19 ms·

The only reference to this I can find: https://twitter.com/pmddomingos/status/1344028996850180097 https://twitter.com/pmddomingos/status/1344028996850180097 No

The only reference to this I can find: https://twitter.com/pmddomingos/status/1344028996850180097 https://twitter.com/pmddomingos/status/1344028996850180097 Notably, Pedro Domingos recently fought against NeurIPS' ethics/social impact requirement in research papers. The argument here is likely related, that science be portrayed in a vacuum and not be diminished based on possible societal harm or political biases.

joshuamorton 6y ago
Which is truly an exceptionally dumb position to take. Many other sciences have IRB and human factors approvals for experiments that involve or may involve humans. Computer Science (and specifically ML, a lot of HCI research does involve human subjects approval) ignores all of the potential for harm here. We've seen that go terribly wrong in other fields, and in the ML field.
- croissants 6y ago
  I agree with the general conclusion that machine learning (just like any way of making decisions) involves ethics, but I disagree with the conclusion that every NeurIPS submission should have a concluding 1-2 paragraphs about the ethics of the submission. I reviewed for NeurIPS this year, and almost all of the ethics sections consisted of vacuous stuff along the lines of "uh, I guess...being efficient is good, might save some energy? and our method is pretty efficient, so that's nice". I think a system where area chairs skim abstracts and solicit these ethics paragraphs where they seem necessary -- so, not for the billionth paper obtaining pretty bounds for some variant of convex optimization -- makes more sense. I know that "think of the machine learning researchers!" is not a take that engenders sympathy, but we're probably talking thousands of human hours spent writing these things. It's not nothing.
  - joshuamorton 6y ago
    Fair enough (I'm not a Neurips reviewer or author), but I can accept the idea that convex optimization papers likely don't need to pre-write a societal impact statement (although I think that, as controversial as the paper may be, stuff like the Gebru et. al. paper on large language models ethical concerns shows that there probably is room for more interesting thought than just "ehhh, efficiency" in many places). But the subtext of this letter goes fairly deep (and to be clear this isn't meant as a response to you specifically): - While it doesn't specifically say it, this letter does appear to be at least somewhat anti-ethical concerns in general, which isn't good. - At least one of the signatories of this letter has not, in my opinion at least, followed the guidelines in this letter. Insinuating that a colleague of holds an opinion because they watch too much online porn is in no way civil, and is absolutely a personal attack. - Given the "disagreement" between Domingos and Anandkumar, who as others mention, sits on the ACM editorial board, this could be an attempt to censure or "cancel" her for her personal views. This is antithetical to the values held in the letter itself, and leaves a sour taste.
    - throwawaysea 6y ago
      > Given the "disagreement" between Domingos and Anandkumar, who as others mention, sits on the ACM editorial board, this could be an attempt to censure or "cancel" her for her personal views. This is antithetical to the values held in the letter itself, and leaves a sour taste. Shouldn't her actions at least be censured? Her behavior has corrupted the science community, limited speech, created a culture of fear, and is ultimately inhibiting others' from freely disseminating their findings to the rest of the community (at NeurIPS and elsewhere) unless the author and/or their work passes a political purity test, effectively. If that's not discouraged, then I think science and open discourse will continue to be under attack.
      - joshuamorton 6y ago
        Which actions? What specifically has she done that "corrupted the science community", that "limited speech", that "created a culture of fear", and that is ultimately "inhibiting others from freely disseminating their findings"? List the particular actions she took that did such things. I don't think there are any. The closest you can get, I feel, is that Domingos and perhaps some anonymous others felt that her list of people who she wished to educate and discuss with was going to be used to attack them. This never actually happened though. Domingos claimed that the list would be used in such a way, and then it was deleted. I could just as easily claim that Domingos created a culture of fear by making hyperbolistic claims about the things that Anandkumar would do.
        julianmarq 6y ago
        https://web.archive.org/web/20201214014408/https://twitter.com/AnimaAnandkumar/status/1338298561692254209 https://web.archive.org/web/20201214014408/https://twitter.c... Don't know what you were hoping to show with this comment, maybe you were unaware that there were archive links of her tweets. In any case, Domingos wasn't wrong, yet for some reason you seem far less willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, while asking others to do so for people you seem to agree with. Even in this case, for a person who clearly doesn't deserve it. I am curious as to why.
