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hirundo
mellosouls
Not quite the same situation, but
"Malgorithms"
is used by Private Eye (British satirical/political magazine) to highlight adverts auto-generated inappropriately to accompany articles on news etc websites.
Example:
hutzlibu
Of all the suggestions, I like the "Malgorithms" the most. It is catchy, easy to read and probably understandable by normal people as well.
BoxOfRain
Yeah, it's definitely the most sellable one I've seen.
I don't like the implication that it's the algorithm that's malicious rather than the person who wrote the algorithm (no algorithm is inherently malevolent or benevolent in my opinion, it's just an algorithm), but I also know this distinction is completely pointless for the vast majority of people and "malgorithm" gets the gist of what people are getting at across very well.
Narann
Interestingly, "mal" in french means "bad". In latin, "malum" means "that leads to something wrong".
So "Malgorithms" it an accurate one.
undefined
swiley
That's just it though. Part of the definition of "algorithm" is "correct" and these things are all just ML output that generate correlated noise.
waterhouse
Hmm? I don't think an algorithm has to give "correct" answers, it just has to be precisely defined. For example, one could say "For this problem, a greedy algorithm yields decent but suboptimal answers."
Merriam-Webster online says: "a procedure for solving a mathematical problem (as of finding the greatest common divisor) in a finite number of steps that frequently involves repetition of an operation" and "broadly : a step-by-step procedure for solving a problem or accomplishing some end".
joelbondurant
I love malgorithms having been exposed to the malicious grift of the healthcare industry.
qmmmur
If you coined this it's great!
crvdgc
Scunthorpe problem [1] is used to describe the false positives for auto filters, which are often results of naive substring matching. In a way, the current problem is similar, but on the semantic level.
However, it doesn't cover other cases for other AI mistakes you mentioned, like self-driving.
runarberg
The problem also goes in the other direction. That is platform rely too much on automation that human signal gets too faint. For example humans have a hard time flagging actual hate speech on these platforms as well. Another example: Every so often there is a front page post on HN where a company like Google will automatically shut down service for a customer (false positive). The customer has a hard time getting through and having this false positive corrected because their signal can’t reach through the layers of automation.
computerlab
The concept of "so-so automation" [1] seems relevant: innovation that allows a business or organization to eliminate human employees, but doesn't result in overall productivity gains or cost savings for society that could then be redistributed to the laid-off employees.
I think so-so automation often is used places where there's a lot of zero-sum conflict between workers and management, or where the work itself causes a lot of negative human externalities. (This can be a good thing: it's probably okay to settle for a "worse result" from an automated system if it eliminates a lot of physical or psychological harm to people...some content moderation issues probably fall under this case, but not this one.)
[1] https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/lure-so-so-tec...
Spooky23
I’d call it “plausible automation”.
It enabled things like Facebook to displace message boards for the most part. Look at Facebook or Reddit, they are barely able to police obvious noxious behavior in English, and military juntas in Myanmar are able to organize on the platforms.
cmehdy
As a non-native English speaker I read "so-so automation" like "sus-automation" and found it oddly appropriate.
dan_mctree
I figured it would be appropriate to ask an AI to come up with a label. So I prompted GPT-J with:
AI has proven to be terrible at moderating human content, we felt we needed a word for these kinds of buggy systems and have chosen: "
And GPT-J answered:
"LOLPOP"
Which seems to capture the spirit of unreliable AIs pretty well
ctrlp
"Totalitalgorithms" (Totalgorithms?) captures the spirit of these algorithms. They seem like bugs but they're actually undirected, organic features of a total technocratic political system that is rapidly coming to dominate life in our modern societies. The filters will be tuned but not fixed because they aren't broken. They're part of what Tocqueville described as 'soft despotism':
"Thus, After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd."
washadjeffmad
Algorithmic totalitarianism resonates strongly.
It's not a human rights violation if it isn't a human doing it!
dylan604
The human's rights were still violated even if it was a machine that did it.
howaboutnope
> It's becoming an increasingly dystopic force in our lives and will likely get much worse before getting even worse. So it needs a label.
It's not just something that happens to us, it's something we do. We need to do better rather than accepting it as inevitable, and let future generations worry about what the best name for it was.
> Maybe there's a ten syllable German word that expresses it perfectly?
That being said, I propose Urteilsfähigkeitsauslagerungsnekrose: The necrosis that follows the outsourcing of our capability of judgement.
laurent92
11 syllables, almost as requested ;)
May I suggest “yacht-feet automation”? It focuses on increasing the yacht feet of Zuckerberg, and doesn’t do anything else right?
burning_hamster
Jachtverlängerungsautomatisierung ;-)
Also 11 sylabels.
remram
"It's not a feature, it's just another yacht foot". I like it.
