I wonder if there's a 'fail in the safest direction' mentality here. Like, their main concern is not to fail in the direction of attracting a 'Google is racist / sexist' backlash. And in the rush to launch, they've applied a fix which is wildly overcompensating – but in the end they'd rather take the hit for being too woke (brief culture war storm) than not woke enough (existential threat). Like a tightrope with a six foot drop on one side, and sixty feet on the other.
This is quite an uncharitable analysis. Given that historically, until recent years, culture, media, tech etc typically ignored minority groups to focus primarily on white, straight males, it seems reasonable that a company releasing new tech would want to ensure they didn’t make the same mistakes and their algorithm presented some amount of diversity. Clearly, as you’ve highlighted, that algorithm went too far, to an absurd degree, but the basic premise doesn’t seem an example of woke-gone-mad so much as a well meaning, albeit poorly implemented attempt to do better by historically marginalised groups.
Someone suggested to me that the people behind these weightings were just trying make the world a bit better. I think that's true, as the developers would see it. What struck me as remarkable about this view was how people might be happy with corporate sociocultural engineering, provided it wasn't too obvious. Plays nicely into my intuition that modern leftishism is really a branch of capitalism.
I wonder if there's a 'fail in the safest direction' mentality here. Like, their main concern is not to fail in the direction of attracting a 'Google is racist / sexist' backlash. And in the rush to launch, they've applied a fix which is wildly overcompensating – but in the end they'd rather take the hit for being too woke (brief culture war storm) than not woke enough (existential threat). Like a tightrope with a six foot drop on one side, and sixty feet on the other.
Interesting from Frank Lantz, game designer and theorist (his book is great)
https://twitter.com/flantz/status/1762617999553654838
This is quite an uncharitable analysis. Given that historically, until recent years, culture, media, tech etc typically ignored minority groups to focus primarily on white, straight males, it seems reasonable that a company releasing new tech would want to ensure they didn’t make the same mistakes and their algorithm presented some amount of diversity. Clearly, as you’ve highlighted, that algorithm went too far, to an absurd degree, but the basic premise doesn’t seem an example of woke-gone-mad so much as a well meaning, albeit poorly implemented attempt to do better by historically marginalised groups.
Someone suggested to me that the people behind these weightings were just trying make the world a bit better. I think that's true, as the developers would see it. What struck me as remarkable about this view was how people might be happy with corporate sociocultural engineering, provided it wasn't too obvious. Plays nicely into my intuition that modern leftishism is really a branch of capitalism.