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Assuming this is sarcasm, you realize Google has a massive userbase all over the globe from all walks of life, right? Does it make business sense to accidentall

Assuming this is sarcasm, you realize Google has a massive userbase all over the globe from all walks of life, right? Does it make business sense to accidentally exclude certain people? Or ethical sense?

fyd6gexygsydy 5y ago
I don't understand this line of reasoning since it assumes inclusion training actually promotes inclusion. My experience has been that it usually means racial/gender intersectionalism training that everyone gets to swallow regardless of culture or belief because it's what white people in the us tech industry are passionate about right now.
- deanCommie 5y ago
  I mean yeah if your culture or belief involves not treating people of different races or genders equitably, then the goal of the training isn't to change your mind. Swallow, follow, or get out of the way.
- ygjb 5y ago
  Yes. The expectation isn't that you actually adopt or accept the values. The expectation is that you know that if you fail to do so (and you lack sufficient privilege in your organization), then you will be held accountable. Practically speaking "woke" people would prefer to work with people who share values, but most of us will settle for people who can at least emulate a decent human being while interacting with other people at work.
  - beaconstudios 5y ago
    Being "woke" goes beyond just being a decent person though, because most people's metric for decency is interpersonal decency. My understanding is that the sociological concepts that go into "wokeness" include intersectional analysis, microaggression theory, critical theory, 3rd wave feminism, gender theory etc. I think these ideas are mostly good (with the exception of microaggression theory), but they go way beyond "just be decent to other people" and into the territory of deep academic and systemic mindsets that are far from the default in the individualist West (and especially the US). I mean damn, half these ideas are French, and France is pretty culturally different from the US, French academia even moreso. For example: not being racist on an individual level is pretty intuitive and obvious to most people, and mostly comes down to being a decent human being. Being institutionally anti-racist is a totally different thing, and way more involving, because you're not just not being a dick to people of a different race; you're trying to counteract systemic disadvantages.
    - _3u10 5y ago
      It also presupposes such systemic disadvantages exist. Not sure why so many people from other countries immigrate to places that are so obviously systemically biased against them. Or why when institutions such as Harvard actually do systemically discriminate against Asians it’s routinely ignored by the woke crowd. Can anyone explain to me why Asians despite having some of the highest scores and GPAs have the lowest rate of admissions to some of the wokest institutions in America? Why is the difference in incarceration rate between men and women or the police shooting rate not presented as systemic discrimination?
      - judge2020 5y ago
        > It also presupposes such systemic disadvantages exist. But it would be incorrect to presuppose that absolutely none exist, which is why they have a culture of reviewing and examining such a possibility.
        _3u10 5y ago
        Of course. I think the vast vast majority of people abhor racism and discrimination in the US and Canada yet our countries are described by the woke as bastions of this kind of thought when the vast majority of the evidence points to it being two of the most welcoming and accepting of differences.
        cto_of_antifa 5y ago
        Even if true, that's definitionally unrelated to whether or not systemix racism exists or not. It just means that you've personally defined some ambiguous bar of entry for whether or not you think marginalized voices require honest thought.
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - eru 5y ago
        > Can anyone explain to me why Asians despite having some of the highest scores and GPAs have the lowest rate of admissions to some of the wokest institutions in America? You mean they have some of the lowest rates of admission when corrected for GPA? Or lowest rates in some absolute sense? > Why is the difference in incarceration rate between men and women or the police shooting rate not presented as systemic discrimination? https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AcceptableTargets https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AcceptableTarget...
b112 5y ago
Nothing is all inclusive. Nothing.
- oriki 5y ago
  Is your argument here supposed to be "Nothing is all inclusive, therefore we shouldn't even bother trying"? If so, I'd argue that's a lot more ridiculous than a review process designed to help catch major inclusivity issues before they become problems.
- mikepurvis 5y ago
  Sure, but that's not a reason to not even ask the question. Maybe not every DI initiative turns out to be helpful or productive, but as someone who's privileged on pretty much every axis there is, I'd be grateful for the kind of internal support system that could give me an early warning sign for "hey, this design decision that made sense to you and your team has the potential to alienate user base X and there's a real possibility that if we launch in this state it's going to explode into a minor Twitter scandal."
  - brailsafe 5y ago
    Isn't this just called user testing? Also this is in the context of a fucking dataset. If data needs to go through DI in case something blows up on Twitter, I guess it's sad state we're in.
    - sumeno 5y ago
      If, for example, the dataset only contains white faces and is intended to train facial recognition then yes, it needs to go through some kind of DI review.
      - brailsafe 5y ago
        Wouldn't this review be done on the data collection and planning side, rather than at point of publishing though? Surely you can publish datasets of just white faces or just black faces if during planning that's what you intended to do for some reason?
brailsafe 5y ago
Does it make sense to serve a dataset without approval that it's inclusive enough? Yes, because that's typically how things in the world work.
- geofft 5y ago
  I don't understand this argument. It's okay for things to be a certain way, because things are typically that way? Apart from the circular reasoning, the practical impact is that you should also drop privacy review because corporations steal your data, security review because everyone gets hacked, readability review because there's a lot of legacy code, etc.
