It only become unmanageable and builds up resentment. Anyway, maybe its a phase. Sometimes I wonder if the openly racist European&Asians ways are healthier since it starts with unpleasant honesty and then comes the adjustment as people of different ethnic and cultural background come to understand each other and learn how to live together.
I was minority in the country I was born and I'm immigrant/expat everywhere and I'm very familiar with racism and discrimination. The worst is the hidden one, I'm completely fine with racist people say their things, its very useful for avoiding them. The institutional racism is easy to overcome by winning the hearts of the non-racists, for every racist there are 9 fair and welcoming people out there who are interested in other cultures and want to see people treated fairly and you end up befriending them and learn from them and adapt to their ways when preserving things important to you. This keyword banning and fake smiles makes everything harder and people are freaking out when you try to discuss cultural stuff like something you do in your household that is different from what is the norm in this locality because they are afraid to say something wrong. This stuff seriously degrades the society. It's almost as if Americans want to skip the part of understanding and adaptation of people from different backgrounds by banning words and smiling all the time.
Students openly call for racial segregation on university campuses.
They angrily shout to professors that it is a professors job to shelter the students from “harmful” or “violent” ideas, and openly call for any professor who disagrees to be fired. Professors are routinely brought up on disciplinary charges and dismissed for expressing their honest opinions.
Mobs of students chant in favor of killing the Jews outside the locked door of a classroom where a few Jewish students hide in fear for their lives, and the administration looks on with a benevolent smile.
Mobs burn down city centers, and the police don’t arrest them. Meanwhile politicians get on the news and openly call for more violence.
The FBI passes around memos stating that Catholics are “extremists”, and instructing agents on how and when to surveil them.
If it’s a phase, I fear that it can only end in blood.
For example, at the big company I worked for in the UK if you were to look at our marketing material, documentation and in-app images you'd be forgiven for thinking that the UK was 30% black and 20% South Asian. (East Asians were comparatively neglected, being about as common as white men)
It's the most online people who don't believe these things actually happened. Go to some of the towns where these issues actually occurred and see what people think.
Was that online, too?
However, sources* for all of the above are easily found, both coverage as the story is breaking and followups. For example:
news campus students chant kill jews classroom locked door
https://www.foxnews.com/us/nyc-colleges-jewish-students-seen...
https://www.foxnews.com/media/chants-calling-murder-jews-sho...
https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/nypd-stresses-cooper-un...
Or ...
news fbi memo catholic extremists
https://news.yahoo.com/fbi-internal-memo-warns-against-22142...
https://judiciary.house.gov/media/press-releases/new-report-...
https://www.catholicculture.org/news/headlines/index.cfm?sto...
The ease with which links surface suggests if one genuinely wanted to read sources, one could Google with no effort.
* NOTE: Media made broad claims on all of these, and media made narrow “corrections”. It's easy enough to find both types of sources. Asking someone for sources doesn't prove anything. On controversial topics one really needs to “do your own research.”
Oh, I just hadn't heard of these things. Thanks for the links!
Edit ---
However, I am now confused by the latter portion of your response
> Asking someone for sources doesn't prove anything.
I wasn't trying to prove anything, nor did I make any claims. I only wanted to be aware of current events. It does seem to me quite backward to place the burden of proof not on the party making claims, but someone asking to understand why that party made those claims.
To delve into the philosophical roots that lead to the type of absurd reasoning mentioned by the original poster, "Cynical Theories" by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay, released in 2020, is recommended. Despite Lindsay's more recent radical stance, the book provides a critical exploration of these theories. It is also heavy on citations.
For the kind of misconduct in higher education described by the original poster, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) or the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) serve as reliable references. There's no lack of explicit anti-semitism on campus.
The discussion around "woke" culture is often muddled by attempts to obscure its existence, framing it as merely an extreme right-wing concern. For those who genuinely want a quick way to challenge their priors regarding "woke" being some kind of "right-wing" thing, you should give this short piece[0] a read. Does it comport with your notion of "right-wing"? If not, you should start questioning those who use "right-wing" as a boogeymen to convince you that there isn't a radical ideology who've created newspeak for their brand of racism, sexism, whatever-ism.
[0] https://helenpluckrose.substack.com/p/defining-woke-and-woke...
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/yale-says-lecture-fanta...
