Gender information for academic purposes

Forum rules
Feel free to discuss any topics here. Please use the Politics sub-forum for political conversations. While most topics will be allowed please be sure to be respectful and follow our normal site rules at http://www.webdiplomacy.net/rules.php.

Post a reply

Confirmation code
Enter the code exactly as it appears. All letters are case insensitive.
Smilies
:points: :-D :eyeroll: :neutral: :nmr: :razz: :raging: :-) ;) :( :sick: :o :? 8-) :x :shock: :lol: :cry: :evil: :?: :smirk: :!:
View more smilies

BBCode is ON
[img] is ON
[flash] is OFF
[url] is OFF
Smilies are ON

Topic review
   

If you wish to attach one or more files enter the details below.

Expand view Topic review: Gender information for academic purposes

Re: Gender information for academic purposes

by kestasjk » Sat Aug 26, 2023 9:50 am

gimix wrote:
Fri Aug 25, 2023 6:08 pm
Jamiet99uk wrote:
Sun Aug 06, 2023 4:36 pm
Apparently Ashburn (in the USA) is a major hub for Internet data centres, so I'd guess we don't actually have hundreds of users living there.
Kestas, as Jamie said traffic from Ashburn is traffic by bots, moving from the big data centers Amazon and others have there. You can easily check that, just by looking at the average length of those visits: it should be 0.0 seconds :lol:

That said, I wonder how are these bots classified in terms of age & gender & interests...
Hmm, I would've thought analytics would filter bot visits out..

Ultimately our usage right now looks like this:
Screenshot 2023-08-26 174724.jpg
If it's all bots from Ashburn(?) I do wonder why it would vary over time, how they would decide it's male / female etc.. I definitely need to do better about our stats and that's a work in progress, but I think that how these numbers vary over time isn't only due to what's going on in Ashburn (and these aren't great numbers by any stretch)

Don't get me wrong this could all be bot activity and a red herring, we need better tags etc in place to be able to tell and that'll be in place soon

edit: Where are our African and Arabic friends btw? Why would they not be into playing European conquerors? /s

Re: Gender information for academic purposes

by gimix » Fri Aug 25, 2023 6:08 pm

Jamiet99uk wrote:
Sun Aug 06, 2023 4:36 pm
Apparently Ashburn (in the USA) is a major hub for Internet data centres, so I'd guess we don't actually have hundreds of users living there.
Kestas, as Jamie said traffic from Ashburn is traffic by bots, moving from the big data centers Amazon and others have there. You can easily check that, just by looking at the average length of those visits: it should be 0.0 seconds :lol:

That said, I wonder how are these bots classified in terms of age & gender & interests...

Re: Gender information for academic purposes

by kestasjk » Tue Aug 22, 2023 1:34 am

momom2 wrote:
Fri Aug 18, 2023 2:29 am
Kestasjk, this infographic is incredibly helpful! Where did you find it?
No worries, it's from google analytics. Trying to add some more tags etc in there as it's kinda hard to tell which parts of the site are doing well, bot games, play.webdiplomacy.net, legacy vs new, etc, so as I add some more of these tags the data should get more useful

Re: Gender information for academic purposes

by momom2 » Fri Aug 18, 2023 2:29 am

Kestasjk, this infographic is incredibly helpful! Where did you find it?

Re: Gender information for academic purposes

by JECE » Sun Aug 06, 2023 5:09 pm

Jamiet99uk wrote:
Sun Aug 06, 2023 4:36 pm
Apparently Ashburn (in the USA) is a major hub for Internet data centres, so I'd guess we don't actually have hundreds of users living there.
Or maybe we do with all the bots.

Image

But yes, Northern Virginia has a lot of data centers.

Re: Gender information for academic purposes

by Jamiet99uk » Sun Aug 06, 2023 4:36 pm

Apparently Ashburn (in the USA) is a major hub for Internet data centres, so I'd guess we don't actually have hundreds of users living there.