tester756 5y ago
>accidentally exclude certain people? e.g how? could you provide some examples e.g two? there's a lot of talk about this stuff when it comes to MAGMA, yet docs still use some auto-generated translations which suck.
- sumeno 5y ago
  https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2020/racial-discrimination-in-face-recognition-technology/ https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2020/racial-discriminatio... https://futurism.com/delphi-ai-ethics-racist https://futurism.com/delphi-ai-ethics-racist https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/25/lens/sarah-lewis-racial-bias-photography.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/25/lens/sarah-lewis-racial-b...
  - tester756 5y ago
    It seems like this kind of problems occur mostly within some specific areas, meanwhile OP seems to suggest that this kind of review should be applied for everything.
    - ygjb 5y ago
      From a practical business perspective, performing a diversity and inclusiveness review is a risk management activity. It doesn't really matter if the business strongly supports or opposes a particular set of diversity and inclusiveness goals from a fiduciary perspective, but it sure does matter if the business keeps losing money or missing targets because it is embroiled in scandals, paying out settlements to staff that have suffered discrimination, or being hauled in front of regulators to air their dirty laundry. One would hope that being a decent place to work, and treating people fairly would be enough of an incentive, but for everyone else, there are risk management processes designed to have repeatable processes to identify business risks, escalate them to leadership, and presumably either accept the risk, or steer the project towards a solution that has a more acceptable risk profile.
    - sumeno 5y ago
      Not every kind of review is applicable for every single launch, but diversity and inclusion is applicable to more than just AI (in general, I don't know what the review process or requirements are for D&I)
killerstorm 5y ago
Businesses exclude people all the time. E.g. many videos are geoblocked, and there's no way to view or purchase them in some countries. Here are some other examples: I can use free version of Google Colab from Ukraine, but I can't pay for Pro version. (I can pay for Google Cloud, though.) OpenAI blocks API dashboard access to IP addresses from Ukraine. (But it is OK if I use VPN LOL.) So it seems blocking ppl is the norm. I guess "diversity and inclusion" is mostly about social topics within US, not about not excluding people.
- skydhash 5y ago
  Cry in Haiti
  - cto_of_antifa 5y ago
    This sentiment is sad, to be honest. Not for the hypothetical actual Haitian people that deserve normal respect that your comment flipantly uses as a gag insult, but because it betrays a perverse resistance to even considering the possibility that having any sort of interaction with people in the larger world might, in fact, make your own internal world better, more knowledgeable, and expose you to things you could never even imagine without doing so. It's possible that you'll never get to be that person unless you let yourself self-consciously deconstruct what brought you here, in all honesty, inside yourself, and actually make the decision to grow a little bit. And if you feel like you should double down and die on this hill, that's not just a big yikes - it's kind of self-destructive, ultimately. The kind of situation where if it weren't so clearly done outside external influence, it would be the kind of thing one might pity you for.
- londons_explore 5y ago
  In general it's about not accidentally excluding people. All the cases you propose are deliberate blocks for various (mostly legal) reasons. The deliberate blocks are considered in the review, and as long as there is a sound business case for launching with the exclusion, it goes ahead.
  - 5y ago
kukx 5y ago
By the same logic we can justify any [social issue] division. The sad thing is that the rules are arbitrary and do not help in solving the issue. Actually it is in the interest of the division to create or exaggerate problems to justify its existence.
xmprt 5y ago
I agree with you but it sometimes seems like Google doesn't care at all about it when they have the kind of customer support processes that they have.
- kevingadd 5y ago
  Customer support is after the fact, reviews are before the fact. It's very cheap to do these reviews before launch and then you can point at those to say "we're trying!" while not providing any customer support.
  - Igelau 5y ago
    You think? Who is doing do diversity and inclusion reviews? Do you think they're getting paid call center wages?
    - ineedasername 5y ago
      The customer base is larger than the # of projects to review by many orders of magnitude. So yes, I think internal review will cost less when a single reviewed project/product might have millions of users.
protomyth 5y ago
Google can talk when they stop using a license by a domain squatting org who revised their history and has a pretty offensive line on their front page. COMMUNITY-LED DEVELOPMENT "THE APACHE WAY indeed. Worse, most of the links on Google search point to the org and not the actual tribes.
- Igelau 5y ago
  Everyone knows the org is called Apache because they Jump on it! Jump on it! and not because they're appropriating Native Americans.
mlcrypto 5y ago
I miss the internet where people just created what they wanted and organically found users
fy20 5y ago
Slightly OT, but a lot of products that are launched in multiple regions - Google included - exclude people who live in a country but don't speak the native language. I work for a company from an English speaking country, and every time I need to reauthenticate with my Google account, it defaults to the native language of the country I'm in. They do have an option to change the language (in native language), but it's weird it defaults to that given I was last logged in with an account that is set to "English (US)" and my computer is set to the same. Recently a large clothing retailer launched that is available in many other European countries, but it's only possible to use the native language here. It's even the same app, they just see your account is set to this country and only lets you view in that language.
wyager 5y ago
That’s not what D(E)I refers to.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

