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When will this madness end? There will always be people offended by something. I'm pretty sure there are individuals claiming that NOT suggesting their pronoun

When will this madness end? There will always be people offended by something. I'm pretty sure there are individuals claiming that NOT suggesting their pronoun deprives them of their identity, dignity or whatever. This is getting ridiculous.

danharaj 8y ago
> There will always be people offended by something. That does not mean every instance of offense should be ignored or dismissed, does it? How about addressing specific grievances instead of this extremely vague proclamation?
- umvi 8y ago
  How do you determine if the grievance is valid or not? Sometimes "addressing specific grievances" should be to recommend the greivers apply for therapy. There are people up in arms about Maryland's flag because the checkered pattern is a confederacy symbol which somehow triggers them. The best course of action for those people is not to change the Maryland flag but rather to get them therapy so they can learn how to live without getting offended.
  - danharaj 8y ago
    > How do you determine if the grievance is valid or not? I can't give you an algorithm in advance that will let you decide every political and social issue ever. That's obviously not possible. There are heuristics, like. You can put yourself in the other person's shoes, try to empathize with them to figure out where they're coming from, and work out what their values and their reasoning is. You're a human being, a social creature whose most distinctive characteristic is extremely complex and nuanced communication. Your brain was made for this. > There are people up in arms about Maryland's flag because the checkered pattern is a confederacy symbol which somehow triggers them. The best course of action for those people is not to change the Maryland flag but rather to get them therapy so they can learn how to live without getting offended. I'm gonna let you in on a secret. If you treat everyone with contempt and dismissal, then every conclusion you come to about them will be contemptful dismissal.
  - elliekelly 8y ago
    >Sometimes "addressing specific grievances" should be to recommend the greivers apply for therapy. People often assume I'm a man on reddit. A lot of the time I'll politely let them know that not everyone on reddit is a man. Are you suggesting that I ought to go to therapy instead?
    - umvi 8y ago
      If you became offended that someone assumed you were a man, then yes, I would recommend therapy. Politely correcting them? Of course not, that's a completely reasonable thing to do. Consistently taking offense where none was intended warrants therapy in my book.
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - Double_a_92 8y ago
      If you became offended that someone assumed you were a man, then yes, I would recommend therapy. Politely correcting them? Of course not, that's a completely reasonable thing to do. Consistently taking offense where none was intended warrants therapy in my book.
Quarrelsome 8y ago
The madness is gendered words to be buried so deeply in our psyche in the first place. There's limited need for those assumptions but due to history we let them rise to the top. Its perfectly straight forward to write evocative and passionate prose without concreting to a gender. It makes sense that when we build general purpose tools we encourage them to choose the neutral words more readily because it increases their accuracy without any loss of meaning. Are you really so terrified of a world where "meeting him" is "meeting them"?
Robelius 8y ago
>There will always be people offended by something. Trying to remove bias from a system is about trying to remove bias from a system. People tend to agree that removing bias from a system rather than intentionally creating a system that discriminates.
- vorticalbox 8y ago
  that's how a lot of these AI work you weight bias' to more towards the result you want.
Double_a_92 8y ago
@Quarrelsome: "Them" wouldn't work here, because it's one specific person which has a concrete gender. 99% of people would assume that the investor is some company with multiple people if you say "them".
- slothtrop 8y ago
  "You" and "They" is proper usage, it has been well before this whole dialog came into play. It's a catch-all. There's nothing about a made-up pronoun that captures an ambiguity about an individual, let alone their individuality. They have to express that themselves. Pronouns are not what jeopardizes or validates individuality.
  - Double_a_92 8y ago
    I agree on "they" but not "theM". Also I would only use "they" when talking about some generic person that really doesn't have a specific gender (or any other specific characteristics). If I'm writing an email about my investor I know who that is and what gender they are. Getting "them" as completion option is almost never what I would wan't in that case. (Above I even used "they" subconsciously, because It was just an example and I don't actually have an investor to talk about here.)
bicubic 8y ago
Tech industry in 2018: ML driven automation widening wealth disparity? Eh. ML ushering in the age of the persistent surveillance state? Eh. ML being used to manipulate elections and hijack democracies? Eh. ML might auto-suggest wrong gender in a text editor? STOP. EVERYTHING. THE RISK IS TOO HIGH IT MIGHT OFFEND SOME USERS.
- whatshisface 8y ago
  The connecting thread through all of them but the last is that there is some cost or difficulty to doing something about them, whereas the last is just a ticket in the bugtracker. Wouldn't it be nice for Google if all the activism in the world was directed towards things that could be solved at no cost by a junior engineer?
- scottlocklin 8y ago
  This encapsulates the modern technocratic 'left' as much as anything.
pasabagi 8y ago
I think the problem is orthogonal to what you're upset about: 1. People expect public organizations to not be bigoted. 2. People are generally fairly bigoted. Therefore, if you're an organization training NNs on data produced by 2, you have to do some editing, or you're going to get in trouble over 1.
thaumasiotes 8y ago
> I'm pretty sure there are individuals claiming that NOT suggesting their pronoun deprives them of their identity, dignity or whatever. This would be similar to how feminist movements in languages that systematically distinguish men from women push to get the language changed so that women are referred to as men ("there shouldn't be any difference between a waiter and a waitress"), while feminist movements in languages that don't draw the distinction push to get the language changed so that women are referred to explicitly as women ("we should acknowledge that women can be waiters too"). If feminism demands one of these things, it surely can't also demand the other.
- woah 8y ago
  What are you talking about?
- VikingCoder 8y ago
  ...OR.... Different groups of people call themselves "feminists," and don't agree with each other about changes they'd like to see in the world. It's kind of odd to me that people (like you apparently) don't understand.
