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The only way to do this is to whitelist acceptable input variables. Detecting bias is a meaningless exercise.
by jncfhnb 3y ago
The only way to do this is to whitelist acceptable input variables. Detecting bias is a meaningless exercise.
- rho138 3y ago[flagged]
- getmeinrn 3y agoTo those of you thinking of debating the above, remember, you cannot win the word game. The more you oppose someone telling you not to use a word, the more racist you appear, no matter the actual origins of the word in question. It simply doesn't matter. The only way to not be seen as a racist is to apologize and use whatever words they tell you to use.
- tekla 3y agoNo. The thing to do is ignore the dumb and irrational and continue to use normal words like "blacklist" and "whitelist"
- peddling-brink 3y agoI don’t think any rational people are offended by the word “blacklist”. I do think there is some validity to the change. Black lists are lists of bad things that need to be blocked or prevented, white lists are things that are good and allowed and wanted. That does create an unsavory connotation with the words themselves. Furthermore, as someone in an industry that used blacklist and whitelist extensively, noobs screw up those words all the time. It’s not a very clear word. Blocklist and allowlist are much less ambiguous.
- phatskat 3y agoThis is the correct response. The origins of the terms are less important here, and often people get hung up on them. Whitelist and blacklist are indeed ambiguous, and they also create negative connotations that could reinforce other, actually racist views and language, whether conscious or not.
- flangola7 3y agoI most enjoy the terminology updates because anyone that throws a fit about the change outs themselves as a can of worms and a person to keep away from your life or payroll. IME it's a heuristic with 100% accuracy.
- getmeinrn 3y agoThis reads like you enjoy antagonizing people, so I'm sure the feeling is mutual. Who would want to work with/for someone who enjoys agitating their peers or subordinates? Do you ask them their stance on abortion and free speech too?
- jncfhnb 3y agoYou can also win this game 99% of the time by just not living in California. It’s really just a local power struggle that some people mistakenly believe is a national dialogue.
- jupp0r 3y agoIt might blow your mind, but did you know there are even other countries in the world that are not the USA?
- blueflow 3y agoYou are the person attributing a racial issue to random words. But hey, i can do that, too: > no matter the actual origins of the word in question > The only way to not be seen as a racist is to apologize and use whatever words they tell you to use. Please stop using the words "debating", "win", "game", "oppose", "racist", "apologize". They are highly offensive and racist vocabulary.
- Spivak 3y agoAnd the reason for this is because for most people a word substation is a zero effort change that simply doesn't matter one way or another. And if one way is better for whatever reason then sure, why not? One side cares because they're trying to eliminate bias and be inclusive, the other side cares because…? "words have meaning": this is a right wing dog whistle, even if you are a true language prescriptivist no one will believe you. "it's stupid": just makes you look like an asshole when someone is trying to do something people see as in good faith. "it's pointless": then why does it matter one way or another? Goto other reason. "it's not racist": when we're talking about blacklists it never was, it's about trying to not always associate black with the negative connotation, but you look really racist for wanting to keep it. "black outside the context of race does have negative connotations in humans, you can't change that we're afraid of the dark": now you look really really racist.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- getmeinrn 3y agoHave you ever considered that people don't like being told how to behave by unlikable people? And that language policing by definition makes you unlikable? When was the last time you told someone not to use a word and they said "you know what, I like being told how not to speak." ? It's maybe the quickest way to tell everyone that you're insufferable. So basically you're "proving" to yourself that everyone is either racist or an asshole, by creating a situation where people don't want to listen to you because you're insufferable. But you can pretend to be virtuous because you're doing it for some make believe greater good about the word "whitelist." BTW I'm actually trying to help you see the reason there's resistance. I use "allowlist" and "denylist" voluntarily in my OSS repos, because it doesn't really matter to me. But I still find people who make it their moral imperative to police these words insufferable. From my perspective, you either don't know that, which shows you have no tact, or you don't care, which shows that you're doing this in bad faith.
