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How to make a program that does what you asked it to do, and then add arbitrary fudge factors as the notion strikes you to "correct" for the bogeyman of bias.

Suppose sentiment for the name Tyrel was better than for Adolf. Would that indicate anti-white bias? Suppose the name Osama has really poor sentiment. What fudge factor do you add there to correct for possible anti-Muslim bias? Suppose Little Richard and Elton John don't have equal sentiment. Is the lower one because Little Richard is black, or because Elton John is gay?

What we have been seeing lately is an effort to replace unmeasurable bias that is simply assumed to exist and to be unjust and replace it with real bias, encoded in our laws and practices, or in this case, in actual code.

It actually might be a lucky thing that you heard a crackle and smelled smoke, because whatever burned up might have left a sign on the board. If you look at the board carefully under bright light with a magnifying glass, you may see some component that is clearly messed up, like blackened or ruptured.

I'm sorry. I don't want to make you or anyone else upset. But my honest opinion is that this is a productive thread that people can learn from, even if it isn't of the form you expect.

I asked them. They're not sure either. Is there a test we can do to know for sure?

Are you able to answer the question?

Sure. What I'm asking for is an explain-like-I'm-5 style explanation of how you determine whether someone is a person of color. Are you able to do that? Thanks.

Sorry, I don't know what you mean. I'm not playing a word game. Someone earlier in the thread asked if somebody was a person of color, and I just want to know how to determine that. I appreciate you sharing the information you did. That was interesting. But I don't really see how it relates to my question. I just want to know the procedure for determining whether someone is a person of color. Are you able to explain the procedure? Do I understand correctly from what you wrote that you are a person of color?

I see, sorry about that. Are you able to answer the question in your own words?

You're suggesting I don't have adult intellectual capacity, right? If it's an easy question, could you just answer it? I'm not sure what "treated as nonwhite" would entail.

I don't know. How do I find out for sure?

I understand that most western countries have societal controls grown over the past centuries. The Chinese did not, and are catching up quickly by implementing similar controls as we have.

A sibling comments asks you what you mean here. I'd like to know, too. This kind of sentiment is depressingly familiar -- it seems to me that a lot of Chinese people like to vacillate between "China is the best", "China is just doing what other countries are doing", and "China is a developing country" as the situation requires, seemingly without being aware they are doing it at all.

China is now the dominant world player

This is true, but not in the way I think you would like it to be. If strength is measured only in concrete production or something, then yes, China is by far the strongest. But that's not where real strength comes from. It comes from good ideas. China is not just behind on good ideas, it's actually shackled. Good ideas are dangerous to the CCP, so they are actively suppressed. The natural result is the epidemic of IP stealing that China engages in. You can cheat on your homework and get good grades on tests for a while, but life is not like a test in school. You cannot cheat on the test that nature gives you. To succeed in the test of life, you need innovation and critical thinking skills, and the CCP will not allow there to be an environment in China conducive to the development of critical thinking skills. Nor will it allow the kind of environment where people listen to their own inner sense of right and wrong. People in China are not generally trying to be righteous, they're just trying to become one of the VIPs with back door access to the power. People in China don't trust each other, and rightfully so. Think about the massive secret costs this is imposing on the entire country.

The CCP is a bit like cancer, and a bit like a parasite. It will continue to drain the vitality from China as long as it is in power. Obviously, it is trying to shut the door forever on the possibility that it will ever not be in power. And it is stoking nationalistic notions of superiority as needed to get the support of those it is vampiring.

So it is deeply sad to me to see someone celebrating the spread of the CCP cancer as if it is a happy development. The rest of the world is watching in horror as you guys happily help build your own prison. China really is #1 at something now, leading the way as a technological/surveillance dystopia, serving as a warning to the rest of the world why we have to prevent what is happening in China from happening anywhere else.

It doesn't matter how you invest. You can't protect yourself from karma with money.

