Professional and unprofessional hairstyles are as different as black and white

[Mal_Tosevite]

@Mister44

I personally don’t have an issue with it, but like when I was looking for a job I took my dads advice and finally cut my long hair to a much shorter length. No more pony tail guy.

Back when mullets were kinda-sorta in fashion, I had one and liked to wear metal Ts. People were a lot nicer to me after I cut my hair, and I rarely, if ever, had to talk to the cops after that.

Fucking pissed me off. At least I have the option of ridding myself of my hair. A couple of years after that I was working in retail and watched a co-worker follow around one of my wife’s favorite teachers, a mild-mannered choral director, because this choral director is black. It’s a small town, like he’d be stupid enough to shoplift.

[Wanderfound]

@nimelennar

I think that if you have an employee in a public-facing role, and you can demonstrably prove that their hairstyle is having a negative impact on your business or your brand (for instance, a hairdresser), then sure. In that case, you should be able to discipline them if they don’t adjust their hairstyle.

So what do you do when the “negative impact on business or brand” is because a significant portion of the customer base are racist arseholes?

[Mister44]

@Daaksyde

Which hair color knows the most about law, redheads, blondes, or brunettes? Does green hair dye seep through the roots into the brain and make bankers/accountants cheat you?

Well I am sure some natural hair colors have biases in some people. But while I agree that maybe it shouldn’t be a big deal, the reality is that it IS a big deal. Same with things like tattoos or certain tattoos like neck or face tattoos.

Now your office is hip, and that is great. Generally where you have a group of people working and not dealing directly with clients and customers the dress codes are more lax. Sales people in my office always dress better than most of us, especially on days they are out making personal appointments. Lawyers have to deal with their clients and judges, Accountants, bankers, and other white color fuddy-duddys also have to deal directly with clients and other professionals. Thus they have to look the part. Doing something to turn off potential customers or hinder your ability to sell or plead a case is a detriment to some businesses. While it could be an asset if you sold say skate boards.

Maybe in 50 years non-natural colored hair will be the norm in some work places, but I promise you it won’t be the norm or allowed in all work places.

[anon50609448]

@tachin1

If we are already relying on imperfect results based on natural language queries we make to help us navigate the world, could it be more ethical to deliberately change the way the results are skewed than presenting the unconscious bias of a society as an objective result?

Above I changed my tune to say that I can see why the algorithm itself is problematic. That said, the idea of fixing it seems very daunting. It’s not possible to individually take on cases like this, and I’m sure there’s no “how black are these results” dial to turn up. Not knowing how the algorithm works it would be very hard to speculate about how it could be changed or whether it could be changed.

That being said, let me speculate. We know that google somehow weights the reliability of information, and that it does so by comparing one site to another. More people linking to you probably increases your reliability.

So if I search google for “indigenous canadians” I get:

the wikipedia article
a huffington post piece about human rights for indigenous canadians
a statistics canada chart giving data about the indigenous population
an entry in “the canadian encyclopedia”
amnesty international
united nations regional information centre
another huffington post article
a gaurdian article about the astonishing rate at which aboriginal women are murdered
a government of canada website defining certain terms

I tried searching some other things like “indigenous canadian leadership organizations” but without knowing, for example, that the Assembly of First Nations is the name of a major national aboriginal organization it’s very hard to have them come up in the first page of search results. Searching for indigenous canadians finds me information about indigenous canadians, but not the voices of indigenous canadians (though, to be fair, the author of the first huffington post article is Mi’kmaq, but we know his article showed up being of Huffington Post, not because of an assessment of him).

So that’s an area where it seems like there might be room for improvement. If I want to know about women, about trans men or trans women, about demisexuals, about furries, maybe part of the solution is biasing towards those people who are actually part of that group.

I’m not sure that’s possible because I don’t know if they break down things by subject in that way. And this, again, is a reflection of culture where self-appointed experts talking about a group are given as much or more credit than members of the group on issues affecting that group (we’re getting better in this regard, but there’s a lot of pushback).

Ultimately I think google results probably won’t get better until we get better and then they’ll just sort of catch up. The reason an indigenous voice got into my search is because the people at huffington Post publish opinion pieces by indigenous canadians. I see that as a much more likely remedy to the overall problem.

[manybellsdown]

Mr. Bells is a game programmer. Yesterday I found his hairbrush under the bed. The man can literally not brush his hair* and still go to work as a “professional”.

*he does wash it, though.

[stinkinbadgers]

@celesteh

If we don’t date women who have naturally tight curls, it’s not something we would hear in our personal lives

Or if we’ve never been friends or come in contact with a woman, ever.

I’ve never been envious of the stupid dance that my wife goes through for work to look good, but not too good.