fyd6gexygsydy 5y ago

I don't understand this line of reasoning since it assumes inclusion training actually promotes inclusion. My experience has been that it usually means racial/gender intersectionalism training that everyone gets to swallow regardless of culture or belief because it's what white people in the us tech industry are passionate about right now.

deanCommie 5y ago
I mean yeah if your culture or belief involves not treating people of different races or genders equitably, then the goal of the training isn't to change your mind. Swallow, follow, or get out of the way.
ygjb 5y ago
Yes. The expectation isn't that you actually adopt or accept the values. The expectation is that you know that if you fail to do so (and you lack sufficient privilege in your organization), then you will be held accountable. Practically speaking "woke" people would prefer to work with people who share values, but most of us will settle for people who can at least emulate a decent human being while interacting with other people at work.
- beaconstudios 5y ago
  Being "woke" goes beyond just being a decent person though, because most people's metric for decency is interpersonal decency. My understanding is that the sociological concepts that go into "wokeness" include intersectional analysis, microaggression theory, critical theory, 3rd wave feminism, gender theory etc. I think these ideas are mostly good (with the exception of microaggression theory), but they go way beyond "just be decent to other people" and into the territory of deep academic and systemic mindsets that are far from the default in the individualist West (and especially the US). I mean damn, half these ideas are French, and France is pretty culturally different from the US, French academia even moreso. For example: not being racist on an individual level is pretty intuitive and obvious to most people, and mostly comes down to being a decent human being. Being institutionally anti-racist is a totally different thing, and way more involving, because you're not just not being a dick to people of a different race; you're trying to counteract systemic disadvantages.
  - _3u10 5y ago
    It also presupposes such systemic disadvantages exist. Not sure why so many people from other countries immigrate to places that are so obviously systemically biased against them. Or why when institutions such as Harvard actually do systemically discriminate against Asians it’s routinely ignored by the woke crowd. Can anyone explain to me why Asians despite having some of the highest scores and GPAs have the lowest rate of admissions to some of the wokest institutions in America? Why is the difference in incarceration rate between men and women or the police shooting rate not presented as systemic discrimination?
    - judge2020 5y ago
      > It also presupposes such systemic disadvantages exist. But it would be incorrect to presuppose that absolutely none exist, which is why they have a culture of reviewing and examining such a possibility.
      - _3u10 5y ago
        Of course. I think the vast vast majority of people abhor racism and discrimination in the US and Canada yet our countries are described by the woke as bastions of this kind of thought when the vast majority of the evidence points to it being two of the most welcoming and accepting of differences.
        cto_of_antifa 5y ago
        Even if true, that's definitionally unrelated to whether or not systemix racism exists or not. It just means that you've personally defined some ambiguous bar of entry for whether or not you think marginalized voices require honest thought.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
    - eru 5y ago
      > Can anyone explain to me why Asians despite having some of the highest scores and GPAs have the lowest rate of admissions to some of the wokest institutions in America? You mean they have some of the lowest rates of admission when corrected for GPA? Or lowest rates in some absolute sense? > Why is the difference in incarceration rate between men and women or the police shooting rate not presented as systemic discrimination? https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AcceptableTargets https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AcceptableTarget...

