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I agree and good point on the broader meaning of editorial judgement. If we had seen any negative impact such as the FB/YouTube examples we would absolutely tak

I agree and good point on the broader meaning of editorial judgement. If we had seen any negative impact such as the FB/YouTube examples we would absolutely take that into account. I haven't seen anything remotely like yet with regard to smart reply but would want to be the first to see it if it exists.

zestyping 7y ago
Your willingness to use "we're optimizing for click through rate" as a defense is quite frightening to me, though. Someone who thinks "We're optimizing for click through rate" is morally neutral is not qualified to be making these decisions, just as someone who thinks giving lit matches to children is morally neutral is not qualified to be a fire marshal. Would you agree?
- foldingmoney 7y ago
  It's a pretty long journey from 'our algorithm chooses which auto-replies to offer you based on which have the highest probability of being selected' to giving lit matches to children. I'm afraid to ask your opinion of SwiftKey's autocomplete.
  - zestyping 7y ago
    That's not quite what I'm saying, though. My concern is not with stating the fact that the algorithm uses this metric. My concern is with presenting the decision to use this metric as morally neutral. If you think that giving lit matches to children is morally neutral, you probably either don't understand how dangerous fire is or don't understand how unpredictable children can be. That's the point of the analogy.
    - foldingmoney 7y ago
      I don't know what could be more morally neutral than 'we offer the suggestions that you've shown us you're most likely to want to use.' Anything else would be trying to put _their_ words in people's mouths. And let's not lose sight of the fact that this is a tool that offers an automatic one to three-word email response for when you're too lazy to actually reply. The stakes are about as low as they come.
      - zestyping 7y ago
        "As low as they come"? You might be forgetting that Gmail has about a billion monthly active users. Scale matters. I'm sure you can think of many products that have fewer users, and features in those products that are less central to them than e-mail composition is to a mail client.
      - dTal 7y ago
        Pretty much the entire history of progressivism is a long, slow dawning realization that it's not harmless to treat individuals on the basis of group statistics, for one group category after another. Part of the problem is feedback loops - you can inadvertently amplify subtle perturbations by feeding them back to people. For example, it might seem harmless to subtly nudge a woman away from a career in STEM, on the basis that women are rare in STEM and therefore they probably won't enjoy it. But this action, repeated across millions of people, creates the pattern that you are reacting to. I think the principle probably generalizes to "everyone", not just "women" and "black people". In the case of autocomplete suggestions, they can still cause harm even when they're statistically likely. What do you think Google would autosuggest for "Blacks are...", if it were around in 1950? What would the statistics on the completion of that sentence look like? And would the effect of someone seeing that list be 100% neutral - or would it subtly nudge them? There's nothing obviously harmful with the specifics of GMail's auto-suggestions now. But the principle of 'we offer the suggestions that you've shown us you're most likely to want to use' is not morally neutral.
        foldingmoney 7y ago
        We're talking about auto suggestions along the lines of 'Yes, I have', 'no, I haven't', 'sounds good!', 'yum!'. I'm not arguing against your principles necessarily, but deploying the argument where it's really not warranted is a form of crying wolf and turns people against it. And as an aside, at my university the only time I ever saw any recruiting material for STEM, it was along the lines of 'Scholarships for women in STEM'.
        dTal 7y ago
- microcolonel 7y ago
  Not everything is a moral travesty; it is in fact okay that people tend to find positive response suggestions more worth selecting.
- microcolonel 7y ago
  > Your willingness to use "we're optimizing for click through rate" as a defense is quite frightening to me, though. I would suggest that if you are frightened by what is essentially an auto-completing on-screen keyboard being optimized for usefulness over making some random person on Hacker News feel it was more nuanced than just trying to be useful... there's probably no way to implement a feature like this, and make it useful, which wouldn't have you shaking in your boots. Don't be frightened by what is essentially a riff on T9.
- v8engine 7y ago
  Veritasium very recently spoke about algorithm optimizing for click through rate in the context of the bad. https://youtu.be/fHsa9DqmId8?t=783 https://youtu.be/fHsa9DqmId8?t=783 It seems okay in this case though.
zestyping 7y ago
How would you know? And what would your threshold be? For example, suppose you did a controlled study and found that the new autocomplete UI was presenting users with only "yes" options, X% of the time. Is there a threshold beyond which you would unlaunch or adjust the feature? What if the new UI was actually changing user behaviour, causing them to answer "yes" more often than they otherwise would have? Is there a delta (positive or negative) beyond which you would unlaunch or adjust the feature? If you had to adjust it, how would you know you were adjusting it correctly? What sort of telemetry would you need to put in the product so that you really would know if this was happening? I'm curious if your team thought about these questions before launching, and what ideas came up.
dmitriid 7y ago
> If we had seen any negative impact such as the FB/YouTube examples we would absolutely take that into account. Maybe? Maybe not? There’s visible and tangible negative impact from Youtube algorithms (owned, incidentally by the same conpany). And Youtube (or Google? Or Alphabet?) rarely if ever acknowledges and fixes those problems because their algorithms are also optimised for click-through.

