6 ms·

This reminds me of a favorite tweet from 2013: "Then Google Maps was like, 'turn right on Malcolm Ten Boulevard' and I knew there were no black engineers workin

This reminds me of a favorite tweet from 2013: "Then Google Maps was like, 'turn right on Malcolm Ten Boulevard' and I knew there were no black engineers working there" -- https://twitter.com/alliebland/status/402990270402543616 https://twitter.com/alliebland/status/402990270402543616 Facebook, like a lot of tech companies, has long had problems with diversity in engineering. Here's an article from April that discusses specific incidents and the broader background: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/04/06/facebook-discrimination-hiring-bias/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/04/06/faceboo...

dd444fgdfg 5y ago
google maps is made in Australia, and the diversity there is different
oreilles 5y ago
This isn't a problem with diversity. Everybody knows how to pronounce Malcom X. And it's not like just because a google engineer was black that he was like "oh, let's try and see if Malcom X is pronounced correctly because he's black and I'm black too". This only happens in white people's brain.
- sinyug 5y ago
  > This only happens in white people's brain. 'Eleven Jinping': Indian TV fires anchor over blooper.[1] [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-29274792 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-29274792
  - travisporter 5y ago
    To play devil advocate, maybe the station fired her for ignorance of current events.
    - sinyug 5y ago
      > maybe the station fired her for ignorance of current events. That would be a valid reason, but I suspect a more culturally appropriate one: loss of reputation. We are sensitive to that. My point was this isn't something that only goes on in 'white' brains but more of a cultural issue. Most people in the West are incapable of pronouncing Asian names. I don't see people making a big issue out of it.
      - atkailash 5y ago
        If you don’t speak the language of course you’re going to mess up names. But having the self awareness to ask before butchering it, or asking to be corrected, is a human issue in general not specific to any particular heritage
- tcmart14 5y ago
  I don't know if I 100% align up with how you stated it, but yea, its a matter of training data set. I don't think these companies have published their training data set. But thinking back on the issue with asians and facial recognition on Apple's face ID. If they just choose 100 people at random, based off US statistics, 5-6 of those 100 people would have been Asian. And that reflects the 5.7 percent of the population is Asian. And we probably all agree 5-6 people is not a sufficient data set, but picking 100 people at random would be a pretty easy assumption to make for making a data set. So yea, I think it is an issue with generating a data set and not hitting a sufficient amount of test cases. Because in this instance, asians would be an edge case where creating a small data set to train an algorithm on with a group with a lower representation in the population.
  - JCharante 5y ago
    I wonder what the datasets of companies like Xiaomi look like. FaceID always worked for me, so it seems like it works for non-asian faces.
    - tcmart14 5y ago
      Maybe they took more caution to their data set. I think the only way we would know is if they publish their sets or how they built them. But I was just highlighting maybe one possible case that Apple could have generated their training set, just grab 100 people in America at random.
- jessaustin 5y ago
  In what universe is "Ten" a more common pronunciation of "X" than "X"? You might have an argument for "II" or "III", but I'll be shocked if any street in USA is named after the tenth generation of really unimaginative namers.
  - handmodel 5y ago
    Do you think Google is having someone go through the tens of thousands of street names? Or do you think they had a team (on a completely different project or perhaps company) write a text to speech function that wasn't well suited for directions. Streets have lots of numbers after all. People frequently have numbers in their name.
    - jessaustin 5y ago
      I could see that for Google Maps v1.0. I think we're past that point now. There's no reason they should still be using libraries suited to parsing the names of forgotten European monarchs.
      - SllX 5y ago
        They’re neither forgotten, unused, nor is it a nomenclature used exclusively by Royals; nor are all the Royals that use this fashion dead or out of power.
  - scrollaway 5y ago
    "(name) (Roman numeral)" is a much more commong occurence than "(name) (Single letter spelled out)". So to answer your question, this one. This universe. And no, nobody "programmed this". I don't know how anyone of decent technical competence can think that. The workaround has likely been hardcoded in some way, if anything. How can you possibly think that someone at google decided it would be funny to program, on purpose, a wrong pronunciation of Malcolm X, and even more so SOMEHOW NOT GET CAUGHT. By the way, there are an incredibly large amount of streets in the US alone, so no it would not be surprising. Here in Europe we have kings going up into the twenties of their name, and those ML models have to pronounce those too. I just... I just fucking can't, with comments like yours, anymore.
