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So, I'd dance around the issue. Google's search algorithm is "fair", but society is not: It is not "fair" that these search terms are over sexualized. This is

So, I'd dance around the issue. Google's search algorithm is "fair", but society is not: It is not "fair" that these search terms are over sexualized. This is, of course, given some particular morality and ethos; your may not find society unfair in this way. (I do) My point is that now it is visible and you can make more informed choices. If you don't like what you see in mirror, why is makeup the "fix" of choice? Alter diets, exercise patterns; sun exposure, fitness levels, stress levels... > Will removing naughty sites from the search results Potentially. We're feedback loops as well; if these terms result in what someone is after, they will use those terms: if they don't, they won't. Eventually, I would expect people to stop trying to search with them; to then stop communicating with them (as meaning that); to then stop thinking with them (as meaning that).

ralusek 9y ago
What you're proposing is a hack, and one with a lot of negative side effects. First of all, to go with the obvious, you better hope that what Google deems the direction they'd like to alter reality is aligned with your own, because I'm quite sure that this will mostly be untrue. Secondly, you're attempting to patch a problem at much too high of a level; making people less racist by altering what they're able to ingest, particularly by altering unbiased reality, is a bandaid that is destined to fail hard. What if, say, we wanted to change the negative stereotype of black Americans engaging in criminal behavior at substantially higher rates, so we demanded that Google remove access to racially distributed crime statistics. Many countries already do this, such as Sweden. We will have lost a primary tool with which to assess the nature of our reality, contextualize it, and strategize about it effectively. I'm more interested in a free society bettering reality than I am with hoping that Google's ideal version of reality is aligned with my own... particularly because I would still consider it to be a horrible solution even if it was.
- RangerScience 9y ago
  Making people less racist by altering what they're ingesting is one of the most effective ways to do it. The "reality" in this case is not unbiased, because it's not the reality of "cars are hard" but the reality of "red means stop". > access to racially distributed crime statistics That does sound like something that would backfire or fail. Seems like you hit on the delineating factor: You search for crime statistics to contextualize and understand your reality. Is that why people search for porn?
PeterisP 9y ago
My point was that it's like applying makeup to the mirror instead on your face - what you propose is not like improving your fitness, it's like making a curved mirror that makes you appear slim and flatters you, hides the problem and doesn't change anything about the underlying issues. After your proposed changes it is no longer visible, and we can no longer make informed choices - people searching for "black girls" still want the same thing, but they're getting a worse service (results that don't fit their intent) just to hide them and their preferences from other parts of the society. There's also a feedback loop in the opposite direction, if there are real problems that simply are hidden, they're not going to get fixed. On the other hand, it's worth examining the actual problem - it's worth noting that people who do want to find sexual pictures of black girls are just as valid users as black girls, and any fair solution must keep both of their preferences in mind; it would be unfair to simply damage the service for one group to appease the another. IMHO a fair solution would be based on data about what the people who use that query actually want (in some equivalence to picking equal opportunities in the "equal opportunities vs equal outcomes" tradeoff dilemma) - if some people are using the term in their daily search and some are not, then the interests of these frequent users could reasonably be considered more important. Aggressive personalization (different users having wildly different search results for the same term because of the differences in the assumed intent) is another way to do that, but it brings a bunch of other problems.
- RangerScience 9y ago
  To be clear, I haven't said anything about my proposed changes. I'm parroting what I understand to be the changes Google actually applied. That said... You're missing that some problems are, actually, entirely perceptive. You're right that changing the mirror to hide problems isn't addressing the underlying issue, but sometimes treatment of symptoms is the only available (or possible the most effective) option. Like everything else, it's one tool that can be applied poorly or effectively. > it would be unfair to simply damage the service for one group to appease the another This is ineffective as a stand-alone principle. The failure mode is described as "your freedom ends where mine begins" and is clearly visible in the exaggerated (and somewhat contrived) example of "damaging services for murdering to appease those who want to remain un-murdered is good". Like all principles, this has both extreme-case failure modes (services for murderers) but also fuzzy-case failure modes. If the term for my identity is sexualized, when that identity has nothing to do with sexuality... well, what's fair? Why should group X define the term instead of group Y? So, for cases where the problem is primarily perceptive (or the symptoms are primarily perceptive), seems reasonable to me to warp the mirror. It's like using glasses: you're already looking through a warped lens, so use a correspondingly warped lens to correct. My actual point is that systems that incidentally encode biases then let you better examine those biases, and, depending on the situation, do stuff to address them.

