The real problem here is a deep political schizophrenia in modern society, or at least parts of it, which demands decisions be deliberately biased towards the outcomes they politically desire. These people then turn around and describe results that are not biased as "biased", which is utterly Orwellian.
I think your comment shows that you understand this. You accept that a decision may be correct, when measured in totally cold and statistical terms. But such decisions would not "change the status quo" and that would be a problem.
But that position is a deeply political one. Why should decisions at banks, tech firms, or wherever be deliberately biased to change the status quo? It's social engineering, a field with a long and terrible track record of catastrophic failure. Failure both to actually change reality, and failure in terms of the resulting human cost.
Injecting bias into otherwise unbiased decisions by manipulating ML models, or by manipulating people (threatening them if they don't toe the line), is never a good thing.
Maintaining the status quo is also a political position, though. In general, there's simply no way to interact with other people at scale without politics coming into play. It can be inadvertent, in a sense that there was no specific intent for "social engineering" - but if one's ethics prioritizes outcome over intent, it doesn't really matter.
Creating unbiased data is, imo, impossible, as I am also biased, and so are you
What about just learning based on the entire web?
I think you're using the word "unbiased" to mean "heavily adjusted for US centric views on racism and sexism" which isn't what the word really means.
If you train an AI on everything written - all books, all web pages, all newspaper articles etc ... a not impossible task these days - then you can argue you're as close to bias free as possible.
However a small number of AI researchers don't like the results they get when they do this, because the AI learns the world that truly exists instead of the one they wish would exist. But that's not a bug in the software. It's a bug in the researchers.
There's only been one case of being unable to recognise black faces that I know of, and it was shown later to be due to the lighting conditions the guy was using leading to very low contrast imagery. The same problem was replicated with white faces: there was no racism anywhere as you would expect given that unconscious bias hasn't been shown to exist at all (the studies that claim to show it have all collapsed).
If you asked the developers of the facial recognition library, "does your software have problems with very low contrast conditions" they'd surely have answered yes. Fully conscious of the issue but, that's software. It's hard to get everything right 100% of the time.
Why would a name letter bias be biological caused? Or do you mean bias about biological factors?
Bear in mind "bias" is just a perjorative for "generalisation" or alternatively "lesson learned". AI algorithms are good at detecting patterns in data and bad at being politically correct. This is not a flaw of the algorithms, it's a flaw in people who can't accept measured reality and go into denial.
So an AI trying to hire programmers discriminates against female sounding names, because it's learned that this is correlated with success? Apply it to hiring nurses or primary school teachers and it'll probably do the opposite. This is only "bias" if you start from ideologically driven blank slate assumptions. Otherwise it's just common sense.
Biologically in the sense that we have affinities towards our own names or initials which studies have shown. Just a consequence of how our brains organize information.
Instead of someone drilling into your head that your initials = good, and others = bad via your environment, it happens through natural processes.
Most biases are just pattern matching which is necessary for efficient memory references and power quick on-the-spot judgements/decisions we need to make. People make too much of a big deal out of stereotypes like it's evil to hold them even though it's a basic function of the brain. It's entirely possible without constant vigilance to make misjudgements based on that but it will still happen to everyone, even the most socially aware people.
The web is anything but small/lightweight and WASM requires a full blown JIT a la V8 to get good performance, so WASM being "small" (relative to what?) seems hardly a benefit.
JVMs are sandboxed and verifiable too, not sure what use a fallback to stock JS is but you can run a JVM in JS (look at TeaVM), it's way easier to emit bytecode for almost any modern language than WASM simply because JVMs do garbage collection for you and it's not really any easier to build tooling for WASM than any other VM.
In the end the main reason to do WASM over other VMs is that this way Mozilla/Chrome guys get to own it, instead of a competing firm.
WASM doesn't need a JIT, it needs a compiler. Unlike a standard JIT, you don't need decompilation and instrumentation. WASM is also designed so that browsers can reuse their JS JIT as a WASM compiler. Even from a JIT perspective, the difference between a lightweight JIT (eg. LuaJIT) and the heavyweight stuff used for JS is huge, and then the gap between JS JITs and Graal is a second such chasm. This equivalence is a false one.
Graal is not designed to be verifiable the way WASM is. We learnt enough from applets to not repeat that mistake.
GC is a distraction; WASM's opt-in is much better than Graal's by-default for use as a general compilation target.
WASM wasn't chosen disingenuously. Nothing else filled the role. If something did they would have used that instead.
Physical safety trumps most other things in our culture, rightly so.
So political activists realised they can brainwash or pressure idiots by claiming that any opinion, person or class of people they don't like creates "lack of safety". It's a kneejerk reaction: safety first.
The worst case I saw of this so far was an event organised by my workplace, for teaching programming. But straight white men were banned. If you were a white man you had to show photos from Facebook to prove you were gay. The justification for sexism and racism was stated as creating a "safe" and "collaborative" environment. Implication: straight white men are unsafe. Except when they're teaching, of course. Then they're needed, so stop being unsafe.
