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It really worries me how many people are so quick to forgive him and tell him so. In my family if someone cheated they got called a cheater and suffered conseq

by ribs 7y ago

It really worries me how many people are so quick to forgive him and tell him so. In my family if someone cheated they got called a cheater and suffered consequences. At least, they would have, if someone did something like that. But my parents didn’t raise mendacious villains. Look at this crap on Twitter: “Everyone makes mistakes. Thank you for the apology”. “Kagglers will still love to have you back” “It's great that you realize your mistakes. Looking forward to see your comeback with more cool DS solutions and ethics than before.” “Thanks for doing this. It's okay to make errors in judgement, we've all been there to varying degrees. Y'all be gonna be fine.1!” Those are the worst. I’m not so crazy about these below, either, although there’s just a hint of steel in them, at least: “I’m glad to see that you had a change of heart after sleeping on it and that you will be returning the prize money. I hope you will consider donating to or volunteering at a local animal shelter as well. Atonement here is more than returning the money and apologizing.” “I hope this can be used as a teaching moment as well. Many people clearly look up to you because of your work. What can we learn from this? Something to ponder in the days to come.”

ribs 7y ago
I’m not saying that Pleskov is a sociopath, but I’m beginning to see how sociopaths manage to make their way in the world without getting punished.
- raverbashing 7y ago
  You're not too far off, it usually starts with the family attitude.
  - mosselman 7y ago
    Any sources for this? You can't just claim things like this. At least now without getting some reaction like mine here.
- bitL 7y ago
  Imagine you have 100 sociopaths, all of them aiming for the top, all able to recognize each other in a crowd. Now you both compete and cooperate together to get to the top; the ones caught are written off, the uncaught ones sooner or later achieve the goal, even if only 10 out of 100 make it there. Some headhunters specifically try to identify high-performing sociopaths for top management positions.
  - seieste 7y ago
    > Some headhunters specifically try to identify high-performing sociopaths for top management positions. [Citation needed]
- C1sc0cat 7y ago
  Its a down side of all these leetcode type systems where people game them for status.
sundvor 7y ago
I'm thinking Kaggle should look to Epic/Fortnite for how to handle cheaters. A lifetime ban would not be out of the place here, considering it went on to win the competition with no admission until caught.
- gpm 7y ago
  Kaggle should be looking to the police on how to handle cheaters. He stole 10,000 dollars, he defrauded h20.ai, etc. That's "go to jail" level crimes, not just "get banned from a competition and fired" level crimes.
  - gowld 7y ago
    He gamed their poorly designed game. He didn't hack their servers.
lultimouomo 7y ago
> In my family if someone cheated they got called a cheater and suffered consequences. He was publicly shamed, banned from Kaggle and he lost his job (and I guess he's basically unhireable right now). I wonder what would be your family reaction, if these things don't sound like consequences to you.
- xigency 7y ago
  Losing his job is one thing, but maybe it's time he got a job doing something else.
luma 7y ago
I'm confused by this reaction here - this was a _brilliant_ hack of the system and I think his work should be celebrated. Was it in keeping with the intention of the competition? Of course not. Were lives threatened by their creative solution to the competition? Also no. At the end of the day it was a fun, inventive approach to a made-up problem. So what's the problem?
- bleuarff 7y ago
  That's not a hack, that's blatant cheating, their solution litterally looked at the anwsers. It bypassed the ML model prediction, so that's not a ML solution, which to my understanding was the constraint of the competition. And in the end, that solution is useless for the adoption site, since the objective is to get adoption predictions (the animal has not been adopted yet). I'm confused too, by how can anyone think it's an acceptable behavior.
  - luma 7y ago
    Their solution made use of the data available to them in a "prize" that was nothing more than a made-up competition for fun. Did the rules expressly say somewhere that one could not make use of available datasets?
    - gpm 7y ago
      Kaggle rules routinely restrict use of datasets to approved ones, almost certainly yes but you would have to check to be certain. The prize was $10,000, not "fun".
    - zentiggr 7y ago
      I think you misunderstood that the team in question scraped prospective test profiles from the website in question outside of the competition data flow. They blatantly cheated the competition process using data that was not supposed to be available to them.
- Townley 7y ago
  For this particular problem, they were working on pet adoption timing prediction algorithms. The proposed solution wouldn’t work as efficiently in production as one of the other competitors. That leads to inaccurate predictions on pet adoption times, which increases costs for adoption centers, and maybe euthanasia rates among kill shelters. So animal lives would be impacted by this cheat. More importantly, Kagggle does competitions across dozens of industries. If a culture of getting better at hiding your cheat pervades the platform, that could impact finance, transportation, and medical research. In those scenarios, lives would either be threatened or at least subject to sub-optimal systems.
45ure 7y ago
>In my family if someone cheated they got called a cheater and suffered consequences. You picked a random sample of ratio'd comments from a platform which is big on performative wokeness to strengthen your opinion, which still fails to explain how Pleskov managed to zugzwang his way into pulling off a Kobayashi Maru style move and the failure of the platform to monitor such abuses. Only time will tell, whether or not he has avoided being a part of the Dark Triad; without condoning his behaviour ─ what more can he do to atone for his sins?
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by ribs 7y ago