I went looking for the story on Chinese sites, even though my Chinese is not quite good enough for this to be practical. I couldn't find anything, so I asked one Chinese friend and two acquaintances about it. Two couldn't find anything. The third found some ordinary people talking about it, but no news websites. She told me without irony that "there are a lot of Chinese people. The societal environment is complex. The government will block the passage of information in order to safeguard societal stability and harmony".

If somebody better at Chinese can find anything, I'd appreciate hearing about it. Thanks in advance.

I lived in China for three years. I speak Mandarin. The article you linked is a report in western media. Can you find the same story in Chinese media?

You're right, the sentiment is not shared by most Chinese people. Then again, most of them wouldn't recognize the Tank Man picture. They have no legitimate news journalism. Their version of the internet is profoundly sabotaged. Human rights lawyers are routinely kidnapped and their families placed under indefinite house arrest. When protests happen, they are violently crushed and subject to complete media blackout. If Chinese people were able to express themselves and hear others express themselves, with some semblance of a news media, I think they'd feel quite differently.

it may have positive benefits for Chinese citizens because government officials can be blacklisted for corrupt behaviour

I understand the Guardian's reporter needs to report what people said, but for the love of god, could they please stop giving support to this absurd notion that "corruption" crackdowns in China have anything to do with corruption? They are almost always about power consolidation.

Is it possible to only discriminate in favor of some group without discriminating against some other group?

we still need a way to get from where we are now to where we want to be.

It has been happening already. It's as if we've been gradually smoking less and less, and then a movement comes along that tells us that in order to quit, we actually need to smoke more for the foreseeable future.

This is a harmful way of thinking, unfortunately on the rise lately. Ostensibly to promote fairness and diversity, it encourages us to think more about arbitrary racial categories, hereditary traits, disabilities, etc. Those things about people we were starting to consider less and less significant, we are being encouraged instead to be hyper-aware of.

Whoever decides the categories has the power to decide whether your organization is compliant. For example, suppose by a miracle that your organization is "correctly diverse" with regard to some set of blessed ethnic groups, hereditary traits, disabilities, etc. Well, your organization is almost certainly not compliant with regard to the left-handed, those who can roll their tongues, those with connected earlobes, those with flat feet, etc. Maybe you have the "correct" number of black people, but do you have the correct number of gay black people? Do you have the correct number of gay black women? How do you feel about sexual orientation or autism being blessed categories, but not, say, albinism, hyperhidrosis, or Marfan syndrome?

As a practical matter, how do you suppose someone would show that they were, say, partly descended from Native Americans? Certificate from a genetics testing lab? Are we going to carry cards in our wallets?

That's not the future I want. Your body is not the important part of you. The important part of you is your mind. I won't help build a hyper-body-focused society.

In the future I envision, nobody cares about anybody's supposed ethnicity. Nobody keeps spreadsheets about it. Nobody specifically considers body attributes during college admissions, or hiring decisions, or really, ever, because it's just not important. Let's not support any efforts to make these things more important.

I have really no idea what you're talking about with respect to water fountains and busses.

Assuming good faith here. Let me try again.

The idea is that saying the n-word while not being black sends a signal of not caring about the word, not giving it enough weight, not caring about the plight of black people. Well, I'm saying that's not true. That information is not in the signal.

Suppose a young white person is sitting in a cafe. They raise a phone to their ear and uses the n-word the way that has become normal, to mean man/person: "hey, what up my (n-word)?"

If I overheard that, I wouldn't think anything of it. They're greeting a friend. I just don't have any notions about how only people of certain ethnicities are allowed to use certain words.

If you did have such notions, you might be offended. But that's in the machinery of your own mind, not the signal. The signal was just "how are you, man/person?"

Suppose you (Thomas) see a black man sitting near the front of a bus. What signal is he sending to you? Not much, right? He's just sitting there. Now, suppose it's the 50s, and it's Alabama, and the onlooker is an older white man. What signal do you suppose that guy gets? He might get a signal that an uppity negro thinks he's the equal of a white man. So, where is the problem? In the sitting, or in the looking?

Now, where is the problem in the situation we're talking about? In the speaking of a word that means man/person, or in the hearing of it?