There's nothing new about this sort of abuse. Orwell focused on the way leftists constantly manipulate language in 1984 with the idea of Newspeak. Consider the contradictory term "dictatorship of the proletariat" or how every communist country calls itself a People's Republic despite not being a republic, nor run by/for the people.
>> The worst case I saw of this so far was an event organised by my workplace, for teaching programming. But straight white men were banned. If you were a white man you had to show photos from Facebook to prove you were gay.
Wow I never experienced anything like that.
I do find some things in popular media offensive though nowadays.
For example, I saw on Netflix there was a show called "Dear white people" and I find the title kind of racist. I'm white, I work ridiculously hard (I have no life) but at this stage in my life, I'm basically a loser (and I'm still working very hard to try to change this) so I feel hurt when other people insinuate that white people like me have it easy and don't understand real life. It's rubbing salt into the wound.
I think if there was a show called "Dear black people" or "Dear working single moms", there would rightfully be a massive backlash.
> So political activists realised they can brainwash or pressure idiots by claiming that any opinion, person or class of people they don't like creates "lack of safety". It's a kneejerk reaction: safety first.
People didn't just suddenly start killing jews in nazi germany. It starts with a shift in sentiment and you probably want to stop that before it gains momentum. That makes me understand how e.g. the "there are good people on both sides" comment made people feel unsafe.
> workplace example
That seems so much like a right wing caricature of "the left" that I'd like to read a source to make sure it isn't just exactly that. Not that I'd expect this to never happen... stupid people can be found everywhere in society. A more plausible scenario leading to this might be affirmative action (something I'd expect you to vehemently disagree with anyway) having its budged cut and someone still trying to go through with it by combining multiple things into one, even if this subverts pretty much the entire purpose. I'd expect reasonable lefties to have a similar stance on gayness checks as they have for sex checks on bathrooms... people will generally do the right thing and abusers should suffer consequences.
Look at codebar.io and then adjust your priors for what you consider a "right wing caricature". In particular read https://codebar.io/student-guide#eligibility (straight white men not eligible) and the preamble on the first page.
No reasonable lefties spoke up against this. Indeed they defended it as necessary and proportionate, as they did when the company started discriminating against men in other ways.
People didn't just suddenly start killing jews in nazi germany
Comparisons to the Nazis are especially stupid in this context because you're right, they didn't just start killing Jews. They started by banning them from various high-status roles and jobs, describing them as the source of problems, hypothesising a Zionist Conspiracy to explain why so many Jews were running rich companies etc.
And that's exactly what we see happening today against ordinary white guys. These days if we're CEOs/on company boards/in high earning jobs it's a problem that needs a "solution" (sound familiar?), it's the result of a conspiracy of the patriarchy, and the solutions start with banning white men from educational opportunities, speaking opportunities, replacing them on boards and so on.
No reasonable lefties spoke up about any of this in Germany either, because the left is fundamentally built on narratives about oppression by one identity group of another. It always has been. It gives people easy excuses for their situation in life. Whether it's the proles vs the capitalists, Jews vs the Aryans, women vs men, blacks vs whites, LGTBQ vs straight white men, if there's a way to treat people as lumpen groups and pit them against each other then you'll find the left doing so as much as they can. The 21st century is no different.
They aren't really asking, are they? Asking is a question at TGIF. What these people were doing is trying to create a bloc of activists that comes with the implied or explicit threat of coordinated employee action or pressure, as they've engaged in previously. They're pushing the boundaries to see how much control over management they really have.
Good! The idea that management should by right have all the power in its relationship with workers is very convenient for management, but I don't see why that obligates anyone else to take it seriously.
I disagree, this shows that it is not a niche concern, and management should be aware of the workers concerns, they can overrule them if they want, but your workers are you first set of customers, so you can expect a similar pushback from your main customer base. So again if you want to overrule concerns you have a better idea of what they are and how to challenge them.
Bombing has become a regular occurrence in a first world European country that isn't fighting a war, or experiencing mass civil unrest, nor are there any major terrorist groups or separatist movements occurring.
How is that not "very interesting"? It is extremely unusual, the onset of this violence has been very sudden, and the accompanying wave of censorship and debate-suppression that has accompanied it is very much within the scope of what HN regularly discusses.
As for (3), you give yourself away. Your problem is not that it's not interesting but rather you fear the political right and their message about immigrants.
Here's a thought. If their message is merely an "agenda" that they're "pushing", and if they're wrong, the Swedish authorities could kill it dead by simply recording the origins and ethnicities of the people blowing up Sweden and showing that they're all long term Swedes. But they refuse to collect this data, for obvious reasons: it wouldn't show that.
For as long as the Swedish government and people keep engaging in a massive coverup, you will continue to see the Sweden Democrats grow stronger. Their criticisms aren't being answered or met with compromise: they're being ignored, smeared and suppressed.
