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IMHO she is saying it’s reasonable to believe that social and systemic issues have an impact on creating ML models (as the teams designing, building, and deploy

IMHO she is saying it’s reasonable to believe that social and systemic issues have an impact on creating ML models (as the teams designing, building, and deploying said models are members of society) in ways in addition to the data sets. I don’t know what the right answer is but plenty of institutions come up with ways they attempt to deal with systemic biases. For example, blind auditions for positions in orchestras (you only hear the person auditioning, you can’t see them). Used to not be a thing. Now it is. Point being that when people are motivated they are able to come up with stuff.

antiquark 6y ago
Sure, but Yann LeCun is a neural network expert. Should it be his job to tackle social/systemic/institutional problems? What if he doesn't want to?
- kristjansson 6y ago
  I think the point was reciting the (true!) 'biased datasets create biased models' argument at best avoids, and at worst actively undermines those bigger questions. Someone in another thread on this had IMO a great comment[1] summarizing the sentiment: > If you are going to say "Well, garbage-in, garbage-out!", why do you keep putting the racist garbage in? [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25286446 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25286446
  - antiquark 6y ago
    It's really a stretch to call the Flickr-Faces-HQ Dataset "racist garbage." It's a collection of images uploaded by random flickr users with permissive licenses. https://github.com/NVlabs/ffhq-dataset https://github.com/NVlabs/ffhq-dataset
- princekolt 6y ago
  Yes it should if the networks he builds have an actual impact on real people because of their social/systemic/institutional status. If he doesn't want to do it, he shouldn't be working on networks that have this kind of impact. What if you're a nuclear engineer that just wanna make the hot bit go hotter, and don't want to care about the nasty habit that radiation has of killing people?

antiquark 6y ago

Sure, but Yann LeCun is a neural network expert. Should it be his job to tackle social/systemic/institutional problems? What if he doesn't want to?

kristjansson 6y ago
I think the point was reciting the (true!) 'biased datasets create biased models' argument at best avoids, and at worst actively undermines those bigger questions. Someone in another thread on this had IMO a great comment[1] summarizing the sentiment: > If you are going to say "Well, garbage-in, garbage-out!", why do you keep putting the racist garbage in? [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25286446 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25286446
- antiquark 6y ago
  It's really a stretch to call the Flickr-Faces-HQ Dataset "racist garbage." It's a collection of images uploaded by random flickr users with permissive licenses. https://github.com/NVlabs/ffhq-dataset https://github.com/NVlabs/ffhq-dataset
princekolt 6y ago
Yes it should if the networks he builds have an actual impact on real people because of their social/systemic/institutional status. If he doesn't want to do it, he shouldn't be working on networks that have this kind of impact. What if you're a nuclear engineer that just wanna make the hot bit go hotter, and don't want to care about the nasty habit that radiation has of killing people?