8 ms·

I actually think it's a positive thing that the media system is being shaken. Society puts way too much trust in shit that is posted on twitter. I feel the sam

I actually think it's a positive thing that the media system is being shaken. Society puts way too much trust in shit that is posted on twitter. I feel the same way about cancel culture on twitter -- it is bad in the short term, but if it incentivizes people like Yann Lecunn to leave it -- it reduces the importance of the medium itself.

octernion 6y ago
how is it bad that a rich white & powerful ML engineer left twitter because he is trying to defend a racist systemic problem. just improves twitter in my opinion.
- isoskeles 6y ago
  Can you explain why it is relevant that he's white?
  - octernion 6y ago
    can you explain what research you have done in the racism in tech space? edit: i mean this in good faith since that question is an incredibly complicated one involving power dynamics and systemic issues that can't be boiled down to a simplistic answer. why the downvotes?
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - ciarannolan 6y ago
    No explanation necessary. It's the same old racism, but with a new 2020 twist: it's ok as long as it's racism against people we don't like. Check out the recent spate of black athletes and celebrities posting openly anti-Semitic comments on social media (one directly (mis)quoting Hitler re: Jews) with zero repercussions. https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/nba/2020/07/08/stephen-jackson-defends-desean-jacksons-fake-adolf-hitler-quote-posts/5399430002/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/nba/2020/07/08/stephen... https://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/wireStory/jewish-leaders-condemn-hurtful-words-nick-cannon-71810371 https://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/wireStory/jewish-leader... https://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/hip-hop/9400472/ice-cube-criticized-anti-semitic-images-conspiracy-theories https://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/hip-hop/9400472/i... A really thoughtful piece about this by Kareem Abdul Jabbar here too: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/kareem-abdul-jabbar-is-outrage-anti-semitism-sports-hollywood-1303210 https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/kareem-abdul-jabbar-i...
    - whymauri 6y ago
      Zero repercussions? Nick Cannon lost his job and board position, and rightfully so [0]. Do not misconstrue the consequences - people will be fired or blacklisted for these anti-Semitic comments, and that's frankly a good thing. [0] https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/15/entertainment/nick-cannon-viacom-trnd/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/15/entertainment/nick-cannon-via...
      - ciarannolan 6y ago
        You're right that Nick Cannon is the exception. (edit: actually, you're wrong: https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/jul/16/nick-cannon-to-keep-the-masked-singer-gig-on-fox-a/ https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/jul/16/nick-cannon...) How about Ice Cube, Stephen Jackson, DeSean Jackson, Dwyane Wade, etc. and all those who supported the comments or brushed them off as "speaking their truth" or some other nonsense? They will face no consequences, because, again, racism is deemed okay in the current climate as long as it's aimed correctly. Can you even _imagine_ the absolute chaos that would rein if a white NBA player started quoting David Duke to millions of followers, and a bunch of white NBA players and commentators supported them?
        amznthrwaway 6y ago
        The fucking US President quotes white supremacists regularly. Shut the fuck up, you vile, dishonest, race war loving piece of shit.
        baddox 6y ago
        > They will face no consequences... > Can you even _imagine_ the absolute chaos that would rein if... I think everyone has their own media diet, influenced partly by their own choices and partly by algorithms. Your media diet likely has a huge effect on whose reactions you see and thus which reactions you perceive to be "brushing something off" or "absolute chaos."
        ciarannolan 6y ago
  - davinic 6y ago
    Because power dynamics play a huge role when we're talking about systemic issues, and the current system gives most favorable outcomes to white males. It's not that the other cases are not important, but dealing with them deserves less priority unless and until they structurally hold that power and receive the benefits.
    - lawnchair_larry 6y ago
      Why do people buy into this nonsense?
      - shadowgovt 6y ago
        It has a long history of evidence supporting it. https://cos.gatech.edu/facultyres/Diversity_Studies/Bertrand_LakishaJamal.pdf https://cos.gatech.edu/facultyres/Diversity_Studies/Bertrand... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2915460/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2915460/
      - davinic 6y ago
        With which part do you disagree and what is your basis for that?
        eternalban 6y ago
