4 ms·

Maybe there's some value there, but my experience is that you can rarely solve a "people" problem with a purely technical solution. Also, as a society, I'd lik

by eli 12y ago

Maybe there's some value there, but my experience is that you can rarely solve a "people" problem with a purely technical solution. Also, as a society, I'd like to think we can do better than "sorry about the rape/murder threats, we'll try to hide most of them from you"

cyorir 12y ago
Agreed. Applying filters hides the symptoms without treating the underlying illness, which is a society that is infested with sexism. We can treat the symptoms by filtering but at the end of the day we need strategies for making society less sexist.
- autokad 12y ago
  get over yourself. you should see the things people say to me in facebook chess let alone playing starcraft. its not because im a male or female, its because people are assholes but we dont need some sort of mind police to 'solve the problem'.
  - cyorir 12y ago
    Where do I argue in favor of mind police? Don't put words in my mouth for me, thank you. I look at how attitudes towards things like race have changed in the past 50 years. That is not a result of regulation imposed on society, that is a result of changing attitudes and culture in society. IMHO the same thing ought to happen with respects to sexism, we should hope that the attitudes and culture of society as a whole begin to shift.
- NotAtWork 12y ago
  > Applying filters hides the symptoms without treating the underlying illness, which is a society that is infested with sexism. This doesn't follow from the symptoms being cited, which is that a small subset of people say incredibly offensive and inappropriate things online. If a million people see a video, and 1% of the people respond, and 3% of the people responding are crazy, that's 300 crazy people responding. If each crazy person sends 15 emails before finding a new thing to obsess about, that's 4,500 threatening or otherwise crazy emails in response - which certainly seems like a flood to the person being responded to - but doesn't actually tell us anything about the population watching the video, at large, except that it has a similar percentage of crazy people to society at large. Continuing the hypothetical: if you assume a normal person only sends 2 emails, then you only have 19000 normal emails to 4500 crazy ones, because crazy people are more talkative. At 1.2 emails for a normal person, It's 11000 to 4500, which makes crazy emails over a quarter of all messages received in response - a vastly disproportionate number considering they were 3% of respondents. One thing that automated filters can provide is sentiment analysis and looking at related messages, to pull out the underlying distribution of people responding (and hence seeing it's just people being people), rather than just seeing the surface level "We have 25% crazy emails!" I would have to see a much more detailed analysis of the emails, responses, and distribution of them to conclude that it's a widespread problem, rather than a small crazy contingent being amplified above their importance by just posting a lot.
  - cyorir 12y ago
    My apologies, I phrased things poorly. I don't want to say a majority of society is bad. I just think that even a small contingent, if loud enough, can make society seem more toxic than it needs to be.
    - seanflyon 12y ago
      Wouldn't making it harder for that small toxic contingent to be heard improve the situation?
      - georgiapeach 12y ago
        How would you feel if a government agency or ISP or some other adversary used such technology to censor all your online communications -- so you couldn't ever contact anyone, through any protocol -- because it considered you to be undesirable/objectionable/dangerous for its own reasons?
        seanflyon 12y ago
        That would be both terrible and dramatically different from what I was talking about. The context here is private websites filtering comments. If you are in a private restaurant expressing some horribly offensive opinion it is appropriate for the owner to ask you to leave. It would not be appropriate for the police to come in and gag you.
        georgiapeach 12y ago
        There is no difference whatsoever. All your censored communications would be attempted -- and rejected -- through private websites, too. So how would you feel about it? How would you feel about the oppression you're looking to subject others to, being applied to you?
        seanflyon 12y ago
NotAtWork 12y ago
Changing the incentives of a situation, such as raising the effort required to get a harassing message through the filters, isn't a "purely technical solution" any more than most economics strategies are. I'd argue it's making use of technology to make a people oriented solution: people do less of things that are harder to do, and seeing less garbage even if you still see some makes the place seem more pleasant. > I'd like to think we can do better than "sorry about the rape/murder threats, we'll try to hide most of them from you" The best we can ever do, without swerving way out in to super repressive regimes, is impact the rate at which it happens, the response of other people, etc and not that it happens at all.