ralusek 9y ago

What you're proposing is a hack, and one with a lot of negative side effects. First of all, to go with the obvious, you better hope that what Google deems the direction they'd like to alter reality is aligned with your own, because I'm quite sure that this will mostly be untrue. Secondly, you're attempting to patch a problem at much too high of a level; making people less racist by altering what they're able to ingest, particularly by altering unbiased reality, is a bandaid that is destined to fail hard. What if, say, we wanted to change the negative stereotype of black Americans engaging in criminal behavior at substantially higher rates, so we demanded that Google remove access to racially distributed crime statistics. Many countries already do this, such as Sweden. We will have lost a primary tool with which to assess the nature of our reality, contextualize it, and strategize about it effectively. I'm more interested in a free society bettering reality than I am with hoping that Google's ideal version of reality is aligned with my own... particularly because I would still consider it to be a horrible solution even if it was.

RangerScience 9y ago
Making people less racist by altering what they're ingesting is one of the most effective ways to do it. The "reality" in this case is not unbiased, because it's not the reality of "cars are hard" but the reality of "red means stop". > access to racially distributed crime statistics That does sound like something that would backfire or fail. Seems like you hit on the delineating factor: You search for crime statistics to contextualize and understand your reality. Is that why people search for porn?

PeterisP 9y ago

My point was that it's like applying makeup to the mirror instead on your face - what you propose is not like improving your fitness, it's like making a curved mirror that makes you appear slim and flatters you, hides the problem and doesn't change anything about the underlying issues. After your proposed changes it is no longer visible, and we can no longer make informed choices - people searching for "black girls" still want the same thing, but they're getting a worse service (results that don't fit their intent) just to hide them and their preferences from other parts of the society. There's also a feedback loop in the opposite direction, if there are real problems that simply are hidden, they're not going to get fixed. On the other hand, it's worth examining the actual problem - it's worth noting that people who do want to find sexual pictures of black girls are just as valid users as black girls, and any fair solution must keep both of their preferences in mind; it would be unfair to simply damage the service for one group to appease the another. IMHO a fair solution would be based on data about what the people who use that query actually want (in some equivalence to picking equal opportunities in the "equal opportunities vs equal outcomes" tradeoff dilemma) - if some people are using the term in their daily search and some are not, then the interests of these frequent users could reasonably be considered more important. Aggressive personalization (different users having wildly different search results for the same term because of the differences in the assumed intent) is another way to do that, but it brings a bunch of other problems.

RangerScience 9y ago
To be clear, I haven't said anything about my proposed changes. I'm parroting what I understand to be the changes Google actually applied. That said... You're missing that some problems are, actually, entirely perceptive. You're right that changing the mirror to hide problems isn't addressing the underlying issue, but sometimes treatment of symptoms is the only available (or possible the most effective) option. Like everything else, it's one tool that can be applied poorly or effectively. > it would be unfair to simply damage the service for one group to appease the another This is ineffective as a stand-alone principle. The failure mode is described as "your freedom ends where mine begins" and is clearly visible in the exaggerated (and somewhat contrived) example of "damaging services for murdering to appease those who want to remain un-murdered is good". Like all principles, this has both extreme-case failure modes (services for murderers) but also fuzzy-case failure modes. If the term for my identity is sexualized, when that identity has nothing to do with sexuality... well, what's fair? Why should group X define the term instead of group Y? So, for cases where the problem is primarily perceptive (or the symptoms are primarily perceptive), seems reasonable to me to warp the mirror. It's like using glasses: you're already looking through a warped lens, so use a correspondingly warped lens to correct. My actual point is that systems that incidentally encode biases then let you better examine those biases, and, depending on the situation, do stuff to address them.