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The issue with all of this, is that it's not just one company with a group of all the parts that design, create, test and sell this stuff. Most of it was desig

The issue with all of this, is that it's not just one company with a group of all the parts that design, create, test and sell this stuff. Most of it was designed somewhere, built somewhere else, integrated yet somewhere else, and then simply bought out of a catalogue bulk, shipped to a warehouse and sold in smaller bulk to stores. The products and people that could have detected a problem are all over the world, and have seen every possible version of a human and still they end up in use with the problems they have. If the pattern were constrained to fit a scenario as you describe then it would probably be something we can do something about. But just like in enterprise software contracts, the distance (both mentally, physically and legally) between all of this is not allowing for much change for any single actor. And I'm pretty sure the manufacturer of a sensor that doesn't even know where it ends up 10 layers deep in the supply chain is going to be remotely aware of this. In practical terms we're seeing an anti-pattern and we try to personify it so we can express our dissatisfaction, but that's just as practical as shouting at the sun for not damaging all skin types at similar rates. There is no single source of the fault and there is no person or company or something like that, that is 'responsible' for it. One possibility is to have some sort of consumer organisation test products on a diverse set of humans and report on products that lack support for certain shapes, colours or sizes, but other than that I have no idea how we'd adjust multiple people at multiple companies in multiple countries with multiple cultures.

jfengel 6y ago
The chains do interfere with the problem, and one part of the solution is to have people at every single step who think of it as their problem. What I suspect happens in a case like this is that a white manufacturer asks a bunch of white engineers for a design, who sends it off to a Chinese manufacturing plant, to be shipped to a white buying agent in pharmacies. Nobody in the process is explicitly racist, but neither are there any black people in the process to say, "Hey, would this work on me?" The problem comes when you say, "Hey, maybe there oughta be some black people involved in some of the processes", and people scream "reverse racism" and "affirmative action" and all the other buzzwords. They assert the harm to themselves, and they get listened to. But when black people say, "Well, I'm also being harmed, and in ways you're not seeing," the response is "well, that specific thing isn't my fault". The solutions are systemic. As you say, it's a chain: for a black person to get hired into that position everything has to have gone right for them. They didn't get failed by bad schools and they didn't get dismissed by their professors and they didn't get filtered out by a resume screener who didn't like their name and they didn't lose a job to somebody who hires people they know -- which just doesn't happen to include black people. So it's not easy to solve, and even the good solutions are slow. But one critical step is for each person to recognize that their local optimizations and local considerations contribute to the bigger problem, and think of ways that they can make things better rather than just say "not my problem".

jfengel 6y ago

The chains do interfere with the problem, and one part of the solution is to have people at every single step who think of it as their problem. What I suspect happens in a case like this is that a white manufacturer asks a bunch of white engineers for a design, who sends it off to a Chinese manufacturing plant, to be shipped to a white buying agent in pharmacies. Nobody in the process is explicitly racist, but neither are there any black people in the process to say, "Hey, would this work on me?" The problem comes when you say, "Hey, maybe there oughta be some black people involved in some of the processes", and people scream "reverse racism" and "affirmative action" and all the other buzzwords. They assert the harm to themselves, and they get listened to. But when black people say, "Well, I'm also being harmed, and in ways you're not seeing," the response is "well, that specific thing isn't my fault". The solutions are systemic. As you say, it's a chain: for a black person to get hired into that position everything has to have gone right for them. They didn't get failed by bad schools and they didn't get dismissed by their professors and they didn't get filtered out by a resume screener who didn't like their name and they didn't lose a job to somebody who hires people they know -- which just doesn't happen to include black people. So it's not easy to solve, and even the good solutions are slow. But one critical step is for each person to recognize that their local optimizations and local considerations contribute to the bigger problem, and think of ways that they can make things better rather than just say "not my problem".