4 ms·

> it's not racist, it's just Hanlon’s razor is no excuse for discrimination. In fact it’s the most common excuse, but it is never acceptable.

• x3n0ph3n3 6y ago
  No one is saying it's an excuse or acceptable, it's just an explanation for why the state of things is the way it is. People are too lazy or incompetent to fix software. Calling it racism is to cheapen the label into meaninglessness.
• judge2020 6y ago
  I'm not saying it is. If Apple spun a wheel of all english words with the commitment to ban the one it landed on, and it was 'asian', it wouldn't be racist, but as you say it wouldn't be acceptable - both in terms of how they did it and the outcome.
• dnautics 6y ago
  as an asian american, uh... I guess my feeling is that this isn't meaningfully discrimination. It's both an understandable mistake, and unacceptable only when not fixed with celerity.
  • Brian_K_White 6y ago
    I don't consider it an understandable or excusable mistake. Not that they failed to specially protect Asians when they made their content filter, that they even made a content filter in the first place. Because this kind of error is not only predictable and inevitable, it's not even fixable. Even now, even if someone at Apple directs this to be fixed, the fix can only possibly be stupid, and the same error will still happen to countless other benign searches and content. Even actual humans get this wrong. Since 2018 when they introduced the filter, it was known for blocking searches for "safe sex" or anything with sex in the string, while allowing searches to join terrorist organizations. The fundamental problem is that words are not deeds nor intents. Words, any words, are just words and have no good or bad value. Even good people doing good things still have to use words that refer to bad things. In order to say "War is Hell", you have to say both war and hell. It's patently insane to think there is some way around such a basic thing. If you wanted to respond to my arguement and say yeah but what about "Japanese school girl"? You had to say "Japanese school girl" and the discussion would be impossible or a farce if both our comments kept getting blocked, or even if just the "bad" parts were.
    • deleted 6y ago
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    • dnautics 6y ago
      You just explained the core problem, so definitionally at least you must agree that it is understandable. I guess we'll have to agree to disagree that it's acceptable. It seems you're coming from a core premise that apple shouldn't block anything, ever, so yeah, you will fundamentally never find any blocking to be acceptable. I can sympathize with that premise, as I myself don't personally like blocking. However, I think it's apple's right to do so, and given that, I think the "racial" aspect of the blocking is excusable (if they fix it quickly).
      • Brian_K_White 6y ago
        My premise is not that I want it or don't want it. It's that it's fundamentally impossible and so it's irrelevant whether anyone likes it or not, and that this makes it non-sensical to even try. I don't mean to say it's pointless to try to solve problems. I mean to say if there is a problem, no good solutions to it lie in that direction. Someone non-ignorant somewhere should have said, and continue to say every time an ignorant parent or school board tries to ask for the non-sensical and ultimately counter-productive, that it is non-sensical and counter-productive. Of course this wish is itself a fantasy, impossible and thus non-sensical to expect, which is why I don't actually expect it.
• eznzt 6y ago
  > Hanlon’s razor is no excuse for discrimination. In fact it’s the most common excuse No it is not.