Symbiote
> Urteilsfähigkeitsauslagerungsnekrose
Post-reason-delegation necrosis?
But English is always a bit awkward for this sort of thing.
cowl
It's easy to blame this on imperfect technology but I'm not so sure. Couple of months back when all tech companies started their holier than though publicity campaigns with token actions we faced the same issue.
"Blacklist" was banned as term because it was deemed racist. No matter that people understand black and white outside the race issue. So if blacklist is deemed by people , not technology, as racist; thus removing context from the equation, why is AI wrong to assume that "attack the black soldier in C4" is hate speech?
TheOtherHobbes
It's why feature extraction/stat bucket AI sucks.
Human interactions have a social/cultural context. You can't just recognise $thing, you have to recognise how $thing depends on $context for the correct interpretation.
Current AI either ignores context completely or doesn't parse it correctly.
It's a rediscovery of the ancient "Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana" problem.
If you're out on a date and you say "Let's go back to mine" it implies one thing. If you say it to some friends after an evening out it usually means something completely different.
Sometimes it means the same thing - but you need to know a lot about the people involved to be able to infer that accurately.
And sometimes humans can't parse these nuances accurately either.
AI-by-grep or stat bucket can't handle them at all, because the inferences are contextual and specific to situations and/or individuals. They can't be extracted from just the words themselves.
Minsky & co researched some of this in the 70s, and eventually it motivated the semantic web people. But it was too hard a problem for the technology of the time. Now it seems somewhat forgotten.
mlang23
I use the phrase "K ohne I" since years already. Which basically means "künstlich ohne Intelligenz". We all saw this coming. The topic has been gone over in scifi literature. And still, big tech decided its time to roll it out. "A human would also not be perfect, and we claim this algo is better then the avg. human" is the last thing you hear before discriminating tech is rolled out. And since politics is in the grip of commerce, regulations will not happen early enough. We are fucked. 2040 will be horrible.
shp0ngle
Well. The speech police started changing "blacklist" and "whitelist" in programming context, even when those had no racist history; maybe it's time to change it in chess. (After all, white always goes first, that is not very PC.)
Rename "black" and "white" to "second player" and "first player".
BrandoElFollito
We should recolor the pieces with neutral colors such as #d3e6fa (because green and yellow have connotations).
And remove the obviously sexist Queen (why stronger than King?) and King (why should it decide when the game is over?).
Rook is shady as well.
And so on. As Aristotle said: "once we look close enough, we will find someone offended".
account42
> We should recolor the pieces with neutral colors
If only! Clearly we need different chess skin colors so that everyone can identify with their chess pieces. I think five skin tones [0] should cover everyone.
baremetal
need different genders for the pieces too.
raxxorrax
What connotation does green have? Where can I find the land of green people?
skinkestek
Greenhorns are the new and inexperienced.
See also: green usernames here on HN.
Note: I'm serious and not serious at all here at the same time.
No: the colors doesn't matter at all. Yes: If someone wants to get offended they will find a way, even how they are held outside since no one makes jokes about them.
SilverRed
First and second implies a hierarchy and uneven power balance. Both players should have their turns simultaneously.
fighterpilot
I thought of this and realized it'd actually be a fun game. Both players write down their next move and then move simultaneously once both are ready. To avoid race conditions, if a player moves a piece that is to be taken by the opponent's move, then that player has saved that piece with that move. That creates an interesting dynamic where you may not wish to take the most valuable piece if you predict the other player will move out of the way.
spxtr
I used to play a real-time version of this called Kung-Fu Chess. Each piece takes time to move to its destination, and when it arrives, a timer ticks down before that specific piece can be moved again. Very fun game.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kung-Fu_Chess https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVob7meb83w
userbinator
"To avoid race conditions", indeed!
d110af5ccf
How would two pieces moving to the same square be resolved? Both lost, or ... ? Regardless of the specifics, it would create a very complicated (but potentially interesting) dynamic when moving any valuable piece within a contested region.
throwaway17_17
My son and I would play chess this way, with my wife actually moving the piece. We use a dice or piece ranking to determine ending turns on the same square depending on the actual game we’re playing.
harryh
Diplomacy works like this.
1337shadow
They are uneven, having the first move is a documented advantage called "initiative". Your first move as black depends on the first move that white made, typically you won't have the same response for 1. d4 and 1. e4!
