Sort By Controversial

"Reddit has a feature where you can sort posts by controversial. Controversy sells, so we trained our network to predict this too. The project went to this new-ish Indian woman with a long name who went by Shiri, and she couldn’t get it to work, so our boss Brad sent me to help. Shiri had tested the network on the big 1.7 billion comment archive, and it had produced controversial-sounding hypothethical scenarios about US politics. So far so good. The Japanese tested their bioweapons on Chinese prisoners. The Tuskegee Institute tested syphilis on African-Americans. We were either nicer or dumber than they were, because we tested Shiri’s Scissor on ourselves."

This is a short story narrated by Matt Arnold with the permission of the author, Scott Alexander. The original text is here:

https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/