NCC April People: A Bad Word?
April 27, 2022
I am trying to get used to the “them” word. I try, but my grade school teachers in the early 1950s were into the he and she pronouns. Its were okay. Them acceptable in certain constructions. Old habits are often hard to change despite the confidence of the nudge experts that altering a humanoid pattern is no big deal. Just ask Facebook (Zuckbook) or Google. Nudge. Nudge.
“A 630-Billion-Word Internet Analysis Shows ‘People’ Is Interpreted as ‘Men’” explains that gender bias turns up in a neutral word. People. Gender biased. Who knew?
The write up explains:
Psychologists at New York University analyzed text from nearly three billion Web pages and compared how often words for person (“individual,” “people,” and so on) were associated with terms for a man (“male,” “he”) or a woman (“female,” “she”). They found that male-related words overlapped with “person” more frequently than female words did. The cultural concept of a person, from this perspective, is more often a man than a woman…
What’s the fix? Nudges? Prescriptive rules with substantive punishments for those who violate the rules? Nuclear destruction of humanoid life forms?
The write up concludes:
Word embeddings, the same linguistic tools employed in the new study, are used to train artificial intelligence programs. That means any biases that exist in a source text will be picked up by such an AI algorithm. Amazon faced this problem when it came to light that an algorithm the company hoped to use to screen job applicants was automatically excluding women from technical roles—an important reminder that AI is only as smart, or as biased, as the humans who train it.
This sounds as if the passage were informed by Dr. Timnit Gebru’s and her concerns about Google, Snorkel, and the use of synthetic data. That leads me to a question:
Why didn’t Scientific American ask Dr. Gebru about the study?
Yeah, science.
Stephen E Arnold, April 27, 2022
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