  - thaumasiotes 8y ago
    What is it that you think I don't understand? I think they all agree that they'd like other people to change as an acknowledgement of their power. I also think that they can't both use the same justification to argue for opposite changes. What did I miss?
    - VikingCoder 8y ago
      "they" is not a homogeneous group. "they" are different groups that might use the same label. They can absolutely use the same justification, to argue for opposite changes. Their justification could be as simple as, "We want to be respected," and different groups of feminists disagree with each other about how best to achieve that goal. Sure, it's even worse if you personally land in the crosshairs, but from your example it sounds like the feminists are working in different places with different languages. And perhaps the problem of gaining respect requires different solutions in different areas.
SolaceQuantum 8y ago
I don't believe this is a move based off of the sensitivity at Google's workplace, especially given what we know now of Google's policies around workplace harassment. I would hesitate to extend it to Google's culture as a whole, or any political movement that is being partaken in here.
lukev 8y ago
> There will always be people offended by something Including, apparently, the fact that some people are making an effort to care about other people.
- bgfmarks 8y ago
  And making a lot of money in the process of "caring". The majority of people who "care" would have no cushy job otherwise. This applies to programmers implementing useless features, social scientists, politicians, administrators and many more.
  - lukev 8y ago
    If you think people who are working to improve the social climate in which we find ourselves are in it for the money, I can only conclude you don't know any of them.
    - throwaway8879 8y ago
      I hate to break it to you, but a lot of that caring is also based on a profit motive. Some of it isn't, but some of it certainly is.
- hueving 8y ago
  Right, and politicians are only in it to represent the people. /s
_pmf_ 8y ago
Oh, they're only getting started. As with the recent Twitter ToS changes, you'll be committing violations of concepts that you have never heard of.
schalab 8y ago
Its a game of diminishing returns. Assume there are 80% included in a game and 20% frozen out. Here it makes sense to change the rules of the game to include the other 20%. Yes it might slightly inconvenience the 80% but the switch from not being included at all to playing the game for the 20% is huge. So, overall it might be a net positive. Problem is when you get to a 98/2 split. Is it worth it to inconvenience such a large majority for the benefit of a very small minority. And how much are you going to change the rules? Is it worth the reduced enjoyment/efficiency of the game? At some point the trade off will become too much, and even moral/emotional arguments will not be enough to silence the dissent.
- 2a0c40 8y ago
  relevant: Taleb's minority rule. cf. https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dictatorship-of-the-small-minority-3f1f83ce4e15 https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...
- pjc50 8y ago
  In this case it's more like a 50/50 split.
- mobjack 8y ago
  Is it really that big of an inconvenience if they don't include gender pronouns in automated email responses? How much revenue would Google be losing over such a decision? Even if something only affects 2% of the population, the cost of getting it wrong may not be worth the benefits.
jackhack 8y ago
It will end with the boot of the state stamping of the face of Winston Smith, and Winston expressing his love for Big Brother. Newspeak. When I first read 1984 I thought it so farfetched as to be laughable. I'm not laughing any more.
xbryanx 8y ago
Asking people to refer to you how you want to be addressed is not madness, it's just considerate.
- voyager2 8y ago
  Asking people to refer to you how you want to be addressed IS madness. You must then ask every person how to refer to him/her/them/it/cis/trans/pan before you assume standard English is good enough.
  - xbryanx 8y ago
    Your madness is my ideal. I really enjoy living in a time that recognizes more than a binary sense of gender identity. Our language should change to address this. Just like it has changed to recognize that we use computers now.
    - voyager2 8y ago
      Please do not refer to madness as "your." "This" would be preferable. Also, I do not recognize that "our" language should change to address a tiny minority wishing to be referred to in a non-binary sense. The analog between using computers and non-binary self-identification is a strawman/woman/person/thing. Which straw<something> will be acceptable?
- wang_li 8y ago
  Being offended when an algorithm picks one of two words that represent 99.9+% of the population is madness. Also the words in question are not used to address a person. When I am speaking to a person, regardless of their gender identity, I use the second person pronouns you, yours, or yourself. These are already gender neutral. The requested gender neutral pronouns (xir/xe/ne/???) are used in the third person and lower the value of communication as there is no asexual physical presentation, people present as men or women based on their fashion and physical characteristics. Going to a restaurant and saying to the attendant that you are here to me "that xir over there" does not help them figure out which table to take you to. Not to mention that people who feel gender neutral are still male or female (or have experienced a physical developmental disorder, humans are dimorphic after all.)
pjc50 8y ago
I have a feeling that if it always suggested "her" instead of always suggesting "him" there would be as much outrage, but from a different quarter.
jahewson 8y ago
Dear Mrs. bitcharmer, Guessing something with a 50% probability of being wrong is not a useful feature.
- bitcharmer 8y ago
  I think it's better than 50%. Besides, how could I be offended at that? I actually think Mrs bitcharmer sounded funny.
Mikeb85 8y ago
I'd rather simply eliminate gender specific pronouns than invent a bunch of new, ridiculous ones. > I'm pretty sure there are individuals claiming that NOT suggesting their pronoun deprives them of their identity, dignity or whatever. Yeah but the end result of everyone wanting to feel special is that in the end, no one will.
- asdkljh 8y ago
  Where would it end, if we just kept inventing pronouns? Everyone getting their own pronoun? Like, perhaps a unique name? In the end, there'd just not be any pronouns. Problem is, pronouns are useful. They compress text. One time I wrote a paper in high school where I didn't use any pronouns and always referred to Abraham Lincoln as "Abraham Lincoln", just so I could pad the paper as much as possible with the full length of Abraham Lincoln's name. "Abraham Lincoln, in Abraham Lincoln's famous Gettysburg Address, suggested that Abraham Lincoln could..."