  - jrumbut 6y ago
    I hate to say that your story made the ethics paragraph sound like a worthwhile exercise. If they didn't have an amazing canned answer it's because they weren't thinking about it enough to have something interesting to say. Maybe not needed for every venue every year forever, but I like this better than requiring it just from ethics sensitive papers. Presumably the people writing about swarms of killer drones have some justification or are fine with being supervillains, the field is trying to figure out where the other blindspots are and that requires broader search efforts. Edit: I just want to add this is the first I'm hearing about this letter and I'm not entirely sure what it's even in response to. Since my work is health adjacent, I haven't had time this year to know much about conferences I wasn't involved in.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
- defen 6y ago
  > Many other sciences have IRB and human factors approvals for experiments that involve or may involve humans. As far as I know, those are for experiments that directly interact with humans as part of the experiment itself. They exist because of a long history of unethical researchers testing interventions (or lack thereof) on people without their knowledge or informed consent - e.g. Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, MK-ULTRA, Stanford prison experiment (there are a lot). The closest equivalent in CS of directly-interacting experiments would be HCI research as you said. I could also see a strong argument being made for research that uses the creative or copyrighted output of a person without their consent - for example, their face as part of training facial recognition software, their written words as part of training GPT-3, their voice as part of training voice recognition software, etc. However the incident in question is really about a different kind of thing - it's asking researchers to speculate on the future ramifications of their research as it pertains to progressive ideals - in practice this means, "How could this negatively affect minorities or the environment?" These aren't inherently bad things to think about, but as you get further and further away from concrete applications of ML, it begins to look more and more like a religious ritual than something that is actually trying to address the stated problems.
  - joshuamorton 6y ago
    > As far as I know, those are for experiments that directly interact with humans as part of the experiment itself. Or use certain kinds of data from humans. For example, a machine learning project on medical data (even anonymized medical data) probably needs an IRB approval to gain access to, say, a dataset of cancer imaging. A facial recognition model doesn't. What makes those fundamentally different (arguably the facial image is more identifying). > However the incident in question is really about a different kind of thing - it's asking researchers to speculate on the future ramifications of their research as it pertains to progressive ideals I see no actual support for this claim in any of the actual documentation on the broader impact statement or its use. The Neurips docs link to 4 blog posts and papers for inspiration/advice to a broader-impact-statemet-author[0][1][2][3][4]. None focus on minorities or the environment in the way you describe, unless you mean "environment" in the broadest sense of "society". [0]: https://nips.cc/Conferences/2020/PaperInformation/NeurIPS-FAQ https://nips.cc/Conferences/2020/PaperInformation/NeurIPS-FA... ("How should I write the Broader Impact section?"_ [1]: https://brenthecht.com/papers/FCADIscussions_NegativeImpactsPost_032918.pdf https://brenthecht.com/papers/FCADIscussions_NegativeImpacts... [2]: https://brenthecht.medium.com/suggestions-for-writing-neurips-2020-broader-impacts-statements-121da1b765bf https://brenthecht.medium.com/suggestions-for-writing-neurip... [3]: https://medium.com/@GovAI/a-guide-to-writing-the-neurips-impact-statement-4293b723f832 https://medium.com/@GovAI/a-guide-to-writing-the-neurips-imp... [4]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1912.06979.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1912.06979.pdf
Jtsummers 6y ago
[deleted] Parent comment has been edited to address my comment.
- rosstex 6y ago
  Oops! Retracted, thanks for checking this.
  - Jtsummers 6y ago
    I can no longer delete my comment, but since you edited your original I'll edit my prior comment to [deleted].
    - rosstex 6y ago
      Much appreciated. Only on HN.
throwawaysea 6y ago
Pedro Domingos, for those who don't know, wrote "The Master Algorithm" and is a professor at the University of Washington. Recently, Anima Anandkumar (Director of AI at nvidia) tried to get him cancelled/blacklisted. I wrote more about the incident in this comment from a past HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25419871 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25419871
- znpy 6y ago
  interestingly, most of the tweets linked in your link (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25419871 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25419871) are either unavailable or from an account that "does not exist anymore".
