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You can't just call everything you don't like a conspiracy theory. I have seen plenty of people on HN arguing for censorship of unflattering statistics to achi

You can't just call everything you don't like a conspiracy theory. I have seen plenty of people on HN arguing for censorship of unflattering statistics to achieve social justice goals. Why not just work on fixing the causes of the unflattering statistics in real life, rather than inventing a new framework to make ML models provide less accurate predictions? How do you know these manual override techniques aren't introducing inequity somewhere else in the model? Pareto optimality seems like it should be a very real concern here.

nl 5y ago
> I have seen plenty of people on HN arguing for censorship of unflattering statistics to achieve social justice goals. I've never seen this. Can you link some examples?
- chroem- 5y ago
  I invite you to spend lots of time digging through search results, which I myself decline to do since these conversations are rarely productive, however this frequently comes up whenever there's a thread discussing declining white demographics in the US. There is usually someone who says we should stop collecting these statistics altogether because it gives fuel to white nationalists. There are more examples beyond that, but those stick out in my mind because they were so blatant. And while people will surely respond to this post with "Ha, got him! He can't link to a specific example!", I don't believe it's a reasonable expectation of me to catalogue the thousands of comments I read on this website.
  - nl 5y ago
    I'm interested in those threads (I do a lot of work with demographics), but I've never noticed that. Searching for "US demographics collection nationalists" finds one result (your comment above - and presumably soon this one): https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=US%20demographic%20collection%20nationalists&sort=byPopularity&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... I tried "US data collection nationalists" but that only found one page of results none of which supported your assertion: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=US%20demographic%20collection%20nationalists&sort=byPopularity&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... Do you have a better set of search terms?
    - chroem- 5y ago
      HN's search feature leaves a lot to be desired when it comes to comments. Perhaps some variation of "replacement conspiracy theory".
      - joshuamorton 5y ago
        Fwiw, I couldn't find anything resembling what you're saying in the last 2 years under "great replacement" and similar terms.
      - nl 5y ago
        I've tried "white replacement data" and "white replacement stats" and "white replacement statistics" (without quote marks) with no luck in the last 2 years. The closest I've found is [1] which is a downvoted comment saying: > Census data indicate White population has shrunk since 2010 Why is this the first bullet point? Why a focus on White people? Why do you care HN? The only other place I see stuff like this is when it’s used as an alt-right talking point, or by white-supremacist mass-shooters who write about ‘The Great Replacement’ [1] So that isn't even arguing against collection of stats. But it's the closest I've been able to find. Perhaps you are misremembering? [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23735866 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23735866
        chroem- 5y ago
        Another extremely unsatisfying possibility is that those threads could have been flagged as flame wars and de-indexed. I'm not entirely sure what happened, but I do distinctly remember reading those posts and I'm willing to stand by that.

nl 5y ago

> I have seen plenty of people on HN arguing for censorship of unflattering statistics to achieve social justice goals. I've never seen this. Can you link some examples?

chroem- 5y ago
I invite you to spend lots of time digging through search results, which I myself decline to do since these conversations are rarely productive, however this frequently comes up whenever there's a thread discussing declining white demographics in the US. There is usually someone who says we should stop collecting these statistics altogether because it gives fuel to white nationalists. There are more examples beyond that, but those stick out in my mind because they were so blatant. And while people will surely respond to this post with "Ha, got him! He can't link to a specific example!", I don't believe it's a reasonable expectation of me to catalogue the thousands of comments I read on this website.
- nl 5y ago
  I'm interested in those threads (I do a lot of work with demographics), but I've never noticed that. Searching for "US demographics collection nationalists" finds one result (your comment above - and presumably soon this one): https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=US%20demographic%20collection%20nationalists&sort=byPopularity&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... I tried "US data collection nationalists" but that only found one page of results none of which supported your assertion: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=US%20demographic%20collection%20nationalists&sort=byPopularity&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... Do you have a better set of search terms?
  - chroem- 5y ago
    HN's search feature leaves a lot to be desired when it comes to comments. Perhaps some variation of "replacement conspiracy theory".
    - joshuamorton 5y ago
      Fwiw, I couldn't find anything resembling what you're saying in the last 2 years under "great replacement" and similar terms.
    - nl 5y ago
      I've tried "white replacement data" and "white replacement stats" and "white replacement statistics" (without quote marks) with no luck in the last 2 years. The closest I've found is [1] which is a downvoted comment saying: > Census data indicate White population has shrunk since 2010 Why is this the first bullet point? Why a focus on White people? Why do you care HN? The only other place I see stuff like this is when it’s used as an alt-right talking point, or by white-supremacist mass-shooters who write about ‘The Great Replacement’ [1] So that isn't even arguing against collection of stats. But it's the closest I've been able to find. Perhaps you are misremembering? [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23735866 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23735866
      - chroem- 5y ago
        Another extremely unsatisfying possibility is that those threads could have been flagged as flame wars and de-indexed. I'm not entirely sure what happened, but I do distinctly remember reading those posts and I'm willing to stand by that.