zestyping 7y ago

Your willingness to use "we're optimizing for click through rate" as a defense is quite frightening to me, though. Someone who thinks "We're optimizing for click through rate" is morally neutral is not qualified to be making these decisions, just as someone who thinks giving lit matches to children is morally neutral is not qualified to be a fire marshal. Would you agree?

foldingmoney 7y ago
It's a pretty long journey from 'our algorithm chooses which auto-replies to offer you based on which have the highest probability of being selected' to giving lit matches to children. I'm afraid to ask your opinion of SwiftKey's autocomplete.
- zestyping 7y ago
  That's not quite what I'm saying, though. My concern is not with stating the fact that the algorithm uses this metric. My concern is with presenting the decision to use this metric as morally neutral. If you think that giving lit matches to children is morally neutral, you probably either don't understand how dangerous fire is or don't understand how unpredictable children can be. That's the point of the analogy.
  - foldingmoney 7y ago
    I don't know what could be more morally neutral than 'we offer the suggestions that you've shown us you're most likely to want to use.' Anything else would be trying to put _their_ words in people's mouths. And let's not lose sight of the fact that this is a tool that offers an automatic one to three-word email response for when you're too lazy to actually reply. The stakes are about as low as they come.
    - zestyping 7y ago
      "As low as they come"? You might be forgetting that Gmail has about a billion monthly active users. Scale matters. I'm sure you can think of many products that have fewer users, and features in those products that are less central to them than e-mail composition is to a mail client.
    - dTal 7y ago
      Pretty much the entire history of progressivism is a long, slow dawning realization that it's not harmless to treat individuals on the basis of group statistics, for one group category after another. Part of the problem is feedback loops - you can inadvertently amplify subtle perturbations by feeding them back to people. For example, it might seem harmless to subtly nudge a woman away from a career in STEM, on the basis that women are rare in STEM and therefore they probably won't enjoy it. But this action, repeated across millions of people, creates the pattern that you are reacting to. I think the principle probably generalizes to "everyone", not just "women" and "black people". In the case of autocomplete suggestions, they can still cause harm even when they're statistically likely. What do you think Google would autosuggest for "Blacks are...", if it were around in 1950? What would the statistics on the completion of that sentence look like? And would the effect of someone seeing that list be 100% neutral - or would it subtly nudge them? There's nothing obviously harmful with the specifics of GMail's auto-suggestions now. But the principle of 'we offer the suggestions that you've shown us you're most likely to want to use' is not morally neutral.
      - foldingmoney 7y ago
        We're talking about auto suggestions along the lines of 'Yes, I have', 'no, I haven't', 'sounds good!', 'yum!'. I'm not arguing against your principles necessarily, but deploying the argument where it's really not warranted is a form of crying wolf and turns people against it. And as an aside, at my university the only time I ever saw any recruiting material for STEM, it was along the lines of 'Scholarships for women in STEM'.
        dTal 7y ago
microcolonel 7y ago
Not everything is a moral travesty; it is in fact okay that people tend to find positive response suggestions more worth selecting.
microcolonel 7y ago
> Your willingness to use "we're optimizing for click through rate" as a defense is quite frightening to me, though. I would suggest that if you are frightened by what is essentially an auto-completing on-screen keyboard being optimized for usefulness over making some random person on Hacker News feel it was more nuanced than just trying to be useful... there's probably no way to implement a feature like this, and make it useful, which wouldn't have you shaking in your boots. Don't be frightened by what is essentially a riff on T9.
v8engine 7y ago
Veritasium very recently spoke about algorithm optimizing for click through rate in the context of the bad. https://youtu.be/fHsa9DqmId8?t=783 https://youtu.be/fHsa9DqmId8?t=783 It seems okay in this case though.

zestyping 7y ago

How would you know? And what would your threshold be? For example, suppose you did a controlled study and found that the new autocomplete UI was presenting users with only "yes" options, X% of the time. Is there a threshold beyond which you would unlaunch or adjust the feature? What if the new UI was actually changing user behaviour, causing them to answer "yes" more often than they otherwise would have? Is there a delta (positive or negative) beyond which you would unlaunch or adjust the feature? If you had to adjust it, how would you know you were adjusting it correctly? What sort of telemetry would you need to put in the product so that you really would know if this was happening? I'm curious if your team thought about these questions before launching, and what ideas came up.

dmitriid 7y ago

> If we had seen any negative impact such as the FB/YouTube examples we would absolutely take that into account. Maybe? Maybe not? There’s visible and tangible negative impact from Youtube algorithms (owned, incidentally by the same conpany). And Youtube (or Google? Or Alphabet?) rarely if ever acknowledges and fixes those problems because their algorithms are also optimised for click-through.