News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Tensions in Google's ethical AI group increase as it send... by dragonwriter on Thursday December 17, 2020 @12:29PM (#25457786)
> A black woman? How is she black?

She's not “black” nor was that claimed; she’s “Black”. The first is a common adjective that never really applies to humans except very loosely, the second is a racial identity group formed by and defined largely through oppression by European and (in US usage; usage and identity elsewhere has evolved through different local forces and experiences) later European-descended American bigots, that has only loose correlation to complexion, ultimately starting with the division of humanity (by people in the last of these groups) fairly arbitrarily into the three broad racial groups of Caucasoid, Negroid, and Mongoloid, which later evolved into White, Black, and the last split into Asian and Native American.

Re:Tensions in Google's ethical AI group increase as it send... by bzb6 on Thursday December 17, 2020 @12:51PM (#25458078)
> She's not “black” nor was that claimed; she’s “Black”.

You must be deep inside some cultural bubble not to see how hilarious this sounds.

Re:Tensions in Google's ethical AI group increase as it send... by dragonwriter on Thursday December 17, 2020 @01:03PM (#25458253)
Hey, look, I'm not the engineer of the European oppression that created the modern racial identities (largely through shared experience of oppression, except White identity, which was created through shared experience as oppressors) and shaped most of the language around those identities. If you want to argue that the categories make no fundamental sense, you aren't wrong in their original delineation; they are groups of shared experience (which is also why even when the terms are the same or deeply etymologically linked, they have different concrete meaning in places where the historical experience worked differently; places, for instance, where the “one drop rule” [0] was a major historical force will, all other things being equal, have a far more expansive concept of “Blackness”.)

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-drop_rule

Re:Tensions in Google's ethical AI group increase as it send... by istjohn on Thursday December 17, 2020 @01:06PM (#25458294)
White people aren't white, either[1]. Maybe I'm sitting at the bottom of a deep cultural abyss, too.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Luschan%27s_chromatic_scal...

Re:Tensions in Google's ethical AI group increase as it send... by tomcam on Thursday December 17, 2020 @02:44PM (#25459500)
That’s a lot of words and I don’t really understand what you’re saying, but she is Black and identifies as Black. Or is she just a tool of the patriarchy for adopting such grossly over simplified self-descriptions?