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> And darker coloured textiles are less visible on people with darker skin. Grass is green and bananas tend to be curved. The point isn't that people have dif

> And darker coloured textiles are less visible on people with darker skin. Grass is green and bananas tend to be curved. The point isn't that people have different skin. It's not even that this one common device works better for some people than others. It's that the practice of medicine, having grown up around this cheap and effective device, turns out to be discriminatory in ways that we wouldn't naively expect. That's worth talking about, because it's a problem that should be fixed. > apply Hanlon's razor when in doubt - it's not always malice like people often assume Nowhere in the article is "malice" alleged. You added that part yourself, precisely because the bias described has infected you too. Reflexively arguing that "black people get bad O2 readings" is an argument that shouldn't be made in journalism isn't helpful to anyone, most especially the patients needing better care.

oneplane 6y ago
My point wasn't to suggest that skin tones are the only thing in the world that aren't considered by all the people during all product design phases. It was more that we know that this is a problem in our bubble of communication, we know it just as much that we know that grass tends to be green (or yellow-ish when it doesn't rain for a while and the sun is out). It's more that having a higher quantity of a known problem doesn't make the problem go away, and neither does trying to find a single source or single instigator of a systemic problem. It's not a new problem either. If we take skin color and replace it with finger length for devices that require you to grip it, or with distance between the eyes for things that you look through, we have the same issue. In that regard this is just another facet of ergonomics in design. Even if we were to test for a lot of things in a lot of places in the supply chain you still can't catch everything.

oneplane 6y ago

My point wasn't to suggest that skin tones are the only thing in the world that aren't considered by all the people during all product design phases. It was more that we know that this is a problem in our bubble of communication, we know it just as much that we know that grass tends to be green (or yellow-ish when it doesn't rain for a while and the sun is out). It's more that having a higher quantity of a known problem doesn't make the problem go away, and neither does trying to find a single source or single instigator of a systemic problem. It's not a new problem either. If we take skin color and replace it with finger length for devices that require you to grip it, or with distance between the eyes for things that you look through, we have the same issue. In that regard this is just another facet of ergonomics in design. Even if we were to test for a lot of things in a lot of places in the supply chain you still can't catch everything.