danharaj 8y ago

> There will always be people offended by something. That does not mean every instance of offense should be ignored or dismissed, does it? How about addressing specific grievances instead of this extremely vague proclamation?

umvi 8y ago
How do you determine if the grievance is valid or not? Sometimes "addressing specific grievances" should be to recommend the greivers apply for therapy. There are people up in arms about Maryland's flag because the checkered pattern is a confederacy symbol which somehow triggers them. The best course of action for those people is not to change the Maryland flag but rather to get them therapy so they can learn how to live without getting offended.
- danharaj 8y ago
  > How do you determine if the grievance is valid or not? I can't give you an algorithm in advance that will let you decide every political and social issue ever. That's obviously not possible. There are heuristics, like. You can put yourself in the other person's shoes, try to empathize with them to figure out where they're coming from, and work out what their values and their reasoning is. You're a human being, a social creature whose most distinctive characteristic is extremely complex and nuanced communication. Your brain was made for this. > There are people up in arms about Maryland's flag because the checkered pattern is a confederacy symbol which somehow triggers them. The best course of action for those people is not to change the Maryland flag but rather to get them therapy so they can learn how to live without getting offended. I'm gonna let you in on a secret. If you treat everyone with contempt and dismissal, then every conclusion you come to about them will be contemptful dismissal.
- elliekelly 8y ago
  >Sometimes "addressing specific grievances" should be to recommend the greivers apply for therapy. People often assume I'm a man on reddit. A lot of the time I'll politely let them know that not everyone on reddit is a man. Are you suggesting that I ought to go to therapy instead?
  - umvi 8y ago
    If you became offended that someone assumed you were a man, then yes, I would recommend therapy. Politely correcting them? Of course not, that's a completely reasonable thing to do. Consistently taking offense where none was intended warrants therapy in my book.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - Double_a_92 8y ago
    If you became offended that someone assumed you were a man, then yes, I would recommend therapy. Politely correcting them? Of course not, that's a completely reasonable thing to do. Consistently taking offense where none was intended warrants therapy in my book.

