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There was no disagreement. Yann didn't say anybody about harms nor did the guy he was replying to (who talked of dangers). In particular Yann did not suggest in

There was no disagreement. Yann didn't say anybody about harms nor did the guy he was replying to (who talked of dangers). In particular Yann did not suggest in any way a) there are no harms or b) that harms are only related to biased training sets. Yann was commenting on the outcome of a particular research project and how they used a biased training set resulting in the outcome that was observed. Timnit brought up harms first, then pretended Yann did marginalize such harms and attributed them solely to a biased training sets. And then viciously attacked that strawman. That's a bad faith argument. I can appreciate that she might have been indeed generally sick and tired as she writes, and can appreciate that sick and tired people will not always manage to be nice or overcome their own biases and assume good faith all the time from the other party; we're all human after all. But that doesn't change anything about her argument being made in bad faith.

joshuamorton 6y ago
> Yann didn't say anybody about harms nor did the guy he was replying to (who talked of dangers) This feels like unreasonable semantics. The dangers are precisely the danger of causing harm. The harms therefore are concrete results of theoretical dangers manifesting. They aren't different. > In particular Yann did not suggest in any way a) there are no harms I agree, and I've said as much. > b) that harms are only related to biased training sets He did, insofar as he suggested that the dangers were due solely to bias in the training set, which is implied when he says that if you train the same model on different data, everyone looks African. Like yes, that is true, but it doesn't reduce the harms (or dangers, if you want to be precise). It just creates a different set of biases with a different set of potential harms (which again, are "dangers"). I'm not seeing a strawperson.

joshuamorton 6y ago

> Yann didn't say anybody about harms nor did the guy he was replying to (who talked of dangers) This feels like unreasonable semantics. The dangers are precisely the danger of causing harm. The harms therefore are concrete results of theoretical dangers manifesting. They aren't different. > In particular Yann did not suggest in any way a) there are no harms I agree, and I've said as much. > b) that harms are only related to biased training sets He did, insofar as he suggested that the dangers were due solely to bias in the training set, which is implied when he says that if you train the same model on different data, everyone looks African. Like yes, that is true, but it doesn't reduce the harms (or dangers, if you want to be precise). It just creates a different set of biases with a different set of potential harms (which again, are "dangers"). I'm not seeing a strawperson.