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These algorithms are not human readable code. They are massively complex interconnected systems of many black box ML models. I don't understand what clarity peo

These algorithms are not human readable code. They are massively complex interconnected systems of many black box ML models. I don't understand what clarity people think releasing the "algorithms" will bring. In fact, describing ranking as a single algorithm is pretty misleading.

ocdtrekkie 6y ago
I also believe any algorithm that isn't human-readable should be banned. If it can't be understood, nobody can validate that it isn't racist, sexist, or slanted towards encouraging violence and harm. The fact that technology companies have been grossly negligent and irresponsible isn't a reason to not regulate them: It's proof regulation needs to be much, much stronger.
- drstewart 6y ago
  >If it can't be understood, nobody can validate that it isn't racist, sexist, or slanted towards encouraging violence and harm. This is quite a bizarre claim as there is famously an entire category of problems that are hard to solve but easy to verify: P vs NP
- Isinlor 6y ago
  Do you apply the same standard to people? Tell me, how did your brain come up with what you wrote? How do I validate that it isn't racist, sexist, or slanted towards encouraging violence and harm?
  - xemoka 6y ago
    By asking them. You can't just ask an algorithm, it must be designed to show its own work. Credibility is another problem...
    - ACow_Adonis 6y ago
      lol. sorry, but that reminds me of a skit by an Australian comedian: male guest: "now first of all, let me just start by saying I'm not racist..." female guest: "pfft..." host: "ah see you made a noise there, but a lot of people accuse him of being a racist, so I think it's very helpful to know that he actually isn't one..."
      - xemoka 6y ago
        Right, like I said, credibility is a different problem. But at this point, we don't even get a lie from them, we get nothing. At least a lie can be checked and examined. There's nothing available at all currently.
        vaidhy 6y ago
        We actually have a reasonable way to test for human biases in AI - perturb the input a bit and see how the AI responds - For e.g., change the name, change the gender etc. and we use them to measure if AI is fair. It is different question whether all AI can be subject to such tests. For e.g., how will you detect a human bias in a page ranking algorithm? but for where it matters, you can test them and we do test them.
        xemoka 6y ago
        Yes. True and fair. But how can we test the page rank algorithm “ourselves"? Who is "we" in the "we do test them"? Is the public even asking for 3rd party examinations by transparent/public organizations (or at least, publicly funded)? Seems like we only get to "test" against the live system, and third party examination seems relatively impossible. It seems like something with such far reaching and invasive results should be more accessible, at the very least.
    - hsbauauvhabzb 6y ago
      Why can’t you just test the algorithm? It’s not conclusive, but it’s also not worthless.
      - xemoka 6y ago
        Seems to me that’s a viable answer. How can we test an algorithm like Google’s ranking though? We can’t feed it consistent data like in a software test. It relies on too much information, and what we know about it indicates we can’t extract it out to test against it—except for results in the real world. Not to mention Facebook’s are even more difficult. Tangentially related, remember when you could use “View As” on your profile page to see what your profile looked like to others? It doesn’t work anymore, only works for Public and Yourself; you can no longer choose the person to view as. It’d be great to test these algorithms. We can’t. They need to be designed and instrumented so this is possible.
  - ocdtrekkie 6y ago
    Very few people have the ability to influence the success or failure of every business on the planet. Those that do are heavily scrutinized for racist or sexist behavior. (Sometimes they also don't get convicted anyways, but that's another matter.)
    - AnthonyMouse 6y ago
      > Very few people have the ability to influence the success or failure of every business on the planet. In other words the solution to this should be antitrust enforcement and decentralization of power.
- disgruntledphd2 6y ago
  > I also believe any algorithm that isn't human-readable should be banned. If it can't be understood, nobody can validate that it isn't racist, sexist, or slanted towards encouraging violence and harm. I'm not sure a human-readable algorithm exists for ranking all the web pages in the world based on natural language input. In fact, I'm pretty sure such an algorithm does not, and potentially cannot, exist given the absolute failure of all approaches towards NLP that weren't based on absolute masses of text data and complex models. Are you willing to make Google 10% as effective to achieve your goal of a human-readable algorithm?
  - ocdtrekkie 6y ago
    > Are you willing to make Google 10% as effective to achieve your goal of a human-readable algorithm? Absolutely. If it can't be done responsibly and ethically, perhaps it should not be done.
    - hooande 6y ago
      what % of people do you think would be willing to stop using search engines because they are unethical?
      - xemoka 6y ago
        To me, their response didn't seem to indicate that it should be directly decided by people. This is a consumer protection matter, and to stretch an analogy, like a list of ingredients on a consumable. Here we have these black boxes, and no list of ingredients, yet they drive and shape our world. A Person can't EVEN directly decide if they wanted to.
  - Barrin92 6y ago