        There are 2 parts here: (1) problem, and (2) remedy. The issue for myself and likeminded individuals who actually do not have a stake in the current "power dynamics" -- I could post during the Twitter hack -- is "part" (2). Where are the "scientific" and "rational" studies on the du jour mob tactics cum "remedy" to social injustice? As a spectator it is reminiscent of previous attempts at "remedy", notably the Cultural Revolution by Chairman Mao. That didn't really solve anything, did it? Distorted power dynamics certainly should be addressed. There are actually quite a few elephants in the room that aren't even discussed. But please do not make a claim that mobilized mob squads are a "proven remedy to fix power dynamic's distortions in society". The historical verdict on this is: one group of power holders replaces another.
- flatline 6y ago
  We have a prominent AI researcher being ostracized for a tweet (and presumably a more general attitude we don't see out of context) that marginalizes people of color, reflecting a larger problem of systemic racism, particularly in academia. Neither his attitude nor the reaction to it seem productive in my mind. Online forums have always been prone to everyone shouting over everyone else until the loudest voice wins.
  - dlivingston 6y ago
    Can you explain how his tweet “marginalizes people of color”? His position, from what I understand, is that the ML algorithm which reconstructed a photo of Obama as white was biased solely because the training data set consisted of mostly white people. If it had been a more diverse data set then the algorithm would have behaved more appropriately.
    - flatline 6y ago
      The complaint is that he was being dismissive of racism in the field by saying it's just the training data. Technically correct, but missing the larger picture - who is generating this training data? Doesn't his comment subtly attempt dismiss the issue entirely? Deployed ML systems are notorious for these kinds of biases. He was offloading the criticism to engineers building these data sets, as though he could not have any possible role to play as a researcher. He was thus shot down for a seemingly innocuous comment that is set against a very large backdrop of racism that tends to get ignored. Haven't you read White Fragility three times over by now?? /s On the one hand this guy was pushed off twitter for a seemingly innocuous comment - one that some people just happened to take as insensitive. The type of comment that, in fact, increasingly large numbers of people seek out to take offense at - so it seems like an overreaction. On the other hand this is twitter, exactly where these types of narratives play out, he was unable to defend his position competently or even acknowledge the criticisms against him, gave up, and walked off.
      - sillysaurusx 6y ago
        I think I see the disconnect then: ML researchers are often the people who build the datasets. Datasets aren't something that grow in the wild, nor is it usually a task for ML engineers. So the original tweet wasn't really offloading the problem; it was self-criticism (though it's understandable it didn't sound like it).
tspike 6y ago
It's insane to me just how much of the news content is taken directly from Twitter while newsrooms and investigative journalism is systematically defunded. How can this be reversed?
- iask 6y ago
  Sadly, I believe it’s too late. Attention span is getting shorter for many. Not many would want to scroll a news article. These days almost everyone I speak with is saying they’re busy, not enough time. So, where would they even find time to watch a 30-60 minute newscast. Which is why Twitter is probably the GoTo for news.
  - searchableguy 6y ago
    I don't buy this completely. I see an enormous amount of redundancy to fill space in newspapers and online news media. An article from vice on any company will mention at least three of their own previous posts and rehash company evil before getting to the point. They will add a paragraph full of questions with no answers and another one for speculations that are only somewhat related. Why bother with that when you can get to the point using a small tweet? There is something online news agencies are doing wrong otherwise you wouldn't see so many startups opening news sumarizers, curation etc.
    - iask 6y ago
      That is also true. I would come across an article that interest me, however, there’s so much fluff that I would scroll 2-3 times and then just move on.
- debacle 6y ago
  People pay for the real value of valuable news.
  - mark_l_watson 6y ago
    +1 I agree I pay $5/month to get Matt Taibbi’s emails, usually about two a month with in depth research and reporting. In general I like to spend about five minutes a day quickly reviewing news on Apple News+. Otherwise I read good books, with a little time on HN. I use Twitter and FB for shamelessly plugging my books. Anyway, this works for me.
sillysaurusx 6y ago
An article about the Yann story: https://syncedreview.com/2020/06/30/yann-lecun-quits-twitter-amid-acrimonious-exchanges-on-ai-bias/ https://syncedreview.com/2020/06/30/yann-lecun-quits-twitter... I hadn’t seen that. Thanks for pointing it out.