Anyway, I've been looking forward to this day, where SJW start trying to change chess because it's "racist" because white have advantage of initiative and "sexist" because it makes you sacrify the queen to save the king. Looking forward to see that level of stupidity being reached!!
zarathustreal
That’s weird, there’s a documented advantage to being the second player to move as well known as the “defender’s advantage” since you have more information to make your move. Your information includes both the board state and the knowledge of the other player’s move while the first player only has knowledge of the board state. No idea where the idea of an advantage to being first came from
user3939382
You can be #1 and I'll be #A.
SilverRed
That sounds like segregation. Putting different players in to different sets.
ikornaselur
Yeah, or the Mongooses, that's a good team name. "The Fighting Mongooses."
agnosticmantis
Be wise, randomize!
phonebucket
Relatedly, the world champion played a game where the player with the black pieces went first to make a statement about racism [1].
[1]: https://www.chess.com/news/view/moveforequality-carlsen-giri...
isolli
Understandably, it was difficult to adapt to the change: "It is difficult to change your mindset in a chess game with a different start. But if we can change our minds in the game, we can surely help people change their minds in real life."
dogorman
I'm sure chess board manufacturers would love this. Think of how many new sets they could sell if everybody decided they had to replace their old black and white sets.
mc32
Eh, many wooden sets are light and dark woods. Also many checkers boards are red and black.
It’s still ridiculous -like cultural revolution level ridiculous.
At least nature will never change and nights will be black and days will be light.
Mordisquitos
> Eh, many wooden sets are light and dark woods.
Ah, but one could argue that the colours of light and dark wood are closer to the skin colour of humans culturally classified as "white" and "black" than are the actual colours white and black!
nextlevelwizard
Until “they” force you to have eye implants that correct for this natural racism
tzs
As far as boards go, most tournaments in the US have long been played on green and white boards. Here are a couple of common boards you'll see for most games in most tournaments [1][2].
[1] https://www.chessusa.com/product/vinyl-chess-board.html
[2] https://www.chessusa.com/product/silicone-chess-board.html
glandium
In Shogi aka "Japanese chess", while for some reason in English, the players are Black and White, in Japanese, they are 先手 (sente, literally first hand/before hand) and 後手 (gote, literally second hand/after hand). Black is first, BTW.
hvis
It would be easy to choose a narrative that casts the first player in the bad light as well.
Chess is a game of war, isn't it? So whoever goes first is the aggressor.
So if Black goes first, that can also play into certain racial biases people have.
glandium
Except there are actually no color difference in Shogi. Which player a piece belongs to is indicated by its direction (at least that's my layman understanding). I have no clue why English goes with Black and White.
prezjordan
The speech police didn't do anything. I stopped using those terms because they're not descriptive.
thr0wawayaway
This is false. At least two very large organizations (Microsoft and the Department of Defense) have decreed that their employees not use "sensitive" terms like "whitelist" and "blacklist".
booleandilemma
How about just light and dark? A lot of chessboards don't have strictly black and white colored pieces anyway.
(For the record I think the whole thing is stupid)
drran
"Light gray" is easy to misspell as "light gay", e.g. "light gay knight takes dark gay bishop". IMHO, it's better to use "wine" (w) and "blue" (b) as colors.
mPReDiToR
If you use English rather than American, you have "light grey" which is less ambiguous.
nextlevelwizard
And attack and defense to moving forward and backward. And I guess we should abolish winning and losing while we are at it
nicky0
Chess already has the terminology of light squares and dark squares, so adopting that for the pieces too would add confusion and awkwardness.
For example “black’s light squared bishop” would become “light’s light squared bishop”.
rawbot
It would still be light-skinned pieces vs. dark-skinned pieces.
rawbot
But the pieces would still be white and black. We just need to recolor them to a color that hasn't been claimed as part of an identity... (looks at rainbow flag) well, shoot...
Infrared-coating player and Ultraviolet-coating player? Chrome player vs. Brass player? No kidding, I like this last idea.
zinekeller
> Chrome player vs. Brass player?
Chrome Player: sponsored by Google.
Sorry, I can't stop from posting this joke!
commandlinefan
The only logical solution is to make all the pieces the same color.
MetaWhirledPeas
What a fine mess we've created.
- Popular experiences tend to be better experiences, so we all congregate to the same services
- Homogenous user behavior leads to monopolistic situations, increasing outrage when anything goes wrong
- Even if the government doesn't try to enforce moderation, the company attempts to self-moderate to maintain its image
- The popularity of the service makes human moderation impossible, creating a need for inevitably-flawed robots
I see no solution. The only way to win is not to play.
skohan
> The popularity of the service makes human moderation impossible, creating a need for inevitably-flawed robots
That's true, but we might be able to improve things with a bit more human moderation.