  - wmf 6y ago
    Anima Anandkumar got off Twitter recently.
  - nitrogen 6y ago
    https://web.archive.org/web/20201215001433/https://twitter.com/AnimaAnandkumar/status/1338282250614411264 https://web.archive.org/web/20201215001433/https://twitter.c... Edit: it's a very long thread of screenshots of blocked users, followed by "In that case use it as a #cancel list". I haven't used Twitter since 2011 or so, and I didn't realize how deep the rabbit hole goes.
  - dekhn 6y ago
    Anima deleted her twitter. I think even she realized how over the top her behavior made her look.
CJefferson 6y ago
Also, Pedro Domingos wants to fight against cancel culture by -- supporting boycotting Nvidia until they fire an employee who supports cancel culture... which sounds an awful lot like cancel culture to me. I've been vaguely following this, and neither side comes off well -- a few people decide winning Twitter points is more important than anything else, and ramp themselves up into a frenzy by Tweeting dozens of times a day.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- baryphonic 6y ago
  Tit-for-tat is a dominant strategy. Promising to cancel the cancelers if you are canceled may seem hypocritical, but it may be a particularly valuable tactic. As Yoda says, a Jedi uses the Force for knowledge and defense, never for attack.
  - nsajko 6y ago
    How to distuingish this behavior from hypocrisy, then? The defense vs attack comparison seems very inappropriate, I don't know where's the line between the former and the latter, but trying to get someone fired seems like an attack to me.
    - unishark 6y ago
      The difference is getting people fired over political arguments, versus getting people fired for getting others fired over political arguments. Is it hypocrisy to have someone arrested for kidnapping?
      - jdkee 6y ago
        See also “The Paradox of Tolerance” by Karl Popper.
    - AnimalMuppet 6y ago
      "Mom, he hit me first!" That's what defense vs attack turns into, with Twitter being "Mom".
Rebelgecko 6y ago
Some additional context is that is that one of the organizers of NeurIps put Pedro Domingos and his "fanboys" on a list of people who her Twitter followers should contact en masse for the purposes of re-education. She said that people on the list who failed to be reeducated should be "canceled". The people on the receiving end of this re-education campaign felt like they were being targeted for harassment, and I can certainly see why. I'm vaguely curious what it took to get on the list of people to be canceled but haven't seen any specifics. IIRC the person distributing the list had strong opinions about renaming the conference Some of the tweets are still accessible via archive.org: https://web.archive.org/web/20201214014408/https://twitter.com/AnimaAnandkumar/status/1338298561692254209 https://web.archive.org/web/20201214014408/https://twitter.c...
- refulgentis 6y ago
  It sounds like we're cancelling someone for saying that we should cancel someone for saying something and dressing that up as some grand ideological battle
- kergonath 6y ago
  This is terrible. This is the opposite of what progressivism should be. They are just substituting one social order with another one with them on top. It is just an new brand of hatred, which is very difficult to reconcile with the values of equality, mutual understanding, and respect that are the heart of social justice and progress.
  - throwaway19937 6y ago
    > It is just an new brand of hatred, which is very difficult to reconcile with the values of equality, mutual understanding, and respect that are the heart of social justice and progress. Do you have any examples of social justice standing for equality, mutual understanding, and respect? All I have encountered is hatred and witch-hunts but I would like to believe there's more to it than that.
    - kergonath 6y ago
screye 6y ago
> science be portrayed in a vacuum and not be diminished based on possible societal harm or political biases That's a rather uncharitable way of framing his argument. > condemn all attempts to coerce scientific activities into supporting or opposing specific social-political beliefs, values, and attitudes, including attempts at preventing researchers from exploring questions of their choice, or at restricting the free discussion and debate of issues related to scientific research. (from the letter) Clearly the issue is the current academic orthodoxy. We are very much seeing a rapidly collapsing overton window, where any inquiry or worse the person that is at odds with a very particular liberal belief is immediately cancelled. It largely asks that ad-hominem attacks and slippery slope arguments be avoided and discourse around heated topics be civil. Tech has largely jumped head first, siding with the hyper-liberal wing of politics in American discourse. This is when the conclusions reached by the said political groups are heatedly argued in both political, academic and societal spheres. I myself feel the air of fear and the prescription of though at my BigN workplace. The argument that