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>They now admit that their outside lawyers emailed the wrong person after confusing two Asian last names—only after we brought this to their attention. I find

by eurleif 2mo ago

>They now admit that their outside lawyers emailed the wrong person after confusing two Asian last names—only after we brought this to their attention. I find it bizarre that they felt the need to specify "Asian". What does that have to do with anything?

pastel8739 2mo ago
They are definitely trying to get you to think that Apple (the company perhaps single-handedly responsible for developing Chinese manufacturing) is racist
- derangedHorse 2mo ago
  I’m not saying they’re racist but I will say that them using Chinese manufacturing isn’t an argument against it. Most top level leadership, which include the people who would have initiated this investigation, actually have a small representation of Asians [1] compared to the rest of the business [2]. [1] https://www.apple.com/leadership/ https://www.apple.com/leadership/ [2] https://www.apple.com/diversity/ https://www.apple.com/diversity/
bob1029 2mo ago
Roughly one in five Koreans have surname "Kim". Upward of 40% Vietnamese have surname "Nguyen". "Li" is quite popular in China. Specifying "Asian last name" in this context is quite apt.
- vostrocity 2mo ago
  The odd thing is one of the guys has the first name Chang, and the other guy has the last name Chang.
- deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
- dgellow 2mo ago
  But what makes that necessary context? That can be communicated clearly without specifying Asian, „Apple confused 2 people with the same name“. Adding Asian sort of excuse Apple for the mistake, which is strange for OpenAI to do? I would tend to believe they are implying some casual racism
  - tmp10423288442 2mo ago
    > I would tend to believe they are implying some casual racism There's probably a little bit of that, but also simple carelessness.
  - prewett 2mo ago
    Because confusing two people because of having the same name is much less likely for European names than for Asian names (there are only about 100 Chinese family names, for instance), so it's an indirect dig that Apple wasn't paying attention (since they presumably employ a lot of Asians, and thus should know better). There's no need to bang on the racism drum, it's pretty tiring.
    - dgellow 2mo ago
      The “Asian” part is a meaningless information to include in such a blog article, if not to imply that Apple is casually racist…
- ergocoder 2mo ago
  "Wang" can be one of the 2 popular different last names in China and Taiwan.
numpad0 2mo ago
Latin alphabet transcription of East Asian languages tend to be incredibly lossy and there tends to be a lot of ambiguities. That Vietnamese surname of Nguyen is formally written as Nguyễn in the current script, or as 阮 in the old adapted Hanzi script, and practically pronounced somewhere around "gwen". Most other EA countries tend to do equivalents of "阮" -> "gwen", and East Asian cultures generally prefer Last-First ordering, which tend to put more information in the first name, and so there are going to be tons of last names in Latin that end up being barely unambiguous to be a form of identification. These can be a problem if email addresses are going to be formulated as e.g. "阮必成" -> "Nguyễn Tất Thành" -> "Gwen Tat Than" -> "t.gwen@example.net", even if the surname is going to be that much long(although Nguyen in particular is just identical even in Vietnamese). (Japan may be less affected thanks to having default 2+ char random surnames farmers made up in modernization efforts, but there are still the 灘(nada) highscool, the 津(tsu) city, etc etc that can be NLP problems)
- dgellow 2mo ago
  Yes, but why specify it? Why not just say „they confused 2 people with the same name“? Adding „Asian“ doesn’t add anything to the story other than flagging Apple as casually racist
  - spongebobstoes 2mo ago
    they don't have the same name, the email confusion was between Wang and Chang
- tmp10423288442 2mo ago
  Even if Westerners maintained the characters for the names rather than transliterate them, there's still the problem that common surnames are used by literally hundreds of millions of people of Chinese descent, and there are a lot of commonly-used given names as well. I think in all of Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese almost all given names are 1-2 syllables in length, so there's even less space for disambiguation, even before you get to the additionally ambiguities introduced by transliteration and dropping of diacritics. Japanese has several advantages: 1. Both given names and surnames often use more than 2 syllables. This makes it more familiar to speakers of European languages, where multi-syllable words are no big deal. 2. English speakers find Japanese easier to pronounce and remember due to its simpler syllable structure and use of globally more common sounds compared to the other languages. 3. Unlike the other languages, Japanese names are always given in Given Name, Surname order in English media, while names from the other languages are inconsistently transcribed in either order. 4. Japanese is the "default" East Asian culture for the West in many ways, since it's the one that at least the US has most deeply engaged for the longest time. Many, many cultural exports that actually originated in China were introduced to the West via Japan with Japanese names. Also, Japan has been an advanced industrial economy since the late 1800s, while China only achieved that status a few decades ago. 5. Japanese transcription into Roman characters has remained consistent for a long time (helped by the simpler phonology). Chinese and Korean have been cursed with several incompatible transcription systems over the years - although Pinyin has been winning out for Chinese, there are still many names with legacy transcriptions, not to mention the other Chinese languages needing their own transcriptions. Vietnamese does exclusively use Latin characters, but the diacritics and unfamiliar pronunciation makes them harder to remember.