- dkonofalski 6y ago
  Pardon my ignorance but what exactly was the issue with what LeCun said in that response? I feel like it's a pretty agreed upon paradigm that feeding an AI/ML algo with biased data for training will make the AI/ML algo biased. That seems unsurprising and like a perfectly valid statement so there must be something I'm missing and, at least from the article, I couldn't glean what the issue was since the response was just "I'm sick of this framing" without any kind of additional information. If I'm reading it correctly, the issue maybe was that he didn't go far enough and put too much emphasis on data set bias?
  - sillysaurusx 6y ago
    I don't know; I had exactly the same questions. FWIW I work in ML, and I've said similar things as LeCun. The thing is, I would love to help (and listen) to those who have studied this extensively. But there wasn't any information to go on. The article makes it seem like they shouted him down while delivering no actionable advice.
    - dkonofalski 6y ago
      Yeah... it's nearly impossible to figure out what's going on after the fact since the conversation is split amongst so many different Twitter threads. The best I can discern is that his response is dismissive of systemic issues that affect results and introduce biases but, to me, that feels like he's getting jumped on for not being general enough in his criticism.
      - Izkata 6y ago
        More specifically, IIRC the claim was that he's using the data as an excuse, instead of adjusting the data so the ML algorithm gets the desired un-biased result. My understanding was that it was mostly coming from activists that don't really understand how AI/ML works.
Tenoke 6y ago
>I feel the same way about cancel culture on twitter -- it is bad in the short term, but if it incentivizes people like Yann Lecunn to leave it -- it reduces the importance of the medium itself. Given that Twitter is the only platform where interesting ML discussions happen daily with a large amount of actual researchers and practitioners talking about their work directly I'm not sure in what way it's better to have people leave without an alternative. The value just decreases for everyone.
- derefr 6y ago
  I feel like we need domain-specific Twitter-alike services, that anyone can read (and send DMs on), but only people "in" that domain can make public tweets on. Not a community-specific service, precisely; I'm not talking about the sort of partitioning StackExchange does. I wouldn't want a CS-people-only Twitter. (Cross-pollination of ideas between fields is important!) Nor am I talking about individual independent forums that have their own specific (rivalrous) memberships, where you can't expect network effects to guarantee that J Random Peer-in-your-domain will definitely already be a member. Everyone you wish would be there, should already be there. Like Twitter. But different domains of discourse have different standards/norms, and it'd be helpful to keep each such domain separate, such that people don't try to interact using conflicting standards/norms; but rather will know what the primary set of norms are for their current domain, and will "mode-switch" to using those when they're in that domain. For example, all of "academia" is one domain of discourse, with its own social norms. So we could have one domain-specific Twitter-alike where, to join (and not get banned), you'd have to obey the rules of academic conduct; and to get verified (and so to make public tweets), you'd have to be actively in academia in some way (e.g. maybe you'd need to submit proof-of-identity in the form of the DOI of an academic paper you've written.) Then you could have a separate domain for politicians and talking-heads, where the rules of discourse to follow are those of a political debate, and where user verification happens through a petition of non-verified users, proving that the user has "constituents." I would imagine a blended app where one user account could be active on multiple domains at once, perhaps even with new posts from them collected onto a merged timeline for easy reading; but it'd be important to make clear, for each post, which domain it's in (e.g. by embedding the post within a background theme that represents that domain.) I'd also imagine that getting verified in a second domain after already being verified as something else, would be harder, requiring a manual audit of your specific case. (Sort of like how multi-classing in Dungeons & Dragons is something you're supposed to have a long talk with the DM about.) Not every economist is both a professional academic and a professional political commentator; most are a professional at one and an amateur at the other.
klyrs 6y ago
Did he leave? https://twitter.com/ylecun/status/1283563228321263619?s=20 https://twitter.com/ylecun/status/1283563228321263619?s=20
SmokeyHamster 6y ago
>Society puts way too much trust in shit that is posted on twitter. So you're saying Biden's isn't going to send me back my Bitcoin doubled? Dang it.

