language

JoeAltmaier 9y ago

But be honest, language has this odd 'gender' thing going on. Orthogonal to any interests about equality of the sexes. Not saying its right or helpful, but its there and a responsible translation algorithm has to take it into account.

braindongle 9y ago
Agreed. I edited my comment to add what I think would be a reasonable way to handle it. "he/she" is just silly for humans to say, but is seems appropriate when the text is coming from a machine and there is uncertainty.
- JoeAltmaier 9y ago
  Good solution!
- ghaff 9y ago
  Singular they seems to be the general approach that people are moving towards. It's now accepted in AP style under some circumstances--the some circumstances being basically if you can't figure out a way to cleanly write around it. And AP style is one of the stylebooks a lot of organizations look to for their own house styles. He/she has always been pretty awkward and silly. But in the eyes of at least some people, it also has the failing that even after all that it still assumes binary genders.
- graeme 9y ago
  Makes it hard to paste though. Then again, so does an error in gender. But, I don't think he/she is viable because a major use case is people pasting quickly on their phones. You can see this because the app has automatic clipboard copy built in.
- damnyou 9y ago
  Not everyone is a he or a she. I'm not, for example.
  - braindongle 9y ago
    In the context of this thread, I thought: if I don't want the machine to presume male or female, than what do I want it to do? he/she was what I came up with, but this does not address non-binary gender or fluid gender, weaknesses which were on my mind. Curious, I looked for guidelines and the best I could come up with was this, which seems helpful if you know the person in question, but not so much if you're referring to someone completely unknown: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-person_pronoun#Transgender_pronouns https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-person_pronoun#Transgend... I welcome advice.
    - damnyou 9y ago
      Sure, I'm glad you asked. Singular "they" has a long history of being used as a generic pronoun, before a bunch of white men decided in the 18th century to try and prescribe "he." Singular "they" is making a comeback, though, and in this case it would be appropriate.

squeeeeeeeeeee 9y ago

Social Justice Warrior spotted.

blattimwind 9y ago
Might be but not his point. The point here is simply that Google's algorithm is translating texts and applies a statistical bias, i.e. the algorithm introduces systematic errors into translations. This results in objectively poor performance of a translation system.
dang 9y ago
Could you please stop posting ideological flamebait to HN? Two of your last three comments have been that—this is bad. The other of the three was quite good, so if you stick to posting civilly and substantively, you'll be fine. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Stranger43 9y ago

And you just hit on one of the major problems with practically all of google's algorithms, in a social context, as pretty much everything Google ever does is measuring popularity(and for the most advanced of their algorithms popularity within "subculture"), and it's not like Facebook is really doing anything more sophisticated then ranking popularity and putting people in boxes either. Which mean that can only ever be an agent of reinforcing existing "cultures" and never really evolve into an agent of exploratory learning. Now it might not be a big problem in the real world that google's algorithms essentially exists as Kuhn paradigm enforcers, locking people into a bubble of accepted dogmatic knowledge(as traditional journalism plays/played the same role is), if it were not for the fact that just about everyone pretends the opposite is true for modern machine learning.

candiodari 9y ago
Isn't this a serious stretch ? I mean, sure there currently is an algorithm limitation that "turns it into a popularity contest". (I strongly disagree with that wording, but I sort of see what you mean if I squint strongly) This is a bug. Plain and simple. (Also as someone who speaks French I would like to point out that the counter on "English speaking person programs a language related thing that gets gender wrong" has long since crossed the 6 digit mark. Maybe language apps should be written by people whose native tongue is a complex language like French or German (I am sure there are others, just examples)) So unfortunately this is a fundamental bug that will take serious research to solve, and it's unlikely to be solved really quickly (let's say ... a year, two tops), but it's a bug that will be solved. It's like "energy is too expensive to just have cheap global travel without airports" type bug. It's a bug, it's currently beyond our capability to fix, but it WILL be fixed. The other claims you make are too far fetched to even respond to. All of Google's algorithms, bubble of accepted dogmatic knowledge (I would even contend that Google by itself is responsible for 20-30% of the worldwide IQ rise seen during it's existence). > just about everyone pretends the opposite is true for modern machine learning. Nope. That's not pretending. That's simply true. However when you request such a machine algorithm "do the same those guys do", and "those guys" are a racist/sexist/... society, then it will come up with slightly off-color conclusions on occasion. Humans, in my experience, are much worse.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

Bromskloss 9y ago

> It's stereotype-reinforcing. Isn't it simply _necessary_ to do such things? Don't we all have to assume the common case whenever someone leaves some detail out, which is of course done all the time? If someone says "they are kicking the ball between each other", I'm going to assume that the ball is round, as is typical for the occasion. That is "stereotype-reinforcing", but could we even avoid it? Would we want to?

braindongle 9y ago
It certainly can be difficult to work around gendered language. The point is to think about it and avoid it when you can. You never met your daughter's surgeon: "I'm sure the surgeon did all he could to help her." "I'm sure the surgeon did all that could be done to help her." Maybe the former expresses your intent better (for some reason?), but why not use the latter? This, of course, is quite aside from what a machine should do in ambiguous cases. In those cases, I just wanted to put a vote in for things like he/she (or: he or she) coming from machines rather than statistics-based presumptions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-neutral_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-neutral_language