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And it's strange no one in media questioned Gebru's paper. For instance, her calculation of carbon footprint of training BERT is ridiculous, as she assumes that

And it's strange no one in media questioned Gebru's paper. For instance, her calculation of carbon footprint of training BERT is ridiculous, as she assumes that companies will train BERT 24x7. I think Gebru is a disgrace to the community because she always, I mean literally always, attacks her critics by motives. You think bias is a data problem? You're a bigot (See her dispute with LeCun). You disagree with my assessment on an ML model? You are white male oppressor (her attacking a Google's SVP). Gebru is not a researcher. She is a modern-age Trofim Lysenko, who politicizes everything and weaponizes political correctness.

octonion 5y ago
- hintymad 5y ago
  What do you mean by zero-content? I mentioned the paper, her attack on LeCun, and her attack on her co-worker as documented in the reddit megathread. Please feel to verify the facts.
registeredcorn 5y ago
> weaponizes political correctness I'm sorry to be nitpick-y. I understand what you are saying, but to be clear: Political correctness is a weapon. The idea is that there is a correct answer (fact), and a separate, unrelated politically advantageous answer (group approval). Following the tactic of political correctness, to any degree, is using the concept for personal gain. There is no way to be political correct without doing so in a harmful manner. Approval of this kind can only be gained by attacking a target. "So-and-so is using explosives to destroy things." It is the design of the thing.
- robonerd 5y ago
  Political correctness means adherence to a political ideology. Whether something is politically correct or politically incorrect is relative to the political ideology in question. Subjective value statements like "X deserves more funding than Y", which don't have objective answers, may be considered politically correct or incorrect depending on the ideological context being considered.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- hintymad 5y ago
  I'm not sure PC itself a weapon, but I get your point. PC is so ingrained in American culture that we implicitly accept that certain degree of PC is needed.
  - registeredcorn 5y ago
    Fair enough. My perspective is that PC is a destructive act to culture, whether it be American, European, Spanish, etc. I can hardly expect everyone to agree with me on that point. I suppose my concern with that perspective would be something close to, "Can you extrapolate the difference between common courtesy and political correctness?" I don't know if that sounds insulting somehow - it's not meant to be, but sometimes when I ask those sorts of questions, it badly received. Anyway, to my mind, there is a difference between a need for politeness & civil discourse, and a perspective which intends to enforce those ideals through destructive language and cultural upheaval. One is self-imposed, the other an imposition.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
godelski 5y ago
Are we talking about the LeCun fight where they were discussing Pulse (the white Obama super-resolution paper)? Didn't Pulse update their paper and show that it was in fact a dataset bias? A lot of these datasets have bias and it is frequently hard to train an unbiased model on a biased dataset. It also isn't the goal for many, though of course there is work on this. Bias is everywhere in a ML system, from the dataset to the model itself. We should be concerned with all these steps but that fight just felt like everyone didn't care about fixing the issue. A lot didn't even consider that the image was decently faithful but that it was our human bias of knowing Obama is black.
- Manuel_D 5y ago
  The "white Obama" pictures didn't even seem biased. They took a brightly lit photo of Obama and the output face has the same skin tone. Compare Obama's skin tone in this photo: https://video-images.vice.com/test-uploads/articles/5ef216e9aea1330097d9ec64/lede/1592924226088-obama.jpeg?crop=0.9075439591605219xw:1xh;center,center&resize=640 https://video-images.vice.com/test-uploads/articles/5ef216e9...:* With other photos. E.g: https://www.obama.org/wp-content/uploads/ar_obama_sq.jpg https://www.obama.org/wp-content/uploads/ar_obama_sq.jpg
  - godelski 5y ago
    Bias is an overloaded word. To be clear, there is bias (there's always bias). Every model always has bias, we just want to understand that to understand the limitations of it. But yes, I agree that the reconstruction is decently faithful. I'm sure an L2 loss isn't that high when comparing the images. Part of what I was trying to say is that there is a clear human bias when evaluating the reconstruction. The problem here is our prior. We humans already know that the compressed image is Obama because he is a well known face. So we're judging based on that prior. So there is some irony when talking about model bias when you don't recognize the prior bias in evaluation. We should analyze the bias of the model (I mean there's problems with the reconstruction other than the race issue, like the teeth), but we have to also be careful when analyzing because we also have a bias (which we may or may not want to impart upon the model). The thing that gets me about these bias people in ML is that it is easy to recognize and identify bias. It is much harder to solve them. There seems to be two camps. Those that just want to identify and those that work on resolving them. The former typically say they work in bias and the latter typically says they work on long tail data (or sometimes few/low shot learning, or even metalearning). Yeah, we should recognize biases and discuss them, but just yelling at people doesn't help develop the necessary mathematical frameworks to resolve the issues.
TheMagicHorsey 5y ago
The quality of her work was also not the best. Just read the AI bias analysis she did. It would not pass scrutiny with an undergrad audience, and yet she does an exaggerated SIGH and acts like she is beyond reproach because she has CREDENTIALS. Nobody cares about credentials. Your study has to stand on its own.
jeffbee 5y ago
That's what kills me. A person in a privileged position inside a company with all the easily-accessed data available to make concrete conclusions about the actual energy consumption of these systems chooses to not learn from that, but instead to publicize wildly inaccurate guesses with no basis in reality. And this person is an "ethicist" somehow.
- anamax 5y ago
  > And this person is an "ethicist" somehow. In most cases, the role of ethicists in any field is to justify monstrous behavior by practitioners to outsiders. In this case, "ethicists" have taken it upon themselves to determine monstrous.