it is indeed stifling tech+research at large is entirely reasonable. Yann LeCun got chased away from twitter by Gebru. Anima Anand kumar's tweet displayed an active participation in cancelling and chasing out anyone who does not fall in line with a very narrow definition of equality in society. There is immense value in exploring the effects of tech and progress on society. There is immense value in commitment to being fair and accountable. It is incredibly important for the people with the power to wield such a hammer, be most level headed, civil and create policies based on consensus. There is a reason that supreme court justices are lawyers and not activists. As of now, the bearers of power display none of those properties. The open letter merely points that out and asks for equal representation of ideas without threat of being fired or sidelined in entirity. > We support discussion of policies aimed at a more diverse and inclusive society; a range of opinions is natural. We condemn all attempts to coerce It is bizzare to see people of science fall in line with claims that don't satisfy even the basic requirements of rigor. Scepticism and inquiry are the foundations of this entire field. As of now I see a very political section of the community making 'extra ordinary claims'. As is customary around these parts, it isn't unreasonable to ask for "extraordinary evidence."
- joshuamorton 6y ago
  > Yann LeCun got chased away from twitter by Gebru. Anima Anand kumar's tweet displayed an active participation in cancelling and chasing out anyone who does not fall in line with a very narrow definition of equality in society. Yann is still active on twitter. He claimed to leave twitter, but didn't for any reasonable definition of "left". Yet people continue to claim that Gebru "cancelled" him or something. He's had like 15 twitter interactions today. Be as skeptical of Yann and Domingos as you are of Gebru. > There is a reason that supreme court justices are lawyers and not activists. Lots of people would claim that many supreme court justices are activists, and depending on who you ask, exactly which judges are activists would change (both Ginsburg and Scalia have been called "activist" judges, not to mention Roberts, which I find hilarious) > The open letter merely points that out and asks for equal representation of ideas without threat of being fired or sidelined in entirity. I'd think someone calling for this would strongly support Timnit Gebru. That would be the ideologically consistent position, yes?
evouga 6y ago
I can't speak for the other signers, but while I happen to agree with Domingos's position on the NeurIPS impact statement (that it's misguided and injects a lot of additional political bias into the already-too-noisy-and-biased peer review process; and that in any case the responsibility for mitigating negative impact of new technology on society should fall more on those who develop the technology into products rather than on scientists doing basic research) it's not the main reason I signed the letter. (Nor do I support all of Domingos's views in general, nor his poor conduct on Twitter; I think changing the conference name from NIPS to NeurIPS was clearly the right decision, for instance.) Rather, I'm alarmed by what I perceive to be a collapse over recent years of the Overton window when it comes to any topic vaguely in the vicinity of politics, ethics, or DEI; especially (but not only) on Twitter. Expressing anything short of the consensus "right" opinion (even on matters of ethics or moral values that are inherently personal and subjective) has become a gamble, with the stakes your job, reputation, and online and offline safety. Probably the most eye-opening moment for me was the recent attempt to "cancel" Steven Pinker---a rigorous thinker who has devoted a not insignificant portion of his time and influence to advancing inclusion in science---over the flimsiest of reasons (out-of-context tweets from literally decades ago). Of course, he has not been the sole target of the Twitter mob (see also: Yann Lecun, Scott Aaronson, etc.) I have great respect for my conservative colleagues and respect their opinions, though I myself am a liberal and my personal politics likely has little overlap with that of Domingos et al. I also strongly support broadening inclusion in STEM and have not hesitated to lend my support to victims of harassment and abuse. But there is vast difference between holding people accountable for misconduct, and silencing people who merely dissent by expressing unpopular or "wrong" opinions. CS faces many challenges ahead at the intersection of ethics and technology, and we will need an open and respectful forum, tolerant of ideas from a wide spectrum of political beliefs and personal values, to make progress. Relevant WaitButWhy, where academic Twitter currently lies very much in the right column: https://28oa9i1t08037ue3m1l0i861-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/31.1-agreement-decency-v2.png https://28oa9i1t08037ue3m1l0i861-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-...
- jmeister 6y ago
  Thank you for signing. It’s very encouraging to hear a mature liberal voice acknowledge the problem.

