Different cultural upbringings have different perspectives. These perspectives get backed into the tools that we create. When one culture dominates tool creation, its their cultural perspective that the world sees things through when they use that tool. When we have less people from less varied cultures building tools, we miss out on important perspectives and different ways of looking at or solving a problem.
I keep seeing this parroted, and while it may have some truth to it, it seems to just be a cover story for racial quotas.
Said another way, I think that a white, a black, and an Asian raised in the valley probably have a much less diverse cultural background than say, three whites from SF, Mississippi, and NYC.
But in that instance people would just complain it is too white and needs 'culture.'
I'm OK with the culture argument, as long as you don't just throw it behind racial lines, which does a huge disservice to everyone and makes a lot of not so nice assumptions.
For example, could you describe an instance where that impacts the kernel development in Linux? Where the network stack is culturally biased? Or the print server is racially biased?
There are already a multitude of cultures and peoples that contribute to Linux, it’s a worldwide phenomenon, not some US centric thing, and shouldn’t be subject to the social justice fad du jour.
I keep hearing statements that seem to boil down to "any assertion of some objective fact or standard is racist", which is utterly nonsense. Statements like that make it sound like someone's afraid everyone will discover that some race is worse or better than some other race, so "let's just de-legitimize objective reality" to cover for it. It's about the worst thing you could do if you're worried about racial/racist problems.
The problem isn't objective reality, test scores, etc. The problem is that racism (and many other evils) persist in people's hearts. Only love and truth can overcome that problem.
I for one hold to the objective truth that "all men (and women) are created equal". Go put that in your pipe and smoke it.
Which while you're not wrong - there are issues with some programs where it could unintentionally discriminate.
The easiest visual instance of this can be photographic filters - Google's Pixel 6 emphasized better photos for people of Color, where other sensors/phones may not be correctly calibrated for PoC. This is a pretty minor instance but easily visualized.
AI that does facial recognition or facial identification has in the past had issues with the faces of non-white people. It isn't a result of a 'racist' programmer. It's just from the fact that most testing and the data sets of these softwares is lacking the necessary diversity. It is part of including more people in software engineering is to combat these issues.