Quarrelsome 8y ago

The madness is gendered words to be buried so deeply in our psyche in the first place. There's limited need for those assumptions but due to history we let them rise to the top. Its perfectly straight forward to write evocative and passionate prose without concreting to a gender. It makes sense that when we build general purpose tools we encourage them to choose the neutral words more readily because it increases their accuracy without any loss of meaning. Are you really so terrified of a world where "meeting him" is "meeting them"?

Robelius 8y ago

>There will always be people offended by something. Trying to remove bias from a system is about trying to remove bias from a system. People tend to agree that removing bias from a system rather than intentionally creating a system that discriminates.

vorticalbox 8y ago
that's how a lot of these AI work you weight bias' to more towards the result you want.

Double_a_92 8y ago

@Quarrelsome: "Them" wouldn't work here, because it's one specific person which has a concrete gender. 99% of people would assume that the investor is some company with multiple people if you say "them".

slothtrop 8y ago
"You" and "They" is proper usage, it has been well before this whole dialog came into play. It's a catch-all. There's nothing about a made-up pronoun that captures an ambiguity about an individual, let alone their individuality. They have to express that themselves. Pronouns are not what jeopardizes or validates individuality.
- Double_a_92 8y ago
  I agree on "they" but not "theM". Also I would only use "they" when talking about some generic person that really doesn't have a specific gender (or any other specific characteristics). If I'm writing an email about my investor I know who that is and what gender they are. Getting "them" as completion option is almost never what I would wan't in that case. (Above I even used "they" subconsciously, because It was just an example and I don't actually have an investor to talk about here.)

bicubic 8y ago

Tech industry in 2018: ML driven automation widening wealth disparity? Eh. ML ushering in the age of the persistent surveillance state? Eh. ML being used to manipulate elections and hijack democracies? Eh. ML might auto-suggest wrong gender in a text editor? STOP. EVERYTHING. THE RISK IS TOO HIGH IT MIGHT OFFEND SOME USERS.

whatshisface 8y ago
The connecting thread through all of them but the last is that there is some cost or difficulty to doing something about them, whereas the last is just a ticket in the bugtracker. Wouldn't it be nice for Google if all the activism in the world was directed towards things that could be solved at no cost by a junior engineer?
scottlocklin 8y ago
This encapsulates the modern technocratic 'left' as much as anything.

pasabagi 8y ago

I think the problem is orthogonal to what you're upset about: 1. People expect public organizations to not be bigoted. 2. People are generally fairly bigoted. Therefore, if you're an organization training NNs on data produced by 2, you have to do some editing, or you're going to get in trouble over 1.

thaumasiotes 8y ago

> I'm pretty sure there are individuals claiming that NOT suggesting their pronoun deprives them of their identity, dignity or whatever. This would be similar to how feminist movements in languages that systematically distinguish men from women push to get the language changed so that women are referred to as men ("there shouldn't be any difference between a waiter and a waitress"), while feminist movements in languages that don't draw the distinction push to get the language changed so that women are referred to explicitly as women ("we should acknowledge that women can be waiters too"). If feminism demands one of these things, it surely can't also demand the other.

woah 8y ago
What are you talking about?
VikingCoder 8y ago
...OR.... Different groups of people call themselves "feminists," and don't agree with each other about changes they'd like to see in the world. It's kind of odd to me that people (like you apparently) don't understand.
- thaumasiotes 8y ago
  What is it that you think I don't understand? I think they all agree that they'd like other people to change as an acknowledgement of their power. I also think that they can't both use the same justification to argue for opposite changes. What did I miss?
  - VikingCoder 8y ago
    "they" is not a homogeneous group. "they" are different groups that might use the same label. They can absolutely use the same justification, to argue for opposite changes. Their justification could be as simple as, "We want to be respected," and different groups of feminists disagree with each other about how best to achieve that goal. Sure, it's even worse if you personally land in the crosshairs, but from your example it sounds like the feminists are working in different places with different languages. And perhaps the problem of gaining respect requires different solutions in different areas.