- elmomle 5y ago
  The implication is that a black person would be more likely to recognize the inherent flaw in automatically interpreting "X" as "10", and in all honestly that's probably true. It isn't a matter of testing, it's a matter of having people with a diverse set of cultural perspectives in the room when decisions like that are made to begin with.
  - giancarlostoro 5y ago
    Diversity doesnt guarantee you automatically catch or account for edge cases. As a minority I am disturbed by some of the odd takes people have about diversity. Theres thousands upon thousands of roads. Unless you have a QA team test directions to every road in the country you wont ever catch the issue with a road named Malcom X. You don’t even have to be ‘diverse’ to know who that is.
    - wpietri 5y ago
      It doesn't guarantee it, but it helps. I personally have gotten bugs fixed at Google. How? Because I, a white man, spotted a bug, cared about it, and talked to white men of my acquaintance at Google who had enough power to get things done. How did I know them? From other tech companies created, run, and majority staffed by other white men. Why am I in these networks at all? Well, my dad was a software developer and he introduced me early on. How did he get his start? His dad, an insurance company exec, brought him in to deal with this newfangled computer thing they had just gotten. That was in Milwaukee in the mid-1960s. I promise you that although Milwaukee had a significant black population, exactly zero of them were insurance company executives in the mid-1960s. So what Allie Bland knew when she wrote her tweet was that she did not have any connection to Google where she might be able to get a to-her glaringly obvious pronunciation issue fixed. That in her estimation no black person did. And I see no reason to think she was wrong.
- wpietri 5y ago
  You realize that the person I'm quoting isn't white, right? Let's separate the general case from the specific. Generally, we know that representation in the people who make things changes what they make. This is obvious and undeniable. For example, look at ASCII vs Unicode. The Chinese invented movable type 500 years before Gutenberg, so it's not like the idea of printing non-roman characters was novel. In the age of telegraphy, Europeans developed encodings that included umlauts and accents; by 1851 they were merged into International Morse Code. So why in 1963 was ASCII codified without any of that? And why did that become the dominant standard for an extended period? Because it was mainly Americans in the rooms where the technology was being created. Similarly, we know that standard color films were developed by white people to represent white people well: https://www.vox.com/2015/9/18/9348821/photography-race-bias https://www.vox.com/2015/9/18/9348821/photography-race-bias And we all know how this happens. It's the same reason a lot of open-source software is good for a developer audience, not an end-user one: making things means iterating on them until they're good enough for the people involved. That's the general case, so let's return to the specific case. If you want to prove that ML systems doing racist stuff has nothing to do with who made it, then you can't just handwave it away. You have to show why that specific project was set up so carefully and so well that it would avoid the natural pitfalls of any technology project. And then despite that it went on to do racist stuff. For reasons that you'd then have to explain.
  - darepublic 5y ago
    Considering the adversarial attacks that image recognition systems are vulnerable to, perhaps even a well trained system could be induced to produce inappropriate results of one sort or another. Perhaps the training set and algorithm for the model should just be publicly available so that people can scrutinize the data and figure out incrementally how to avoid most biases or guffaws to a generally accepted level.
sinyug 5y ago
> Facebook, like a lot of tech companies, has long had problems with diversity in engineering. If that is the case, why is it that Google voice nav routinely butchers the names of places and roads in India in spite of having thousands of Indian engineers on staff? Could we blame the intractability of the problem, or just plain old incompetence, before we blame every single problem in the world on racism and lack of 'diversity'?
- atkailash 5y ago
  There’s a lot of streets in my state that it gets wrong too. If it was biased toward English or “White” names shouldn’t it pronounce those sufficiently? It seems like cherry picking to say “hey it pronounced this wrong, it’s a racist system” when it isn’t even getting the supposed counter examples correct