Re: Gender information for academic purposes

by Octavious » Sun Aug 06, 2023 11:52 am

Jamie, mate. I was born in Plymouth. UK geographic knowledge for people from Devon is pretty good for Devon and Cornwall, passable for Dorset and Somerset, and completely ignorant of everywhere else. I can assure you that I was not thinking of Ashbourne. ;)

Re: Gender information for academic purposes

by Jamiet99uk » Sun Aug 06, 2023 11:06 am

Octavious wrote:
Sun Aug 06, 2023 12:02 am
The stats seem bang on to me. They show that webDip users come predominantly from the three great cities of the world.

London, New York, and Ashburn.

When you're tired of Ashburn you're tired of life
Are you thinking of Ashbourne?

Re: Gender information for academic purposes

by Octavious » Sun Aug 06, 2023 12:02 am

The stats seem bang on to me. They show that webDip users come predominantly from the three great cities of the world.

London, New York, and Ashburn.

When you're tired of Ashburn you're tired of life

Re: Gender information for academic purposes

by JECE » Sat Aug 05, 2023 8:06 pm

The age breakdown makes sense to me. We just pretend to be old, ha ha

Re: Gender information for academic purposes

by kestasjk » Sat Aug 05, 2023 6:28 pm

If I look up the stats in analytics it looks more varied at 75% male 25% female over the last 12 months.. But I'm not sure how accurate it is, not sure how they know the gender of users. I imagine it's based on search patterns or some such?

The age stats also seem dubious, I feel like our user based would be skewed a bit older?
Screenshot 2023-08-06 022544.jpg

Re: Gender information for academic purposes

by Doom427 » Sat Aug 05, 2023 1:45 pm

It is pretty male heavy, which makes sense! A game about gossiping behind someone's back while pretending to be friends is classic male behavior. Women just don't get much experience with that (I'm an outlier I know)

returning players realize this is a rewritten joke I used last year during the feminist wars

Still, only one woman? That's kinda crazy.

Re: Gender information for academic purposes

by Ginge86 » Thu Aug 03, 2023 12:05 pm

Who would have ever guessed that the majority of players are male?
What a huge shock that must be to everyone.

Re: Gender information for academic purposes

by Esquire Bertissimmo » Wed Aug 02, 2023 4:08 pm

Doom427 wrote:
Wed Aug 02, 2023 3:50 pm
Well, the reason the survey is here is to see if it accurately reflects the gender balance of the website. We can assume it accurately reflects the gender bias of messages received in random games. The bias is that the model that exists to send diplomacy messages will default to he/him for all players, so if one player doesn't use he/him, and every other player can tell, the AI will be, somewhat obviously, faulty.

( A cervical cancer ai wouldn't be female sex-biases because an AI that detects cervical cancer doesn't need to sex the photos it's looking at. It's not useful information. In diplomacy however, knowing what to say about the other players is pretty important - you need to talk in the third-person all the time. )
Thanks for this, totally clears it up for me!

Re: Gender information for academic purposes

by Doom427 » Wed Aug 02, 2023 3:50 pm

Well, the reason the survey is here is to see if it accurately reflects the gender balance of the website. We can assume it accurately reflects the gender bias of messages received in random games. The bias is that the model that exists to send diplomacy messages will default to he/him for all players, so if one player doesn't use he/him, and every other player can tell, the AI will be, somewhat obviously, faulty.

( A cervical cancer ai wouldn't be female sex-biases because an AI that detects cervical cancer doesn't need to sex the photos it's looking at. It's not useful information. In diplomacy however, knowing what to say about the other players is pretty important - you need to talk in the third-person all the time. )

Re: Gender information for academic purposes

by Esquire Bertissimmo » Wed Aug 02, 2023 3:32 pm

captainmeme wrote:
Wed Aug 02, 2023 10:14 am
Esquire Bertissimmo wrote:
Wed Aug 02, 2023 3:53 am
If a bot trained heavily on male-skewed WebDip data and then defaults more often to masculine pronouns is that "bias" or just an accurate reflection of its training set?
It's both. Bias in AI generally means it's accurately reflecting biased training data.