b112 5y ago

Nothing is all inclusive. Nothing.

oriki 5y ago
Is your argument here supposed to be "Nothing is all inclusive, therefore we shouldn't even bother trying"? If so, I'd argue that's a lot more ridiculous than a review process designed to help catch major inclusivity issues before they become problems.
mikepurvis 5y ago
Sure, but that's not a reason to not even ask the question. Maybe not every DI initiative turns out to be helpful or productive, but as someone who's privileged on pretty much every axis there is, I'd be grateful for the kind of internal support system that could give me an early warning sign for "hey, this design decision that made sense to you and your team has the potential to alienate user base X and there's a real possibility that if we launch in this state it's going to explode into a minor Twitter scandal."
- brailsafe 5y ago
  Isn't this just called user testing? Also this is in the context of a fucking dataset. If data needs to go through DI in case something blows up on Twitter, I guess it's sad state we're in.
  - sumeno 5y ago
    If, for example, the dataset only contains white faces and is intended to train facial recognition then yes, it needs to go through some kind of DI review.
    - brailsafe 5y ago
      Wouldn't this review be done on the data collection and planning side, rather than at point of publishing though? Surely you can publish datasets of just white faces or just black faces if during planning that's what you intended to do for some reason?

brailsafe 5y ago

Does it make sense to serve a dataset without approval that it's inclusive enough? Yes, because that's typically how things in the world work.

geofft 5y ago
I don't understand this argument. It's okay for things to be a certain way, because things are typically that way? Apart from the circular reasoning, the practical impact is that you should also drop privacy review because corporations steal your data, security review because everyone gets hacked, readability review because there's a lot of legacy code, etc.

tester756 5y ago

>accidentally exclude certain people? e.g how? could you provide some examples e.g two? there's a lot of talk about this stuff when it comes to MAGMA, yet docs still use some auto-generated translations which suck.

sumeno 5y ago
https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2020/racial-discrimination-in-face-recognition-technology/ https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2020/racial-discriminatio... https://futurism.com/delphi-ai-ethics-racist https://futurism.com/delphi-ai-ethics-racist https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/25/lens/sarah-lewis-racial-bias-photography.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/25/lens/sarah-lewis-racial-b...
- tester756 5y ago
  It seems like this kind of problems occur mostly within some specific areas, meanwhile OP seems to suggest that this kind of review should be applied for everything.
  - ygjb 5y ago
    From a practical business perspective, performing a diversity and inclusiveness review is a risk management activity. It doesn't really matter if the business strongly supports or opposes a particular set of diversity and inclusiveness goals from a fiduciary perspective, but it sure does matter if the business keeps losing money or missing targets because it is embroiled in scandals, paying out settlements to staff that have suffered discrimination, or being hauled in front of regulators to air their dirty laundry. One would hope that being a decent place to work, and treating people fairly would be enough of an incentive, but for everyone else, there are risk management processes designed to have repeatable processes to identify business risks, escalate them to leadership, and presumably either accept the risk, or steer the project towards a solution that has a more acceptable risk profile.
  - sumeno 5y ago
    Not every kind of review is applicable for every single launch, but diversity and inclusion is applicable to more than just AI (in general, I don't know what the review process or requirements are for D&I)