- ummonk 5y ago
  Another example: Apple Maps pronounces “Jai Ho” as “high hoe”. Apparently Apple has too many Latino engineers and not enough Indian engineers?
  - IncRnd 5y ago
    Maybe, but in the particular case you mentioned there is a specific word, "jai", that is pronounced as "high". See Jai Alai, which has been absorbed into English.
- esyir 5y ago
  Strong agreement here. The impulse to attribute any mishap on anything race-adjacent to racism is one of the most destructive memes at the moment. It forces a worldview where malice is the default assumption and encourages the "enemies all around us" mindset.
- wpietri 5y ago
  Given that the goal of racism is to structure society, and given how well that succeeded in America, I don't think it's unreasonable to ask whether it's at play in pretty much any situation where we see racially biased outcomes. But it is an excellent question why Google Maps is still terrible at Indian place names even though they have plenty of people internally who not only could help, but would be delighted to. The answer to that will be essentially sociological. If you think that answer in no way includes structural inequity despite it being pervasive in America since its founding, you will have to explain how you think Google managed to eliminate that in the Maps division and then managed to re-introduce some sort of structure that leaves a wealth of internal knowledge untapped.
IncRnd 5y ago
Your comment implies black engineers will check that Malcom X Boulevard is pronounced correctly. That's awfully specious.
- jazzyjackson 5y ago
  Alternatively it just implies white engineers never have their GPS taking them through Harlem.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - zizee 5y ago
    Yes, all engineers are white </sarcasm>. Or how about this one: Yes, all black engineers on the maps team live in New York. Truth is that it is just an example one of the thousands of edge-cases that exist in these types of complex products, and some of them will look like they have some sinister basis.
  - jpollock 5y ago
    Or that Google Maps is primarily developed in Australia for a worldwide market.
    - User23 5y ago
      Did the geo team get moved from Seattle?
- wpietri 5y ago
  It really doesn't. There are more things, Horatio.
throwcommonsns 5y ago
This is a contrarian take that may get me downvoted and unfairly labeled, but I encourage critical thinking instead: I've struggled with people telling me that these FAANG companies have "diversity problems," as a person of color myself. A majority of software engineers are female and male immigrants from East Asia and South Asia. These population centers are some of the most diverse regions of the world. The engineers who have been hired by preparing for and passing these companies' selective merit based coding tests had to overcome adverse conditions in their home countries as well, including extreme poverty, starvation, and totalitarian regimes. Why do they not count toward diversity, to some white and white-adjacent critics? What message are we sending to people who are ethnic minorities from certain groups who earned their spots through merit and have also been targeted in recent newsworthy attacks, just as others have, when we make these kinds of accusations? What does a non problematic ethnic composition look like? What are these companies doing right toward some minority groups and wrong towards others?
- strken 5y ago
  The short answer is that tech companies run diversity programs for three reasons: they believe in righting wrongs, they don't want to be sued for biased hiring practices, and they don't want bad PR. All three require under-represented minorities. Turning it back on you, what should the point of a diversity program be? What's meant to be achieved outside those three goals?
  - throwcommonsns 5y ago
    While I certainly understand bad PR (a surprising number of people lack critical thinking skills), what is wrong or biased about hiring for coding positions based on merit-based performance on an objective coding test? Anybody regardless of background or group membership that passes will be hired, meaning it is fair and unbiased, by definition -- that is the diversity program, and if there is some lack of objectivity, that is what needs to be addressed. If that is not the case, then yes, I agree with you, the hiring process would be biased.
    - 5y ago
root_axis 5y ago
As others noted, just because someone is black doesn't mean that they would have caught this. The whole point of ML is to adapt to what is effectively an unbounded set of inputs, pretty much by definition there will be cases where even a team of 100% black people will train a model that, given the correct input, will fail in ways that particularly affect black people.
zozbot234 5y ago
> Then Google Maps was like, 'turn right on Malcolm Ten Boulevard' and I knew there were no black engineers working there Silly Google TTS, the proper pronunciation is obviously "Malcolm the Tenth" there.