It's very insidious.
The majority of people that committed these atrocities are dead. Will you stoop to their same level and collectively discriminate against whole swaths of populations based on the actions of some dead people? Guilt by association? An eye for an eye? Great way to perpetuate the madness. How about you focus on individuals, as only they can act and be held accountable? Find the extortion inherent to the system, and remove it so individuals can succeed.
That is what all these people are arguing, so you agree with them here. If people didn't complain then this wouldn't get fixed.
When I asked Gemini to "generate an image of all an black male basketball team" it gladly generated an image exactly as prompted. When I replaced "black" with "white", Gemini refused to generate the image on the grounds of being inclusive and less divisive.
There’s no argument here, it literally says this is the reason when asked
So I'd argue that those particular "override" responses (as opposed to majority of model answers which are emergent from large quantities of unannotated text) do represent the views of the creators, because they explicitly and intentionally chose to manufacture those particular training examples telling that this is an appropriate response to a particular type of query. This should not strain credulity - the demonstrated behavior totally doesn't look like a side-effect of some other restriction, all evidence points that Google explicitly included instructions for the model to refuse generating white-only images and the particular reasoning/justification to provide along with the refusal.
I agree with you, but then the question is WHY do they implement a system that does exactly that? Why don't they speak up? Because they will be shut down and labeled a racist or fired, creating a chilling effect. Dissent is being squashed in the name of social justice by people who are self-righteous and arrogant and fall into the identity trap, rather than treat individiuals like the rich, wonderful, fallible creatures that we are.
The existence of the guardrails and the stated reasons for their existence suggest that this is exactly what its creators expect me to do. If nobody thought that was reasonable, the guardrails wouldn't need to exist in the first place.
I never saw such a comment. Can you link to it?
All people are saying that Google is refusing to generate images of white people due to "wokeness", which is the same explanation you gave just with different words, "wokeness" made them turn this dial until it no longer generates images of white people, they would never have shipped a model in this state otherwise.
When people talk about "wokeness" they typically mean this kind of overcorrection.
If you asked the creators of Gemini why they altered the model from it's initial state such that it produced the observed behavior, I'm sure they would tell you that they were attempting to correct undesirable biases that existed in the training set, not "we're woke!". This is the issue I'm pointing out. Rather than viewing this incident as an honest mistake, many commenters seem to want to impute malice, or use it as evidence to support their preconceived notions about the overall ideological stance of an organization with 100,000+ employees.
Wokeness describes a very particular type of behaviour — look it up. It’s not the catch-all pejorative you think it is, unlike, say, ‘xyz-phobia’.
…and I probably don’t have the opinions you might assume I do.
It doesn’t sound like a good faith argument to me; more an attempt to tar individuals with a broad brush because they happen to have used a term also used by others whose views one disapproves of. I think it’s better to try to gauge intentions rather than focusing on particular terminology and leaping to ‘you used this word which is related to this and therefore you’re really bad’ kind of conclusions.
I’m absolutely sure your view isn’t this crude, but it is how it comes across. Saying something is ‘politically charged’ isn’t an argument.
You not understanding the term is why you don't see why you are saying the same thing as those people. Communication gets easier when you try to listen to what people say instead of straw manning their arguments.
So when you read "woke", try substitute "over correcting" for it and it is typically still valid. Like that post above calling "woke" people racist, what he is saying is that people over corrected from being racist against blacks to being racist against whites. Just like Google here over corrected their AI to refuse to generate white people, that kind of over correction is exactly what people mean with woke.
No. We use vague and loaded terms all the time. That's OK. That's human. Paternalism yields resentment because it treats adults like babies. Some person in some corporate office trying to teach me how to think when they themselves lack critical thinking ability is unacceptable.
Words like "woke" mean different things to different people and their use is very harmful to discourse between people from opposite sides on that particular culture war. Tabooing the term and replacing it with one's intended meaning can really clear things up and prevent getting people's backs up. E.g. rather than "woke" one might use "race aware" or "tribalistic" or "injustice aware" or whatever specific meaning one intends to convey. That way you can actually be understood rather than offending people because they identify as "woke" but consider it to mean "injustice aware" rather than some negative meaning.
