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Then I would say racial bias is not the same as racism. You can not really blame the people who developed those tools for not being surrounded by people of all

Then I would say racial bias is not the same as racism. You can not really blame the people who developed those tools for not being surrounded by people of all races, or for the use case of, say, white people. It's not a malicious intent, whereas racism implies malice. It seems to me many US citizens think the whole world is like the US. It isn't. There are many countries where there are not as many "races" living together as in the US. I think it's an important point. For example, if I were a writer and I would write a novel, I would perhaps only feature white people in it. But not because I have anything against black people, but simply because I don't really know any black people and would therefore be hard pressed to write about them. Doing that wouldn't make me racist - I would simply write a novel from "my" world. It would in fact probably be impossible to write a novel that accounts for all possible human experiences. Edit: would it even have been possible to calibrate chemical film to work equally well for black and white skin? What if it would have been necessary to have different film rolls for white and black skin, for optimal result. Would those have been racist film rolls? Or what about makeup for different skin tones? Is that racist?

billy_beef 8y ago
> Then I would say racial bias is not the same as racism. You can not really blame the people who developed those tools for not being surrounded by people of all races, or for the use case of, say, white people. It's not a malicious intent, whereas racism implies malice. No it doesn't. You just made that up. Either way, it should be clear to anyone with any semblance of a moral imagination that having a group of people receive worse treatment and outcome on the basis of their race is immoral and should not be happening. Call it racism or call racialized bias, if it results in a disproportionately high murder rate for that group by the police, a disproportionately high poverty rate, a disproportionately high imprisonment rate, then it is a bad thing. It doesn't matter how pedantic you want to be about it. > It seems to me many US citizens think the whole world is like the US. It isn't. There are many countries where there are not as many "races" living together as in the US. Not having many different racial groups living together does not mean that a nation has not significantly benefitted from or perpetuated massively destructive, often times genocidal projects on racialized grounds. (See the european scramble for africa, the colonization of India and of south east asia to name the first three that come to mind out of so many examples). If the unit of analysis you're using for a society is an individual, then it is hard to grasp the way modern racism operates. This is why the term 'systemic racism' is applied and used readily. It is a helpful term for understanding the ways that people of a certain race (usually non-white) receive non-equal treatment by societal structures.
- adlkjnndnnd 8y ago
  "it should be clear to anyone with any semblance of a moral imagination that having a group of people receive worse treatment and outcome on the basis of their race is immoral and should not be happening." It's fine to strive for preventing it. Google surely learned from the Gorilla mistake and improved their algorithm. But it is too much to blame them of racism for that error, and demand all such errors are prevented. That is simply impossible. You now think of the simple example of "white vs black", but there are many, many more facets to it. There may be races that are not even discovered yet. You may now have accounted black people in your algorithm. Have you included Tibetan monks, Inuit, native Americans? People with facial deformities? Bad lighting? It is simply impossible to take into account all possibilities, because you can not predict them all. You can only try to improve your algorithm as much as possible. You can't demand perfect algorithms. People have "gamed" image recognition algorithms, adding some noise to make them yield completely silly results. The algorithms are simply not perfect yet. "Not having many different racial groups living together does not mean that a nation has not significantly benefitted from or perpetuated massively destructive, often times genocidal projects on racialized grounds" Ugh, spare me. If you want to go down that route, consider that many people in Africa also benefited from slavery (black tribes selling their enemies as slaves). And my country (Germany) was not even involved in the slave trade, or much of colonization. Yes, if you look down far enough in history, you will find violence and all sorts of ugly things. The PoC you are trying to protect might only be alive because his ancestors killed off their neighboring tribe, women, children and all. I don't think it even makes sense to somehow try to disentangle that. Just treat the people living today in a fair way.
  - billy_beef 8y ago
    You should perhaps begin by educating yourself to the actual role that Germany did play in the colonization of the African continent in the late 19th and early 20th century: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_colonial_empire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_colonial_empire . I would not call this particularly far in history since it only ended in the 1910s.
    - deleted 8y ago

billy_beef 8y ago

> Then I would say racial bias is not the same as racism. You can not really blame the people who developed those tools for not being surrounded by people of all races, or for the use case of, say, white people. It's not a malicious intent, whereas racism implies malice. No it doesn't. You just made that up. Either way, it should be clear to anyone with any semblance of a moral imagination that having a group of people receive worse treatment and outcome on the basis of their race is immoral and should not be happening. Call it racism or call racialized bias, if it results in a disproportionately high murder rate for that group by the police, a disproportionately high poverty rate, a disproportionately high imprisonment rate, then it is a bad thing. It doesn't matter how pedantic you want to be about it. > It seems to me many US citizens think the whole world is like the US. It isn't. There are many countries where there are not as many "races" living together as in the US. Not having many different racial groups living together does not mean that a nation has not significantly benefitted from or perpetuated massively destructive, often times genocidal projects on racialized grounds. (See the european scramble for africa, the colonization of India and of south east asia to name the first three that come to mind out of so many examples). If the unit of analysis you're using for a society is an individual, then it is hard to grasp the way modern racism operates. This is why the term 'systemic racism' is applied and used readily. It is a helpful term for understanding the ways that people of a certain race (usually non-white) receive non-equal treatment by societal structures.

adlkjnndnnd 8y ago
"it should be clear to anyone with any semblance of a moral imagination that having a group of people receive worse treatment and outcome on the basis of their race is immoral and should not be happening." It's fine to strive for preventing it. Google surely learned from the Gorilla mistake and improved their algorithm. But it is too much to blame them of racism for that error, and demand all such errors are prevented. That is simply impossible. You now think of the simple example of "white vs black", but there are many, many more facets to it. There may be races that are not even discovered yet. You may now have accounted black people in your algorithm. Have you included Tibetan monks, Inuit, native Americans? People with facial deformities? Bad lighting? It is simply impossible to take into account all possibilities, because you can not predict them all. You can only try to improve your algorithm as much as possible. You can't demand perfect algorithms. People have "gamed" image recognition algorithms, adding some noise to make them yield completely silly results. The algorithms are simply not perfect yet. "Not having many different racial groups living together does not mean that a nation has not significantly benefitted from or perpetuated massively destructive, often times genocidal projects on racialized grounds" Ugh, spare me. If you want to go down that route, consider that many people in Africa also benefited from slavery (black tribes selling their enemies as slaves). And my country (Germany) was not even involved in the slave trade, or much of colonization. Yes, if you look down far enough in history, you will find violence and all sorts of ugly things. The PoC you are trying to protect might only be alive because his ancestors killed off their neighboring tribe, women, children and all. I don't think it even makes sense to somehow try to disentangle that. Just treat the people living today in a fair way.
- billy_beef 8y ago
  You should perhaps begin by educating yourself to the actual role that Germany did play in the colonization of the African continent in the late 19th and early 20th century: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_colonial_empire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_colonial_empire . I would not call this particularly far in history since it only ended in the 1910s.
  - deleted 8y ago