[adlkjnndnnd]

What makes you think that? No, of course not. I'm just saying having read that gorilla story doesn't imply any degree of technical understanding.

Also, I have to say I considered it hyperbole to be outraged about the Gorilla. It seems pretty obvious that it was just a mistake with the data, not intentional. It is a good warning for things to watch out for, but there wasn't really anything racist about it.

Iirc there are even physical reasons why it is more difficult to identify black faces than white faces. Is that then racist, if an algorithm struggles more with identifying black faces?

[hannasanarion]

>I'm just saying having read that gorilla story doesn't imply any degree of technical understanding.

Is great technical understanding required before one can evaluate whether a program that labels black people as gorillas is functioning appropriately?

>Iirc there are even physical reasons why it is more difficult to identify black faces than white faces. Is that then racist, if an algorithm struggles more with identifying black faces?

So you're saying that black people are innately similar to gorillas, and an algorithm can't be blamed for failing to distinguish them? -

If you're trotting out that grand old "black people all look the same" thing, then yep, that's racist too. Black people tend to have different points of variation in facial features (jaw, chin, ear, and brow shape instead of eye and lip shape and color for white people). Inability to differentiate one face from another means not tracking the correct identifying features, which means racist algorithmic design.

[adlkjnndnnd]

"So you are saying" - are you saying you are really a parody/troll account, referring to that infamous Jordan Peterson interview?

No, I am not "saying".

My comment was in response to praise of AOCs alleged technical understanding, not of her ability to judge the gorilla algorithm.

And you don't seem to understand what algorithms do. A simple algorithm could count pixels in an image. If most pixels are white, it could say "human", if most pixels are "black", it could say "gorilla". It would be a verify bad classifier, that would only work in a number of cases. For that algorithm, you could say a black person would be more similar to a gorilla. But nobody would "be saying" black people are similar to gorillas, just that the algorithm would be more likely to classify them as such.

Are you saying people would use the "authority" of such an algorithm to claim black people are gorillas?

"If you're trotting out that grand old "black people all look the same" thing"

I didn't - stop imagining so many things. I am not a photographer. I think there were issues with the lighting and contrast. Physical issues. Other commentator claims it is just because film equipment was calibrated that way.

Even then I would dispute the "racist" label. There are many different looking people on the planet. Just because you can not account for all of them, it is not racist.

I am inclined to call your attitude racist, because you assume everybody is surrounded by the same mix of people (like in the US), and maliciously chooses to ignore certain types. That overlooks the reality of people who are not surrounded by an even mix of people of all types.

[billy_beef]

> Iirc there are even physical reasons why it is more difficult to identify black faces than white faces. Is that then racist, if an algorithm struggles more with identifying black faces?

Unless there is some physics based reason it is orders of magnitude more difficult to do feature detection against black skin, then yes something racist is going on. The tools/cameras that we've designed have historically been metered and measured on their ability to detect white features/skin. This was a holdover from film that translated to digital photography. (Some info from an NPR interview https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2014/04/16/303721251...). The tools that perform this feature detection contain this same biases and reproduce it in the data that they collect. If an algorithm struggles more with identifying black skin, it's because the data that was used to the produce the algorithm contained unexamined racial bias that was never corrected for in a serious way.

[adlkjnndnnd]

Then I would say racial bias is not the same as racism. You can not really blame the people who developed those tools for not being surrounded by people of all races, or for the use case of, say, white people. It's not a malicious intent, whereas racism implies malice.

It seems to me many US citizens think the whole world is like the US. It isn't. There are many countries where there are not as many "races" living together as in the US.

I think it's an important point. For example, if I were a writer and I would write a novel, I would perhaps only feature white people in it. But not because I have anything against black people, but simply because I don't really know any black people and would therefore be hard pressed to write about them. Doing that wouldn't make me racist - I would simply write a novel from "my" world. It would in fact probably be impossible to write a novel that accounts for all possible human experiences.

Edit: would it even have been possible to calibrate chemical film to work equally well for black and white skin? What if it would have been necessary to have different film rolls for white and black skin, for optimal result. Would those have been racist film rolls? Or what about makeup for different skin tones? Is that racist?

[billy_beef]

[flagged]

[adlkjnndnnd]

[flagged]

[billy_beef]

You should perhaps begin by educating yourself to the actual role that Germany did play in the colonization of the African continent in the late 19th and early 20th century: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_colonial_empire . I would not call this particularly far in history since it only ended in the 1910s.

[adlkjnndnnd]

They were late to the party and I don't think their "efforts" were comparable to that of some other prominent nations.

But it doesn't really matter, as I said. Nobody who was around back then is still alive today.

[billy_beef]

[flagged]

[adlkjnndnnd]

It's all besides the point. As I said, you will find violence, slavery and murder in every person's ancestors history, if you go back far enough.

But also, I don't feel guilty for the deeds of my nation, as they happened before my birth. I feel we have a duty to learn from history to prevent bad things from happening. That's it.

If you really want to go down that route - you are aware that the USA was taken away from native Americans, who died by the millions?

[billy_beef]

> If you want to go down that route, consider that many people in Africa also benefited from slavery (black tribes selling their enemies as slaves).

Yeah, that's gonna be a yikes from me dawg.

[dang]

We've banned this account. This is not a site for political or ideological battle. Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email [e-mail] and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.

[adlkjnndnnd]

Why? What? What is your point?