joshuamorton 6y ago

Which is truly an exceptionally dumb position to take. Many other sciences have IRB and human factors approvals for experiments that involve or may involve humans. Computer Science (and specifically ML, a lot of HCI research does involve human subjects approval) ignores all of the potential for harm here. We've seen that go terribly wrong in other fields, and in the ML field.

croissants 6y ago
I agree with the general conclusion that machine learning (just like any way of making decisions) involves ethics, but I disagree with the conclusion that every NeurIPS submission should have a concluding 1-2 paragraphs about the ethics of the submission. I reviewed for NeurIPS this year, and almost all of the ethics sections consisted of vacuous stuff along the lines of "uh, I guess...being efficient is good, might save some energy? and our method is pretty efficient, so that's nice". I think a system where area chairs skim abstracts and solicit these ethics paragraphs where they seem necessary -- so, not for the billionth paper obtaining pretty bounds for some variant of convex optimization -- makes more sense. I know that "think of the machine learning researchers!" is not a take that engenders sympathy, but we're probably talking thousands of human hours spent writing these things. It's not nothing.
- joshuamorton 6y ago
  Fair enough (I'm not a Neurips reviewer or author), but I can accept the idea that convex optimization papers likely don't need to pre-write a societal impact statement (although I think that, as controversial as the paper may be, stuff like the Gebru et. al. paper on large language models ethical concerns shows that there probably is room for more interesting thought than just "ehhh, efficiency" in many places). But the subtext of this letter goes fairly deep (and to be clear this isn't meant as a response to you specifically): - While it doesn't specifically say it, this letter does appear to be at least somewhat anti-ethical concerns in general, which isn't good. - At least one of the signatories of this letter has not, in my opinion at least, followed the guidelines in this letter. Insinuating that a colleague of holds an opinion because they watch too much online porn is in no way civil, and is absolutely a personal attack. - Given the "disagreement" between Domingos and Anandkumar, who as others mention, sits on the ACM editorial board, this could be an attempt to censure or "cancel" her for her personal views. This is antithetical to the values held in the letter itself, and leaves a sour taste.
  - throwawaysea 6y ago
    > Given the "disagreement" between Domingos and Anandkumar, who as others mention, sits on the ACM editorial board, this could be an attempt to censure or "cancel" her for her personal views. This is antithetical to the values held in the letter itself, and leaves a sour taste. Shouldn't her actions at least be censured? Her behavior has corrupted the science community, limited speech, created a culture of fear, and is ultimately inhibiting others' from freely disseminating their findings to the rest of the community (at NeurIPS and elsewhere) unless the author and/or their work passes a political purity test, effectively. If that's not discouraged, then I think science and open discourse will continue to be under attack.
    - joshuamorton 6y ago
      Which actions? What specifically has she done that "corrupted the science community", that "limited speech", that "created a culture of fear", and that is ultimately "inhibiting others from freely disseminating their findings"? List the particular actions she took that did such things. I don't think there are any. The closest you can get, I feel, is that Domingos and perhaps some anonymous others felt that her list of people who she wished to educate and discuss with was going to be used to attack them. This never actually happened though. Domingos claimed that the list would be used in such a way, and then it was deleted. I could just as easily claim that Domingos created a culture of fear by making hyperbolistic claims about the things that Anandkumar would do.
      - julianmarq 6y ago
        https://web.archive.org/web/20201214014408/https://twitter.com/AnimaAnandkumar/status/1338298561692254209 https://web.archive.org/web/20201214014408/https://twitter.c... Don't know what you were hoping to show with this comment, maybe you were unaware that there were archive links of her tweets. In any case, Domingos wasn't wrong, yet for some reason you seem far less willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, while asking others to do so for people you seem to agree with. Even in this case, for a person who clearly doesn't deserve it. I am curious as to why.
- jrumbut 6y ago
  I hate to say that your story made the ethics paragraph sound like a worthwhile exercise. If they didn't have an amazing canned answer it's because they weren't thinking about it enough to have something interesting to say. Maybe not needed for every venue every year forever, but I like this better than requiring it just from ethics sensitive papers. Presumably the people writing about swarms of killer drones have some justification or are fine with being supervillains, the field is trying to figure out where the other blindspots are and that requires broader search efforts. Edit: I just want to add this is the first I'm hearing about this letter and I'm not entirely sure what it's even in response to. Since my work is health adjacent, I haven't had time this year to know much about conferences I wasn't involved in.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
defen 6y ago
> Many other sciences have IRB and human factors approvals for experiments that involve or may involve humans. As far as I know, those are for experiments that directly interact with humans as part of the experiment itself. They exist because of a long history of unethical researchers testing interventions (or lack thereof) on people without their knowledge or informed consent - e.g. Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, MK-ULTRA, Stanford prison experiment (there are a lot). The closest equivalent in CS of directly-interacting experiments would be HCI research as you said. I could also see a strong argument being made for research that uses the creative or copyrighted output of a person without their consent - for example, their face as part of training facial recognition software, their written words as part of training GPT-3, their voice as part of training voice recognition software, etc. However the incident in question is really about a different kind of thing - it's asking researchers to speculate on the future ramifications of their research as it pertains to progressive ideals - in practice this means, "How could this negatively affect minorities or the environment?" These aren't inherently bad things to think about, but as you get further and further away from concrete applications of ML, it begins to look more and more like a religious ritual than something that is actually trying to address the stated problems.
- joshuamorton 6y ago
  > As far as I know, those are for experiments that directly interact with humans as part of the experiment itself. Or use certain kinds of data from humans. For example, a machine learning project on medical data (even anonymized medical data) probably needs an IRB approval to gain access to, say, a dataset of cancer imaging. A facial recognition model doesn't. What makes those fundamentally different (arguably the facial image is more identifying). > However the incident in question is really about a different kind of thing - it's asking researchers to speculate on the future ramifications of their research as it pertains to progressive ideals I see no actual support for this claim in any of the actual documentation on the broader impact statement or its use. The Neurips docs link to 4 blog posts and papers for inspiration/advice to a broader-impact-statemet-author[0][1][2][3][4]. None focus on minorities or the environment in the way you describe, unless you mean "environment" in the broadest sense of "society". [0]: https://nips.cc/Conferences/2020/PaperInformation/NeurIPS-FAQ https://nips.cc/Conferences/2020/PaperInformation/NeurIPS-FA... ("How should I write the Broader Impact section?"_ [1]: https://brenthecht.com/papers/FCADIscussions_NegativeImpactsPost_032918.pdf https://brenthecht.com/papers/FCADIscussions_NegativeImpacts... [2]: https://brenthecht.medium.com/suggestions-for-writing-neurips-2020-broader-impacts-statements-121da1b765bf https://brenthecht.medium.com/suggestions-for-writing-neurip... [3]: https://medium.com/@GovAI/a-guide-to-writing-the-neurips-impact-statement-4293b723f832 https://medium.com/@GovAI/a-guide-to-writing-the-neurips-imp... [4]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1912.06979.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1912.06979.pdf