killerstorm 5y ago

Businesses exclude people all the time. E.g. many videos are geoblocked, and there's no way to view or purchase them in some countries. Here are some other examples: I can use free version of Google Colab from Ukraine, but I can't pay for Pro version. (I can pay for Google Cloud, though.) OpenAI blocks API dashboard access to IP addresses from Ukraine. (But it is OK if I use VPN LOL.) So it seems blocking ppl is the norm. I guess "diversity and inclusion" is mostly about social topics within US, not about not excluding people.

skydhash 5y ago
Cry in Haiti
- cto_of_antifa 5y ago
  This sentiment is sad, to be honest. Not for the hypothetical actual Haitian people that deserve normal respect that your comment flipantly uses as a gag insult, but because it betrays a perverse resistance to even considering the possibility that having any sort of interaction with people in the larger world might, in fact, make your own internal world better, more knowledgeable, and expose you to things you could never even imagine without doing so. It's possible that you'll never get to be that person unless you let yourself self-consciously deconstruct what brought you here, in all honesty, inside yourself, and actually make the decision to grow a little bit. And if you feel like you should double down and die on this hill, that's not just a big yikes - it's kind of self-destructive, ultimately. The kind of situation where if it weren't so clearly done outside external influence, it would be the kind of thing one might pity you for.
londons_explore 5y ago
In general it's about not accidentally excluding people. All the cases you propose are deliberate blocks for various (mostly legal) reasons. The deliberate blocks are considered in the review, and as long as there is a sound business case for launching with the exclusion, it goes ahead.
- 5y ago

kukx 5y ago

By the same logic we can justify any [social issue] division. The sad thing is that the rules are arbitrary and do not help in solving the issue. Actually it is in the interest of the division to create or exaggerate problems to justify its existence.

xmprt 5y ago

I agree with you but it sometimes seems like Google doesn't care at all about it when they have the kind of customer support processes that they have.

kevingadd 5y ago
Customer support is after the fact, reviews are before the fact. It's very cheap to do these reviews before launch and then you can point at those to say "we're trying!" while not providing any customer support.
- Igelau 5y ago
  You think? Who is doing do diversity and inclusion reviews? Do you think they're getting paid call center wages?
  - ineedasername 5y ago
    The customer base is larger than the # of projects to review by many orders of magnitude. So yes, I think internal review will cost less when a single reviewed project/product might have millions of users.

protomyth 5y ago

Google can talk when they stop using a license by a domain squatting org who revised their history and has a pretty offensive line on their front page. COMMUNITY-LED DEVELOPMENT "THE APACHE WAY indeed. Worse, most of the links on Google search point to the org and not the actual tribes.

Igelau 5y ago
Everyone knows the org is called Apache because they Jump on it! Jump on it! and not because they're appropriating Native Americans.

mlcrypto 5y ago

I miss the internet where people just created what they wanted and organically found users

fy20 5y ago

Slightly OT, but a lot of products that are launched in multiple regions - Google included - exclude people who live in a country but don't speak the native language. I work for a company from an English speaking country, and every time I need to reauthenticate with my Google account, it defaults to the native language of the country I'm in. They do have an option to change the language (in native language), but it's weird it defaults to that given I was last logged in with an account that is set to "English (US)" and my computer is set to the same. Recently a large clothing retailer launched that is available in many other European countries, but it's only possible to use the native language here. It's even the same app, they just see your account is set to this country and only lets you view in that language.

wyager 5y ago

That’s not what D(E)I refers to.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]