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It's an article about a systemic bias. I think a lot of tech people are interested in this sort of thing, because so much of tech involves interpreting one thin
by roywiggins 8y ago
It's an article about a systemic bias. I think a lot of tech people are interested in this sort of thing, because so much of tech involves interpreting one thing and moving it to another. Take images and making descriptions; taking text and making decisions; speech to text; translation; medical charting; anything where you have messy data and need to get it down in some sort of canonical format.
That's what court stenographers do, and it turns out they have a systemic bias. It's only "politics" when that systemic bias is racial- what if they were biased about computer technicalities, and wrote down the wrong things about, I don't know, IP addresses or computer forensics and that ended up screwing over people at trial. That would be a similar sort of systemic bias and nobody would be calling it "politics".
How many times have you accidentally used technical terms and jargon and been misunderstood? Now imagine it's in a court case and there's someone in the corner taking notes and they miswrite something crucial and you only learn about it much later when it's too late and part of the official record. Now imagine this is pervasive and means that accused "hackers" are being convicted based on shoddy court records.
- 0db532a0 8y agoIt’s up to opinion whether discussion of racial issues is political, but if I want to read about racial issues, Hacker News is not the top of my list.
- roywiggins 8y agoI suppose you also hate this article that's been posted here all the time, because it mentions that people with different ethnicities have different naming traditions? https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/ https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-... You can't escape this stuff and, I submit, you shouldn't want to. Even in tech. Heck, especially in tech.
- 0db532a0 8y agoI just had a read, and found it to be informative. The article does not mention race or ethnicity and covers something useful which pertains to tech. I absolutely do want to escape the politics, as I find the discussions only lead to anxiety and polarisation.
- DanBC 8y agoDon't fucking read it then. Flag it, ignore it, and read something else.