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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

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.
      - 6y ago
- threwaway4392 6y ago
  It's quick to sample 10-20 accepted NeurIPS papers randomly and realize that almost all of those have useless platitudes as impact statements. I am not so sure the letter attempts to cancel Anandkumar. Although her blacklist clearly went too far, it's quite difficult to find the context that led to the letter (as several comments show in the thread). The sad truth is that expressing publicly any opinion on diversity/politics/AI ethics is currently a minefield for anyone's career and online safety. It shouldn't be the case and that's how I understand the letter.
- croissants 6y ago
  The subtext of the letter is not clear to me. There have been two recent controversies among machine learning people: 1) Gebru getting fired/resigning from Google (depending on who you ask), and 2) Anandkumar fighting with Domingos on Twitter and Tweeting a list of a bunch of people she had blocked and encouraging her followers to try and change their minds. My perception is that this letter is about 2), not 1), given the closing statement that > challenging and debating ideas is always acceptable and ought to be encouraged. Marginalizing, intimidating, or attacking the holders of those ideas is not. If anything, that statement reads as supportive of Gebru. But I don't know.
  - jonathankoren 6y ago
    Domingos most definitely is not supportive of Grebru. For a while he had "anti-woke" in his Twitter bio, and his recent tweets[0] are lamenting AI ethicists and negatively commenting on how "science is under attack from politics"[1] [0] https://twitter.com/pmddomingos https://twitter.com/pmddomingos [1] https://twitter.com/pmddomingos/status/1341966137576198144 https://twitter.com/pmddomingos/status/1341966137576198144
    - kodah 6y ago
      As an outside observer to both these political and political cultural camps, often "woke" means different things to each camp.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
- kaitai 6y ago
  This is a totally reasonable comment and I don't understand why it's being downvoted... well I take that back, reading the other comments I certainly do understand!
- mlthoughts2018 6y ago
  The Gebru paper’s discussion of wokeness vocabulary and rapid changes in activist language is a deep embarrassment to science and utterly says nothing whatsoever about ethics in large NLP models or implicit biases from biased corpora. It’s sheer embarrassment to see anyone taking that section of her paper with any seriousness. That is politics and tribalism 100%, completely devoid of critical analysis that holds it up to basic levels of rigor.
  - joshuamorton 6y ago
    I wasn't speaking about any particular section of the paper. Happy to hear your thoughts on it though! Ultimately though, they're irrelevant to my point, which is that even if you personally dislike the conclusions of the paper, even if you disagree, it is an existence proof of thoughtful and deep analysis of broader impact. You are more than welcome to dislike the concept. But it still remains present.
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]

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.
    - 6y ago
threwaway4392 6y ago
It's quick to sample 10-20 accepted NeurIPS papers randomly and realize that almost all of those have useless platitudes as impact statements. I am not so sure the letter attempts to cancel Anandkumar. Although her blacklist clearly went too far, it's quite difficult to find the context that led to the letter (as several comments show in the thread). The sad truth is that expressing publicly any opinion on diversity/politics/AI ethics is currently a minefield for anyone's career and online safety. It shouldn't be the case and that's how I understand the letter.
croissants 6y ago
The subtext of the letter is not clear to me. There have been two recent controversies among machine learning people: 1) Gebru getting fired/resigning from Google (depending on who you ask), and 2) Anandkumar fighting with Domingos on Twitter and Tweeting a list of a bunch of people she had blocked and encouraging her followers to try and change their minds. My perception is that this letter is about 2), not 1), given the closing statement that > challenging and debating ideas is always acceptable and ought to be encouraged. Marginalizing, intimidating, or attacking the holders of those ideas is not. If anything, that statement reads as supportive of Gebru. But I don't know.
- jonathankoren 6y ago
  Domingos most definitely is not supportive of Grebru. For a while he had "anti-woke" in his Twitter bio, and his recent tweets[0] are lamenting AI ethicists and negatively commenting on how "science is under attack from politics"[1] [0] https://twitter.com/pmddomingos https://twitter.com/pmddomingos [1] https://twitter.com/pmddomingos/status/1341966137576198144 https://twitter.com/pmddomingos/status/1341966137576198144
  - kodah 6y ago
    As an outside observer to both these political and political cultural camps, often "woke" means different things to each camp.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
kaitai 6y ago
This is a totally reasonable comment and I don't understand why it's being downvoted... well I take that back, reading the other comments I certainly do understand!
mlthoughts2018 6y ago
The Gebru paper’s discussion of wokeness vocabulary and rapid changes in activist language is a deep embarrassment to science and utterly says nothing whatsoever about ethics in large NLP models or implicit biases from biased corpora. It’s sheer embarrassment to see anyone taking that section of her paper with any seriousness. That is politics and tribalism 100%, completely devoid of critical analysis that holds it up to basic levels of rigor.
- joshuamorton 6y ago
  I wasn't speaking about any particular section of the paper. Happy to hear your thoughts on it though! Ultimately though, they're irrelevant to my point, which is that even if you personally dislike the conclusions of the paper, even if you disagree, it is an existence proof of thoughtful and deep analysis of broader impact. You are more than welcome to dislike the concept. But it still remains present.

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]