Re: The Gender Genie [OT: very]

[David Auerbach auerbach@xxxxxxxx]

On Jun 20, at 6:57 PM, Patricia M. Godfrey wrote:
> L Anderson wrote:
> > I plugged the following in:
> > Obviously whoever devised that suffered from the delusion that men
> > cannot cook. Having several very good male cooks in my family, I KNOW
> > that's a canard.
> > snip
> > and I got:
> > Female Score: 111
> > Male Score: 181.
>
>
> Algorithms! Or are they assuming no woman would acknowledge men can
> cook? Please.
They (for many they) wish they could get it that kind of wrong. To
get it that kind of wrong the algorithm would have figure out *what
you said*. All these algorithms do (from this silly example, to
Google, to the very useful Devonthink) is word counts, word proximity
and some simple table lookups for certain words or word patterns (in
this case, some they have dubbed masc. and some fem.). Then they
wave an algorithmic wand and presto-- garbage. (The better
algorithms "learn". But, nonetheless, meaning is beyond them.)




David Auerbach
Department of Philosophy & Religion
Box 8103
Raleigh, NC 27695-8103                  http://
slowfoodusa.org
auerbach@xxxxxxxx                  http://
slowfoodtriangle.org