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> AIs aren't oracles or omniscient purveyors of truth, and they will always carry the bias they're created with When people went nuts about matrix multiplicati
by qsort 4y ago
> AIs aren't oracles or omniscient purveyors of truth, and they will always carry the bias they're created with
When people went nuts about matrix multiplication being racist I was the first in line to laugh them off. When people go nuts arguing that ChatGPT supports the gay agenda or whatever other hobgoblin, I feel compelled to laugh them off just as much.
A more interesting question is whether or not introducing post-hoc fixes like RLHF makes the model more or less useful; I can see both sides of the argument.
- disqard 4y ago> matrix multiplication being racist This is the first time I'm hearing about this. Could you point me to a source? Thanks!
- AlbertCory 4y agotry searching DDG for "math is racist".
- genderwhy 4y agoI believe the general claim is that multiplication tables, and more specifically, the manner in which they are taught could disadvantage particular communities. Culturally, not every community handles rote memorization the same. There's been a desire to change the way multiplication is taught, and a strong pushback from a certain set that say, "Well, I learned multiplication tables, what's wrong with them?" Most (good) math curriculum in elementary age now teaches many different techniques for performing the same operation. Sums, for instance, are taught in the traditional way (add the ones column, then carryover to the tens column, etc.) but they are also taught in other ways, e.g. (borrow to get to the nearest tens, add the tens together, return what you borrowed). Kids then have a variety of approaches, must still show their work, but can use the technique that makes the most intuitive sense to them. Like many things that get demonized online, or reduce to the absurd, there's a really interesting and systemic change happening if you take the time to understand the reasoning.
- Kranar 4y agoThe question was not about the general claim regarding childhood education and the multitude of ways that children can learn mathematics. A specific claim was made that matrix multiplication is racist. Children don't learn about matrices to begin with, so discussing childhood math education is irrelevant. Can someone cite a source to such a claim?
- genderwhy 4y agoI was asserting that the parent comment was misremembering, misquoting, or mistaken. There are no claims that "Matrix multiplication is racist". There are claims regarding multiplication tables. So the parent probably meant "Multiplication tables are racist!". Which, again, is a reduction/strawman.
- Kranar 4y agoCan you cite a source to a claim that multiplication tables are racist? All I managed to find was one book called "Multiplication is for White People." but it's not actually about multiplication tables or even math specifically. The title is a quote from a child that the author taught and is a broader book about the U.S. education system and its growing achievement gap.
- eldavojohn 4y agoIt could be referring to the the underpinnings of how these things are used. Use race as a dimension for something and that ends up as a value in a vector that packs a human into a discreet set of pigeonholes. Then take many of those and stack them and you've got a matrix ready for things like principal component analysis or CNN training. You might say "oh come on, that hasn't been done since WWII by IBM" and you'd be wrong. It still happens today with things like calculating insurance premiums and approving bank loans. And your response might be "no way, nobody records someone's race" and while that might be technically correct, we frequently harvest things like income and interest in products that are highly correlated with spacefic races (some innocuous others much less innocuous). This can be harvested through cookies in websites like facebook or they can be self reported income on credit card applications. You can disagree that it's the same as saying "matrix multiplication is racist" but that is just a boiled down way of saying "we are very good at hiding racism in our algorithms and then acting super surprised when someone points them out and our defense is that we just did some math."
- orangecat 4y agowe frequently harvest things like income and interest in products that are highly correlated with spacefic races Yes, and it is not at all clear that this should be considered racism.