Queer Rights

While queer rights in the US has not necessarily advanced to where most want it to be, my primary focus now will be on queer rights in Korea where I spent a significant number of years. Korea is still very conservative in these issues, as discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity is not outlawed (in fact, the military bans homosexuality and has undergone purges fairly recently, in 2017), and close to 60% of the population are against same-sex marriage.

Law

Implementation of fundamental anti-discrimination laws (which would direct the norm) could be an eventual goal, but it is a difficult one that many rights organizations have been working towards for over a decade. Another unmentioned yet possibly helpful establishment may be a more rigorous separation of church and state, because far-right Christians are often the strongest opponents of the anti-discrimination law. In the past, their anti-homosexuality arguments based on the Bible have been taken seriously by the government in annulling the proposed anti-discrimination laws.

Norm

One of the difficulties in establishing queer rights is low visibility. Given that acceptance from the general public is as important a factor as establishing anti-discrimination laws (though the two are correlated), it is difficult to advocate for a group that does not seem to exist. Increasing public visibility—whether it is introducing more media content or more individuals (especially public figures) coming out of the closet—would help significantly.

Code

Online community services have been a major driving force in organizing support groups and strategic rights movements. Changes I would like to see implemented are differentiated use of words sex vs gender in official papers, a wider variety of choices in sexual orientation and gender identity on social media websites, and many more.

Market

More companies could be invited to advertise in Pride. Companies would have a monetary incentive to somewhat inadvertently participate in pride and to advocate for queer people as a special market. There is a precedent of a more natural occurrence of queer(especially gay)-targeted marketing in the UK where it was popularly referred to as pink economics.

 

 

Algorithmic discrimination

Algorithms are supplanting humans in making decisions. However, these systems have been often found to perpetuate bias, especially socioeconomic discrimination, while forgoing explanation or critical interpretation.

Law & Market

A vast majority of these algorithms are developed and implemented in commercial settings, so the market is of great significance. Law could regulate the market by requiring publication of training/testing data for the model and periodic performance reports? To critique this suggestion, there are so many models out there and such verification is a nontrivial amount of work with not much incentive that even if the data is released, not much may be done with them. On the other hand, data may start coming from more credible sources.

Restrict the usage of algorithms in hiring processes unless proven to be fair enough?

Norm

The current public opinion—machine learning is magic!—or the lack thereof may be the main source of troubles. Publicly recognizing the fact that 1) “correct” results are not necessarily correct nor justifiable especially when the process cannot be explained and 2) these systems are not destined to solve all of our problems would help proliferate a culture of critical implementation and usage.

Code

Ideally, code would become more explainable in the future. In the meanwhile, since lack of formal analysis is probably another reason for continuously biased performance, so developing guidelines and infrastructure to gauge performance at each step would help. Regarding transparency, development of open source models could help.

 

 

Waste Reduction

Americans produce 7 pounds of trash per day on average, and nearly 70% goes to landfill.

Law

There is so much law could do: mandate compost, tax waste by volume/weight; restrict (by taxing or banning) usage of excessive packaging, single-use material, and non-recyclable material; give incentives to developing materials that are bio-degradable.

Norm & Market

There are many unsustainable norms in the US compared to other as-developed countries: consumerism that could be improved; short cycle of buying to throwing out exacerbated by the tendency to buy cheaper, lower-quality products; lack of recycling principles; overusing single-use, disposable products, use excessive/un-recyclable packaging.

Code

Increasing the number of Waste-To-Energy facilities. Development (and competitive pricing) of bio-degradable material.