Jtsummers 6y ago

[deleted] Parent comment has been edited to address my comment.

rosstex 6y ago
Oops! Retracted, thanks for checking this.
- Jtsummers 6y ago
  I can no longer delete my comment, but since you edited your original I'll edit my prior comment to [deleted].
  - rosstex 6y ago
    Much appreciated. Only on HN.

throwawaysea 6y ago

Pedro Domingos, for those who don't know, wrote "The Master Algorithm" and is a professor at the University of Washington. Recently, Anima Anandkumar (Director of AI at nvidia) tried to get him cancelled/blacklisted. I wrote more about the incident in this comment from a past HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25419871 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25419871

znpy 6y ago
interestingly, most of the tweets linked in your link (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25419871 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25419871) are either unavailable or from an account that "does not exist anymore".
- wmf 6y ago
  Anima Anandkumar got off Twitter recently.
- nitrogen 6y ago
  https://web.archive.org/web/20201215001433/https://twitter.com/AnimaAnandkumar/status/1338282250614411264 https://web.archive.org/web/20201215001433/https://twitter.c... Edit: it's a very long thread of screenshots of blocked users, followed by "In that case use it as a #cancel list". I haven't used Twitter since 2011 or so, and I didn't realize how deep the rabbit hole goes.
- dekhn 6y ago
  Anima deleted her twitter. I think even she realized how over the top her behavior made her look.