Tl;dr: words are for communication, use words your audience has the same understanding of
Here you and I are having a civil discussion and meta-conversation. We can literally talk about how the word is used, misunderstood, weaponised, etc. Thoughtful and curious debate should be encouraged. If a word triggers behavior that is unpleasant or counter productive, we should reprimand the individuals doing so not assume nobody can use the word in a civil discussion and I for one feel I learn different perspectives that I hope make me a better person.
> words are for communication, use words your audience has the same understanding o
That’s a very narrow perspective. Not only is it not achievable in principle (meanings of words shift over time and have cultural and personal context), but the point of communication is often to build shared understanding.
I do, however, it is a valid decision to want to make certain topics off limits, because they tend to devolve into chaos and a broken community, but I would argue against a blacklist of words. We should be able to discuss porn but not share porn in this site. We should be able to debate each other on wokeness (the word and our differing perspectives) without getting disrespectful or assuming bad intent or overlooking abuse.
Maybe I’m too idealistic and you have the more practical position… so I want to be open to that possibility.
> Here you and I are having a civil discussion and meta-conversation. We can literally talk about how the word is used, misunderstood, weaponised, etc.
I want to warn you that that does not apply to all words. I was informed by moderation that the following is not acceptable: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38680523
I'm pretty curious if you agree with them there (I've actually been meaning to get around to asking someone else for their opinion but it's still emotionally a bit difficult). (I think this subthread is dead enough that no one but you will read this)
I read it. What specifically did you hear was unacceptable - there’s no moderator comment attached to your writing so I cannot tell what they told you is unacceptable.
(I was avoiding going to that thread again because looking at it stresses me out, I took a week long break from hackernews after that)
take the word eugenics, for example. we've decided that's not okay. by asking modern questions around it, you think you can make it okay to support eugenics. but unfortunately words can have two meanings, and the word eugenics has picked up the meaning that non-blonde blue eyed white people are to be euthanized. thus, you can't use the word eugenics. you want it to mean one thing, but the rest of us have agreed it means this other thing, and you're left confused because you're saying X and everyone else is hearing Y because Y is what that word means to everyone else.
My sad experience is that you just can’t do what you want, if what you want is most people to treat your language with the high precision you intended or to pause their emotional filters and explore some philosophical “what ifs”. You might be able to find some pure and deep thinkers in real life or private settings to explore questions highlighted in the fourth post in your link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38699727
But in public settings (including online) you mostly can’t.
You also can’t even use some words online, despite them having a very precise and innocuous meaning.
As an example:
Try to guess the reaction to something like: “when I realized Colin didn’t leave a tip, I didn’t confront him as I knew that he wasn’t going to change since that was just an inherent part of his niggardly nature.”
A human compiler, equipped with the correct dictionary definition of “niggardly” will process your sentence one way. A random person on the street, online, or in a pub is highly likely to take offense. If you insist that people are obliged to treat your sentence as if you’d said “stingy” (the definition of the race-connotation-free word “niggardly”), you’re going to be confused when many refuse.
Similarly, if you ask some of the questions from the link above among strangers in a public forum: are they asking in order to deeply explore all valid philosophies concerning them? Or are they placing poop into the pretty nice punch bowl we have here?
Many will assume and treat you as if it’s the latter, because their experience is many people do do that online, and treat you as if you’re doing that as well.
You know your intentions. Other people have to guess at them. If you communicate in a way that matches you to a pattern they have a negative reaction to, you’re going to get that reaction.
That would mean you cannot talk about it. You want to constrain debate. You want issues to not be discussed. The idea that any particular word should not be rendered is absurd.
https://web.archive.org/web/20211108155321/https://freddiede...
Forgive me if my interest in arguing with someone who quotes "CRT in schools" (with a salient example) and an intentionally (?) crude understanding of what "defund the police" means on the website that courted far right populists[1] is rather insubstantial.
I think we're just too far apart to reconcile anything. A YouTube personality called Vaush might be your kind of rhetoric if you look for left leaning people to address the claims head on, in length. I don't have the breath for it.
[1]: https://nathantankus.substack.com/p/i-am-leaving-substack
Like, if I were on that team, it'd be pretty risky to question this, and it'd probably not lead to change. So they let the public do it instead.
"Asked specifically to generate images of people of various ethnic groups, it would happily do it except in the case of white people, in which it would flatly refuse."