For instance facebook is insanely profitable. They could probably increase their staffing for moderation by a pretty decent multiple and still be very profitable.
So the current state of moderation is not strictly a matter of need, it's also a matter of greed in terms of Facebook wanting to automate away jobs they could pay people to do. And given the state of online discourse, it's a decision we're all paying for.
blfr
Then you have the problem of bias in human reviewers. I don't think you can solve the problem of censorship with just a few more hires.
convery
In the past for a game-modding project we sort of opensourced reports. Users (meeting certain criteria) could visit a page and view 5 seconds of video and statistics of an alleged/detected cheater. Then select positive/negative/inconclusive. If (IIRC 5 users) had voted and the majority said positive/negative then a ban/unban would be issued. Because it was random reports and the usernames were hidden, there were no obvious bias.
raxxorrax
Some communities seem to be immune to this. Mostly smaller ones of course. Some even use language that would immediately net you a twitter ban and they are still much friendlier than most popular hashtags.
It was always assumed that unnecessarily vulgar language leads to escalation and in some cases that is certainly true. But the internet netted some evidence that this isn't a general rule. One the contrary, ambitions to sanitize speech can make communities extremely toxic.
undefined
nova22033
Homogenous user behavior leads to monopolistic situations,
i.e. Lots of people using a product that works for them..
thoughty
There was a star trek channel on youtube which got suspended because he called the fictional race Ferengi “greedy”, which they actually are. Got reinstated after a few days. But it’s getting ridiculous now.
exporectomy
I wonder how The Onion gets away with https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q4PC8Luqiws where they suggest visualizing your money related stress as a greedy hook-nosed race of creatures who want to grabble up all your money - and only hire their own kind.
ficiek
That is really well done, Onion used to be amazing.
smusamashah
Ferengi looks the same as فرنگی if 'g' sounds as in 'girl'.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D9%81%D8%B1%D9%86%DA%AF%DB%8...
"A foreigner, especially a British or a white person." https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/firangi
account42
Huh, the Thai ฝรั่ง ("farang", meaning Guava but also used to refer to white people) is also kinda similar. Looks like it has similar etymology and is not just based on the color of the fruit flesh. [0]
[0] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E0%B8%9D%E0%B8%A3%E0%B8%B1%E...
booleandilemma
My wife is a Ferengi.
fieryskiff11
(((Ferengi)))
dorkwood
It's never been confirmed that the language of chess is the reason the channel was flagged. It's all speculation. A fishing channel being taken offline due to hate speech, for example, is a boring story. The same thing happening to a chess channel is much juicier due to the implication that an AI accidentally flagged the words "black" and "white" as racist. There are a lot of reasons to be outraged by that idea, but it's important to remember that it may not have happened.
schwartzworld
And then it blows up here because HN has a lot of people who are disproportionately upset about default branches being called "main" instead of "master".
swalls
The amount of slippery slope argument and strawmanning on HN when it comes to topics like this is pretty embarrassingly Daily Mail-ish.
username90
The slipper slope has already happened, we are already at the point where words that had no bad connotations and didn't offend anyone are changed. Continuing to change words like that is just pushing constant frustration and costs billions in lost hours changing and fixing old build systems, of course people push back against that!
Chris2048
You don't think there is a slippery slope from banning one form of speech, to another?
undefined
tehnub
Agadmator, the person who made the video in question, also made a video soon after explaining the situation, and gave some hypotheses on why the video got taken down. In addition to the reason being hate speech, he suggested it may have been because they discussed Covid-19, lockdowns, etc, and YouTube was attempting to stop the spread of misinformation.
The video I’m talking about is here: https://youtu.be/KSjrYWPxsG8
eloisius
That adds some color to the situation but it's still worrisome that we're becoming so averse to misinformation that platforms are censoring the discussion of misinformation. This isn't going to help the misinformed. For a real world example: I was chatting with a close personal acquaintance who was semi-sympathetic to the Proud Boys privately via FB Messenger. They wouldn't believe me that the Proud Boys had a rule not to masturbate, so I tried to share a link from the PB website. Messenger wouldn't send the message, but didn't outright say it was banned content either. I tried again using an archive.org archive link to the page, same error: "Send failed. Operation could not be completed."