CJefferson 6y ago

Also, Pedro Domingos wants to fight against cancel culture by -- supporting boycotting Nvidia until they fire an employee who supports cancel culture... which sounds an awful lot like cancel culture to me. I've been vaguely following this, and neither side comes off well -- a few people decide winning Twitter points is more important than anything else, and ramp themselves up into a frenzy by Tweeting dozens of times a day.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
baryphonic 6y ago
Tit-for-tat is a dominant strategy. Promising to cancel the cancelers if you are canceled may seem hypocritical, but it may be a particularly valuable tactic. As Yoda says, a Jedi uses the Force for knowledge and defense, never for attack.
- nsajko 6y ago
  How to distuingish this behavior from hypocrisy, then? The defense vs attack comparison seems very inappropriate, I don't know where's the line between the former and the latter, but trying to get someone fired seems like an attack to me.
  - unishark 6y ago
    The difference is getting people fired over political arguments, versus getting people fired for getting others fired over political arguments. Is it hypocrisy to have someone arrested for kidnapping?
    - jdkee 6y ago
      See also “The Paradox of Tolerance” by Karl Popper.
  - AnimalMuppet 6y ago
    "Mom, he hit me first!" That's what defense vs attack turns into, with Twitter being "Mom".

Rebelgecko 6y ago

Some additional context is that is that one of the organizers of NeurIps put Pedro Domingos and his "fanboys" on a list of people who her Twitter followers should contact en masse for the purposes of re-education. She said that people on the list who failed to be reeducated should be "canceled". The people on the receiving end of this re-education campaign felt like they were being targeted for harassment, and I can certainly see why. I'm vaguely curious what it took to get on the list of people to be canceled but haven't seen any specifics. IIRC the person distributing the list had strong opinions about renaming the conference Some of the tweets are still accessible via archive.org: https://web.archive.org/web/20201214014408/https://twitter.com/AnimaAnandkumar/status/1338298561692254209 https://web.archive.org/web/20201214014408/https://twitter.c...

refulgentis 6y ago
It sounds like we're cancelling someone for saying that we should cancel someone for saying something and dressing that up as some grand ideological battle
kergonath 6y ago
This is terrible. This is the opposite of what progressivism should be. They are just substituting one social order with another one with them on top. It is just an new brand of hatred, which is very difficult to reconcile with the values of equality, mutual understanding, and respect that are the heart of social justice and progress.
- throwaway19937 6y ago
  > It is just an new brand of hatred, which is very difficult to reconcile with the values of equality, mutual understanding, and respect that are the heart of social justice and progress. Do you have any examples of social justice standing for equality, mutual understanding, and respect? All I have encountered is hatred and witch-hunts but I would like to believe there's more to it than that.
  - kergonath 6y ago

