This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
How NOT to Regulate the Tech Industry
Hot on the heels of my comment describing the UK's effort to finally rid the IoT market of extremely basic vulnerabilities like "has a default password", Colorado jumps in like Leroy Jenkins to show us how, exactly, tech regulation shouldn't be done. SB 205 is very concerned with "algorithmic discrimination", which it defines as, "any condition in which the use of an artificial intelligence system results in an unlawful differential treatment or impact that disfavors an individual or group of individuals on the basis of their actual or perceived age, color, disability, ethnicity, genetic information, limited proficiency in the English language, national origin, race, religion, reproductive health, sex, veteran status, or other classification protected under the laws of this state or federal law."
Right off the bat, it seems to be embracing the absolute morass of "differential treatment or impact", with the latter being most concerning, given how incomprehensible the similar "disparate impact" test is in the rest of the world. This law makes all use of algorithms in decision-making subject to this utterly incomprehensible test. There are rules for developers, telling them how they must properly document all the things to show that they've apparently done whatever magic must be done to ensure that there is no such discrimination. There are rules for deployers of those algorithms, too, because the job is never done when you need to root out any risk of impacting any group of people differently (nevermind that it's likely mathematically impossible to do so).
Their definitions for what types of algorithms this law will hit are so broad that they already know they captured far too much, so they go on a spree of exempting all sorts of already-existing things that they know about, including:
If your idea for a mundane utility-generating algorithm didn't make the cut two weeks ago, sucks to be you. Worse, they say that these things aren't even exempted if they "are a substantial factor in making a consequential decision". I guess they also exempt things that "perform a narrow procedural task". What does that mean? What counts; what doesn't? Nobody's gonna know until they've taken a bunch of people to court and gotten a slew of rulings, again, akin to the mess of other disparate impact law.
Don't despair, though (/s). So long as you make a bunch of reports that are extremely technologically ill-specified, they will pinky swear that they won't go after you. Forget that they can probably just say, "We don't like the look of this one TPS report in particular," and still take you to court, many of the requirements are basically, "Tell us that you made sure that you won't discriminate against any group that we're interested in protecting." The gestalt requirement can probably be summed up by, "Make sure that you find some way to impose quotas (at least, quotas for whichever handful of groups we feel like protecting) on the ultimate output of your algorithm; otherwise, we will blow your business into oblivion."
This is the type of vague, awful, impossible regulation that is focused on writing politically correct reports and which actually kills innovation. The UK's IoT rules might have had some edge cases that still needed to be worked out, but they were by and large technically-focused on real, serious security problems that had real, practical, technical solutions. Colorado, on the other hand, well, I honestly can't come up with words to describe how violently they've screwed the pooch.
Disparate Impact is going to be struck down. The GOP pressing the inclusion political party registration, veteran status and religion (Christian etc) in disparate impact laws is one of the smartest things they’ve done recently (not, admittedly, a long list) since it will accelerate their demise.
But in the long term they’re just not viable. They are pushed because explicit quotes were ruled illegal by SCOTUS, but the more they contradict each other (eg disparate impact against hiring Republicans Va disparate impact against hiring minorities) the more the courts are going to be overloaded with an endless series of these cases and SCOTUS is going to have to act. Even though companies may have legally sound defenses to why their new hires are 70% registered diverse Dems but retirees are, say, largely Christian Republicans (age and politics, changing racial demographics, whatever) the sheer onslaught of cases will become unmanageable.
Nybbler will undoubtedly have some kind of blackpilled spiel about why even this is doomed, but it seems to me that, uh, heightening the contradictions of disparate impact is the surest route to tearing it down.
John Roberts's court is not going to strike down disparate impact.
Aside from Roe/Casey, he's not willing to strike down anything for real. The court will issue a decision, make it super-narrow or leave massive loopholes, and then consider the issue solved and refuse future cases, allowing the lower courts free reign.
Congress put disparate impact in statutes, the 14th amendment specifies that Congress can enforce it by appropriate legislation, the conservative court will defer to Congress on the point that forbidding disparate impact is OK.
The Republican College Professors’ Association sues on disparate impact grounds after political party affiliation is added to more such laws. They say that the college’s DEI recruitment policy explicitly favors classes of people among whom Republicans are extremely underrepresented (female academics, minorities), which is especially egregious when only 10% of faculty are Republicans and 70% are registered Democrats, a trend the new policies will only exacerbate. They claim the college’s internal DEI materials advocating for a ‘less white, male’ faculty show explicit and direct animus or hostility toward the Republican affiliation because of the above.
The college counters that white men are overrepresented on the faculty, that women and people of color are underrepresented, and that because both the vast majority of academics are Democrats and almost all Republican academics are white men, attempting to correct the balance in the party affiliation protected characteristic category would have an extreme negative disparate impact on minority and women applicants.
The Republican Professors’ Association responds that black people and women are also highly underrepresented among professors, particularly in STEM, and yet this makes no difference to the university’s extensive efforts to recruit and advance those applicants and candidates, and suggests that a special effort for Republicans would be no different.
The university is located in a blue enclave in a red state in a circuit that leans red. The court rules that disparate impact rules mean the college must make every effort to hire and promote Republicans in its diversity programs aimed at increasing the representation of underrepresented faculty. This is a legally questionable ruling, but it is made.
The college appeals to SCOTUS, arguing that the same rules would destroy all diversity programs everywhere if they went nationwide, at least in those entities subject to laws that allow disparate impact claims based on the political affiliation/registration category. How does Roberts rule?
Roberts overturns the Circuit Court decision, on the grounds that race, as a Federally protected class, trumps political affiliation (which is not), and therefore the college's interest in not having a disparate impact on protected class members trumps the college's requirement to not have disparate impact on Republicans.
Suppose that a new regulatory bill affecting universities passes in congress in which political affiliation is explicitly described as a protected class (as it has been in some federal bipartisan AI efforts). What then?
My first guess would be a ruling that, applying Strauder, the portions of the law that could negatively impact minorities based on "suspect classifications" would need to satisfy elevated or even strict scrutiny, and would fail to do so, but that the portions which allowed discrimination on other categories would satisfy rational basis and be permissible.
More options
Context Copy link
That's not going to happen. If it somehow did anyway, Roberts would uphold the circuit court decision for that case, but include language about how universities must balance the interests of the protected classes and rule that because they didn't make a good showing of doing so this time, they're getting slapped down. Universities would in the future do some lip service about how they did some balancing and really truly this helps more for race than it hurts for political affiliation, but otherwise change nothing.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link