
Gmail really wants me to say yes - awinter-py
https://abe-winter.github.io/2019/05/21/yes-gmail-yes.html
======
prlambert
I was the PM on this feature (and these are my views not Googles, as per
normal). The truth is actually much more banal. Most people are just really
positive over email.

The model is trained to offer reply suggestions that have the highest chance
of being accepted, from a large whitelist of the most common short replies.
The whitelist contains many negative options. We're optimizing for click
through rate. That's it. There's no editorial judgement, definitely not "‘no’
struck someone as too negative and they had to take it out."

We actually experimented with intentionally inserting more negative options to
increase diversity. Doing this reliably causes a hit to our metrics.

Discovering this made me pretty happy about the world. Most people are
generally pretty friendly to one another (at least over email!).

~~~
zestyping
The truth may be banal, but the impact is not. That's the problem with
technology. So often, there's no ill intent in the design decisions, but at
scale, the effects can be harmful, even massively harmful.

> We're optimizing for click through rate. That's it. There's no editorial
> judgement...

Something that all of us as technologists need to learn is that this IS an
editorial judgement. We do not get to disclaim responsibility just because we
delegated that responsibility to an algorithm. It is we who delegated it, we
who chose the algorithm and the metrics, and we who are responsible.

"We're optimizing for click through rate" is how we got the proliferation of
misinformation on Facebook. It's how we got
[https://twitter.com/chrislhayes/status/1037831503101579264](https://twitter.com/chrislhayes/status/1037831503101579264).
It's how we got Pizzagate.

"We're optimizing for click through rate" is simply not good enough in 2019.

We could claim to be naive in 2000, perhaps even 2010. But today? We all know
we're playing with fire now, and it doesn't much matter that of course we
didn't MEAN to burn the house down. What matters is that we don't give lit
matches to children and we know how to not set the house on fire.

~~~
prlambert
I agree and good point on the broader meaning of editorial judgement. If we
had seen any negative impact such as the FB/YouTube examples we would
absolutely take that into account. I haven't seen anything remotely like yet
with regard to smart reply but would want to be the first to see it if it
exists.

~~~
zestyping
Your willingness to use "we're optimizing for click through rate" as a defense
is quite frightening to me, though.

Someone who thinks "We're optimizing for click through rate" is morally
neutral is not qualified to be making these decisions, just as someone who
thinks giving lit matches to children is morally neutral is not qualified to
be a fire marshal.

Would you agree?

~~~
foldingmoney
It's a pretty long journey from 'our algorithm chooses which auto-replies to
offer you based on which have the highest probability of being selected' to
giving lit matches to children.

I'm afraid to ask your opinion of SwiftKey's autocomplete.

~~~
zestyping
That's not quite what I'm saying, though. My concern is not with stating the
fact that the algorithm uses this metric. My concern is with presenting the
decision to use this metric as morally neutral.

If you think that giving lit matches to children is morally neutral, you
probably either don't understand how dangerous fire is or don't understand how
unpredictable children can be. That's the point of the analogy.

~~~
foldingmoney
I don't know what could be more morally neutral than 'we offer the suggestions
that you've shown us you're most likely to want to use.' Anything else would
be trying to put _their_ words in people's mouths.

And let's not lose sight of the fact that this is a tool that offers an
automatic one to three-word email response for when you're too lazy to
actually reply. The stakes are about as low as they come.

~~~
dTal
Pretty much the entire history of progressivism is a long, slow dawning
realization that it's not harmless to treat individuals on the basis of group
statistics, for one group category after another. Part of the problem is
feedback loops - you can inadvertently amplify subtle perturbations by feeding
them back to people. For example, it might seem harmless to subtly nudge a
woman away from a career in STEM, on the basis that women are rare in STEM and
therefore they probably won't enjoy it. But this action, repeated across
millions of people, creates the pattern that you are reacting to. I think the
principle probably generalizes to "everyone", not just "women" and "black
people".

In the case of autocomplete suggestions, they can still cause harm even when
they're statistically likely. What do you think Google would autosuggest for
"Blacks are...", if it were around in 1950? What would the statistics on the
completion of that sentence look like? And would the effect of someone seeing
that list be 100% neutral - or would it subtly nudge them?

There's nothing obviously harmful with the specifics of GMail's auto-
suggestions now. But the _principle_ of 'we offer the suggestions that you've
shown us you're most likely to want to use' is _not_ morally neutral.