It seems weird to outright ban the discussion of certain things on public platforms, but even more weird to ban it within private chats.
motohagiography
I'm actually starting to think we only see these stories about absurd censorship to make the more commonplace and pernicious stuff seem legitimate by comparison. "Oh, hahah, our totally legitimate censorship ML that uses language models to isolate people from each other based on predictions of patterns in their thinking made a funny goof! Gee whiz, you got us that time!"
Anyway, Google will be fine. Lots of tech companies have managed to re-brand after getting on board with idealists, just look at Hollerith.
tdhz77
A friend of mine was banned for sending a chat message that said “this is a Mexican standoff” — the people in the room were both Mexican, if it matters.. we were all confused on why he was permanently banned.
EdwardDiego
I got flagged by FB for inciting violence when my sister said "Your wife is awesome, I'm going to steal her" and I replied "Haha, I'll fight you au".
At least the human moderator who handled my challenge of it was able to consider context.
spuz
Banned from what?
nemo44x
Because it implies the Mexican race can’t resolve disputes without violence thus normalizing xenophobia.
hn_throwaway_99
I think I'm more offended you referred to "the Mexican race". Mexican is not a race.
nemo44x
That was the attempt at sarcasm - I think it fell flat.
wccrawford
Did you miss the part where everyone involved was Mexican?
nemo44x
I was trying to mimic an overzealous hall monitor there and choose ignorance for effect. I don’t think it worked as the rating and the flagging indicate.
daenz
I honestly wouldn't be surprised if someone makes the argument that this automated flagging is an indicator that chess's language is inadvertently racially charged. And think about the concept of "white goes first." All it takes is a few viral tweets, and suddenly the game of chess is in the crosshairs.
hyperhopper
In my opinion, that might be a sign that the idea of drawing abstract connections between words and concepts, that are several layers of indirection apart, may be going too far.
Yeah using language that upsets people is bad, but if you allow enough layers between words and concepts, _everything_ can be argued to be offensive for one reason or another. Or will be soon once something else becomes a hot button issue.
kleer001
> using language that upsets people is bad
Shouldn't be. Intent should be the grounds for upset, intent only. Otherwise you get a Euphemism Treadmill, and that's a goddamn fucking waste of time.
SilverRed
This would save so much time wasting. When someone says "Can you push that to the master branch" there is nothing that ties that statement to slavery or racism so there is nothing wrong with it.
mc32
It reminds me of all the synonyms and symbols, homophones and homographs Chinese use when referring to mr Xi on Weibo, etc., including the now censored Winnie the Pooh. To get around the censorship which blocks mentioning of me Xi in unflattering light. It’s ever evolving to keep ahead of the censors.
BigJono
I've never got why people don't understand this. Judging people by their intent resolves a lot of ambiguity, for both political sides.
If someone gets up infront of a room of 1000 people and says "hey guys!", clearly intending to reference the entire audience, they're not being fucking sexist.
And if you're standing there with 5 racists showing a pepe flag or an ok sign or whatever random garbage it is this week, then you're a fucking racist.
There's absolutely no need for nuance or ambiguity in either case.
You can argue the toss all you want about how to determine whether someone is intending to do something (it's not like you can read minds so that can obviously have a ton of complexity to it), but if you're starting from a position that people can unintentionally do something offensive then everything that follows is just pointless bullshit. You've just built a trump card for both sides into the argument so they can just scream past each other like morons without contributing anything meaningful.
brianpan
> intent only
Communication is a multiple party activity. It's not just a speaker and a speaker's intent. The recipient and how it's received absolutely matter (and should). I've said plenty of things I didn't intend to be stupid. Still stupid.
Is it ok for the Washington football team to be the Redskins because no current fan or owner intends to be using a racist name?
It's not only the hearer getting upset that matters either. There's room for error and for grace and tact on both sides of a conversation. But it's definitely not just intent only. Humans don't work like that. Hell, even computers don't work like that.
judge2020
Text is text, and you can't encode intent without assuming that the reader has a similar level of internet experience to be able to pull such hidden intent using context clues.
kube-system
> Intent should be the grounds for upset, intent only.
People can be unintentionally upset. I'm sure we can all think of a time when we've accidentally upset someone. I still try not to do it.
We don't have to force people to change their language. It will happen over generations as we discuss these topics.
godelski
> intent only.