by eurleif 2mo ago

pastel8739 2mo ago

They are definitely trying to get you to think that Apple (the company perhaps single-handedly responsible for developing Chinese manufacturing) is racist

derangedHorse 2mo ago
I’m not saying they’re racist but I will say that them using Chinese manufacturing isn’t an argument against it. Most top level leadership, which include the people who would have initiated this investigation, actually have a small representation of Asians [1] compared to the rest of the business [2]. [1] https://www.apple.com/leadership/ https://www.apple.com/leadership/ [2] https://www.apple.com/diversity/ https://www.apple.com/diversity/

bob1029 2mo ago

Roughly one in five Koreans have surname "Kim". Upward of 40% Vietnamese have surname "Nguyen". "Li" is quite popular in China. Specifying "Asian last name" in this context is quite apt.

vostrocity 2mo ago
The odd thing is one of the guys has the first name Chang, and the other guy has the last name Chang.
deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]
dgellow 2mo ago
But what makes that necessary context? That can be communicated clearly without specifying Asian, „Apple confused 2 people with the same name“. Adding Asian sort of excuse Apple for the mistake, which is strange for OpenAI to do? I would tend to believe they are implying some casual racism
- tmp10423288442 2mo ago
  > I would tend to believe they are implying some casual racism There's probably a little bit of that, but also simple carelessness.
- prewett 2mo ago
  Because confusing two people because of having the same name is much less likely for European names than for Asian names (there are only about 100 Chinese family names, for instance), so it's an indirect dig that Apple wasn't paying attention (since they presumably employ a lot of Asians, and thus should know better). There's no need to bang on the racism drum, it's pretty tiring.
  - dgellow 2mo ago
    The “Asian” part is a meaningless information to include in such a blog article, if not to imply that Apple is casually racist…
ergocoder 2mo ago
"Wang" can be one of the 2 popular different last names in China and Taiwan.

numpad0 2mo ago

Latin alphabet transcription of East Asian languages tend to be incredibly lossy and there tends to be a lot of ambiguities. That Vietnamese surname of Nguyen is formally written as Nguyễn in the current script, or as 阮 in the old adapted Hanzi script, and practically pronounced somewhere around "gwen". Most other EA countries tend to do equivalents of "阮" -> "gwen", and East Asian cultures generally prefer Last-First ordering, which tend to put more information in the first name, and so there are going to be tons of last names in Latin that end up being barely unambiguous to be a form of identification. These can be a problem if email addresses are going to be formulated as e.g. "阮必成" -> "Nguyễn Tất Thành" -> "Gwen Tat Than" -> "t.gwen@example.net", even if the surname is going to be that much long(although Nguyen in particular is just identical even in Vietnamese). (Japan may be less affected thanks to having default 2+ char random surnames farmers made up in modernization efforts, but there are still the 灘(nada) highscool, the 津(tsu) city, etc etc that can be NLP problems)

dgellow 2mo ago
Yes, but why specify it? Why not just say „they confused 2 people with the same name“? Adding „Asian“ doesn’t add anything to the story other than flagging Apple as casually racist
- spongebobstoes 2mo ago
  they don't have the same name, the email confusion was between Wang and Chang
tmp10423288442 2mo ago
Even if Westerners maintained the characters for the names rather than transliterate them, there's still the problem that common surnames are used by literally hundreds of millions of people of Chinese descent, and there are a lot of commonly-used given names as well. I think in all of Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese almost all given names are 1-2 syllables in length, so there's even less space for disambiguation, even before you get to the additionally ambiguities introduced by transliteration and dropping of diacritics. Japanese has several advantages: 1. Both given names and surnames often use more than 2 syllables. This makes it more familiar to speakers of European languages, where multi-syllable words are no big deal. 2. English speakers find Japanese easier to pronounce and remember due to its simpler syllable structure and use of globally more common sounds compared to the other languages. 3. Unlike the other languages, Japanese names are always given in Given Name, Surname order in English media, while names from the other languages are inconsistently transcribed in either order. 4. Japanese is the "default" East Asian culture for the West in many ways, since it's the one that at least the US has most deeply engaged for the longest time. Many, many cultural exports that actually originated in China were introduced to the West via Japan with Japanese names. Also, Japan has been an advanced industrial economy since the late 1800s, while China only achieved that status a few decades ago. 5. Japanese transcription into Roman characters has remained consistent for a long time (helped by the simpler phonology). Chinese and Korean have been cursed with several incompatible transcription systems over the years - although Pinyin has been winning out for Chinese, there are still many names with legacy transcriptions, not to mention the other Chinese languages needing their own transcriptions. Vietnamese does exclusively use Latin characters, but the diacritics and unfamiliar pronunciation makes them harder to remember.