This is a more clear cut case of racism in academia and the field of economics. It's almost as if your success in the field hinges on the whims and fancies of rabid racists.
Cancel Culture
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I think you're actually allowed to dislike both.
cool.
I don't know if you realise that you just sound like someone sulking because he thinks someone else's opinions are being listened to, and that maybe it'll even give their career a boost if someone agrees.
It seems that your particular preoccupation is that AI is coming under more scrutiny as its early manifestations start doing more work. Part of the scrutiny is without doubt falling on the idea that "AI is colour blind and genderless" in its decision-making, whereas the reality is that it's currently as unaware of institutional and systemic bias as you appear to be.
I don't know which "very high in Facebook" individual you say posted "most of the bias on machine learning systems come from the bias on data" - there have been a few examples over the years. Of course he was right, he was "telling the truth" but if that was where he left it, as an excuse for the resulting bias in the outcomes of searches, targeting of ads or even employment practices, then he deserves to be criticised. Especially if he's very high in Facebook - there's no real excuse for someone in that position not to address the key point - that AI itself has to be trained differently, if it's not simply going to reinforce the (racist/sexist) status quo. Diversity, at the top of organisations like Facebook and in the technical discipline of AI is actually crucial to cracking that kind of problem. Data analysis needs to understand biases built into the data.
If the Facebook high up is now cancelled as unemployable, then that's a shame - because presumably he does have some talents, he just maybe doesn't have the talent/experience/empathy to be commenting on the subject. Or do you just mean he got criticised and his employer had to make some kind of apology saying that they know better, and that they understand that they have a responsibility to improve.
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Interesting considering he wrote a book all about public shaming.
Is that real?
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Interesting but entirely consistent, in my reading of it. The shaming that he examines in his work, he fairly comprehensively defines. "Cancel culture" is a far more spurious term that may include everything from shaming to silencing and censorship and more.
It's similar to how Trump and those who oppose Trump both use "fake news" to explain their position in the world. Cancel culture is a vague term exploited by bigots and non bigots alike.
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You can tell he’s pretty jaded about getting tagged into every single Twitter pile on and asked to be judge and jury.
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idk if i've shared this story here, but a friend of mine at a very very elite university knows a lab where
1. no white or black women are taken, only asian women* and white and asian men (maybe black men, i don't remember)
2. the women are restricted to certain topics of research
3. they are routinely humiliated in lab meetings
nobody complains because it would jeopardise their career once they've joined the lab to complain about their guide and mentor. instead you graduate asap and try and get a good letter from him.
*not sure if this includes anything other than east asians in theory, in practice it has not.
Ok, here we go again. Yes, if you go from the prior 'that all white male are sexist and racist, all black women are pure' yes, you get exactly that conclusion, that I am sulking because they are stealing our jobs instead of staying in Africa. Or you can check some facts:
Here is the lecture: https://storage.googleapis.com/deepmind-media/UCLxDeepMind_2020/L9 - UCLxDeepMind DL2020.pdf Roughly 35 citations, a few of them from the authors. Around 10 are arXiv-only, in all cases ultra-famous papers (in case of conditional GANs, over 3500 citations).
It is very hard to estimate the number of GAN papers. They have been discovered in 2014, and since 2016, they have been the hottest topic on Deep learning. And deep learning itself has been arguably the most heavily researched topic on Science (the top conference in computer vision is the fifth most impactful venue in entire science). I checked this year, and the number of GAN papers in that conference was around 35. There are 2 big computer vision conferences (yes, on AI conferences are important, no one cares about journals) and 3 big machine learning conferences. So, we are talking for an estimate of 100-200 GAN papers each year. Multiply it by 4 (since 2016), and you can guesstimate somewhere around 300-1000 papers in top venues. There are more papers who do not make it there (after all, those conferences are highly competitive, with more than 3/4th of papers get rejected), so if you include all the second and third tier venues, in addition to arxiv-only papers, the number of GAN papers is much higher. I have no idea how many. I would guess somewhere between 5000 and 10000. Let's use 5000.
The probability of a top accepted paper to make that lecture would be 2.5%-8.3%. Most of accepted papers did not make it. Mine didn't. I didn't even think about complaining, cause you know, it was supposed to not make it.
The probability of unaccepted (or accepted in lower-venue) papers making it would be 0.2% (using 5000 number). That is pretty low, right?
So why she had to complain about it, crying racism and sexism? Why people had to support that type of behavior? How that is anything else except using the racism and sexist card?
Instead of speculating, let's see what happened.
