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> 'Regardless of scientific quality or contribution, a submission may be rejected for ethical considerations, including methods, applications, or data that crea

> 'Regardless of scientific quality or contribution, a submission may be rejected for ethical considerations, including methods, applications, or data that create or reinforce unfair bias' In other words science has to pass trough political filter of the day. If reality is wrong, unfair or politically incorrect (in our subjective view), we're going to reject reality. Prof. Pedro Domingos published a great piece on this https://spectator.us/militant-liberals-politicizing-artificial-intelligence/ https://spectator.us/militant-liberals-politicizing-artifici...

Der_Einzige 6y ago
I think your vitriol is wrong, but there is a kernel of truth. AI with no debiasing is a mirror. It's pattern recognition. Techniques for achieving fair and equitable AI are frequently quite similar to "playing god" and do come dangerously close to implementing "rejecting your reality and substituting my own" into the data through sophisticated techniques for social justice reasons. This can elevate the impact of an AI developers actions far above what they may have expected. For instance, I am shocked that the right wing media has not reported more about the "censorship" inherent to some kinds of word vector debiasing techniques proposed in papers after the famous "man is to computer programmer as woman is to homemaker?" paper within NLP. Usually the undesirable associations (programmer is "male" and homemaker is "female") are due to a representation gap either inherit to reality (far fewer female programmers) or due to failure to properly write about and represent female programmers in corpra (Wikipedia editors should write more articles about female programmers). One of the techniques proposed to prevent this bias is to simply find the specific rows in your dataset that maximizes the undesirable association and remove these rows. In practice, most of these "undesirable" rows (let's say a row is a wikipedia article) will have no inherit bias what-so-ever, and only get their poor scores because the article is about someone where the editors/authors wrote a lot about their relationship with their dad (using male words) before talking about their programming career. It leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth to remove not-sexist articles to mitigate or remove sexist associations. Maybe the OP could have critiqued this kind of work rather than their original post and it may have been more constructive...
- free_rms 6y ago
  Set aside the details, it's clear that the definition of "ethics" is "things which are currently fashionable in US coastal universities". The fact that many of these technologies could be used to steer a cruise missile? Barely on the radar (heh). Nothing about poverty, religious issues, the global south.. but something vaguely resonant with US culture wars? Sound the alarm! Any real conception of "ethics" in my mind should be studiously divorced from fashion and group affiliation.
  - marcinzm 6y ago
    >Set aside the details, it's clear that the definition of "ethics" is "things which are currently fashionable in US coastal universities" I just read around 20 of the broader impact statements from NeurIPS 2020 papers (at random) and exactly 0 covered such topics. Most covered purely technical issues or concerns. One talked about datasets not representing all world populations. Another talked about the model being used to power weapons. One talked about advertising. One talked about essentially subliminal messaging. Two mentioned adversarial attacks leading to potential life threatening injuries (industrial equipment, traffic systems, etc.). Look, if you're going to have an objection to something then at least look into it rather than blindly forcing your own preconceived views onto it irrespective of reality.
    - free_rms 6y ago
      I wasn't talking about the actual researchers, I was talking about the 'ethics' people insisting on these sections (who may also be actual researchers). I would expect most of the papers who have to fill in some impact statement to fill it in with the most anodyne thing possible and get on with their jobs. I'm all for thinking about ethics, and particularly the 'adversarial attacks on poorly understood NNs' you mentioned resonates with me. That doesn't mean I can't also distrust people who want to claim 'ethics' for their political views.
      - tawtawtaw 6y ago
        It's interesting, the concept of academic freedom is supposed to prevent individual researchers from having to in any way pay service, even lip service, to anything not directly related to their research. It is a fundamental principle of academic research, and your comment reminds me that even if as you say, people are just putting down some platitude about broader impact, it completely flies in the face of academic traditions where researchers are free to judge what is important and what is not in their work. This kind of requirement is an end run around academic freedom which exists exactly to combat any outside influence in research
throwawaysea 6y ago
An interesting aside: the politically charged members of the AI world are trying to cancel Pedro Domingos. For example he was a victim of a (failed) attempt at cancellation by Anima Anandkumar, Director of AI at Nvidia. See what I wrote about it at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25419871 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25419871
- kaitai 6y ago
  Oh for heaven's sake. If you're going to be ethically honest about this, note that he tweeted speculation about her porn habits. When is a person allowed to fight back? Is there a sufficiently "polite" way you'd like her to react? Convenient that her side of the argument gets to be labelled "cancellation". My God. Can we not just have an old-fashioned down & dirty fight these days without it being labelled a "cancellation"?
bdhe 6y ago
Setting aside the discussion around the responses on twitter, I think his take on algorithmic bias is too simplistic. > Credit-card scoring algorithms may reject more qualified applicants in order to ensure that the same number of women and men are accepted. The entire discussion revolves around what defines "more qualified" and why it cannot simply be the output of an algorithm because it reflects biases in training data and even training methodologies. If you just skip past that entire discussion you may think that there is this nefarious worldview of "injecting bias" but that requires a false or at least simplified premise to begin with. There is a lot of just-world fallacies behind this sort of thinking. The same that leads to suggest that if "X started a business and made a lot of money" X must be by-definition hard working or talented etc. ignoring aspects of generational wealth, opportunities, fallback options if they failed, etc.

