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I don’t think Ben was trying to say it’s a cultural agenda thing. It’s clear to me he wants to avoid that third rail for his point. I think he spelled it out we
by MBCook 3y ago
I don’t think Ben was trying to say it’s a cultural agenda thing. It’s clear to me he wants to avoid that third rail for his point. I think he spelled it out well on his subscription only podcast Dithering with John Gruber.
They were afraid of being criticized for only white men when you asked for a picture of a CEO (likely based on input data) or a woman for a nurse or some other traditionally stereotypical profession.
So they seem to have put in something to ensure diversity to try to correct for bias in the input data. That seems good to me.
But they overcorrected in a way it just wouldn’t show you white people. Turns out the Nazis and founding fathers were more diverse than I was taught. Oops.
But worse, and the big problem Ben pointed out, was there was no way this wasn’t known internally. And the company culture seems to be at a point where either you can’t speak up or it’s ignored because diversity is good even if it’s at the cost of all accuracy on easily verifiable facts.
And that’s a problem. They avoided the culture war so hard out of fear they crammed themselves back into the culture war and it blew up in their face. It was an unforced error that they must have seen coming. So this whole incident seems very indicative of a culture/management problem inside Google.
- tech_ken 3y agoHm okay fair enough, I'll check out the podcast I do think that's a better format for communicating some of the details of this type of criticism. > It was an unforced error that they must have seen coming. To some extent this feels like something that's happening a lot in tech across the board, not just in 'culture war' type issues but across several other fronts (the various Metaverse flops, for example). I do think this indicates an overabundance of groupthink, but part of me wonders if its just a consequence of these companies becoming so big and working on so many fronts that it's basically impossible for them to avoid stepping on every rake. Still, they did seem like they genuinely wanted this to take off so concerning that couldn't be prepared for even this basic failure mode (which is already a pretty well-trod problem space).
- MBCook 3y agoI agree. A lot of it just seems to be general big company ossification and trouble avoidance. Don’t do anything anyone might criticize you for = don’t do much of anything innovative. But AI is very innovative. Since it’s trained in biased/imperfect data and just hallucinates in general they seem to be in a minefield now by mistake.