Good AI needs to be able to work well in a variety of situations, which is why this is a major issue. If it very specifically works well with WebDiplomacy's past demographics then that's great if it's playing on webDip and the demographics have stayed the same, but it's a problem if it's playing anywhere else or if the demographics change.
Thanks, I found this clarifying!

That said, I'm still a little confused. To consider an edge case, is an AI that's trained to spot cervical cancer female-sex biased? The answer is "yes" by definition, but it's incomprehensible to me to call that a bias because it perfectly reflects the training data and the group it is going to be used on. The "bias" in this case would only be an issue if you wanted to extend the model to see if it can detect other cancers that both sexes suffer from.

Maybe it's something similar here? If the model accurately reflects the gender balance of the site (I'm assuming it's skewed male-identifying) and it's only used on this site, wouldn't it just hurt the efficiency of the model to try to de-bias it? Maybe the researchers just want to better know the extent of the bias, or maybe they want to extend the model to other games or sites where they expect the preponderance of man-generated data to be a drawback. All of this would probably be more clear if we had access to the scientific paper linked in the article posted by OP.

Re: Gender information for academic purposes

by captainmeme » Wed Aug 02, 2023 10:14 am

Esquire Bertissimmo wrote:
Wed Aug 02, 2023 3:53 am
If a bot trained heavily on male-skewed WebDip data and then defaults more often to masculine pronouns is that "bias" or just an accurate reflection of its training set?
It's both. Bias in AI generally means it's accurately reflecting biased training data.

Good AI needs to be able to work well in a variety of situations, which is why this is a major issue. If it very specifically works well with WebDiplomacy's past demographics then that's great if it's playing on webDip and the demographics have stayed the same, but it's a problem if it's playing anywhere else or if the demographics change.

Re: Gender information for academic purposes

by Esquire Bertissimmo » Wed Aug 02, 2023 3:53 am

JECE wrote:
Tue Aug 01, 2023 11:51 pm
Esquire Bertissimmo wrote:
Tue Aug 01, 2023 8:37 pm
That's certainly a huge skew towards masculine pronouns, but what if it turns out that WebDip is genuinely overwhelmingly played by men? Is it still "biased" if it accurately reflects the data it was trained on and the group it will play with?
<facepalm>

Of course it's still gender bias. If the AI was trained on overwhelmingly masculine data then that just helps measure the extent of the gender bias.
Maybe there's something I'm missing. If an advertisement for feminine hygiene products doesn't have any men in it I'd hesitate to call that biased. If a bot trained heavily on male-skewed WebDip data and then defaults more often to masculine pronouns is that "bias" or just an accurate reflection of its training set?

Said another way, would artificially feeding the bot data such that half the data came from female players and the other half from men reduce the bias if that is intact very unlike the actual gender balance on the site?

Re: Gender information for academic purposes

by JECE » Tue Aug 01, 2023 11:51 pm

Esquire Bertissimmo wrote:
Tue Aug 01, 2023 8:37 pm
That's certainly a huge skew towards masculine pronouns, but what if it turns out that WebDip is genuinely overwhelmingly played by men? Is it still "biased" if it accurately reflects the data it was trained on and the group it will play with?
<facepalm>

Of course it's still gender bias. If the AI was trained on overwhelmingly masculine data then that just helps measure the extent of the gender bias.

Re: Gender information for academic purposes

by Esquire Bertissimmo » Tue Aug 01, 2023 8:37 pm

The full article is behind a paywall so we're missing some details. I'd be interested in knowing how the authors concluded there was gender bias. That's certainly a huge skew towards masculine pronouns, but what if it turns out that WebDip is genuinely overwhelmingly played by men? Is it still "biased" if it accurately reflects the data it was trained on and the group it will play with?

Top