ribs 7y ago

I’m not saying that Pleskov is a sociopath, but I’m beginning to see how sociopaths manage to make their way in the world without getting punished.

raverbashing 7y ago
You're not too far off, it usually starts with the family attitude.
- mosselman 7y ago
  Any sources for this? You can't just claim things like this. At least now without getting some reaction like mine here.
bitL 7y ago
Imagine you have 100 sociopaths, all of them aiming for the top, all able to recognize each other in a crowd. Now you both compete and cooperate together to get to the top; the ones caught are written off, the uncaught ones sooner or later achieve the goal, even if only 10 out of 100 make it there. Some headhunters specifically try to identify high-performing sociopaths for top management positions.
- seieste 7y ago
  > Some headhunters specifically try to identify high-performing sociopaths for top management positions. [Citation needed]
C1sc0cat 7y ago
Its a down side of all these leetcode type systems where people game them for status.

sundvor 7y ago

I'm thinking Kaggle should look to Epic/Fortnite for how to handle cheaters. A lifetime ban would not be out of the place here, considering it went on to win the competition with no admission until caught.

gpm 7y ago
Kaggle should be looking to the police on how to handle cheaters. He stole 10,000 dollars, he defrauded h20.ai, etc. That's "go to jail" level crimes, not just "get banned from a competition and fired" level crimes.
- gowld 7y ago
  He gamed their poorly designed game. He didn't hack their servers.

lultimouomo 7y ago

> In my family if someone cheated they got called a cheater and suffered consequences. He was publicly shamed, banned from Kaggle and he lost his job (and I guess he's basically unhireable right now). I wonder what would be your family reaction, if these things don't sound like consequences to you.

xigency 7y ago
Losing his job is one thing, but maybe it's time he got a job doing something else.

luma 7y ago

I'm confused by this reaction here - this was a _brilliant_ hack of the system and I think his work should be celebrated. Was it in keeping with the intention of the competition? Of course not. Were lives threatened by their creative solution to the competition? Also no. At the end of the day it was a fun, inventive approach to a made-up problem. So what's the problem?

bleuarff 7y ago
That's not a hack, that's blatant cheating, their solution litterally looked at the anwsers. It bypassed the ML model prediction, so that's not a ML solution, which to my understanding was the constraint of the competition. And in the end, that solution is useless for the adoption site, since the objective is to get adoption predictions (the animal has not been adopted yet). I'm confused too, by how can anyone think it's an acceptable behavior.
- luma 7y ago
  Their solution made use of the data available to them in a "prize" that was nothing more than a made-up competition for fun. Did the rules expressly say somewhere that one could not make use of available datasets?
  - gpm 7y ago
    Kaggle rules routinely restrict use of datasets to approved ones, almost certainly yes but you would have to check to be certain. The prize was $10,000, not "fun".
  - zentiggr 7y ago
    I think you misunderstood that the team in question scraped prospective test profiles from the website in question outside of the competition data flow. They blatantly cheated the competition process using data that was not supposed to be available to them.
Townley 7y ago
For this particular problem, they were working on pet adoption timing prediction algorithms. The proposed solution wouldn’t work as efficiently in production as one of the other competitors. That leads to inaccurate predictions on pet adoption times, which increases costs for adoption centers, and maybe euthanasia rates among kill shelters. So animal lives would be impacted by this cheat. More importantly, Kagggle does competitions across dozens of industries. If a culture of getting better at hiding your cheat pervades the platform, that could impact finance, transportation, and medical research. In those scenarios, lives would either be threatened or at least subject to sub-optimal systems.

45ure 7y ago

>In my family if someone cheated they got called a cheater and suffered consequences. You picked a random sample of ratio'd comments from a platform which is big on performative wokeness to strengthen your opinion, which still fails to explain how Pleskov managed to zugzwang his way into pulling off a Kobayashi Maru style move and the failure of the platform to monitor such abuses. Only time will tell, whether or not he has avoided being a part of the Dark Triad; without condoning his behaviour ─ what more can he do to atone for his sins?

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