Here is the original tweet:
Here is the original attack:
Followed by:
And:
Followed by him explaining:
There was a back and forth, with one person being respectful, the other not. Here comes the punchline:
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Here is the original attack:
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Followed by:
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And:
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Followed by him explaining:
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There was a back and forth, with one person being respectful, the other not. Here comes the punchline:
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No, he is not unemployable. After all, he is Yann fecking LeCun, the guy who invented convolutional neural networks, the main tool on AI today and winner of Turing award (the Nobel of computer science). He is chief scientist on Facebook, and before was the director of AI, in fact, founding director. He was also the only voice (that matters) on Facebook not regulating hate speech with regard to Trump's hate speech. And from the exchange, he said nothing wrong, nothing at all, was always civil and respectful. That did not stop from people attacking him for daring to disagree with Timnit Gebru, and some of those people are actually very influential (for example a famous Caltech professor who is also Director of AI in a top company).
The result, LeCun says that he is leaving Twitter, calls for people to not attack Gebru (yes, she got attacked from some people who dared to say that she was being disrespectful), and his boss had to publicly apologize to Gebru (did something happened in between?). Despite that LeCun did absolutely nothing wrong.
I mean, having different opinions in science is kinda expected. Einstein was quite against quantum mechanics after all. And even if we assume that Timnit is the expert and LeCun is a noob (when in fact, LeCun is her senior by 3 decades and 150K citations), and even assuming that LeCun was wrong (which he wasn't), so what? He never said that 'it is only the bias on data that makes ML systems racists', he never said that 'we should not do anything about it'. He was simply giving a scientific opinion.
The discussions (in science too) have become extremely toxic and totally not-malicious correct comments can bring a lot of trouble to people. Which is extremely ridiculous!
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what level of censorship do you advocate for criticism of scientists? obviously one starts with the disrepectful tweets to higher citation authors, but what about the snarky subtweets? blogs? in my opnion, we need to find all the ways they are being disrespected (while still getting more likes than comments on each one) and stop it. also, if we train the system on enough existing tweets, it should be possible to automate the criticism of those making these harmful tweets in the first place.
i think our joint proposal has real potential!
Yeah sure, as you say.
Person A says that 'the bias in ML systems comes cause datasets are biased', person B essentially calls him a white-supremacist, Person A then has to apologize. Everything is cool, right.
no, we must restrict the free speech of would-be cancelers before this gets out of hand.
seriously, what exactly is your complaint here. all of this happened within the liberal bounds of free and open discourse. just like 4chan. you may not like the result of this, and i may not like the result of 4chan's /pol/, but there was no government or even corporate silencing of speech here or in /pol/. the debate resolved itself with an apology here and resolved itself with nazism there. that's how it goes. if speech is free, you can't control the result.
e - and if you believe that free online debate necessarily leads to the best synthesis and competition of views, i think nazism is the logical ideology since it doesn't need moderation to flourish, unlike trumpism, liberalism, or leftism.
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You complain about black people "playing the race card" while you are all over this thread playing the "getting called a racist card".
Cancel culture has nothing to do with government, and you know it well.
My problem is that free speech is getting limited, where saying perfectly correct scientific opinions (which aren't even controversial in the first space), makes you getting attacked and being called a white supremacist, with many other people saying bullshit about you and with your boss having to apologize. It is a sick culture where you need to stick 100% to some particular ideology. It also has been experimented heavily last century. It never ended well.
Yes, I am saying that calling someone a white supremacist is not very cool
Unless, of course, he says or behaves like a white supremacist. Same as accusing someone of playing a racist card when someone is not playing the racist card is not cool. In general, accusing people for something that they haven't done is not cool.
what happened in that exchange, on both sides, is free speech. every bit of it. your criticism of that exchange is also free speech.
What is exactly your point?
No one was called a white supremacist there, you're faking it to win a debate. He's obviously pointing out how poor the arguments are, by saying that it's the same ones that white supremacists use. If white supremacists use those arguments to defend themselves, then they're obviously inadequate.
You're doing exactly what you're complaining about. You're making up accusations of racism.
Also: " It also has been experimented heavily last century. It never ended well. "
I'm going to need you to spell this out for me. Exactly what are you comparing this twitter comment to? Earlier you said "playing the race card" was as bad as racism, what are you saying "cancel culture" will lead to?
People of the 2020s, making problems if they can find none, looking for some kind of totalitarian cultural perfect moral revolution. Wonder how the 2030s will look like. Maybe we will all be perfect humans only eating perfect food made by perfect companies, watching perfect television shows with no moral faults, wearing the perfect moral clothing made by normal perfectly balanced and ethical other humans thinking only good and morally correct thoughts while scratching our buttocks in a politically correct manner. Time to stop drinking beers. good night.
that you cannot confront cancel culture (at least the example you provided) without restricting speech in some way. just like some people think you cannot confront racist culture by restricting speech in some way.
the logical battelegrounds are then - what is the line beyond which something is racist (cancel culture)? is it ok to be racist (a canceler) and still be employed? who gets to police racism (attempts to cancel) online? should there be legal speech restrictions to racist speech (twitter threads trying to cancel)? is reverse racism (canceling a canceler) also a type of racism (cancel culture)? and etc.