~~~
foldingmoney
We're talking about auto suggestions along the lines of 'Yes, I have', 'no, I
haven't', 'sounds good!', 'yum!'.

I'm not arguing against your principles necessarily, but deploying the
argument where it's really not warranted is a form of crying wolf and turns
people against it.

And as an aside, at my university the only time I ever saw any recruiting
material for STEM, it was along the lines of 'Scholarships for women in STEM'.

~~~
dTal
It's not a given that it's not warranted:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19978313](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19978313)
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19978300](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19978300)
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19978171](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19978171)

But the point is, whether this particular case is a problem or not, the
general attitude that led to its development _is_ a problem, and we're using
this opportunity to discuss that (even though the original article is not very
coherent).

~~~
foldingmoney
I think the general attitude of being willfully blind to fundamental
distinctions between things that are only superficially similar and
shoehorning issue debates in where they don't belong is ultimately unhelpful
for the debate over what is, elsewhere, an important issue.

------
cakoose
Another explanation: "no" responses require more information.

If you are saying yes, then that's basically all you need to say. If you're
saying no, you usually also provide a reason, so you probably wouldn't use any
of the short, generic "no" responses Gmail would come up with.

~~~
dsl
This was my initial reaction. Every time I use the suggested replies feature
it is in the affirmative, because that is an easy response. No takes some
wordsmithing I'd rather do myself.

------
ghayes
I’m a little... confused, is this blog post informed by one data point and
then extrapolates a set of conclusions / reasons / motives? I can understand
the sentiments of the article and poster, but I am not convinced of the
premises that Gmail always prepares affirmative responses, and I’d love to see
more data on that point specifically.

~~~
aeternus
I'm also not convinced. I frequently see Gmail suggestions that I would not
consider positive, for instance: I'm not interested. What is this about? Who
are you?

------
theamk
> The day that 20% of consumers put a price tag on privacy, freemium is over
> and privacy is back.

It's ironic coming from person with @gmail.com email. Fastmail's service is
$5/month, but they chose the free one which harvests their data instead.

If even the privacy advocates are not using their own advice, I doubt freemium
is going to be over anytime soon.

~~~
jaabe
I use gmail and I value privacy, I pay for g-suite though.

I tried all of them, fastmail, protonmail, tutanota, Runbox and a few others,
and none of them came close to using gmail. So I figured, what the hell,
g-suite is around the same price and it gets me 30gb of cloud storage as well.

I wish google was a little more clear on where the privacy starts and ends
though. Like if you want to use google home with a g-suite, you have to enable
a bunch of tracking. I know this has to do with the fact that google wants to
separate business from personal use, but really, I don’t want two e-mails.

~~~
Semaphor
Just out of interest, what do you prefer with gmail over fastmail? I find
using FM to be a much better experience.

~~~
jaabe
Spam, I got a lot of it on fastmail and even though I kept flagging it as
spam, it kept coming.

The mobile client, I really like the gmail iOS client. I think fastmail was
better than the native iOS mail client, but I just really like the gmail one.

Google docs, photos and drive are nice additions, but it’s mainly the first
two.

~~~
Semaphor
I keep reading about the spam problem. Can't confirm that for me. I extremely
rarely get spam in my inbox while on gmail I got about the same amounts but
also quite a few false positives.

The mobile client: I don't know the iOS client but urgh. The Android FM client
is pretty lame :D Luckily, I rarely use it.