[celesteh]

@Daaksyde

It’s an unpleasant truth that our culture thinks that way. It appears that the search results reflect that truth. If a person neutrally reports an unpleasant truth, does that person ‘need adjustment’? Is it ethical to force them to whitewash it and suppress the truth because it might make some people uncomfortable? Could covering it up be worse than revealing it?

Yeah, the search results are mirroring and replicating structural equality. They are not ‘reporting an unpleasant truth’, they’re participating in racism.

Intentionality does not matter in structural racism. What matters is the structure. The algorithm is participating, without intent. This is why many anti-racist activists are wary of deployment of AI, especially in areas like policing.

[Mal_Tosevite]

@celesteh

Yeah, the search results are mirroring and replicating structural equality. They are not ‘reporting an unpleasant truth’, they’re participating in racism.

Yeah…except…

The thing is, as others have pointed out, if you click through the “unprofessional hairstyles” images to the articles, they’re articles discussing the racist notion that black women’s hair is unprofessional. It’s not merely reflecting an unpleasant truth of society, it’s unintentionally misrepresenting the intent of those images.

@celesteh

What matters is the structure. The algorithm is participating, without intent. This is why many anti-racist activists are wary of deployment of AI, especially in areas like policing.

Understandable, but given something like the Internet, the only alternative I can think of, if you’re wanting to catalog the Internet but not have unintended racism, sexism, etc. pop up, would be to build an incredibly powerful AI that was capable of deducing intent, or just avoid mistakes and not index images at all. I don’t really want to see either one happen, especially the former; too much temptation for some weirdo dudebro CEO to power a sexbot with it.

Or I guess they could build sentient killing machines with that A.I.

Whatever. Anyway.

I get where you’re coming from, I just wonder what the solution will be, and if the solution will end up being worse than the problem.

[anon61221983]

Whatevs! @beschizza is clearly a professional with that mop-top! Also…

[anon61221983]

Um… shouldn’t we be outraged that a group of human beings are consistently discriminated against? Or is that unimportant, because REASONS?

[naam]

Thanks, I guess I messed that one up. I was targetting the “how can google do this!” outrage. It seemed people were missing the point that “the algorithm” is registering something horrible, instead thinking it is perpetuating it.

[anon50609448]

@naam

Thanks, I guess I messed that one up. I was targetting the “how can google do this!” outrage. It seemed people were missing the point that “the algorithm” is registering something horrible, instead thinking it is perpetuating it.

I don’t think people are missing the point, I think they are disagreeing that it is valid. Google isn’t an academic paper studying racism, it is a public service. Is the service actually serving people in an equitable way? Google isn’t a neutral reporter of fact, it is a proprietary algorithm for telling people what they want to know that takes many things into consideration. It’s a curator, not just a register.

[nimelennar]

@Wanderfound

So what do you do when the “negative impact on business or brand” is because a significant portion of the customer base are racist arseholes?

Hmm. That’s a good question.

My first instinct was to say the following:

Well, then, as a business, you have to decide whether catering to a significant portion of your customer base is worth alienating your employees and risking a PR backlash.

And then as an employee, if your employer decides the above question in favour of the customers instead of you, then you have to decide whether it’s worth working in such a place.

But then, I thought more upon it, and it seems like that attitude would allow racist employers to drive employees away by saying, “We’re not being racist; you’re being disciplined based on your unprofessional hairstyle, not your race.”

I don’t know. I don’t think I have an answer to your question.

[anon61221983]

Okay. Thanks for the clarification. As I’m not a computer science guy, I’m not sure how algorithms work, but I can imagine that they could pick up on horribleness of our society via internet searches. As such, perhaps they can be useful in rooting out this sort of subtle racism. I mean if something that’s not a human being can highlight it, perhaps some of the people who dismiss arguments about structural racism will start to understand a bit better how it works, because now we have some scientific underpinnings (because for some people, the people who experience racism saying that is happens to them just hasn’t been enough for them… because reasons, I guess).

[anon61221983]

But couldn’t it work that way? If the algorithm, which is probably not written to give racist outcomes, just to give popular ones, can be used to chart this stuff, isn’t that a means of illustrating how this sort of discrimination actually works in our social world?

[anon50609448]

@anon61221983

But couldn’t it work that way? If the algorithm, which is probably not written to give racist outcomes, just to give popular ones, can be used to chart this stuff, isn’t that a means of illustrating how this sort of discrimination actually works in our social world?

Yeah, I think that’s the conversation we are having right here. The algorithm is useful in pointing out racism because it shows the racism. What i realized reading some comments above was that is that still exists to serve white people. Since it’s white people who need to stop being discriminatory, tools to teach white people about how discrimination functions are obviously good. On the other hand, most people googling something just want to get relevant results, not have the usefulness of the service hindered for them so it can be more educational for racists.

It’s like sending people to the back of the bus. That stark dividing line surely made many people notice just how racist the situation was. But suffering to teach others about your suffering isn’t anyone’s idea of a good time.