Unanswered assertion
WHEN YOU KNOW HOW THINGS WORK, YOU DON'T NEED DETAILS.

There's an unexamined bad assumption on the techmonster side of the current pointless argument about censorship.

Google and FB claim that their censorship is unbiased because it's done by computer.

Sheer nonsense.

This assertion is unexamined because most people think of computers as arithmetic machines.

Arithmetic by itself is unbiased. After you bring the data in, the operations of adding and subtracting and sines and cosines are strictly mechanical. So an arithmetic machine can't favor one side. This is true and unarguable.

Unfortunately, computers are NOT arithmetic machines. Computers are SORTING MACHINES that do a little bit of arithmetic. This has been true from the start. Hollerith's 1880 Census machine was strictly a sorter, and the latest CPU is still a sorter. Every useful program spends most of its time sorting and deciding.

Sorting is inherently biased. Deciding is BY DEFINITION an act of bias. This is common knowledge and common sense. When you decide where to put a dish, or decide what to wear today, or decide which candidate to mark on a ballot, you are applying bias BY DEFINITION. You start with a set of preconceptions built from your experience and status and desires. Everyone knows this, nobody doubts it.

The same thing happens in an algorithm, whether it's dealing with numbers or words.

An income tax algorithm decides which expenses are deductible and then deducts them. The subtraction is unbiased, but the decision depends on highly subjective standards.

A censorship algorithm decides which words and messages are deletable and then deletes them. The act of deleting words is unbiased, but the decision depends on highly subjective standards.

Subjectivity is obviously stronger for words than numbers. Even at the basic level of removing the Seven Bad Words, the programmer has to decide which bad words are on the list, and how to deal with peculiarities like the Scunthorpe syndrome. Is Dick an abbreviation for Richard or a word for penis? Is pussy a cat or a front-hole? All of these choices are based on an intentional choice of cultural standards.

Each of these sorting standards must be written into the constants of the program at some level, and the inclusion or exclusion is a purely human decision.

Labels: Answered and unasked

  ¶ 12:01 AM