I use next cloud for all docs, images, etc. and neither has an integration so
that's a toss-up for me ;)

~~~
jaabe
When you say gmail, do you mean gmail or g-suite? Because my gmail gets a lot
of spam, but my g-suite doesn’t.

~~~
Semaphor
I meant gmail. I didn't even know there were differences like that between
them. I think when I switched to FM, G-Suite was business only.

~~~
jaabe
I think it’s mostly still business, but a lot of the things I do business wise
correlate with a lot of things I do personally, so it blends together rather
nice.

Now I prefer the mix, I can certainly understand people who prefer the
separation.

------
francescovv
OP touches on a slightly tangential topic:

    
    
      This is kind of meta because I’ve turned this
      autocomplete feature off, I’m sure of it.
      Did I just do it on my phone? Did my wifi
      blip so the AJAX didn’t work? I certainly
      didn’t turn it on.
    

This strike home hard for me, as a pervasive problem. So many tech companies
conveniently "forget" about user preferences all the time.

For example, on my kobo e-reader, I'm positive I've disabled auto-update. And
yet, one day few weeks ago it auto-updated and the new version stopped
displaying side-loaded .epub files (from project Guttenberg). No rollback, no
appeal. Seller's 2-year warranty has recently expired. Now essentially I have
a modestly expensive semi-brick that will only let me read two titles
purchased via kobo store, and nothing else

~~~
tomglynch
I have an issue with something similar. I often get emails from email lists
where I'm pretty sure I have previously unsubscribed. But I can never be sure
if I actually did and they're ignoring it, or if I unsubscribed from something
else.

------
skybrian
This is the new superstition of the digital age: instead of saying "huh,
that's funny" when some autocomplete suggestions strike you as odd, invent a
myth about your personal relationship to the gods of computing (the big tech
firms) to explain it.

There are a lot of things about the computers we use that we simply don't
understand unless someone tells us (because we weren't involved and don't have
access to the code) and yet I guess many people want to pretend that they know
what's going on?

------
enriquto
> Works for me. | I'm down. | Absolutely.

As a non-native English speaker these sentences are very confusing to me. I'm
not used to English in an informal setting, and they seem overly informal
answers with implied meanings.

~~~
saagarjha
They're relatively informal, but they all generally mean "yes" and I would not
be against using a response like this when replying to a friend or close
acquaintance.

~~~
enriquto
Wait, does "I'm down" mean "yes" ? I thought it means "I'm a bit depressed".

~~~
SmellyGeekBoy
Yes, although as a Brit I see this as an Americanism, it's certainly not
common usage here. I believe it's generally used when being invited to an
event for example -

"Do you want to come bowling with us on Friday?"

"I'm down"

However, it's not always interchangeable with "yes" \- for example:

"Did you get the server migration finished over the weekend?"

"I'm down"

... Would be completely wrong.

------
a_imho
_Now I think black mirror a little, but occam’s razor still prefers
incompetence to malice._

Hanlon's razor.

------
owenwil
I don’t really understand why the author is being annoyed about a model that
takes time to figure things out based on what it learns from the user. I use
these buttons all the time, and they’ve grown to be more useful/accurate as
things go on–it’s definitely something I would be sad to lose.

------
aj7
I use those prompts more and more. In business communications almost
exclusively. I had to return a contract to my termite guy. Gmail guessed right
twice.

------
nullc
> You can taste the dank PM sweat dripping from the prompt that instead of
> saying ‘Yes’, ‘Later’, ‘Never ask me again’, says ‘Yes forever’, ‘Maybe
> later’. Sooner or later I’m going to slip and tap yes by accident and then
> some app will get microphone access on my phone.

This is exactly how 'enhanced' location access worked on android for years. It
would actually grey out "no" option if you told it to save the choice!

But on the subject, there was actually a publication on the effort it took to
get this system to not just return minor variations of the same answer.

------
preordained
Not to mention always asking me for more information for "recovery..." Get out
of my life. I want you for email (for the moment anyhow) and nothing more,
that's exactly how I want it, just back off. Even as I say this...I think I
really do need to switch to an email provider that understands boundaries,
paid or otherwise.