I disagree. Intent matters, a lot, and you're right, but it isn't the only thing. Right now I think we fall on the other side, that reception is all that matters (in the bias training I receive they specifically mention that it is 100% reception and not intent). I believe the law works on reception because that's easier to quantify. Intent is very tricky. You can do something that most people would consider wrong and just say "well I didn't mean it that way." (the inverse can happen too, but less people are likely to start a legal case out of spite compared to people defending themselves. It is tricky)
I believe that there is a middle ground somewhere. Where that is I'm not sure and I think we need to work together as a society to figure that out. I think somewhere in there there is a "reasonable" set of norms, and we have other laws to suggest that we can use this as a basis. But even this can be tricky as there are many different cultural norms and customs. It isn't even just ethnic customs. In America we have very different regional customs that often butt heads. I think we need to recognize that people are different and operate based on different values and often this is fine.
But I think a big thing we've lost in our current standing is good faith. There's three parts to any form of communication. 1) The idea that is within one's head that they are trying to convey to the other person. 2) The words, body language, inflection, etc that are used to codify this idea (aka: encoding). 3) The understanding of that language that was used to convey the idea (aka: decoding). Humans are pretty good encoders and decoders (we wouldn't have made it here where we are if we weren't) but there are limitations. Language is extremely messy and we often don't think it is because we're so used to it. But you can look at words being used today and you'll often find that people are talking past one another because they are using different definitions of the same word and actively refuse to interpret the other person's intended message (as an example, every internet conversation about capitalism/socialism/communism). The point of communication is to pass one idea from one head to another head. It requires understanding that there are these three components. If we do not act in good faith then we cannot communicate. With that knowledge it suggests there are two different actions to take if one wants to act in good faith. The communicator should try to encode their thoughts as best as they can, attempting to understand their audience (aka: speak to your audience). BUT we often forget that the listener's job is to decode, to do their best to determine the idea that the communicator is trying to convey (aka: __intent__). In fights we will say "but you said..." even knowing what was intended as a way to win. This is not in good faith but is so prevalent.
When conversations are about mic drops and one upping another person, communication cannot be had.
soheil
thinks the case of yelling fire in a movie theater jokingly
userbinator
I remember many years ago when colour schemes/UI themes were still called "skins", and forum discussions about them often yielded amusing racist-if-taken-out-of-context sentences like "do you like white or black skin" and "I have dark skin, but I prefer the white skin." Not a single person was offended or outraged, everyone saw the racial associations but clearly understood the context and was more amused than anything else.
I'm of mixed opinion whether people were actually more intelligent or level-headed back then, or whether the current "ultra-PC/SJW-ism" trend actually started as a joke that got taken too far and adopted as truth by the gullible.
tshaddox
I have no knowledge of the example situation you provided (I don’t recall any such jokes about software skins), but consider the possibility that in some cases where “back in the day we did it and no one was offended” it was in fact the case that people who were offended weren’t welcome or weren’t able to voice their opinions.
cynicaltheories
If you would actually like to know the history of the current trend, read Cynical Theories by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay
visarga
> whether the current "ultra-PC/SJW-ism" trend actually started as a joke that got taken too far and adopted as truth by the gullible
It started with a few German philosophers and social theorists in the Western European Marxist tradition known as the Frankfurt School in the interwar period.
cryptoz
Jokes that evoke racist hatred are not good, though. You don't actually know that NOBODY - literally you said that not a single person - was offended.
Also, so what if someone was offended? Isn't that mostly irrelevant to this debate? The goal isn't to stop people from offending others, the goal of changing our speech is to reduce the unknown harm that words can do re: normalization of hatred of minorities. The 'jokes' you describe aren't funny and do in fact have a potential to cause real harm in the world.
I would posit that unchecked hatred towards minorities online for decades is one of the reasons we are in this 'mess' of language today.
ma2rten
You know that many people are advocating for replacing the terms whitelist and blacklist, right?
I don't see how chess is any different.
spatley
Chess is different in that the pieces are literally black and white in their color.
Blacklist and whitelist are used as linguistic symbols: black==bad white==good.
That is pretty different to me.
textgel
You're right it isn't different, it was a stupid idea with firewalls and it's a stupid idea with chess sets.
piyh
I think if we let racists own the color wheel then we've lost.
uxp100
Because the pieces really are white and black, or light and dark. The list is not black.
nextlevelwizard
But literally anything can upset anyone. You can never satisfy everyone at the same time.
flippinburgers
This was in my opinion already readily apparent the instant that whitelist/blacklist came under fire.
boublepop
> Yeah using language that upsets people is bad
There are people who get upset about the language used to communicate results of scientific studies proving the efficiency of vaccines against the ongoing pandemic. Kids get upset at the language “No” even when uttered to tell them that they can’t go out and play with a chainsaw, purely for their own protection.