octonion 5y ago

hintymad 5y ago
What do you mean by zero-content? I mentioned the paper, her attack on LeCun, and her attack on her co-worker as documented in the reddit megathread. Please feel to verify the facts.

registeredcorn 5y ago

> weaponizes political correctness I'm sorry to be nitpick-y. I understand what you are saying, but to be clear: Political correctness is a weapon. The idea is that there is a correct answer (fact), and a separate, unrelated politically advantageous answer (group approval). Following the tactic of political correctness, to any degree, is using the concept for personal gain. There is no way to be political correct without doing so in a harmful manner. Approval of this kind can only be gained by attacking a target. "So-and-so is using explosives to destroy things." It is the design of the thing.

robonerd 5y ago
Political correctness means adherence to a political ideology. Whether something is politically correct or politically incorrect is relative to the political ideology in question. Subjective value statements like "X deserves more funding than Y", which don't have objective answers, may be considered politically correct or incorrect depending on the ideological context being considered.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
hintymad 5y ago
I'm not sure PC itself a weapon, but I get your point. PC is so ingrained in American culture that we implicitly accept that certain degree of PC is needed.
- registeredcorn 5y ago
  Fair enough. My perspective is that PC is a destructive act to culture, whether it be American, European, Spanish, etc. I can hardly expect everyone to agree with me on that point. I suppose my concern with that perspective would be something close to, "Can you extrapolate the difference between common courtesy and political correctness?" I don't know if that sounds insulting somehow - it's not meant to be, but sometimes when I ask those sorts of questions, it badly received. Anyway, to my mind, there is a difference between a need for politeness & civil discourse, and a perspective which intends to enforce those ideals through destructive language and cultural upheaval. One is self-imposed, the other an imposition.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

godelski 5y ago

Are we talking about the LeCun fight where they were discussing Pulse (the white Obama super-resolution paper)? Didn't Pulse update their paper and show that it was in fact a dataset bias? A lot of these datasets have bias and it is frequently hard to train an unbiased model on a biased dataset. It also isn't the goal for many, though of course there is work on this. Bias is everywhere in a ML system, from the dataset to the model itself. We should be concerned with all these steps but that fight just felt like everyone didn't care about fixing the issue. A lot didn't even consider that the image was decently faithful but that it was our human bias of knowing Obama is black.

Manuel_D 5y ago
The "white Obama" pictures didn't even seem biased. They took a brightly lit photo of Obama and the output face has the same skin tone. Compare Obama's skin tone in this photo: https://video-images.vice.com/test-uploads/articles/5ef216e9aea1330097d9ec64/lede/1592924226088-obama.jpeg?crop=0.9075439591605219xw:1xh;center,center&resize=640 https://video-images.vice.com/test-uploads/articles/5ef216e9...:* With other photos. E.g: https://www.obama.org/wp-content/uploads/ar_obama_sq.jpg https://www.obama.org/wp-content/uploads/ar_obama_sq.jpg
- godelski 5y ago
  Bias is an overloaded word. To be clear, there is bias (there's always bias). Every model always has bias, we just want to understand that to understand the limitations of it. But yes, I agree that the reconstruction is decently faithful. I'm sure an L2 loss isn't that high when comparing the images. Part of what I was trying to say is that there is a clear human bias when evaluating the reconstruction. The problem here is our prior. We humans already know that the compressed image is Obama because he is a well known face. So we're judging based on that prior. So there is some irony when talking about model bias when you don't recognize the prior bias in evaluation. We should analyze the bias of the model (I mean there's problems with the reconstruction other than the race issue, like the teeth), but we have to also be careful when analyzing because we also have a bias (which we may or may not want to impart upon the model). The thing that gets me about these bias people in ML is that it is easy to recognize and identify bias. It is much harder to solve them. There seems to be two camps. Those that just want to identify and those that work on resolving them. The former typically say they work in bias and the latter typically says they work on long tail data (or sometimes few/low shot learning, or even metalearning). Yeah, we should recognize biases and discuss them, but just yelling at people doesn't help develop the necessary mathematical frameworks to resolve the issues.

TheMagicHorsey 5y ago

The quality of her work was also not the best. Just read the AI bias analysis she did. It would not pass scrutiny with an undergrad audience, and yet she does an exaggerated SIGH and acts like she is beyond reproach because she has CREDENTIALS. Nobody cares about credentials. Your study has to stand on its own.

jeffbee 5y ago

That's what kills me. A person in a privileged position inside a company with all the easily-accessed data available to make concrete conclusions about the actual energy consumption of these systems chooses to not learn from that, but instead to publicize wildly inaccurate guesses with no basis in reality. And this person is an "ethicist" somehow.

anamax 5y ago
> And this person is an "ethicist" somehow. In most cases, the role of ethicists in any field is to justify monstrous behavior by practitioners to outsiders. In this case, "ethicists" have taken it upon themselves to determine monstrous.