I imagine there are a lot of black people who just loathe the n-word, and never want to hear it from anyone. This is actually the perspective that makes the most sense to me. But they have to concede that the meaning of the word has changed. The vast majority of the time, it just means man/person. Sorry. I would have preferred we just forget the word, but that's not what happened. Now it means man/person, and our squabble is about whether people who never had anything whatsoever to do with the racial persecution of anyone will be firewalled from certain parts of our language because of their perceived ethnic affiliation.

I'm saying no. It's unfair, and it's not a wise way forward, and just unacceptable to me personally.

You say my words send signals, and that the signals depend in this case on the color of my skin. That seems to me to be an evasive way of saying some people will discriminate whether what I'm saying is perfectly OK or terribly offensive based on my race.

If the interpreter sees themselves as a member of a racial group, and thinks that their racial group has ownership over a word, they may get upset if they see an outsider using their word. I understand that. That is what's happening. But the mentality in which someone sees themselves as a member of some separate group because of their race is exactly what I am opposing.

You say our actions send signals. Well, is this guy just drinking water at a water fountain? Is he just sitting on a bus? Or is he sending a "signal" that he thinks he's as good as a white man by drinking from the "wrong" fountain or sitting in the "wrong" seat on the bus? The problem is not entirely within the so-called signal, a big part of it is within the mind of the interpreter.

I know how saying that word would be received by a lot of black people, and I would never do that, as I have a very strong commitment never to harm anyone, and just a lot of general sympathy, compassion, and love for black people. But I have to resist if anyone starts claiming that their race gives them special ownership over words. That is a step in the wrong direction.

You can call me a racist all you want. At the end of the day, I'm advocating one standard of conduct for everyone without distinction by race, while my opponents are arguing for discrimination by race when judging conduct, for segregation of parts of our language by race, etc.

Now you seem to be pretending not to understand a metaphor. Is that to avoid actually debating the point? And please do let me know where I'm coming from. I'd like to hear that, since it's so clear in your mind.

It's not up to you.

It's as much up to me as anybody else. I won't be discounted because you think I don't have the right skin color to have a valid opinion.

There is something resembling a consensus among black people

I doubt you have any reliable way of knowing whether your claim is true, but it wouldn't matter if it was. I simply don't respect your, or anyone else's, racist notions about what skin colors entitle the wearer to say certain words, any more than I would respect racist notions about who gets to use which drinking fountain.

I have no desire to say that word, but if I want to use it, I will, as is my right as a human, and if someone wants to persecute me because they think my skin color does not authorize me to that word, that is their own racist, neo tribalist, re-segregationist thing, and nothing I've done wrong.

We as a society have elected to make it a word that is forbidden in polite conversation unless you think the definition is accurate.

We have done no such thing. Your statement is about as inaccurate and misleading as it could possibly be. The word you are talking about can be heard throughout TV shows, movies, and music. The vast majority of the time, it is not being used in the way you suggest. Your assertion that it is a "rule of our society" is as absurd as claiming the earth is flat.

Men are much more likely than women to commit suicide and be homeless, and many times more likely to be incarcerated. If this is not the result of sexism, please tell me what causes that difference.

Also, we should not have some racial criterion for whether somebody gets to utter a word.

He is stupid to now know the social untold rules, such as never say the "n-word".

Are millions of black people across the country stupid not to know not to say it?

The speaker in your video used the word "faggot" the same way, with no intent to offend. How should he be punished?

If we're going to have this debate via videos, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRJy48JWiHk

This is extraordinarily stupid. I fear people in the US are living under some form of mass psychosis about this topic.

I grew up in the south. It's been probably 30 years since I heard anyone use the dreaded word in the traditional derogatory and demeaning way. But, like every other American, I've heard it used thousands upon thousands of times in the new way, and I know exactly what it means: "man", or sometimes just "person". That's all it means. I wish that word had died long ago. But it's still here, for better or worse, and everyone knows it means man/person.

Did the people who supposedly took great offense at the use of this word take great offense at its usage by other people throughout daily life, including being used in probably thousands of programs on Netflix itself?