by eli 12y ago

cyorir 12y ago

Agreed. Applying filters hides the symptoms without treating the underlying illness, which is a society that is infested with sexism. We can treat the symptoms by filtering but at the end of the day we need strategies for making society less sexist.

autokad 12y ago
get over yourself. you should see the things people say to me in facebook chess let alone playing starcraft. its not because im a male or female, its because people are assholes but we dont need some sort of mind police to 'solve the problem'.
- cyorir 12y ago
  Where do I argue in favor of mind police? Don't put words in my mouth for me, thank you. I look at how attitudes towards things like race have changed in the past 50 years. That is not a result of regulation imposed on society, that is a result of changing attitudes and culture in society. IMHO the same thing ought to happen with respects to sexism, we should hope that the attitudes and culture of society as a whole begin to shift.
NotAtWork 12y ago
> Applying filters hides the symptoms without treating the underlying illness, which is a society that is infested with sexism. This doesn't follow from the symptoms being cited, which is that a small subset of people say incredibly offensive and inappropriate things online. If a million people see a video, and 1% of the people respond, and 3% of the people responding are crazy, that's 300 crazy people responding. If each crazy person sends 15 emails before finding a new thing to obsess about, that's 4,500 threatening or otherwise crazy emails in response - which certainly seems like a flood to the person being responded to - but doesn't actually tell us anything about the population watching the video, at large, except that it has a similar percentage of crazy people to society at large. Continuing the hypothetical: if you assume a normal person only sends 2 emails, then you only have 19000 normal emails to 4500 crazy ones, because crazy people are more talkative. At 1.2 emails for a normal person, It's 11000 to 4500, which makes crazy emails over a quarter of all messages received in response - a vastly disproportionate number considering they were 3% of respondents. One thing that automated filters can provide is sentiment analysis and looking at related messages, to pull out the underlying distribution of people responding (and hence seeing it's just people being people), rather than just seeing the surface level "We have 25% crazy emails!" I would have to see a much more detailed analysis of the emails, responses, and distribution of them to conclude that it's a widespread problem, rather than a small crazy contingent being amplified above their importance by just posting a lot.
- cyorir 12y ago
  My apologies, I phrased things poorly. I don't want to say a majority of society is bad. I just think that even a small contingent, if loud enough, can make society seem more toxic than it needs to be.
  - seanflyon 12y ago
    Wouldn't making it harder for that small toxic contingent to be heard improve the situation?
    - georgiapeach 12y ago
      How would you feel if a government agency or ISP or some other adversary used such technology to censor all your online communications -- so you couldn't ever contact anyone, through any protocol -- because it considered you to be undesirable/objectionable/dangerous for its own reasons?
      - seanflyon 12y ago
        That would be both terrible and dramatically different from what I was talking about. The context here is private websites filtering comments. If you are in a private restaurant expressing some horribly offensive opinion it is appropriate for the owner to ask you to leave. It would not be appropriate for the police to come in and gag you.
        georgiapeach 12y ago
        There is no difference whatsoever. All your censored communications would be attempted -- and rejected -- through private websites, too. So how would you feel about it? How would you feel about the oppression you're looking to subject others to, being applied to you?
        seanflyon 12y ago

NotAtWork 12y ago

Changing the incentives of a situation, such as raising the effort required to get a harassing message through the filters, isn't a "purely technical solution" any more than most economics strategies are. I'd argue it's making use of technology to make a people oriented solution: people do less of things that are harder to do, and seeing less garbage even if you still see some makes the place seem more pleasant. > I'd like to think we can do better than "sorry about the rape/murder threats, we'll try to hide most of them from you" The best we can ever do, without swerving way out in to super repressive regimes, is impact the rate at which it happens, the response of other people, etc and not that it happens at all.