dd444fgdfg 5y ago

google maps is made in Australia, and the diversity there is different

oreilles 5y ago

This isn't a problem with diversity. Everybody knows how to pronounce Malcom X. And it's not like just because a google engineer was black that he was like "oh, let's try and see if Malcom X is pronounced correctly because he's black and I'm black too". This only happens in white people's brain.

sinyug 5y ago
> This only happens in white people's brain. 'Eleven Jinping': Indian TV fires anchor over blooper.[1] [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-29274792 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-29274792
- travisporter 5y ago
  To play devil advocate, maybe the station fired her for ignorance of current events.
  - sinyug 5y ago
    > maybe the station fired her for ignorance of current events. That would be a valid reason, but I suspect a more culturally appropriate one: loss of reputation. We are sensitive to that. My point was this isn't something that only goes on in 'white' brains but more of a cultural issue. Most people in the West are incapable of pronouncing Asian names. I don't see people making a big issue out of it.
    - atkailash 5y ago
      If you don’t speak the language of course you’re going to mess up names. But having the self awareness to ask before butchering it, or asking to be corrected, is a human issue in general not specific to any particular heritage
tcmart14 5y ago
I don't know if I 100% align up with how you stated it, but yea, its a matter of training data set. I don't think these companies have published their training data set. But thinking back on the issue with asians and facial recognition on Apple's face ID. If they just choose 100 people at random, based off US statistics, 5-6 of those 100 people would have been Asian. And that reflects the 5.7 percent of the population is Asian. And we probably all agree 5-6 people is not a sufficient data set, but picking 100 people at random would be a pretty easy assumption to make for making a data set. So yea, I think it is an issue with generating a data set and not hitting a sufficient amount of test cases. Because in this instance, asians would be an edge case where creating a small data set to train an algorithm on with a group with a lower representation in the population.
- JCharante 5y ago
  I wonder what the datasets of companies like Xiaomi look like. FaceID always worked for me, so it seems like it works for non-asian faces.
  - tcmart14 5y ago
    Maybe they took more caution to their data set. I think the only way we would know is if they publish their sets or how they built them. But I was just highlighting maybe one possible case that Apple could have generated their training set, just grab 100 people in America at random.
jessaustin 5y ago
In what universe is "Ten" a more common pronunciation of "X" than "X"? You might have an argument for "II" or "III", but I'll be shocked if any street in USA is named after the tenth generation of really unimaginative namers.
- handmodel 5y ago
  Do you think Google is having someone go through the tens of thousands of street names? Or do you think they had a team (on a completely different project or perhaps company) write a text to speech function that wasn't well suited for directions. Streets have lots of numbers after all. People frequently have numbers in their name.
  - jessaustin 5y ago
    I could see that for Google Maps v1.0. I think we're past that point now. There's no reason they should still be using libraries suited to parsing the names of forgotten European monarchs.
    - SllX 5y ago
      They’re neither forgotten, unused, nor is it a nomenclature used exclusively by Royals; nor are all the Royals that use this fashion dead or out of power.
- scrollaway 5y ago
  "(name) (Roman numeral)" is a much more commong occurence than "(name) (Single letter spelled out)". So to answer your question, this one. This universe. And no, nobody "programmed this". I don't know how anyone of decent technical competence can think that. The workaround has likely been hardcoded in some way, if anything. How can you possibly think that someone at google decided it would be funny to program, on purpose, a wrong pronunciation of Malcolm X, and even more so SOMEHOW NOT GET CAUGHT. By the way, there are an incredibly large amount of streets in the US alone, so no it would not be surprising. Here in Europe we have kings going up into the twenties of their name, and those ML models have to pronounce those too. I just... I just fucking can't, with comments like yours, anymore.