- Spivak 3y agoYou're writing this like I don't agree with you and do the exact same thing. Explaining the social dynamics at play doesn't mean I agree with them. > When was the last time you told someone not to use a word Literally never. Again you assume a lot about me. I am speaking purely from the perspective of being told to use different words. It's never really bothered me. My response has always been "sure whatever." Some of them are a stretch but a lot of them make sense. No one has ever made me to feel bad about it. Clearly someone hurt you and made you feel bad and I'm sorry for that.
- roenxi 3y agoThe problem with "allowlist" is it is an ugly phrase that sounds like it was dreamt up by a bureaucrat. There is a reason we have blacklist and whitelist - they roll off the tongue. The move from master -> main was silly but at least technically superior because it is easier to say and type. "Blocklist" and "Allowlist" are worse words than "blacklist" and "whitelist" because they are the same to type and harder to pronounce aloud. Whoever cooks up these schemes should have put more effort in. Even something like passlist and stoplist is easier to say. Throughlist. Something that sounds nice in a foreign language, maybe.
- phatskat 3y agoThat’s all just a matter of preference though. I personally like how allowlist and blocklist sound, and they also immediately convey intention. You may also be biased towards whitelist and blacklist if you’ve heard them your entire life - if you had grown up with allowlist and blocklist, can you say for certain that someone suddenly saying “we should use whitelist and blacklist” wouldn’t give you the same feeling of clunkiness?
- AmericanChopper 3y agoThe correct technical jargon is actually whitelist, and the origin of the term has no racial connotations whatsoever.
- bitwise-bouncer 3y agoGranting that premise, consider that words do not exist in a vacuum. What pain is it to you to promote a more inclusive atmosphere?
- AmericanChopper 3y ago> consider that words do not exist in a vacuum You’re right. They exist in the context in which they’re used. In this case that context is as a technical term that has no association at all to any racist ideas. I would advise you to consider that you do not exist in a vacuum, and perhaps you should reconsider your anti-social impulse to police other peoples’ use of innocent words. Forcing people to remove words from their vocabulary because they remind you of some upsetting concept is not inclusive at all. It is by definition exclusionary.
- bitwise-bouncer 3y agoThe move to more neutral language isn't about policing speech. It's about being aware of potential unintentional biases our words may carry and promoting a comfortable, inclusive environment. It's a dialogue, not a mandate
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- AmericanChopper 3y ago> My attempt to police your speech wasn’t about policing speech. It was about about creating a dialogue, and making sure you know that you are racist if you don’t agree with me, not mandating that you agree with me. Haha, ok buddy. If you want to be more inclusive, perhaps you could go to the effort of understanding the vocabulary of my trade and the meaning of those words, rather than try to prevent me from using them. Because I’m feeling very excluded by you right now. Do you care about the lived experience I’m having right now? If not, why?
- flextheruler 3y agoIf we get rid of whitelist/blacklist then we should also make referring to a company being in the black or the red verboten as well. Both terms of phrase have just as much racist connotation which is to say none.
- flangola7 3y ago> If we get rid of whitelist/blacklist then we should also make referring to a company being in the black or the red verboten as well. I seriously 100% agree.
- alphazard 3y agoWhite and black are technical terms used in physics and electrical engineering. White means all of the components of the spectrum and black means none of the components of the spectrum. White noise contains all the frequencies. Black body radiation is radiation due to heat emitted from an object which does not reflect any light (is black). That is the etymology of whitelist and blacklist.
- Springtime 3y ago> That is the etymology of whitelist and blacklist. It's hard finding a definitive source for blacklist, though first time reading someone suggesting it's from that sense. Many centuries old examples I've seen when looking this up seem to have already had it as some in-use vocabulary. Edit: huh, entire parent thread has been entirely hidden on HN. I suppose it was too much of a digression.
- tsimionescu 3y agoThe etymology of blacklist in English seems to be more related to a list of his enemies that Prince John (of Robin Hood fame) made of his enemies. Most likely the word is related to the MUCH older association between the color black and death in much of Europe. Still, nothing to do with black or white skin or any bias against people of different skin colors, so not contesting your actual point.
- lotsofpulp 3y ago>Most likely the word is related to the MUCH older association between the color black and death in much of Europe. I would have thought it would have something to do with darkness/night versus bright days/day, where people experience more danger in the former than the latter for obvious reasons.