octernion 6y ago

how is it bad that a rich white & powerful ML engineer left twitter because he is trying to defend a racist systemic problem. just improves twitter in my opinion.

isoskeles 6y ago
Can you explain why it is relevant that he's white?
- octernion 6y ago
  can you explain what research you have done in the racism in tech space? edit: i mean this in good faith since that question is an incredibly complicated one involving power dynamics and systemic issues that can't be boiled down to a simplistic answer. why the downvotes?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- ciarannolan 6y ago
  No explanation necessary. It's the same old racism, but with a new 2020 twist: it's ok as long as it's racism against people we don't like. Check out the recent spate of black athletes and celebrities posting openly anti-Semitic comments on social media (one directly (mis)quoting Hitler re: Jews) with zero repercussions. https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/nba/2020/07/08/stephen-jackson-defends-desean-jacksons-fake-adolf-hitler-quote-posts/5399430002/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/nba/2020/07/08/stephen... https://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/wireStory/jewish-leaders-condemn-hurtful-words-nick-cannon-71810371 https://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/wireStory/jewish-leader... https://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/hip-hop/9400472/ice-cube-criticized-anti-semitic-images-conspiracy-theories https://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/hip-hop/9400472/i... A really thoughtful piece about this by Kareem Abdul Jabbar here too: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/kareem-abdul-jabbar-is-outrage-anti-semitism-sports-hollywood-1303210 https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/kareem-abdul-jabbar-i...
  - whymauri 6y ago
    Zero repercussions? Nick Cannon lost his job and board position, and rightfully so [0]. Do not misconstrue the consequences - people will be fired or blacklisted for these anti-Semitic comments, and that's frankly a good thing. [0] https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/15/entertainment/nick-cannon-viacom-trnd/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/15/entertainment/nick-cannon-via...
    - ciarannolan 6y ago
      You're right that Nick Cannon is the exception. (edit: actually, you're wrong: https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/jul/16/nick-cannon-to-keep-the-masked-singer-gig-on-fox-a/ https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/jul/16/nick-cannon...) How about Ice Cube, Stephen Jackson, DeSean Jackson, Dwyane Wade, etc. and all those who supported the comments or brushed them off as "speaking their truth" or some other nonsense? They will face no consequences, because, again, racism is deemed okay in the current climate as long as it's aimed correctly. Can you even _imagine_ the absolute chaos that would rein if a white NBA player started quoting David Duke to millions of followers, and a bunch of white NBA players and commentators supported them?
      - amznthrwaway 6y ago
        The fucking US President quotes white supremacists regularly. Shut the fuck up, you vile, dishonest, race war loving piece of shit.
      - baddox 6y ago
        > They will face no consequences... > Can you even _imagine_ the absolute chaos that would rein if... I think everyone has their own media diet, influenced partly by their own choices and partly by algorithms. Your media diet likely has a huge effect on whose reactions you see and thus which reactions you perceive to be "brushing something off" or "absolute chaos."
        ciarannolan 6y ago
- davinic 6y ago
  Because power dynamics play a huge role when we're talking about systemic issues, and the current system gives most favorable outcomes to white males. It's not that the other cases are not important, but dealing with them deserves less priority unless and until they structurally hold that power and receive the benefits.
  - lawnchair_larry 6y ago
    Why do people buy into this nonsense?
    - shadowgovt 6y ago
      It has a long history of evidence supporting it. https://cos.gatech.edu/facultyres/Diversity_Studies/Bertrand_LakishaJamal.pdf https://cos.gatech.edu/facultyres/Diversity_Studies/Bertrand... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2915460/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2915460/
    - davinic 6y ago
      With which part do you disagree and what is your basis for that?
      - eternalban 6y ago
        There are 2 parts here: (1) problem, and (2) remedy. The issue for myself and likeminded individuals who actually do not have a stake in the current "power dynamics" -- I could post during the Twitter hack -- is "part" (2). Where are the "scientific" and "rational" studies on the du jour mob tactics cum "remedy" to social injustice? As a spectator it is reminiscent of previous attempts at "remedy", notably the Cultural Revolution by Chairman Mao. That didn't really solve anything, did it? Distorted power dynamics certainly should be addressed. There are actually quite a few elephants in the room that aren't even discussed. But please do not make a claim that mobilized mob squads are a "proven remedy to fix power dynamic's distortions in society". The historical verdict on this is: one group of power holders replaces another.
flatline 6y ago
We have a prominent AI researcher being ostracized for a tweet (and presumably a more general attitude we don't see out of context) that marginalizes people of color, reflecting a larger problem of systemic racism, particularly in academia. Neither his attitude nor the reaction to it seem productive in my mind. Online forums have always been prone to everyone shouting over everyone else until the loudest voice wins.
- dlivingston 6y ago
  Can you explain how his tweet “marginalizes people of color”? His position, from what I understand, is that the ML algorithm which reconstructed a photo of Obama as white was biased solely because the training data set consisted of mostly white people. If it had been a more diverse data set then the algorithm would have behaved more appropriately.
  - flatline 6y ago
    The complaint is that he was being dismissive of racism in the field by saying it's just the training data. Technically correct, but missing the larger picture - who is generating this training data? Doesn't his comment subtly attempt dismiss the issue entirely? Deployed ML systems are notorious for these kinds of biases. He was offloading the criticism to engineers building these data sets, as though he could not have any possible role to play as a researcher. He was thus shot down for a seemingly innocuous comment that is set against a very large backdrop of racism that tends to get ignored. Haven't you read White Fragility three times over by now?? /s On the one hand this guy was pushed off twitter for a seemingly innocuous comment - one that some people just happened to take as insensitive. The type of comment that, in fact, increasingly large numbers of people seek out to take offense at - so it seems like an overreaction. On the other hand this is twitter, exactly where these types of narratives play out, he was unable to defend his position competently or even acknowledge the criticisms against him, gave up, and walked off.
    - sillysaurusx 6y ago
      I think I see the disconnect then: ML researchers are often the people who build the datasets. Datasets aren't something that grow in the wild, nor is it usually a task for ML engineers. So the original tweet wasn't really offloading the problem; it was self-criticism (though it's understandable it didn't sound like it).

