RE: [huml-comment] PC-33 -Section 4.4.6-race

["Dennis E. Hamilton" <dennis.hamilton@acm.org>]

Rex,

My apologies for not following up sooner, as promised.

I will provide closer attention to your careful and gracious comments today,
now that I have subscribed to the comments list.

Meanwhile, I wanted to make some quick clarification.  (See the <ORCNOTE ...
.> pseudo-markup.

-- Dennis

Dennis E. Hamilton
AIIM DMware Technical Coordinator
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-----Original Message-----
From: Rex Brooks [mailto:rexb@starbourne.com]
Sent: Friday, November 29, 2002 06:58
To: humanmarkup-comment@lists.oasis-open.org;
humanmarkup@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: [huml-comment] PC-33 -Section 4.4.6-race
[ ... ]

However, before I focus on race, I want to answer the observation that the
alleged conceit/illusion of saying that: "we require better fundamental
descriptions that take nothing for granted," is at best ingenuous.

This objectionable phrase occurs in Section 4.2.13 in the textual
description of HumanGroup following upon the description of Human. The
objection seems to imply that there should be criteria for establishing who
or what qualifies as Human and thence HumanGroup (being two or more Humans
gathered in an environment by our definition). This is at best ingenuous?

<ORCNOTE I think I've thrown you a curve.  I don't object to not taking
something for granted.  I suggest that the specification fails to do that.
It may be that it is impossible to do that, and I recommend that prospect be
explored. (I looked up ingenuous because I wanted to be careful here.
Haven't found a better word yet.  I don't mean it to be pejorative.)  />

My answer is simply that is necessarily so. That is quite different from
assuming that it is possible to "take nothing for granted." It is stated as
a requirement that we adopt no a priori exclusionary conditions. To think
otherwise would be to hypothesize that some acceptable test could be
constructed to establish the qualification of an identity of Human and then
of HumanGroup.

<ORCNOTE I missed this in the requirements.  Where does it state that? />

Anyone who wishes to do so is certainly free to attempt that. If Dennis or
anyone else returns with a suitable test in hand, we will give up our
naivete and impose it, if it is shown to achieve adequate reliability and
can be proven NOT to disallow any valid Human, or Human-authorized,
interaction-capable software agent. THAT is an important part of what we
mean by taking nothing for granted. The criticism implies that we somehow
SHOULD take something for granted (in this case the universal reliability
and applicability of some test). I submit that this tendency to make such
assumptions (not this particular assumption) is exactly the root cause of
much miscommunication and misunderstanding. That people do take too much for
granted is exactly why we must do our utmost to avoid that.

<ORCNOTE OK, but it bothers me that there is even the notion of "valid
HUMAN" here.  What can that possibly mean? The very phrase suggests some
position (e.g., criteria, expressed or not).  More to the point, collapsing
characteristics of a person or HUMAN with human-authorized and with
non-human "characters" that somehow present human attributes strikes me as a
universalization that is not likely to enhance fidelity in communication.
/>


race-

As I said in my reply to Dennis, we included race because the term is used
in the arena of public safety and, I will add now, law enforcement.

<ORCNOTE Precisely.  This is a great example. So race is attributed to
persons in a law-enforcement context.  It shows up on firms usually filled
in by third parties.  As a crime victim I have been asked the race of the
perpetrator.  I get that it is used.  That is a *highly* contextual case of
attribution of a quality that is specific to culture, practice, i.e., it is
very situated.  To abstract this into the specification as a HUMAN trait
strips all of that out the way it is in the specification is not going to
improve matters. The problem is the generalization.  I sense that it is not
your intention to be doing that.  I suggest that it is in fact what has been
accomplished.  It is not fair to say that someone should go to the list
discussions to know the context of this.  That is not how the specification
will be used.  It should not be necessary to have written it to be able to
apply it with some reliability.  Maybe the question should be how are the
contexts of Human ML instances, uh a "human" occurrence, to be established
and misattributions to be avoided? />

[ ... ]

We did not include it for any reason of our own, but because we are
attempting to deal with objective world the way the objective world is,
rather than how we would prefer it to be. In this case, the term and the
associated concept of racism, as discredited as they are, are also
indisputably operant in our human world.

<ORCNOTE Oh boy, the objective world.  Operant in our human world I will
grant you. />

I don't think we can claim any measure of objectivity if we start to exclude
terms of which we do not approve. [ ... ]

[ ... ]

I would appreciate it if someone would cast this as a motion to remove race
from the attributeGroup physicalDescriptors.

<ORCNOTE You said something here about wanting to honor how people describe
themselves (or are described).  That sounds like a perfectly straightforward
thing to do.  Is that indeed the subject matter to be embraced by Human ML?
That's not how it is presented.  Maybe the problem is that the scope and
reach is stated too broadly for something that is actually relatively
straightforward when the markup is made more situated.  I think that
otherwise you are trying to serve too many masters, and too many agendas,
and it will diminish the accomplishment.  I would start by coming up with a
better term than Human Markup Language.  Also, the race term is simply a
dramatic example.  Hair color is enough of a problem, but it is more
difficult to recognize.  Height and weight are also difficult.  Think about
it.  When and where and determined by whom?  There's a big difference
between a witness's description taken in a police report and a measurement
at the pediatricians!  By the way, are you going to tolerate non-English
descriptive terms? The Anglo centrism is pretty pronounced. />

<ORCNOTE Real world example.  My niece is a single mother (presently engaged
to be married -- are you guys going to embrace kinship relationships?  I
forgot to look) and on the usual questionnaires, such as the one for the
just-past US Census, she describes her son's race as OTHER and bi-racial.
That's how she describes it.  That is not likely to be what a police officer
or a school official writes in a report, when referring to this same
teen-ager.  It is what my grand-nephew says, as his mother has taught him.
How does Human ML apply to this?  />

Ciao,
Rex


--

Rex Brooks
Starbourne Communications Design
1361-A Addison, Berkeley, CA 94702 *510-849-2309
http://www.starbourne.com * rexb@starbourne.com