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Sorry, but this is actually a real world situation that happened - I have a Jewish ancestor who was named Adolf before WWII but after Hitler's rise unsurprising

by klipt 9y ago

Sorry, but this is actually a real world situation that happened - I have a Jewish ancestor who was named Adolf before WWII but after Hitler's rise unsurprisingly chose to go by his middle name instead. You can ascribe it to "Godwin's law" as much as you like, I just find it a more realistic example than some hypothetically disadvantaged "Bob".

geofft 9y ago
Ah! That's fair - but I think the spirit of Godwin's law is that comparisons to Hitler in particular, when the subject matter is more general than Hitler, yield unnecessarily hyperbolic responses (that - among other things - are bad at actually addressing the causes that led to the rise of Hitler and therefore weaken the goal of making sure that such a thing never again happens). We should make sure that an AI, who is probably making decisions on things like legal documents / public records and not just the middle name someone goes by, will not consider it a negative that someone is named "Adolf" if they aren't Adolf Hitler specifically. And we should for the same reason make sure that an AI will not consider it a negative that someone is named "Bob" if it has a newly-acquired specific negative impression of some other person named Bob. There isn't a difference in the cases. "Hitler" shouldn't be a special case because the rise of Hitler wasn't as much of a one-time event as we'd like to believe. When the next genocidal dictator with a somewhat rare first name gains control of a country, there will be people from the victim population who share that first name, and they should not suffer the same indignity at the hands of an AI, either. And on the flip side, when this genocidal dictator rises to power, the AI shouldn't be taught that Hitler was the only evil man who ever lived or will live; if it has the data to conclude that some actual individual (not a name) is as bad as Hitler, it should be able to conclude that.

by klipt 9y ago

geofft 9y ago

Ah! That's fair - but I think the spirit of Godwin's law is that comparisons to Hitler in particular, when the subject matter is more general than Hitler, yield unnecessarily hyperbolic responses (that - among other things - are bad at actually addressing the causes that led to the rise of Hitler and therefore weaken the goal of making sure that such a thing never again happens). We should make sure that an AI, who is probably making decisions on things like legal documents / public records and not just the middle name someone goes by, will not consider it a negative that someone is named "Adolf" if they aren't Adolf Hitler specifically. And we should for the same reason make sure that an AI will not consider it a negative that someone is named "Bob" if it has a newly-acquired specific negative impression of some other person named Bob. There isn't a difference in the cases. "Hitler" shouldn't be a special case because the rise of Hitler wasn't as much of a one-time event as we'd like to believe. When the next genocidal dictator with a somewhat rare first name gains control of a country, there will be people from the victim population who share that first name, and they should not suffer the same indignity at the hands of an AI, either. And on the flip side, when this genocidal dictator rises to power, the AI shouldn't be taught that Hitler was the only evil man who ever lived or will live; if it has the data to conclude that some actual individual (not a name) is as bad as Hitler, it should be able to conclude that.