- AbolishLunacy 3y agoThere must be a white paper somewhere about why we should adopt this word...
- jupp0r 3y agoLike all the deny holes in the center of our galaxy ....
- scrps 3y agoJust don't apply ML as a solution? Even without the bias issues, if I were a hiring manager how do I verify that the weights "MagicHireAI SaaS Corp" are using aren't leaving swaths of talent on the table that I don't even know exist?
- coffeefirst 3y agoYes. All these solutions are snake oil. Resumes are BS—it’s the very definition of garbage in garbage out. I don’t need an AI to sort candidates, I need really fast organizing tools.
- jncfhnb 3y agoLooking at the outcomes and validating whether or not they make sense
- WirelessGigabit 3y agoMy wife recently went through multiple applications after a stint of no work permit. The amount of stuff they make you fill out that is then parsed with AI is insane. Indeed ruined a lot. Before if you had an ok resume but we're able to talk to them in person you might be able to convince them. Now with all those aptitude training you have to do well there. Not to mention the applications that require you to turn on your webcam (!) while you do them. Disgusting. That last one by the way was the same company where my wife had an in person interview. She drove there. The interview was on Zoom with somebody in another office. She declined the offer. Wastefulness and already showing that they're not against monitoring by AI means 0 humanity.
- geraldwhen 3y agoDriving plus zoom describes many corporate jobs I think. How many of us are required to drive to an office to take remote meetings? I imagine a lot. I know I have to.
- rovr138 3y agoI imagine not a lot. I know I don’t have to.
- zulban 3y ago> whitelist acceptable input variables A core lesson in ML: this is difficult or impossible. See the classic example with wolves, dogs, and snow. [1] For a resume example, suppose you don't want to be biased again black candidates, or women. Well, good luck trying to filter out resume experience, skills, schools, and interests so that they don't list anything that is statistically more likely to be found among black folks or women. It's impossible. So now you have a hiring process that looks at... what exactly? [1] https://www.researchgate.net/figure/A-husky-on-the-left-is-confused-with-a-wolf-because-the-pixels-on-the-right_fig1_329277474 https://www.researchgate.net/figure/A-husky-on-the-left-is-c...
- jncfhnb 3y agoThat is not the same problem. That’s a sample bias problem. The whole point of white listing variables is to only allow things you are comfortable using todiscimrinate. And yes, that likely reduces the power of the model. Edit: to clarify, your example had the model failing to classify something correctly because the training data did not generalize across real world examples. The problem with diversity bias is that the modes are trained on past data where the labels themselves tend to have some bias. Black candidates do worse. So recreatingthese will generally produce worse outcomes for minority candidates. Now for a lot of these cases the average minority individual is more likely to do worse. Not intrinsically because of race, but still worse. You can’t realistically expect the model to produce equal outcomes for all classes when all classes are not equal on the actual traits. But you do want to try and make it so that the model doesn’t use race indicators as a crutch that ignores actual good indicators. The common complaint is you hear about a man and a woman applying with the exact same credentials but different outcomes. Well obviously the model had to have additional information besides those credentials if it made different decisions. If this causes problems, you probably should not permit those additional pieces of information.
- parpfish 3y ago> The whole point of white listing variables is to only allow things you are comfortable using todiscimrinate. The problem is that variables where you can safely discriminate don't exist in the real world because everything is intertwined. For example, if you see that somebody went to school at {Howard, Bryn Mawr, BYU} you can make some pretty solid inferences about their {race, gender, religion} even if they don't explicitly provide them.
- mgraczyk 3y agoUnfortunately this doesn't work, one of the basic things to know about ML fairness is that you generally can't get the outcomes you want by hiding things from your model. For example you can infer the race of a candidate from other facts about them. The model could still illegally discriminate by first inferring race, then discriminating on the basis of inferred race.
- jncfhnb 3y agoThen those things shouldn’t be on the whitelist. That’s the point of a whitelist. The problem you describe affects blacklists that try to remove only the things you obviously don’t want to use.
- mgraczyk 3y agoYou will end up adding things to your whitelist that you think are innocuous, but if that's all you do you will very likely end up discriminating and not even knowing it.