tspike 6y ago

It's insane to me just how much of the news content is taken directly from Twitter while newsrooms and investigative journalism is systematically defunded. How can this be reversed?

iask 6y ago
Sadly, I believe it’s too late. Attention span is getting shorter for many. Not many would want to scroll a news article. These days almost everyone I speak with is saying they’re busy, not enough time. So, where would they even find time to watch a 30-60 minute newscast. Which is why Twitter is probably the GoTo for news.
- searchableguy 6y ago
  I don't buy this completely. I see an enormous amount of redundancy to fill space in newspapers and online news media. An article from vice on any company will mention at least three of their own previous posts and rehash company evil before getting to the point. They will add a paragraph full of questions with no answers and another one for speculations that are only somewhat related. Why bother with that when you can get to the point using a small tweet? There is something online news agencies are doing wrong otherwise you wouldn't see so many startups opening news sumarizers, curation etc.
  - iask 6y ago
    That is also true. I would come across an article that interest me, however, there’s so much fluff that I would scroll 2-3 times and then just move on.
debacle 6y ago
People pay for the real value of valuable news.
- mark_l_watson 6y ago
  +1 I agree I pay $5/month to get Matt Taibbi’s emails, usually about two a month with in depth research and reporting. In general I like to spend about five minutes a day quickly reviewing news on Apple News+. Otherwise I read good books, with a little time on HN. I use Twitter and FB for shamelessly plugging my books. Anyway, this works for me.

sillysaurusx 6y ago

An article about the Yann story: https://syncedreview.com/2020/06/30/yann-lecun-quits-twitter-amid-acrimonious-exchanges-on-ai-bias/ https://syncedreview.com/2020/06/30/yann-lecun-quits-twitter... I hadn’t seen that. Thanks for pointing it out.

