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The problem is that what you describe is a question of pragmatics and specific data curation, which is not sexy or marketable for political fairness and bias re
by mlthoughts2018 6y ago
The problem is that what you describe is a question of pragmatics and specific data curation, which is not sexy or marketable for political fairness and bias researchers. They need to manifest false angles of the problem, connections to climate change or #metoo or whatever is the social justice outrage du jour, so that it can win news cycle attention, TED talks and political notoriety. It leads to perverse incentives where AI fairness stops being an engineering problem that should be exclusively focused on objective criteria that need to be met to solve concrete problems, and starts being a tribalistic song and dance about wokeness, cancel culture and shoe-horning subjective values into learning systems at a strategic level.
Unfortunately AI fairness is not a serious research domain yet. It’s a venue for trying to create political cottage industries around convenient social justice drama and then trying to parlay that into a career by building political moats such that if anyone questions the legitimacy of this or that aspect of “fairness research” then that skepticism alone can be used to cancel them and argue they are regressive.