screye 6y ago

> science be portrayed in a vacuum and not be diminished based on possible societal harm or political biases That's a rather uncharitable way of framing his argument. > condemn all attempts to coerce scientific activities into supporting or opposing specific social-political beliefs, values, and attitudes, including attempts at preventing researchers from exploring questions of their choice, or at restricting the free discussion and debate of issues related to scientific research. (from the letter) Clearly the issue is the current academic orthodoxy. We are very much seeing a rapidly collapsing overton window, where any inquiry or worse the person that is at odds with a very particular liberal belief is immediately cancelled. It largely asks that ad-hominem attacks and slippery slope arguments be avoided and discourse around heated topics be civil. Tech has largely jumped head first, siding with the hyper-liberal wing of politics in American discourse. This is when the conclusions reached by the said political groups are heatedly argued in both political, academic and societal spheres. I myself feel the air of fear and the prescription of though at my BigN workplace. The argument that it is indeed stifling tech+research at large is entirely reasonable. Yann LeCun got chased away from twitter by Gebru. Anima Anand kumar's tweet displayed an active participation in cancelling and chasing out anyone who does not fall in line with a very narrow definition of equality in society. There is immense value in exploring the effects of tech and progress on society. There is immense value in commitment to being fair and accountable. It is incredibly important for the people with the power to wield such a hammer, be most level headed, civil and create policies based on consensus. There is a reason that supreme court justices are lawyers and not activists. As of now, the bearers of power display none of those properties. The open letter merely points that out and asks for equal representation of ideas without threat of being fired or sidelined in entirity. > We support discussion of policies aimed at a more diverse and inclusive society; a range of opinions is natural. We condemn all attempts to coerce It is bizzare to see people of science fall in line with claims that don't satisfy even the basic requirements of rigor. Scepticism and inquiry are the foundations of this entire field. As of now I see a very political section of the community making 'extra ordinary claims'. As is customary around these parts, it isn't unreasonable to ask for "extraordinary evidence."

joshuamorton 6y ago
> Yann LeCun got chased away from twitter by Gebru. Anima Anand kumar's tweet displayed an active participation in cancelling and chasing out anyone who does not fall in line with a very narrow definition of equality in society. Yann is still active on twitter. He claimed to leave twitter, but didn't for any reasonable definition of "left". Yet people continue to claim that Gebru "cancelled" him or something. He's had like 15 twitter interactions today. Be as skeptical of Yann and Domingos as you are of Gebru. > There is a reason that supreme court justices are lawyers and not activists. Lots of people would claim that many supreme court justices are activists, and depending on who you ask, exactly which judges are activists would change (both Ginsburg and Scalia have been called "activist" judges, not to mention Roberts, which I find hilarious) > The open letter merely points that out and asks for equal representation of ideas without threat of being fired or sidelined in entirity. I'd think someone calling for this would strongly support Timnit Gebru. That would be the ideologically consistent position, yes?

evouga 6y ago

I can't speak for the other signers, but while I happen to agree with Domingos's position on the NeurIPS impact statement (that it's misguided and injects a lot of additional political bias into the already-too-noisy-and-biased peer review process; and that in any case the responsibility for mitigating negative impact of new technology on society should fall more on those who develop the technology into products rather than on scientists doing basic research) it's not the main reason I signed the letter. (Nor do I support all of Domingos's views in general, nor his poor conduct on Twitter; I think changing the conference name from NIPS to NeurIPS was clearly the right decision, for instance.) Rather, I'm alarmed by what I perceive to be a collapse over recent years of the Overton window when it comes to any topic vaguely in the vicinity of politics, ethics, or DEI; especially (but not only) on Twitter. Expressing anything short of the consensus "right" opinion (even on matters of ethics or moral values that are inherently personal and subjective) has become a gamble, with the stakes your job, reputation, and online and offline safety. Probably the most eye-opening moment for me was the recent attempt to "cancel" Steven Pinker---a rigorous thinker who has devoted a not insignificant portion of his time and influence to advancing inclusion in science---over the flimsiest of reasons (out-of-context tweets from literally decades ago). Of course, he has not been the sole target of the Twitter mob (see also: Yann Lecun, Scott Aaronson, etc.) I have great respect for my conservative colleagues and respect their opinions, though I myself am a liberal and my personal politics likely has little overlap with that of Domingos et al. I also strongly support broadening inclusion in STEM and have not hesitated to lend my support to victims of harassment and abuse. But there is vast difference between holding people accountable for misconduct, and silencing people who merely dissent by expressing unpopular or "wrong" opinions. CS faces many challenges ahead at the intersection of ethics and technology, and we will need an open and respectful forum, tolerant of ideas from a wide spectrum of political beliefs and personal values, to make progress. Relevant WaitButWhy, where academic Twitter currently lies very much in the right column: https://28oa9i1t08037ue3m1l0i861-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/31.1-agreement-decency-v2.png https://28oa9i1t08037ue3m1l0i861-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-...

jmeister 6y ago
Thank you for signing. It’s very encouraging to hear a mature liberal voice acknowledge the problem.