dkonofalski 6y ago
Pardon my ignorance but what exactly was the issue with what LeCun said in that response? I feel like it's a pretty agreed upon paradigm that feeding an AI/ML algo with biased data for training will make the AI/ML algo biased. That seems unsurprising and like a perfectly valid statement so there must be something I'm missing and, at least from the article, I couldn't glean what the issue was since the response was just "I'm sick of this framing" without any kind of additional information. If I'm reading it correctly, the issue maybe was that he didn't go far enough and put too much emphasis on data set bias?
- sillysaurusx 6y ago
  I don't know; I had exactly the same questions. FWIW I work in ML, and I've said similar things as LeCun. The thing is, I would love to help (and listen) to those who have studied this extensively. But there wasn't any information to go on. The article makes it seem like they shouted him down while delivering no actionable advice.
  - dkonofalski 6y ago
    Yeah... it's nearly impossible to figure out what's going on after the fact since the conversation is split amongst so many different Twitter threads. The best I can discern is that his response is dismissive of systemic issues that affect results and introduce biases but, to me, that feels like he's getting jumped on for not being general enough in his criticism.
    - Izkata 6y ago
      More specifically, IIRC the claim was that he's using the data as an excuse, instead of adjusting the data so the ML algorithm gets the desired un-biased result. My understanding was that it was mostly coming from activists that don't really understand how AI/ML works.

Tenoke 6y ago

>I feel the same way about cancel culture on twitter -- it is bad in the short term, but if it incentivizes people like Yann Lecunn to leave it -- it reduces the importance of the medium itself. Given that Twitter is the only platform where interesting ML discussions happen daily with a large amount of actual researchers and practitioners talking about their work directly I'm not sure in what way it's better to have people leave without an alternative. The value just decreases for everyone.

derefr 6y ago
I feel like we need domain-specific Twitter-alike services, that anyone can read (and send DMs on), but only people "in" that domain can make public tweets on. Not a community-specific service, precisely; I'm not talking about the sort of partitioning StackExchange does. I wouldn't want a CS-people-only Twitter. (Cross-pollination of ideas between fields is important!) Nor am I talking about individual independent forums that have their own specific (rivalrous) memberships, where you can't expect network effects to guarantee that J Random Peer-in-your-domain will definitely already be a member. Everyone you wish would be there, should already be there. Like Twitter. But different domains of discourse have different standards/norms, and it'd be helpful to keep each such domain separate, such that people don't try to interact using conflicting standards/norms; but rather will know what the primary set of norms are for their current domain, and will "mode-switch" to using those when they're in that domain. For example, all of "academia" is one domain of discourse, with its own social norms. So we could have one domain-specific Twitter-alike where, to join (and not get banned), you'd have to obey the rules of academic conduct; and to get verified (and so to make public tweets), you'd have to be actively in academia in some way (e.g. maybe you'd need to submit proof-of-identity in the form of the DOI of an academic paper you've written.) Then you could have a separate domain for politicians and talking-heads, where the rules of discourse to follow are those of a political debate, and where user verification happens through a petition of non-verified users, proving that the user has "constituents." I would imagine a blended app where one user account could be active on multiple domains at once, perhaps even with new posts from them collected onto a merged timeline for easy reading; but it'd be important to make clear, for each post, which domain it's in (e.g. by embedding the post within a background theme that represents that domain.) I'd also imagine that getting verified in a second domain after already being verified as something else, would be harder, requiring a manual audit of your specific case. (Sort of like how multi-classing in Dungeons & Dragons is something you're supposed to have a long talk with the DM about.) Not every economist is both a professional academic and a professional political commentator; most are a professional at one and an amateur at the other.

klyrs 6y ago

Did he leave? https://twitter.com/ylecun/status/1283563228321263619?s=20 https://twitter.com/ylecun/status/1283563228321263619?s=20

SmokeyHamster 6y ago

>Society puts way too much trust in shit that is posted on twitter. So you're saying Biden's isn't going to send me back my Bitcoin doubled? Dang it.