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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34549 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 30, 2023

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As cynical as it sounds, I'm beginning to hear the term "algorithmic bias" as nothing more than a form of projection - algorithm systems frequently detect something real about the world, people with racially motivated politics don't like that outcome, and they seek to shift the algorithm towards a bias in favor of their preferred group.

I suppose "always was" is a glib response so I'll say:

This tendency is widespread and isn't even specific to algorithms: leftists always first insist that society did a wrong via its social engineering to then demand social engineering to ostensibly "correct" this.

You see this all the time with nebulous complaints about how "the media" brainwashed people into not liking everything from fat people to Africa to the WNBA and therefore have a responsibility to fix it despite very little evidence being adduced for this (and people ignoring more obvious explanations for why these things are low status)

It's just part of a fundamental, distorted Rousseauianism that has swallowed the Left: any inconvenient situation must be blamed on some sort of malignant social programming and, not just that, on the usual villains: white supremacy, Western sexism,etc. (as if minorities can't "program" themselves with awful beliefs).

This tendency is widespread and isn't even specific to algorithms: leftists always first insist that society did a wrong via its social engineering to then demand social engineering to ostensibly "correct" this.

If too many whites or "X" get ahead, the system is broken. Otherwise, the meritocracy is working (like in sports, Hollywood, etc. ) but not in STEM (in which Asians, Whites are overrepresented).

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