I have never said that the cancel culture needs to be policed/regulated by the government. I had just said that it is a sick behavior that if it continues like this, it might bring countless problems.
Also, there are legal consequences for being a racist. There aren't on being a canceler.
it depends very heavily on the context. saying racial slurs is protected by law. talking about the inherent inferirity of some races isn't just protected by law, it is a position taken by some prominent people in my field.
should've added this one too
https://carlbeijer.substack.com/p/the-cancel-culture-discourse-is-incoherent
and for me, this remains the classic example of what online cancellation can lead to in real life
http://mattbruenig.com/2018/02/16/trump-nlrb-smashed-google-guy/
(the author was *actually* canceled - lost his 2 jobs, while his wife was pregnant - for calling a prominent hillary backer a scumbag on twitter)
http://mattbruenig.com/2018/02/16/trump-nlrb-smashed-google-guy/
(the author was *actually* canceled - lost his 2 jobs, while his wife was pregnant - for calling a prominent hillary backer a scumbag on twitter)
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Yes, indeed you did go again - with more or less the same post you've already made.
No one got cancelled - lost their job, got arrested, had their mortgage interest rate changed or their children taken into care.
All that happened was someone tweeted something you disagreed with. It also implicitly questioned the process and asked them to consider whether the full depth and breadth of talent/research is considered - or whether people citing their mates/colleagues feeds a self-perpetuating closed shop.
So again, no one got cancelled then.
A statement he made got criticised for sounding glib and glossing over the fact that most datasets are biased, not just those that are demographically inaccurate representations of the world. That's because current biases and inequalities are present in that data.
Was the criticism harsh in the context of the facial recognition app? Sure, but then people do take it personally if they realise a big company failed to notice that the dataset itself was flawed about something as personal as a face.
More importantly though, that general criticism needs to be heard over and over again in the industry. Crude AI is already producing bad results for already disadvantaged people. Some of those bad results are coming from well-intentioned efforts to make systems "colour blind" or "gender-free" - by revising datasets.
It's obvious from that exchange that it's not the first time they'd exchanged words over it. She wants him to look at human focused AI from the point of view of human ethics. That means it isn't just about creating better datasets, it's about analysing impacts, on individuals and groups, and looking at how to avoid baking current prejudices into the future.
It sounds like the discussion around it involved multiple people leaping in on both sides. Maybe that included people telling her that he "is her senior by 3 decades and 150K citations" - and maybe it's unsurprising that she heard a hierarchy defending its own status, rather than one listening to the real world dangers and current impacts of over-simplifying the problem.
But again, no one got cancelled. LeCun just decided he didn't want to continue the argument in that format.
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He feels threatened by an old woman?
I saw some responses saying that he shouting "I feel threatened" so that he could use a gun legally.
I don't know how the stand your ground law works but it's scary if it can be abused in that way.
Cancel culture? My thoughts are very simple. It's many things. Thought control. A means to get people to self censor. It's born from a Marxist mind. Now, people may argue examples …...but in the main I think people don't know what they're talking about and if a bus was coming right for you....and you stood in the road? Would you need to be told to get your arse out of the road? The worlds in a war of ideologies and it's the crazies that run the asylum and it['s been this way for a long time and of course the concept of conspiracy theoriest - is part of the same ideology because this madness has travelled through time and people didn't see it because they used the systems language which gets us no where.
He has beliefs about masks and what they would do to him.
That is true, but he didn't.
Whatever his sins, I am 100% against him being fired. Cancel culture means many things, and context is important. Here is someone fired from his job, losing his income and his health insurance, because he is an asshole (and his shirt probably means he has awful views beyond masks). I believe assholes deserve to live. The barrier to fire someone should be higher than this. Alternatively, basic income and healthcare should not be dependent on having a job.
https://thebaffler.com/latest/youre-fired-featherstone
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Personally I'm not a fan of this social media justice either. In some cases, i guess it has it place, but I would rather use the video footage as evidence to give to the authorities if the person is violating a law. Now it's basically millions or thousands of strangers calling for you to fired and condenmed for being an asshole.
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The thing with cases like that is that he was always an arsehole, and the company are not firing him because they're only just realising it. They're firing him because he was filmed and went viral.
Anyone in the right circumstances can be filmed made to look like an arsehole and go viral.
Anyone in the right circumstances can be filmed made to look like an arsehole and go viral.
i don't think people calling him an asshole is the problem. i think people wanting him fired, or the company having the power to fire him for this, isthe problem. and i think he can be awful withut doing something illegal - no need or reason to call the authorities over many incidents where people have been cancelled. [not sure about the legal status of masks wherever he is].
But what tells you that it's the only reason they fired him? There is also the possibility that this isn't the first time that they have a negative experience with him and that this incident was the straw that broke the camel's back. My experience is that people that are appreciated in a company are given more leeway by management.