~~~
creato
I think this is a little over the top. They're pushy about this because they
want people to have an account recovery method so people can recover their
account if necessary. It really is important to them for that reason. This is
probably any online services' single biggest source of customer service
headaches: people forgetting/losing their credentials and needing the account
unlocked. This is a really problematic thing for companies to deal with
because any "human" customer service solution is both expensive but more
importantly, very vulnerable to social engineering attacks.

------
yeleti
My life is locked into one gmail account. All my notifications, passwords,
bank statements, invoices, to and fro emails from exes, etc. etc. come to this
gmail account. I have to rewind too much of my time to go to every place that
uses my gmail account and change it. I can't do it. I'm locked in for life.

~~~
taneq
And now think what would happen to you if your Gmail account was locked. No
recourse, no response except form mails saying "your account is banned because
it's banned." No way to recover any other account using it as recovery mail.
No way to access your records or email history. Maybe locked out of your phone
too. You're boned.

That's what made me extract myself from Gmail. I created my new email address
and forwarded my Gmail account to it, and then for every email coming to the
Gmail address I updated the sender with my new address. It took me about six
months before all my important mail was using my new address, but it actually
wasn't that hard and I feel hugely less vulnerable to Google's whims.

Edit: At the same time I also started using a proper password manager, making
me again much less vulnerable to losing an email account because I no longer
rely on resetting passwords to get into my multifarious online accounts.

~~~
kkarakk
If your account is banned do your auto reply(canned responses) stop working?
Coz that would be a proper stop gap to tell important people(job
offers/contact requests for eg) to your website/email you actually use etc.

~~~
eridius
If your account is banned how would you even set up an auto-reply to tell
people about your new email?

~~~
creatornator
Presumably it would be set up before-hand? If you preferred the other email,
you might deprecate the gmail account and set up an auto-reply for all traffic
to update contact information. It would require giving up gmail early. The
question would be if auto-reply keeps working after being banned

------
guyromm
does anyone remember this little gem? [http://www.linehollis.com/wp-
content/uploads/2016/08/capture...](http://www.linehollis.com/wp-
content/uploads/2016/08/capture_24072016_173706-cropped-e1473084382629.png)

------
colordrops
> Why am I not more pissed about this? I think because ‘maybe yes forever
> later’ isn’t a sign of G’s dominance or power over my life, it’s a sign that
> they’re afraid of losing it all and are employing dark patterns to hold on
> to me. And like most strategies conceived in desperation, it has a 50/50
> chance of backfiring and driving people away.

This is too optimistic. Google has got a grip on consumers and they will
certainly not be driven away by dark patterned prompts. Anyway it's definitely
not 50/50.

------
kkarakk
>A lot of ML still comes down to feature engineering i.e. it’s art as much as
science.

Is it though? Or has this just become the polite way of saying "you don't know
what you're doing but I - abe the artistic - do?"

------
gcb0
Sounds good! Thanks.

------
bananaheel
I stopped using gmail because of this feature.

------
scarejunba
This feature is great. Lots of pearl clutching going on. Just type 'No thanks'
or whatever if you don't want to go, dude. Seriously.

I have this pet theory that the West has achieved safety and peace of such a
degree that people have to box shadows to get that little bit of thrill in
their lives. No, there's no scary dystopia coming. You've just got to chill.

This is like me panicking that Jetbrains wants me to print out secrets to
stdout because I typed out sout<tab> while writing something handling a
secret. My god! They must be moving us to a scary dystopia where everyone's
plaintext password is in logs somewhere where Jetbrains can steal it!

~~~
fenwick67
Your comment is a long-winded equivalent of "who cares".

~~~
archon810
And it should be at the top of this discussion thread.

