Some people get taken to see the Oracle. Others have to make do with visiting the Gender Genie. I'm one of the latter. I took all of the entries below this one that are currently displayed on the page, and entered them.

Lo and behold, the software was able to confirm (broadly) what I could have told anyone after a quick check of various attributes and so forth: The Country Pundit is a man. Under Gender Genie (heh heh heh) analysis, the score is 'male' by more than 2:1, on results of a "male score" of 16209 versus a "female score" of 7726.

Of course, this thing also called Virginia Postrel a man, so I'm not entirely sure that it works all that well. However, VP does point out that the thing's underlying theorems are supposed to work on fiction as opposed to non-fiction, so it's going to be a little out of whack on non-fiction.

I've got an irreverent question at this point: Has a Turing test been given at some level? If the Turing test requires Human A to be incapable of distinguishing between the responses given by Human B or Computer C in a blind test, then perhaps the Gender Genie has failed an ersatz Turing test. I had a theoretical construct of how this was minutely significant somehow in the development of computer intelligence, but the heat of the room in which I'm composing it caused me to forget or otherwise bungle the theory. My law school's too bloody cheap to turn off the heating when the temperatures creep above 70 in the city. Their excuse is something about coolant and so forth, and all this may be true and objectively problematic. That doesn't change the fact that I'm subjectively sweltering in here.

Ende.

Posted by: Country Pundit at 02:07 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 312 words, total size 2 kb.