    you don't need any NLP to rank webpages (in fact the entire innovation of Google was that they figured out a way to rank pages completely ignoring that fact). Pagerank works fundamentally by treating the web as a graph and prioritising results based on their connections, that is to say it ranks based on popularity and is agnostic about the content of the actual page. This generally has worked well. On the other hand, actually attempting to manipulate search results based on automated handling of content is what has given us countless of censorship debates or simply failure where even uncontroversial content is removed or downranked because it violated some sort of strange rule because it had a 'bad word' in it. On Facebook recently clothing ads for the disabled people were banned[1], because turns out the ML system only cared about the wheelchair, not the person in it. It's actually fairly straight-forward to build recommender systems on transparent, graph-based algorithms and it gives you the added advantage of not discriminating in strange ways. [1]https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/11/style/disabled-fashion-facebook-discrimination.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/11/style/disabled-fashion-fa...
- Jonanin 6y ago
  This is an incredibly naive perspective. I guess you want to ban search engines, self driving cars, automated filtering of lewd and abusive content (why do you think FB isn’t full of porn? It’s not a hand engineered algorithm), automatic speech recognition for the hearing impaired, and a vast swath of important technology I didn’t list. I don’t think you really understand the implications of what you’re asking for. Sorry - black boxes are here to stay. And they are immeasurably useful. I could spend hours listing important and crucial technologies that you want banned because you are scared of racism.
  - ocdtrekkie 6y ago
    I absolutely want to ban self-driving cars that behave in ways no human can explain or understand! The mere idea that anyone would think that should be legal is borderline insane. All you are doing here is convincing me that tech companies are just runaway trains with nobody at the controls!
    - cabalamat 6y ago
      > I absolutely want to ban self-driving cars that behave in ways no human can explain or understand! Can you explain or understand the algorithms humans use to drive cars?
      - Nowado 6y ago
        Screw that. Explain to me step by step how you walk.
      - askesum 6y ago
        Humans are held responsible if they cause harm to others. If a driver hits a pedestrian on purpose he is charged with murder. Who do you charge if a self-driving car behaves in this way?
        executive 6y ago
        only if caught
- Jonanin 6y ago
  If you look at the actual data, you will find that black box models are in fact responsible for preventing the majority of abusive content including hate speech and porn on social media platforms. Ban these models and you’d find your favorite social media platform is more abusive. Most of the racism and sexism you are concerned about comes from other humans.
- tantalor 6y ago
  > any algorithm that isn't human-readable should be banned There's existing a term for people with this view: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite
  - danielheath 6y ago
    You refer to the activists who successfully protected their quality of life by refusing to let someone else use technology to ruin it. An apt comparison.
    - TurkishPoptart 6y ago
      I'm sorry I have to tell you this, but they were not successful.
      - danielheath 6y ago
        The luddites obtained numerous concessions and retired comfortable. Not clear how that’s unsuccessful.
- yellow_postit 6y ago
  Explainable models do not preclude the systemic problems you highlight. Plenty of systems before the advent of non-explanatory ML models had those defects. One option is to define test and validation sets and encourage 3P validation, somewhat like how accreditation works in other contexts.
- visarga 6y ago
  Yeah, they can give you the architecture drawn as a nice mind map, list the hyper-parameters, but that's like knowing the algorithm of the compiler, it doesn't help detect a bad program. The question is what the model is learning, not how. What are the inputs and what is it learning to output.
zmmmmm 6y ago
As you say, explaining the intracicies of the algorithm is a fools errand. I guess it is more reasonable if you turn it around: these changes have drastic impact on businesses, so there is a duty to behave responsibly in administering them. If Google really has no idea what the impact of a change will be then it is fairly irresponsible to make that change given the real world harm it can cause. But I suspect in general it does have at least a reasonable idea what the effect of changes will be - that is why it is making them. So the more reasonable version of this is that they need to submit human interpretable descriptions of the effect of changes based on reasonable evidence and validation of their models.
- not2b 6y ago
  In many cases they (Google) don't know the impact of changes until they try deploying the changes, and there's ML in the picture, not just algorithms. As I understand it, they often run tests that expose the change to a limited subset of users first.
  - xg15 6y ago
    Yes, but they don't just do random stuff. They make changes with the intention to adjust the experience in certain ways, so making those intentions public is important.
- visarga 6y ago
  Monitoring search engine and social network ranking and filtering updates should be more efficient than complaining about biased parrots (language models). This is a tip to certain ethics researchers who are raising scandals about search bias, but not in the right place - go in the field, check the fucking feeds, leave your abstract ethical tower and measure the reality.
  - xg15 6y ago
    I'm sorry, but this post sounds pretty abstract itself. What exactly do you propose they should do?
philliphaydon 6y ago
If it’s ML that is doing all the work to display articles. Then ML has a long way to go.
- visarga 6y ago
  No, it's ML tasked with "user engagement" doing the work. Not ML in general.

