Category Archives: morality

Battle Against Hate Speech?

Posted on by
Reply

Bob Pearson, co-author of Countering Hate and CIO of W2O Group says that AI is able to identify hate speech today.

All human beings follow patterns online.  You can see what language, content, channel, and people matter to them. You can see which words trigger information seeking, which language is most associated with hate topics or sites, which people are the most important influencers and you can see a range of behavioral characteristics.

Except that humans can’t define “hate speech;” we can’t even define “hate.”  All that can be done is for each of us, individually, to identify what it seems like that to us—not what it is to anyone else.  A Justice’s remark about pornography—that he couldn’t define it, but he knew it when he saw it—is worse than wholly inadequate when Government tries to regulate speech, or when private enterprises try to regulate speech in the public spaces they create as their business models or offshoots of them.  Such regulation is a threat to individual liberty.

Artificial Intelligence certainly is not up to this task of discriminating unacceptable speech from acceptable.  The definitions of those terms will be programed by a select group of humans—who can’t define the terms except as they personally apply the terms to themselves.  This frangibility is demonstrated by those cases that go to jury trials and the differing outcomes differing juries reach on substantially similar cases.  All AIs can do is reflect the prejudices of their programmers.

How, indeed, is “hate speech” to be discriminated from the merely rude or offensive or uncivil speech?  To narrow the thing a bit, think about civility—simple courtesy.  Why should a New Yorker’s version of civility be forced to take a back seat to a Midwesterner’s or a Californian’s version of civility?  Why should one of the other two be forced to take a back seat to a New Yorker’s version?  On what basis would any definer pick one or identify a middle ground that doesn’t wind up being a more insidious censorship?

Consider Marshall McLuhan’s the medium is the message.  Sometimes the overt rudeness—even “hate”—is a demonstration of a point.  Is burning our national flag an act of hatred or political speech?  Is posting a picture of Mohammed…?  Prove it: it’s a hard line to draw between that and rudeness on the one hand or actual hate on the other.

Not even civility is “simple.”  How is something as complex as hate speech to be handled?

Yet the whole argument over identifying, and then censoring, hate speech is irrelevant other than the threat to freedom that is that effort to identify and censor.

The problem he [Pearson] says, is that Facebook and other companies have not taken up the charge to make the battle against hate speech a major priority.

No, Pearson is utterly wrong on this.  Facebook, et al., must not take up the battle, any more than can Government be allowed to.  Any effort along these lines can only be the despicable bigotry and the equally shameful cowardice of censorship.  Bigotry because all such efforts amount to is one man, or a small group of them, imposing his prejudice of acceptability on the speech of all others.

Hackneyed as it’s become, Justice Louis Brandeis still is right: the answer to bad speech—however defined—is more, and better, speech—however defined.

Engage in the discourse, don’t cower away from it.

The Comey Memos

Posted on by
Reply

The memos can be read here.  Aside from all the commentary on the memos’ content, a couple of other things jump out at me.

One is the level of classification: SECRET/NOFORN.  Comey noted at their start that he was unsure of the memos’ classification, so he marked them SECRET and invited his addressees to correct that as required.  One or more of them considered NOFORN—nor for foreign viewing, even if otherwise cleared to the level of secrecy; this is an addendum that gets added to unclassified material, too, on occasion—to be a suitable addition.  Reading around the redactions, this seems an obvious need.

The bigger deal though, is the amount of redaction that actually was done.  Out of 15 total pages of memos, some 34 lines had something redacted, and most of that was just a couple of words or a short phrase.  That little bit didn’t take all this time and the threat of a subpoena to get the memos marked and released to the House committees demanding them.  That emphasizes the question of what the FBI was trying to hide with its intransigence in stonewalling the release.

And that raises another question in my pea brain: having read the memos, there’s nothing in them that should have caused embarrassment to the FBI.  So: what else is the FBI hiding, what is it holding back that we haven’t heard about?

A Teachers Union Strike

Posted on by
Reply

There have been teachers union strikes in Oklahoma, Kentucky, and West Virginia, and now there’s one set to go off later this week in Arizona.  Readers know my disdain for union strikes generally: they’re nothing but legalized extortion—”nice business you got here.  Be too bad if something were to happen to it.  Like, say, it’s destroyed because nobody works here anymore.”  It isn’t possible to negotiate when the other party is sticking a gun in your ear—even if it’s “just” a metaphorical gun.

But it’s especially despicable when it’s a teachers union strike.  These persons are using children as hostages to back up their extortion.  And the Arizona one is all about ego and hurt feelings.

Lynn White, a high school biology teacher in Gilbert, AZ:

People feel like the state doesn’t respect the job we do as public school teachers[.]

Never mind that respect comes the way any honest American gets it: by earning it with actual deeds.  It certainly doesn’t come because this or that person, or collection of them—think they’re special.  And in the case of public school teachers, those deeds are how well they teach, as demonstrated by the quality of their graduated students.  And that’s not very high (scroll down the table at the link to see Arizona’s bad and worsening performance in 4th grade math).

Arizona should replace the strikers en masse with substitutes and insist on actual teaching performance.

A Lesson About Discrimination

Posted on by
Reply

A few days ago, The Wall Street Journal ran a piece about a teacher and a principal who taught a 1968 lesson about racial tolerance, using the equally arbritrary blue eyes-brown eyes discriminant as the teaching prop.

A Letter to the Editor response decried both the lesson and the pride in it that was conveyed in that article.

…one of the most disturbing and emotional things I had ever experienced. Teachers whom I once looked up to were subjecting me to irrational and arbitrary treatment based on my eye color. … My father … called my school’s leadership and received a complete apology.

How sad, that letter writer and his father missed the point of the lesson and missed precisely that “disturbing and emotional thing” that real victims of irrational and arbitrary treatment experience.

On the other hand, a commenter in the Letters thread asked this:

Does this same reasoning that this was child abuse apply to the teachers lecturing about “white privilege” and setting up situations to guilt trip children based on their skin color?

How sad, too, that that discrimination is actively practiced today.

Union Threat

Posted on by
Reply

The American Federation of Teachers doesn’t like guns, gun owners, gun manufacturer, or those who support them.  That’s fine; this is America.

The union’s President, Randi Weingarten, has taken a typically union follow-on step: threatening a union boycott of Wells Fargo if the bank doesn’t end its relationship with the National Rifle Association and with those manufacturers.

We’re issuing Wells Fargo an ultimatum.  They can have a mortgage market that includes America’s teachers, or they can continue to do business with the NRA and gun manufacturers. They can’t do both.

The rest of us, including banks, have rights, too.  Wells Fargo is resisting Weingarten’s ultimatum, which if widely acceded to will leave the very people she pretends to want to protect utterly defenseless.  Wells should advise her and her union supporters to not let the door hit her in the fanny on the way out.

And the rest of us should push the harder for schools that aren’t unionized.  Wells’ products, along with the NRA’s and manufacturers’, are quality products.  The same can’t be said for the AFT’s products.