Der_Einzige 6y ago

I think your vitriol is wrong, but there is a kernel of truth. AI with no debiasing is a mirror. It's pattern recognition. Techniques for achieving fair and equitable AI are frequently quite similar to "playing god" and do come dangerously close to implementing "rejecting your reality and substituting my own" into the data through sophisticated techniques for social justice reasons. This can elevate the impact of an AI developers actions far above what they may have expected. For instance, I am shocked that the right wing media has not reported more about the "censorship" inherent to some kinds of word vector debiasing techniques proposed in papers after the famous "man is to computer programmer as woman is to homemaker?" paper within NLP. Usually the undesirable associations (programmer is "male" and homemaker is "female") are due to a representation gap either inherit to reality (far fewer female programmers) or due to failure to properly write about and represent female programmers in corpra (Wikipedia editors should write more articles about female programmers). One of the techniques proposed to prevent this bias is to simply find the specific rows in your dataset that maximizes the undesirable association and remove these rows. In practice, most of these "undesirable" rows (let's say a row is a wikipedia article) will have no inherit bias what-so-ever, and only get their poor scores because the article is about someone where the editors/authors wrote a lot about their relationship with their dad (using male words) before talking about their programming career. It leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth to remove not-sexist articles to mitigate or remove sexist associations. Maybe the OP could have critiqued this kind of work rather than their original post and it may have been more constructive...

free_rms 6y ago
Set aside the details, it's clear that the definition of "ethics" is "things which are currently fashionable in US coastal universities". The fact that many of these technologies could be used to steer a cruise missile? Barely on the radar (heh). Nothing about poverty, religious issues, the global south.. but something vaguely resonant with US culture wars? Sound the alarm! Any real conception of "ethics" in my mind should be studiously divorced from fashion and group affiliation.
- marcinzm 6y ago
  >Set aside the details, it's clear that the definition of "ethics" is "things which are currently fashionable in US coastal universities" I just read around 20 of the broader impact statements from NeurIPS 2020 papers (at random) and exactly 0 covered such topics. Most covered purely technical issues or concerns. One talked about datasets not representing all world populations. Another talked about the model being used to power weapons. One talked about advertising. One talked about essentially subliminal messaging. Two mentioned adversarial attacks leading to potential life threatening injuries (industrial equipment, traffic systems, etc.). Look, if you're going to have an objection to something then at least look into it rather than blindly forcing your own preconceived views onto it irrespective of reality.
  - free_rms 6y ago
    I wasn't talking about the actual researchers, I was talking about the 'ethics' people insisting on these sections (who may also be actual researchers). I would expect most of the papers who have to fill in some impact statement to fill it in with the most anodyne thing possible and get on with their jobs. I'm all for thinking about ethics, and particularly the 'adversarial attacks on poorly understood NNs' you mentioned resonates with me. That doesn't mean I can't also distrust people who want to claim 'ethics' for their political views.
    - tawtawtaw 6y ago
      It's interesting, the concept of academic freedom is supposed to prevent individual researchers from having to in any way pay service, even lip service, to anything not directly related to their research. It is a fundamental principle of academic research, and your comment reminds me that even if as you say, people are just putting down some platitude about broader impact, it completely flies in the face of academic traditions where researchers are free to judge what is important and what is not in their work. This kind of requirement is an end run around academic freedom which exists exactly to combat any outside influence in research

throwawaysea 6y ago

An interesting aside: the politically charged members of the AI world are trying to cancel Pedro Domingos. For example he was a victim of a (failed) attempt at cancellation by Anima Anandkumar, Director of AI at Nvidia. See what I wrote about it at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25419871 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25419871

kaitai 6y ago
Oh for heaven's sake. If you're going to be ethically honest about this, note that he tweeted speculation about her porn habits. When is a person allowed to fight back? Is there a sufficiently "polite" way you'd like her to react? Convenient that her side of the argument gets to be labelled "cancellation". My God. Can we not just have an old-fashioned down & dirty fight these days without it being labelled a "cancellation"?

bdhe 6y ago

Setting aside the discussion around the responses on twitter, I think his take on algorithmic bias is too simplistic. > Credit-card scoring algorithms may reject more qualified applicants in order to ensure that the same number of women and men are accepted. The entire discussion revolves around what defines "more qualified" and why it cannot simply be the output of an algorithm because it reflects biases in training data and even training methodologies. If you just skip past that entire discussion you may think that there is this nefarious worldview of "injecting bias" but that requires a false or at least simplified premise to begin with. There is a lot of just-world fallacies behind this sort of thinking. The same that leads to suggest that if "X started a business and made a lot of money" X must be by-definition hard working or talented etc. ignoring aspects of generational wealth, opportunities, fallback options if they failed, etc.