ocdtrekkie 6y ago

I also believe any algorithm that isn't human-readable should be banned. If it can't be understood, nobody can validate that it isn't racist, sexist, or slanted towards encouraging violence and harm. The fact that technology companies have been grossly negligent and irresponsible isn't a reason to not regulate them: It's proof regulation needs to be much, much stronger.

drstewart 6y ago
>If it can't be understood, nobody can validate that it isn't racist, sexist, or slanted towards encouraging violence and harm. This is quite a bizarre claim as there is famously an entire category of problems that are hard to solve but easy to verify: P vs NP
Isinlor 6y ago
Do you apply the same standard to people? Tell me, how did your brain come up with what you wrote? How do I validate that it isn't racist, sexist, or slanted towards encouraging violence and harm?
- xemoka 6y ago
  By asking them. You can't just ask an algorithm, it must be designed to show its own work. Credibility is another problem...
  - ACow_Adonis 6y ago
    lol. sorry, but that reminds me of a skit by an Australian comedian: male guest: "now first of all, let me just start by saying I'm not racist..." female guest: "pfft..." host: "ah see you made a noise there, but a lot of people accuse him of being a racist, so I think it's very helpful to know that he actually isn't one..."
    - xemoka 6y ago
      Right, like I said, credibility is a different problem. But at this point, we don't even get a lie from them, we get nothing. At least a lie can be checked and examined. There's nothing available at all currently.
      - vaidhy 6y ago
        We actually have a reasonable way to test for human biases in AI - perturb the input a bit and see how the AI responds - For e.g., change the name, change the gender etc. and we use them to measure if AI is fair. It is different question whether all AI can be subject to such tests. For e.g., how will you detect a human bias in a page ranking algorithm? but for where it matters, you can test them and we do test them.
        xemoka 6y ago
        Yes. True and fair. But how can we test the page rank algorithm “ourselves"? Who is "we" in the "we do test them"? Is the public even asking for 3rd party examinations by transparent/public organizations (or at least, publicly funded)? Seems like we only get to "test" against the live system, and third party examination seems relatively impossible. It seems like something with such far reaching and invasive results should be more accessible, at the very least.
  - hsbauauvhabzb 6y ago
    Why can’t you just test the algorithm? It’s not conclusive, but it’s also not worthless.
    - xemoka 6y ago
      Seems to me that’s a viable answer. How can we test an algorithm like Google’s ranking though? We can’t feed it consistent data like in a software test. It relies on too much information, and what we know about it indicates we can’t extract it out to test against it—except for results in the real world. Not to mention Facebook’s are even more difficult. Tangentially related, remember when you could use “View As” on your profile page to see what your profile looked like to others? It doesn’t work anymore, only works for Public and Yourself; you can no longer choose the person to view as. It’d be great to test these algorithms. We can’t. They need to be designed and instrumented so this is possible.
- ocdtrekkie 6y ago
  Very few people have the ability to influence the success or failure of every business on the planet. Those that do are heavily scrutinized for racist or sexist behavior. (Sometimes they also don't get convicted anyways, but that's another matter.)
  - AnthonyMouse 6y ago
    > Very few people have the ability to influence the success or failure of every business on the planet. In other words the solution to this should be antitrust enforcement and decentralization of power.
disgruntledphd2 6y ago
> I also believe any algorithm that isn't human-readable should be banned. If it can't be understood, nobody can validate that it isn't racist, sexist, or slanted towards encouraging violence and harm. I'm not sure a human-readable algorithm exists for ranking all the web pages in the world based on natural language input. In fact, I'm pretty sure such an algorithm does not, and potentially cannot, exist given the absolute failure of all approaches towards NLP that weren't based on absolute masses of text data and complex models. Are you willing to make Google 10% as effective to achieve your goal of a human-readable algorithm?
- ocdtrekkie 6y ago
  > Are you willing to make Google 10% as effective to achieve your goal of a human-readable algorithm? Absolutely. If it can't be done responsibly and ethically, perhaps it should not be done.
  - hooande 6y ago
    what % of people do you think would be willing to stop using search engines because they are unethical?
    - xemoka 6y ago
      To me, their response didn't seem to indicate that it should be directly decided by people. This is a consumer protection matter, and to stretch an analogy, like a list of ingredients on a consumable. Here we have these black boxes, and no list of ingredients, yet they drive and shape our world. A Person can't EVEN directly decide if they wanted to.
- Barrin92 6y ago
  you don't need any NLP to rank webpages (in fact the entire innovation of Google was that they figured out a way to rank pages completely ignoring that fact). Pagerank works fundamentally by treating the web as a graph and prioritising results based on their connections, that is to say it ranks based on popularity and is agnostic about the content of the actual page. This generally has worked well. On the other hand, actually attempting to manipulate search results based on automated handling of content is what has given us countless of censorship debates or simply failure where even uncontroversial content is removed or downranked because it violated some sort of strange rule because it had a 'bad word' in it. On Facebook recently clothing ads for the disabled people were banned[1], because turns out the ML system only cared about the wheelchair, not the person in it. It's actually fairly straight-forward to build recommender systems on transparent, graph-based algorithms and it gives you the added advantage of not discriminating in strange ways. [1]https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/11/style/disabled-fashion-facebook-discrimination.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/11/style/disabled-fashion-fa...
Jonanin 6y ago
This is an incredibly naive perspective. I guess you want to ban search engines, self driving cars, automated filtering of lewd and abusive content (why do you think FB isn’t full of porn? It’s not a hand engineered algorithm), automatic speech recognition for the hearing impaired, and a vast swath of important technology I didn’t list. I don’t think you really understand the implications of what you’re asking for. Sorry - black boxes are here to stay. And they are immeasurably useful. I could spend hours listing important and crucial technologies that you want banned because you are scared of racism.
- ocdtrekkie 6y ago
  I absolutely want to ban self-driving cars that behave in ways no human can explain or understand! The mere idea that anyone would think that should be legal is borderline insane. All you are doing here is convincing me that tech companies are just runaway trains with nobody at the controls!
  - cabalamat 6y ago
    > I absolutely want to ban self-driving cars that behave in ways no human can explain or understand! Can you explain or understand the algorithms humans use to drive cars?
    - Nowado 6y ago
      Screw that. Explain to me step by step how you walk.
    - askesum 6y ago
      Humans are held responsible if they cause harm to others. If a driver hits a pedestrian on purpose he is charged with murder. Who do you charge if a self-driving car behaves in this way?
      - executive 6y ago
        only if caught
Jonanin 6y ago
If you look at the actual data, you will find that black box models are in fact responsible for preventing the majority of abusive content including hate speech and porn on social media platforms. Ban these models and you’d find your favorite social media platform is more abusive. Most of the racism and sexism you are concerned about comes from other humans.
tantalor 6y ago
> any algorithm that isn't human-readable should be banned There's existing a term for people with this view: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite
- danielheath 6y ago
  You refer to the activists who successfully protected their quality of life by refusing to let someone else use technology to ruin it. An apt comparison.
  - TurkishPoptart 6y ago
    I'm sorry I have to tell you this, but they were not successful.
    - danielheath 6y ago
      The luddites obtained numerous concessions and retired comfortable. Not clear how that’s unsuccessful.
yellow_postit 6y ago
Explainable models do not preclude the systemic problems you highlight. Plenty of systems before the advent of non-explanatory ML models had those defects. One option is to define test and validation sets and encourage 3P validation, somewhat like how accreditation works in other contexts.
visarga 6y ago
Yeah, they can give you the architecture drawn as a nice mind map, list the hyper-parameters, but that's like knowing the algorithm of the compiler, it doesn't help detect a bad program. The question is what the model is learning, not how. What are the inputs and what is it learning to output.