You cannot determine if language or language usage is bad purely from the response of others even if they get extremely upset about it.
busymom0
“Political correctness: is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.” ― Theodore Dalrymple
mc32
Or cooler heads prevail like at the Académie Française who recognize that sexual genders are completely unrelated to grammatical genders despite what activists try to say.
So we may just get some people who push back and tell people that chess isn’t racist and it’s people who are injecting race where it doesn’t exist (such as here in chess) who are the problem.
MontyCarloHall
Have cooler heads prevailed in this regard? “Progressive” Americans degendering Spanish by referring to Latino people as “Latinx” seems to be going as strong as ever, despite the protests of actual native Spanish speakers. In their haste to appear progressive, people who say “Latinx” are ironically engaging in linguistic colonialism, as it were.
mc32
But that’s the problem with progressives. They trip over themselves trying to be at the front. And yes, I’ve asked people of Latin descent if they use latinx in their speech to which they respond no and that it’s a North American invention and that in Spanish it’s Latino for sing male, Latinos for plural males or combo males and females, and Latina for singular female and latinas for all female but never latinx for any combination of the above.
tenpies
> Americans degendering Spanish by referring to Latino people as “Latinx”
Depends, do you speak Spanish? If so, there's a governing body - the Real Academia Española (RAE) - and they have referred to the "x" ending as an abomination. It is rejected from the style guide and not acceptable Spanish.
If you want to speak Woke Proto-Spanish, by all means do. Just realize it's not Spanish and it's spoken by a tiny fraction of a percent of - generally American woke-sters desperate to cling to Latin or Spanish culture as they realize they are actually American and as such - not oppressed minorities (the worst of fates!). This is why Oxford recognizes "Latinx" but the RAE does not.
tshaddox
That’s a perfect example of something that literally every single time I’ve seen it mentioned was in the context of people expressing outrage at other people’s activism, and never in the context of an activist actually advocating for it.
judge2020
Related: Referring to American Indians as 'Native Americans', which is often seen as over-inclusive by American Indians themselves since it implies you're talking about Natives to the entire North and South America. While not the worst thing, when you are specifically talking about the native tribes the United States pushed out and forcibly moved to reservations, the term 'Indian' is codified in law[0] and is what the group themselves embraced as their identity so that, as a whole, they could bargain with the United States government to obtain compensation for the tragedies endured.
aftbit
It's none of my business but personally I prefer latine[1]. IMO there's no need for white English speakers to tell Spanish speakers their language. We're all on the journey to a world with more than two genders together. Spanish speakers will figure out their own path to inclusivity.
1: https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2019/10/15/20914347/latin-...
godelski
> referring to Latino people as “Latinx”
Isn't this connecting a Latin conjugation? Which in turn would be westernization? I understood westernizing people to not be the right thing to do. (Which to be fair, Spanish does originate from Europe but Latin people are not). I never understood this. If someone has a good explanation I'd love to hear.
esrauch
Isn't Latinx supposed to be Latino+Latina? Surely those two words areactually gendered (in the biological sex way), unlike most words which are gendered in a purely linguistic way.
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hn_throwaway_99
> Or cooler heads prevail like at the Académie Française who recognize that sexual genders are completely unrelated to grammatical genders despite what activists try to say.
But that's not really true. I always learned that, for example, ils (grammar-masculine they) should be used when referring to a group of people where any of the people are sexual-gender-masculine, but elles (grammar-feminine they) should be used when referring to a group of sexual-gender-feminine people. Ils and elles have the same rules when referring to a group of inanimate objects depending on the grammar-gender of the objects.
Adrig
You're both right. In grammatically gendered languages, various situations and context are present. Sometimes, people get worked up on a non-issue (like the latinx example other commented). Other rules have a more debatable impact, like the famous "in groups, the masculine prevail".
Interestingly, other approaches existed in the past like the rule of proximity where the gender of the closest element will dictate how the verb and adjectives will be written.
Languages are an ever-changing thing. I think it's healthy to propose and discuss grammatical changes if it makes sense, but everyone should be aware of what they are actually talking about.
raxxorrax
In Germany we had the same. That didn't stop most newspapers to use some form of weird gendering of language. I think it will fade out since people don't use it.
It also underscores why some people think the media is a partisan mess. It is to some degree at least. They even asked people and most didn't like it. Didn't stop them.
chessmiater
Already done:
> In 2019, Magnus Carlsen and Anish Giri – who as of July were the number 1 and number 10 players in the world, respectively – promoted a #MoveforEquality campaign as a way of acknowledging social inequalities. In their game, black moved first and the line was, “We broke a rule in chess today, to change minds tomorrow.” It was billed as an anti-racist statement, but some took it as a suggestion to change the rules of chess to black having the first move.
https://theconversation.com/why-does-white-always-go-first-i...
