Comment by perihelions
1 year ago
There's an amusing irony here: real diversity would entail many competing ML companies from non-Western countries—each of which would bring their own cultural norms, alien and uncomfortable to Westerners. There's no cultural diversity in Silicon Valley being a global hegemon: exporting a narrow sliver of the world's viewpoints to the whole planet, imposing them with the paternalism drawn from our own sense of superiority.
Real diversity would be jarring and unpleasant for all of us accustomed to being the "in" group of a tech monoculture. Real diversity is the ethos of the WWW from 30+ years ago: to connect the worlds' people as equals.
Our sense of moral obligation to diversity goes (literally) skin-deep, and no further.
And there are cases where the global infocoms just don't care about what is happening locally, and bad consequences ensue :
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37907482
There's just one problem: even if you collect all the biases of all the countries in the world, you still won't get something diverse and inclusive in the end...
No, and that's a utopianism that shouldn't be anyone's working goal, because it's fantastic and unrealistic.
> imposing them with the paternalism drawn from our own sense of superiority.
The pandemic really drove this point home for me. Even here on HN groupthink violations were delt with swiftly and harshly. SV reminds me of the old Metallica song Eye of the Beholder.
Doesn't matter what you see Or intuit what you read You can do it your own way If it's done just how I say
In this case, it's more like maternalism.