elmomle 5y ago
The implication is that a black person would be more likely to recognize the inherent flaw in automatically interpreting "X" as "10", and in all honestly that's probably true. It isn't a matter of testing, it's a matter of having people with a diverse set of cultural perspectives in the room when decisions like that are made to begin with.
- giancarlostoro 5y ago
  Diversity doesnt guarantee you automatically catch or account for edge cases. As a minority I am disturbed by some of the odd takes people have about diversity. Theres thousands upon thousands of roads. Unless you have a QA team test directions to every road in the country you wont ever catch the issue with a road named Malcom X. You don’t even have to be ‘diverse’ to know who that is.
  - wpietri 5y ago
    It doesn't guarantee it, but it helps. I personally have gotten bugs fixed at Google. How? Because I, a white man, spotted a bug, cared about it, and talked to white men of my acquaintance at Google who had enough power to get things done. How did I know them? From other tech companies created, run, and majority staffed by other white men. Why am I in these networks at all? Well, my dad was a software developer and he introduced me early on. How did he get his start? His dad, an insurance company exec, brought him in to deal with this newfangled computer thing they had just gotten. That was in Milwaukee in the mid-1960s. I promise you that although Milwaukee had a significant black population, exactly zero of them were insurance company executives in the mid-1960s. So what Allie Bland knew when she wrote her tweet was that she did not have any connection to Google where she might be able to get a to-her glaringly obvious pronunciation issue fixed. That in her estimation no black person did. And I see no reason to think she was wrong.
wpietri 5y ago
You realize that the person I'm quoting isn't white, right? Let's separate the general case from the specific. Generally, we know that representation in the people who make things changes what they make. This is obvious and undeniable. For example, look at ASCII vs Unicode. The Chinese invented movable type 500 years before Gutenberg, so it's not like the idea of printing non-roman characters was novel. In the age of telegraphy, Europeans developed encodings that included umlauts and accents; by 1851 they were merged into International Morse Code. So why in 1963 was ASCII codified without any of that? And why did that become the dominant standard for an extended period? Because it was mainly Americans in the rooms where the technology was being created. Similarly, we know that standard color films were developed by white people to represent white people well: https://www.vox.com/2015/9/18/9348821/photography-race-bias https://www.vox.com/2015/9/18/9348821/photography-race-bias And we all know how this happens. It's the same reason a lot of open-source software is good for a developer audience, not an end-user one: making things means iterating on them until they're good enough for the people involved. That's the general case, so let's return to the specific case. If you want to prove that ML systems doing racist stuff has nothing to do with who made it, then you can't just handwave it away. You have to show why that specific project was set up so carefully and so well that it would avoid the natural pitfalls of any technology project. And then despite that it went on to do racist stuff. For reasons that you'd then have to explain.
- darepublic 5y ago
  Considering the adversarial attacks that image recognition systems are vulnerable to, perhaps even a well trained system could be induced to produce inappropriate results of one sort or another. Perhaps the training set and algorithm for the model should just be publicly available so that people can scrutinize the data and figure out incrementally how to avoid most biases or guffaws to a generally accepted level.

sinyug 5y ago

> Facebook, like a lot of tech companies, has long had problems with diversity in engineering. If that is the case, why is it that Google voice nav routinely butchers the names of places and roads in India in spite of having thousands of Indian engineers on staff? Could we blame the intractability of the problem, or just plain old incompetence, before we blame every single problem in the world on racism and lack of 'diversity'?