SilverRed
I wouldn't be surprised if the Google moderator AI becomes the source of truth on what is offensive. If google doesn't delete it than clearly it is ok. If google does delete it then it is offensive regardless of anything else.
eloisius
Or it will at least become a cheap barometer used by journalists: Materials so offensive that they are automatically rejected by all major social networks.
dylan604
That's the scariest worst idea I've read all day.
Jach
Others have pointed out it's been done -- so it will continue to be done again and again until something gives. But I'd like to point out at least Go is safe for now, since black goes first! (However, white is used by the stronger player when not doing nigiri or playing a handicap game... And I'm sure some artificial drama could be manufactured based on which color you want to give draws to by giving or taking 0.5 from the perfect komi of 7. There's no safe space.)
fieryscribe
This happened last year. The Australian Broadcasting Corp (ABC) hosted a discussion about this[1]
[1] https://www.news.com.au/sport/more-sports/john-adams-slams-a...
CliffyA
Or what actually happened was the radio show asked if white going first was racially based, concluding that it was not. But conservative media spent days getting themselves outraged over it before it even aired.
fieryscribe
OP was talking about someone making the argument, not that it would be affirmed. That's what I was referencing, fwiw
abnry
You would be interested in this, starring Magnus: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPFI3-W8Fqo
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api
This reminds me of a story from a previous era of automated content moderation...
When I was a student at the University of Cincinnati, I was a member of a group called LARC which stood for Laboratory for Recreational Computing. The main purpose of LARC was to get the University of Cincinnati to subsidize our yearly trip to DEFCON, but I digress.
The UC mail servers, or at least the ones where the LARC mailing list was hosted, had some kind of stupid search and replace censorship to replace naughty words with cleaner equivalents. The cleaner equivalents were in ALL CAPS of course.
So a few members of LARC were working on a project to build a classical arcade cocktail table game out of Linux and MAME and some other stuff. I don't remember the details. All I remember is that the mail server transformed this into the "MALE GENITALIAtail table".
This became its official name. I think the MALE GENITALIAtail table was eventually installed in the student union.
toast0
> All I remember is that the mail server transformed this into the "MALE GENITALIAtail table".
I now realize I have a Pac-Man MALE GENITALIAtail table, thanks.
acheron
The clbuttic mistake.
gundmc
This is from March and was discussed heavily on here at the time.
soheil
It's even older than that it was first discussed in July last year https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23729156
underseacables
Oh no. Please. Not chess. Can’t we just leave this one alone?
nemo44x
No. Everything must be examined critically through the lenses of social justice. Chess is a Eurocentric and thus colonial game only valued because of its expression of whiteness. Dominance of an opponent of another color reenforces normative racism and the white pieces going first internalizes white supremacy to Black, brown, and indigenous peoples. I won’t even go into the obvious sexism and misogyny of the emotional labor of the womxn piece moving the longest distances in all directions while being valued less than the male piece.
We should expect and demand equity in all our so called “games” so that everyone wins.
colordrops
Ugh, I'm so screwed up. Your comment would be taken as dead serious in some circles and as parody in others. Based on the HN demographic I'm guessing the latter but I'm not sure.
nate_meurer
I hate to do this because the parent is good at letting their dry humor speak for itself.
But yes, it's parody.
nemo44x
I will confirm - it is parody.
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dogorman
Obviously your comment is sarcastic, but this is worth correcting: Chess is a Eurocentric
Chess came from Persia, or maybe India, and spread both east and west along the silk road trade routes.
tk75x
That part makes the comment even better, IMO. It paints the speaker as someone ignorant enough not only to go after the black/white convention in chess but also as not knowing the origins or details of the issue at hand(which is usually the case when people are virtue signalling).
akho
That's a bit of a misconception. Modern chess is European. Shatranj was a much less dynamic and interesting game.
egman_ekki
Well, it seems it was culturally appropriated by Europeans.
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We need a word or phrase for this phenomenon, where we attempt to substitute human pattern recognition with algorithms that just aren't up to the job. Facebook moderation, Tesla Full Self Driving, the War Games movie, arrests for mistaken facial identification. It's becoming an increasingly dystopic force in our lives and will likely get much worse before getting even worse. So it needs a label. Maybe there's a ten syllable German word that expresses it perfectly?