This whole episode unfortunately reminds me of this Robin Hanson post. http://www.overcomingbias.com/2013/08/inequality-is-about-grabbing.html http://www.overc

This whole episode unfortunately reminds me of this Robin Hanson post. http://www.overcomingbias.com/2013/08/inequality-is-about-grabbing.html http://www.overcomingbias.com/2013/08/inequality-is-about-gr... The state of AI fairness research is really poor, as in the focus is on politics and sincere effort to develop useful algorithmic notions of fairness aren’t even attempted. It creates a way to take notoriety and clout within the AI field by doing work that is “about” fairness without actually solving fairness problems. This article itself is a good example. Comparing Timnit Gebru’s body of work or authority in the field even remotely with Yann LeCun is preposterous, and Gebru happening to focus on the impacts of bias in the field doesn’t change that. Yet the article is totally loaded to highlight Gebru and undercut LeCun. I think AI fairness is tremendously important for the world, but I don’t see anyone remotely tackling the problem in a rigorous way at all. Instead I see people trying to hype up fluff work about fairness as a hot topic into fame & clout so they can be de facto leaders in the overall field of AI despite not actually contributing to it (not even in fairness research). The whole thing politicizes it in a really ugly way. It reminds me of the Feynman anecdote where people try to get him to settle a dispute about the physics of electricity having an implication for observers of the Sabbath. “ It really was a disappointment. Here they are, slowly coming to life, only to better interpret the Talmud. Imagine! In modern times like this, guys are studying to go into society and do something--to be a rabbi--and the only way they think that science might be interesting is because their ancient, provincial, medieval problems are being confounded slightly by some new phenomena.”