
Silicon Valley Is Inserting Its Biases into Nearly Every Technology We Use - petethomas
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/pakxby/silicon-valley-is-inserting-its-biases-into-nearly-every-technology-we-use
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jimmywanger
The funny thing is that the valley is doing everything in its power to get rid
of these "biases", even when they're proven out by machine learning, empirical
evidence, and profitability.

For instance, Facebook says that it will automatically stop assigning targeted
ads by race, because it could get the race wrong. [1]

However, when they got the race "wrong" even though the person might have
interests stereotypically associated with those races, there was a big
outroar. If they had instead called the race groupings by some other name such
as "urban" for rap and basketball, for instance, I think that would not be so
much of a big deal.

[1]
[https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/12/business/media/facebook-w...](https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/12/business/media/facebook-
will-stop-some-ads-from-targeting-users-by-race.html)

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thatonechad
Why are there so many articles talking about "white" silicon valley. Why does
the left always make everything about race?

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vkou
Because in our society people of different races are treated differently.

If you don't realize this, you either need to spend more time interacting with
people outside of your bubble, or your friends aren't comfortable enough with
you to share their experiences.

If neither of those are the case, you should tell us where you live, and what
the secret sauce to this magical, post-racism colorblind Utopia is.

~~~
thatonechad
Thats complete and utter nonsense.

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mesozoic
It's funny to see a site known for their own bias to point out the bias of the
large tech companies.

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nitwit005
I've seen a lot of articles making this suggestion, but never do they seem to
actually check if the software was indeed written by white men. It's as if
they don't want their biases contradicted by evidence.

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wtflmaohnisdumb
Who the biased algorithms are written by are pretty irrelevant. The argument
is they are biased against anyone who is not a white male, and that we should
be aware of that.

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nitwit005
The article has a hypothesis right in the headline: "algorithmic bias is a
result of the insular, mostly white tech industry". So no, if it was written
by an entirely Indian staff at an Indian outsourcing company, that would
discredit the idea.