atkailash 5y ago
There’s a lot of streets in my state that it gets wrong too. If it was biased toward English or “White” names shouldn’t it pronounce those sufficiently? It seems like cherry picking to say “hey it pronounced this wrong, it’s a racist system” when it isn’t even getting the supposed counter examples correct
ummonk 5y ago
Another example: Apple Maps pronounces “Jai Ho” as “high hoe”. Apparently Apple has too many Latino engineers and not enough Indian engineers?
- IncRnd 5y ago
  Maybe, but in the particular case you mentioned there is a specific word, "jai", that is pronounced as "high". See Jai Alai, which has been absorbed into English.
esyir 5y ago
Strong agreement here. The impulse to attribute any mishap on anything race-adjacent to racism is one of the most destructive memes at the moment. It forces a worldview where malice is the default assumption and encourages the "enemies all around us" mindset.
wpietri 5y ago
Given that the goal of racism is to structure society, and given how well that succeeded in America, I don't think it's unreasonable to ask whether it's at play in pretty much any situation where we see racially biased outcomes. But it is an excellent question why Google Maps is still terrible at Indian place names even though they have plenty of people internally who not only could help, but would be delighted to. The answer to that will be essentially sociological. If you think that answer in no way includes structural inequity despite it being pervasive in America since its founding, you will have to explain how you think Google managed to eliminate that in the Maps division and then managed to re-introduce some sort of structure that leaves a wealth of internal knowledge untapped.

IncRnd 5y ago

Your comment implies black engineers will check that Malcom X Boulevard is pronounced correctly. That's awfully specious.

jazzyjackson 5y ago
Alternatively it just implies white engineers never have their GPS taking them through Harlem.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- zizee 5y ago
  Yes, all engineers are white </sarcasm>. Or how about this one: Yes, all black engineers on the maps team live in New York. Truth is that it is just an example one of the thousands of edge-cases that exist in these types of complex products, and some of them will look like they have some sinister basis.
- jpollock 5y ago
  Or that Google Maps is primarily developed in Australia for a worldwide market.
  - User23 5y ago
    Did the geo team get moved from Seattle?
wpietri 5y ago
It really doesn't. There are more things, Horatio.

throwcommonsns 5y ago

This is a contrarian take that may get me downvoted and unfairly labeled, but I encourage critical thinking instead: I've struggled with people telling me that these FAANG companies have "diversity problems," as a person of color myself. A majority of software engineers are female and male immigrants from East Asia and South Asia. These population centers are some of the most diverse regions of the world. The engineers who have been hired by preparing for and passing these companies' selective merit based coding tests had to overcome adverse conditions in their home countries as well, including extreme poverty, starvation, and totalitarian regimes. Why do they not count toward diversity, to some white and white-adjacent critics? What message are we sending to people who are ethnic minorities from certain groups who earned their spots through merit and have also been targeted in recent newsworthy attacks, just as others have, when we make these kinds of accusations? What does a non problematic ethnic composition look like? What are these companies doing right toward some minority groups and wrong towards others?

strken 5y ago
The short answer is that tech companies run diversity programs for three reasons: they believe in righting wrongs, they don't want to be sued for biased hiring practices, and they don't want bad PR. All three require under-represented minorities. Turning it back on you, what should the point of a diversity program be? What's meant to be achieved outside those three goals?
- throwcommonsns 5y ago
  While I certainly understand bad PR (a surprising number of people lack critical thinking skills), what is wrong or biased about hiring for coding positions based on merit-based performance on an objective coding test? Anybody regardless of background or group membership that passes will be hired, meaning it is fair and unbiased, by definition -- that is the diversity program, and if there is some lack of objectivity, that is what needs to be addressed. If that is not the case, then yes, I agree with you, the hiring process would be biased.
  - 5y ago

root_axis 5y ago

As others noted, just because someone is black doesn't mean that they would have caught this. The whole point of ML is to adapt to what is effectively an unbounded set of inputs, pretty much by definition there will be cases where even a team of 100% black people will train a model that, given the correct input, will fail in ways that particularly affect black people.

zozbot234 5y ago

> Then Google Maps was like, 'turn right on Malcolm Ten Boulevard' and I knew there were no black engineers working there Silly Google TTS, the proper pronunciation is obviously "Malcolm the Tenth" there.