zmmmmm 6y ago

As you say, explaining the intracicies of the algorithm is a fools errand. I guess it is more reasonable if you turn it around: these changes have drastic impact on businesses, so there is a duty to behave responsibly in administering them. If Google really has no idea what the impact of a change will be then it is fairly irresponsible to make that change given the real world harm it can cause. But I suspect in general it does have at least a reasonable idea what the effect of changes will be - that is why it is making them. So the more reasonable version of this is that they need to submit human interpretable descriptions of the effect of changes based on reasonable evidence and validation of their models.

not2b 6y ago
In many cases they (Google) don't know the impact of changes until they try deploying the changes, and there's ML in the picture, not just algorithms. As I understand it, they often run tests that expose the change to a limited subset of users first.
- xg15 6y ago
  Yes, but they don't just do random stuff. They make changes with the intention to adjust the experience in certain ways, so making those intentions public is important.
visarga 6y ago
Monitoring search engine and social network ranking and filtering updates should be more efficient than complaining about biased parrots (language models). This is a tip to certain ethics researchers who are raising scandals about search bias, but not in the right place - go in the field, check the fucking feeds, leave your abstract ethical tower and measure the reality.
- xg15 6y ago
  I'm sorry, but this post sounds pretty abstract itself. What exactly do you propose they should do?

philliphaydon 6y ago

If it’s ML that is doing all the work to display articles. Then ML has a long way to go.

visarga 6y ago
No, it's ML tasked with "user engagement" doing the work. Not ML in general.