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No. Sociology conferences and various thinkable still exist. I'd argue the he incentives for an ml conference are far more similar to those of a policing compan

No. Sociology conferences and various thinkable still exist. I'd argue the he incentives for an ml conference are far more similar to those of a policing company then a sociology conference or think tank tasked with analyzing the impact of predictive policing on minority communities.

SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
I'm very skeptical that this is a sufficient replacement. Relevant expertise matters. If all the top economics conferences adopted a code of ethics saying they can't study minimum wages or tax increases, that would be a serious constraint on our ability to understand the issues, even if think tanks and sociology conferences ignored those constraints. Perhaps equally importantly, I'm skeptical that you can limit ethics rules in this way. If we clearly establish that suchandsuch research would be unethical at NeurIPS, I don't expect sociology conferences or think tanks would be eager to continue it, and I'm not convinced Alex Hanna would want them to.
- joshuamorton 6y ago
  So let's examine our axioms: I'd, in some ways, expect Dr. Hanna to ascribe to the axiom that predictive policing is unethical. As such, applied research into "improving" predictive policing would also sit squarely in the unethical space. And I expect that's all you're going to get at an ML conference (outside of explicitly ethics/critique papers): "Our model predicts crime 4.2% better than competing models" However, I'm not convinced that research into the meta-question "Can predictive policing be done ethically" would be considered equally unethical. ML is only a very small part of that meta question though. You're looking at much more complex socio-political changes that don't belong at NeurIPS ("do we need to change policing so that predictive policing can be done ethically"). > ethics saying they can't study minimum wages or tax increases In general, we have far more oversight into the elected officials who manage tax and minimum wage policy than police forces. These structural differences in influence and oversight play into the need for self-regulation. > Relevant expertise matters. There's nothing that prevents a think tank from working with domain experts (in fact, iiuc this is often what happens: a think tank will contract out to domain experts to write a report on some subject). Now there's all kinds of other conflict of interest issues with think tanks, but we all know that already.
  - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
    But I just don't see how you can meaningfully study the ethics of predictive policing without building potential predictive policing models and studying them for flaws. How can we talk in generalities about the ethics of predictive policing if we don't know how it works or what its effects are? I've seen articles that try to, and they just get dragged into the larger political debate about whether police are good in general.
  - croissants 6y ago
    > There's nothing that prevents a think tank from working with domain experts One issue here is that the pool of domain experts depends on the different incentives faced by different researchers. If the top machine learning conferences all decide to reject papers about predictive policing, then this will reduce the incentive for machine learning researchers (who mostly want to publish in these conferences) to work in the area at all. Maybe critics of predictive policing think this is good, or think that it's better for the field to restrict itself to the few computer science researchers who are prepared to seriously devote themselves to it? But there don't seem to be very many of them. And, as someone who thinks there is a lot of room for police departments to in general do a better job --- and I think most of the people arguing against predictive policing would believe the same! --- it's disappointing to me that the end result of this argument seems to be disincentivizing technical research on it.

SpicyLemonZest 6y ago

I'm very skeptical that this is a sufficient replacement. Relevant expertise matters. If all the top economics conferences adopted a code of ethics saying they can't study minimum wages or tax increases, that would be a serious constraint on our ability to understand the issues, even if think tanks and sociology conferences ignored those constraints. Perhaps equally importantly, I'm skeptical that you can limit ethics rules in this way. If we clearly establish that suchandsuch research would be unethical at NeurIPS, I don't expect sociology conferences or think tanks would be eager to continue it, and I'm not convinced Alex Hanna would want them to.

joshuamorton 6y ago
So let's examine our axioms: I'd, in some ways, expect Dr. Hanna to ascribe to the axiom that predictive policing is unethical. As such, applied research into "improving" predictive policing would also sit squarely in the unethical space. And I expect that's all you're going to get at an ML conference (outside of explicitly ethics/critique papers): "Our model predicts crime 4.2% better than competing models" However, I'm not convinced that research into the meta-question "Can predictive policing be done ethically" would be considered equally unethical. ML is only a very small part of that meta question though. You're looking at much more complex socio-political changes that don't belong at NeurIPS ("do we need to change policing so that predictive policing can be done ethically"). > ethics saying they can't study minimum wages or tax increases In general, we have far more oversight into the elected officials who manage tax and minimum wage policy than police forces. These structural differences in influence and oversight play into the need for self-regulation. > Relevant expertise matters. There's nothing that prevents a think tank from working with domain experts (in fact, iiuc this is often what happens: a think tank will contract out to domain experts to write a report on some subject). Now there's all kinds of other conflict of interest issues with think tanks, but we all know that already.
- SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
  But I just don't see how you can meaningfully study the ethics of predictive policing without building potential predictive policing models and studying them for flaws. How can we talk in generalities about the ethics of predictive policing if we don't know how it works or what its effects are? I've seen articles that try to, and they just get dragged into the larger political debate about whether police are good in general.
- croissants 6y ago
  > There's nothing that prevents a think tank from working with domain experts One issue here is that the pool of domain experts depends on the different incentives faced by different researchers. If the top machine learning conferences all decide to reject papers about predictive policing, then this will reduce the incentive for machine learning researchers (who mostly want to publish in these conferences) to work in the area at all. Maybe critics of predictive policing think this is good, or think that it's better for the field to restrict itself to the few computer science researchers who are prepared to seriously devote themselves to it? But there don't seem to be very many of them. And, as someone who thinks there is a lot of room for police departments to in general do a better job --- and I think most of the people arguing against predictive policing would believe the same! --- it's disappointing to me that the end result of this argument seems to be disincentivizing technical research on it.