3 ms·

It's a pretty long journey from 'our algorithm chooses which auto-replies to offer you based on which have the highest probability of being selected' to giving

It's a pretty long journey from 'our algorithm chooses which auto-replies to offer you based on which have the highest probability of being selected' to giving lit matches to children. I'm afraid to ask your opinion of SwiftKey's autocomplete.

zestyping 7y ago
That's not quite what I'm saying, though. My concern is not with stating the fact that the algorithm uses this metric. My concern is with presenting the decision to use this metric as morally neutral. If you think that giving lit matches to children is morally neutral, you probably either don't understand how dangerous fire is or don't understand how unpredictable children can be. That's the point of the analogy.
- foldingmoney 7y ago
  I don't know what could be more morally neutral than 'we offer the suggestions that you've shown us you're most likely to want to use.' Anything else would be trying to put _their_ words in people's mouths. And let's not lose sight of the fact that this is a tool that offers an automatic one to three-word email response for when you're too lazy to actually reply. The stakes are about as low as they come.
  - zestyping 7y ago
    "As low as they come"? You might be forgetting that Gmail has about a billion monthly active users. Scale matters. I'm sure you can think of many products that have fewer users, and features in those products that are less central to them than e-mail composition is to a mail client.
  - dTal 7y ago
    Pretty much the entire history of progressivism is a long, slow dawning realization that it's not harmless to treat individuals on the basis of group statistics, for one group category after another. Part of the problem is feedback loops - you can inadvertently amplify subtle perturbations by feeding them back to people. For example, it might seem harmless to subtly nudge a woman away from a career in STEM, on the basis that women are rare in STEM and therefore they probably won't enjoy it. But this action, repeated across millions of people, creates the pattern that you are reacting to. I think the principle probably generalizes to "everyone", not just "women" and "black people". In the case of autocomplete suggestions, they can still cause harm even when they're statistically likely. What do you think Google would autosuggest for "Blacks are...", if it were around in 1950? What would the statistics on the completion of that sentence look like? And would the effect of someone seeing that list be 100% neutral - or would it subtly nudge them? There's nothing obviously harmful with the specifics of GMail's auto-suggestions now. But the principle of 'we offer the suggestions that you've shown us you're most likely to want to use' is not morally neutral.
    - foldingmoney 7y ago
      We're talking about auto suggestions along the lines of 'Yes, I have', 'no, I haven't', 'sounds good!', 'yum!'. I'm not arguing against your principles necessarily, but deploying the argument where it's really not warranted is a form of crying wolf and turns people against it. And as an aside, at my university the only time I ever saw any recruiting material for STEM, it was along the lines of 'Scholarships for women in STEM'.
      - dTal 7y ago
        It's not a given that it's not warranted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19978313 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19978313 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19978300 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19978300 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19978171 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19978171 But the point is, whether this particular case is a problem or not, the general attitude that led to its development is a problem, and we're using this opportunity to discuss that (even though the original article is not very coherent).
        foldingmoney 7y ago
        I think the general attitude of being willfully blind to fundamental distinctions between things that are only superficially similar and shoehorning issue debates in where they don't belong is ultimately unhelpful for the debate over what is, elsewhere, an important issue.

zestyping 7y ago

That's not quite what I'm saying, though. My concern is not with stating the fact that the algorithm uses this metric. My concern is with presenting the decision to use this metric as morally neutral. If you think that giving lit matches to children is morally neutral, you probably either don't understand how dangerous fire is or don't understand how unpredictable children can be. That's the point of the analogy.

foldingmoney 7y ago
I don't know what could be more morally neutral than 'we offer the suggestions that you've shown us you're most likely to want to use.' Anything else would be trying to put _their_ words in people's mouths. And let's not lose sight of the fact that this is a tool that offers an automatic one to three-word email response for when you're too lazy to actually reply. The stakes are about as low as they come.
- zestyping 7y ago
  "As low as they come"? You might be forgetting that Gmail has about a billion monthly active users. Scale matters. I'm sure you can think of many products that have fewer users, and features in those products that are less central to them than e-mail composition is to a mail client.
- dTal 7y ago
  Pretty much the entire history of progressivism is a long, slow dawning realization that it's not harmless to treat individuals on the basis of group statistics, for one group category after another. Part of the problem is feedback loops - you can inadvertently amplify subtle perturbations by feeding them back to people. For example, it might seem harmless to subtly nudge a woman away from a career in STEM, on the basis that women are rare in STEM and therefore they probably won't enjoy it. But this action, repeated across millions of people, creates the pattern that you are reacting to. I think the principle probably generalizes to "everyone", not just "women" and "black people". In the case of autocomplete suggestions, they can still cause harm even when they're statistically likely. What do you think Google would autosuggest for "Blacks are...", if it were around in 1950? What would the statistics on the completion of that sentence look like? And would the effect of someone seeing that list be 100% neutral - or would it subtly nudge them? There's nothing obviously harmful with the specifics of GMail's auto-suggestions now. But the principle of 'we offer the suggestions that you've shown us you're most likely to want to use' is not morally neutral.
  - foldingmoney 7y ago
    We're talking about auto suggestions along the lines of 'Yes, I have', 'no, I haven't', 'sounds good!', 'yum!'. I'm not arguing against your principles necessarily, but deploying the argument where it's really not warranted is a form of crying wolf and turns people against it. And as an aside, at my university the only time I ever saw any recruiting material for STEM, it was along the lines of 'Scholarships for women in STEM'.
    - dTal 7y ago
      It's not a given that it's not warranted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19978313 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19978313 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19978300 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19978300 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19978171 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19978171 But the point is, whether this particular case is a problem or not, the general attitude that led to its development is a problem, and we're using this opportunity to discuss that (even though the original article is not very coherent).
      - foldingmoney 7y ago
        I think the general attitude of being willfully blind to fundamental distinctions between things that are only superficially similar and shoehorning issue debates in where they don't belong is ultimately unhelpful for the debate over what is, elsewhere, an important issue.