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> Maybe I am misunderstanding but... Why does a community need a moral stance on external issues? If everyone is there to do/learn/advance machine learning, isn
by andyjohnson0 6y ago
> Maybe I am misunderstanding but... Why does a community need a moral stance on external issues? If everyone is there to do/learn/advance machine learning, isn't that the end of it? It isn't their purpose to engage with Chinese or other issues.
Because its wrong to write-off the mistreatment of other human beings as an external issue. It never is: we're all human and we all share the same planet.
- LatteLazy 6y agoSo any group anywhere needs to have a stance on every injustice everywhere? Isn't that exhausting?
- SiempreViernes 6y agoYou just need to take a stance on injustice classes, after that its simply classification. Surely you can muster that much moral effort?
- LatteLazy 6y agoSorry, what's a class in this context I'm more than happy to say something like "injustice everywhere is bad and we should oppose it and not let our technology be used to support it". But I feel that's a bit less than people expect?
- crispyambulance 6y ago> Isn't that exhausting? Eventually, but this is a unique time right now. People are paying attention to injustice. I would say that much of these "stances" are inauthentic and done just for PR reasons. We'll see who is being genuine and who is phony soon enough.
- protomyth 6y agoNo, people are paying attention to some injustice. They don't give a damn about other injustices unless they can wrap those back into one of their causes. They'll visit Native Americans when its something about environment, but ignore them when it comes to police violence.
- Enginerrrd 6y agoThat's quite a stretch from taking a stance on the ways the products you are developing might be weaponized. The discussion is more analogous to groups making cruise missiles and the like.
- cycloptic 6y agoOf course it's exhausting. It would be less exhausting if more people paid attention to these things instead of viewing it as someone else's problem.
- LatteLazy 6y agoThat's not true though is it? The more people get involved, the more opinions you need to weigh and the more consensus you need to get to even 1 stance. Getting 10 people to agree a stance on the 10 issues facing you is much much easier than getting 7bn people to agree on the billions of possible issues in the known universe. That's sort of my whole point: eithe limit the issues you have to take a stance on, or watch the amount of time taken up with stances grown exponentially.
- cycloptic 6y agoIt is true because there is no alternative. Dismissing the exponential growth and required time commitment won't make it go away, if anything it amplifies the problem and increases the number of discussion that need to happen in the end. If you have no consensus then the stance will just be taken for you by whoever screams the loudest, in modern times that is social media and advertising.
- LatteLazy 6y agoSo you accept its impossible to do mathematically, But insist we still need to do it because we have no alternative? Doesn't this mean that no community can ever actually function beyond very small sizes? They will just get stuck answering infinite moral quandries?
- cycloptic 6y agoI can't speak for what the best method of organizing for the ML community should be, but society at-large is already stuck answering these infinite moral quandaries.
- michaelmrose 6y agoPresumably actually working in a prison camp is actually exhausting.
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