
Software shouldn't guess gender - lladnar
https://github.com/nlp-compromise/nlp_compromise/issues/117
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wanderr
The commenter asserting that knowing a user's gender is not useful for
marketing is wildly wrong. I agree that showing pink to a user you think is
female or only showing trucks to males is laughably stupid, but we have had
campaigns that were not designed to target a specific gender that had a
significantly higher conversion rate from one gender. It would have been a
huge waste of money to not change the targeting criteria for the ads. Even an
imperfect algorithm could save lots of money there if it's more than 50%
accurate.

That said, trying to guess gender based solely on name without any other
context does seem woefully unlikely to do well.

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thescribe
People like this just love to complain, the best thing society could do is
learn to ignore them.

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KhalilK
"If you don't like the implementation, write your own"

People forget this very important concept in open source all the time.

~~~
Pica_soO
I wrote twenty pages of complains- now got to find a compiler for that.

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aksdj
Why do people love to get offended?

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zepto
It wouldn't be offensive if there weren't real-world implications of how
different genders are treated.

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aries1980
The software under argument is not an end-user tool that is applied the actual
state of the language. It has nothing to do with gender politics.

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zepto
Not so. These tools _are_ currently in use in web apps which guess user
genders. I have actually witnessed embarrassment caused when invitations to
sign up or collaborate get sent out with an incorrectly guessed gender.

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aries1980
This feature is planned to be compulsory, therefore the web apps
responsibility to disable it if their audience is sensitive to such errors.

The bug in this case is in English, so the English language has to be fixed to
reflect better to the times we live in. Tools like nlp_compromise are
reflecting to the current state of English, not the other was round.

In theory, language is a tool that you can replace if you are not happy with
it. People who feel offended by the gender-aware languages have to option to
use a gender-neutral language, such as Hungarian. ;)

(Side-note: I more than happy to support a curated version of English, but
only if it becomes a phonetic language. That would make billions of people's
life much-much simpler.)

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zepto
Sounds like you are advocating that people adapt to what is convenient for
programmers.

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aries1980
What do you mean?

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zepto
Suggesting that people should adopt another language if they don't like
software that incorrectly guesses their gender.

~~~
aries1980
The OP was upset about the gender-aware English as well.