SolaceQuantum 8y ago

I don't believe this is a move based off of the sensitivity at Google's workplace, especially given what we know now of Google's policies around workplace harassment. I would hesitate to extend it to Google's culture as a whole, or any political movement that is being partaken in here.

lukev 8y ago

> There will always be people offended by something Including, apparently, the fact that some people are making an effort to care about other people.

bgfmarks 8y ago
And making a lot of money in the process of "caring". The majority of people who "care" would have no cushy job otherwise. This applies to programmers implementing useless features, social scientists, politicians, administrators and many more.
- lukev 8y ago
  If you think people who are working to improve the social climate in which we find ourselves are in it for the money, I can only conclude you don't know any of them.
  - throwaway8879 8y ago
    I hate to break it to you, but a lot of that caring is also based on a profit motive. Some of it isn't, but some of it certainly is.
hueving 8y ago
Right, and politicians are only in it to represent the people. /s

_pmf_ 8y ago

Oh, they're only getting started. As with the recent Twitter ToS changes, you'll be committing violations of concepts that you have never heard of.

schalab 8y ago

Its a game of diminishing returns. Assume there are 80% included in a game and 20% frozen out. Here it makes sense to change the rules of the game to include the other 20%. Yes it might slightly inconvenience the 80% but the switch from not being included at all to playing the game for the 20% is huge. So, overall it might be a net positive. Problem is when you get to a 98/2 split. Is it worth it to inconvenience such a large majority for the benefit of a very small minority. And how much are you going to change the rules? Is it worth the reduced enjoyment/efficiency of the game? At some point the trade off will become too much, and even moral/emotional arguments will not be enough to silence the dissent.

2a0c40 8y ago
relevant: Taleb's minority rule. cf. https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dictatorship-of-the-small-minority-3f1f83ce4e15 https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...
pjc50 8y ago
In this case it's more like a 50/50 split.
mobjack 8y ago
Is it really that big of an inconvenience if they don't include gender pronouns in automated email responses? How much revenue would Google be losing over such a decision? Even if something only affects 2% of the population, the cost of getting it wrong may not be worth the benefits.

jackhack 8y ago

It will end with the boot of the state stamping of the face of Winston Smith, and Winston expressing his love for Big Brother. Newspeak. When I first read 1984 I thought it so farfetched as to be laughable. I'm not laughing any more.

xbryanx 8y ago

Asking people to refer to you how you want to be addressed is not madness, it's just considerate.

voyager2 8y ago
Asking people to refer to you how you want to be addressed IS madness. You must then ask every person how to refer to him/her/them/it/cis/trans/pan before you assume standard English is good enough.
- xbryanx 8y ago
  Your madness is my ideal. I really enjoy living in a time that recognizes more than a binary sense of gender identity. Our language should change to address this. Just like it has changed to recognize that we use computers now.
  - voyager2 8y ago
    Please do not refer to madness as "your." "This" would be preferable. Also, I do not recognize that "our" language should change to address a tiny minority wishing to be referred to in a non-binary sense. The analog between using computers and non-binary self-identification is a strawman/woman/person/thing. Which straw<something> will be acceptable?
wang_li 8y ago
Being offended when an algorithm picks one of two words that represent 99.9+% of the population is madness. Also the words in question are not used to address a person. When I am speaking to a person, regardless of their gender identity, I use the second person pronouns you, yours, or yourself. These are already gender neutral. The requested gender neutral pronouns (xir/xe/ne/???) are used in the third person and lower the value of communication as there is no asexual physical presentation, people present as men or women based on their fashion and physical characteristics. Going to a restaurant and saying to the attendant that you are here to me "that xir over there" does not help them figure out which table to take you to. Not to mention that people who feel gender neutral are still male or female (or have experienced a physical developmental disorder, humans are dimorphic after all.)

pjc50 8y ago

I have a feeling that if it always suggested "her" instead of always suggesting "him" there would be as much outrage, but from a different quarter.

jahewson 8y ago

Dear Mrs. bitcharmer, Guessing something with a 50% probability of being wrong is not a useful feature.

bitcharmer 8y ago
I think it's better than 50%. Besides, how could I be offended at that? I actually think Mrs bitcharmer sounded funny.

Mikeb85 8y ago

I'd rather simply eliminate gender specific pronouns than invent a bunch of new, ridiculous ones. > I'm pretty sure there are individuals claiming that NOT suggesting their pronoun deprives them of their identity, dignity or whatever. Yeah but the end result of everyone wanting to feel special is that in the end, no one will.

asdkljh 8y ago
Where would it end, if we just kept inventing pronouns? Everyone getting their own pronoun? Like, perhaps a unique name? In the end, there'd just not be any pronouns. Problem is, pronouns are useful. They compress text. One time I wrote a paper in high school where I didn't use any pronouns and always referred to Abraham Lincoln as "Abraham Lincoln", just so I could pad the paper as much as possible with the full length of Abraham Lincoln's name. "Abraham Lincoln, in Abraham Lincoln's famous Gettysburg Address, suggested that Abraham Lincoln could..."