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Major AI conference is moving to Africa in 2020 due to visa issues

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Re: Major AI conference is moving to Africa in 2020 due to visa issues

#61

Post by falcor84 »

Radim wrote: post #17

Lest you think this is a problem only for Africans & USA: I was denied visa, going to present my paper at NIPS 2010 in Vancouver, Canada. Czech citizen (EU), PhD student at the time, with obvious ties to CZ. I fully respect each country's right to refuse anyone, including without providing a reason (as was the case with me). I see it as "their loss" :-) You pesky computer scientists, stay away!

Regarding the right to refuse anyone, I was of the same opinion myself but mostly changed my mind after reading this article posted on HN:

http://www.owl232.net/papers/immigration.htm

I now find this to be a very interesting and subtle ethical question

Re: Major AI conference is moving to Africa in 2020 due to visa issues

#62

Post by logicchains »

andybak wrote: post #45
logicchains wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If this was an academic paper then maybe but it's a comment on a forum on a website and life is too short to marshal supporting evidence for every stated opinion. The reason academic papers require rigour is because such rigour is necessary to make a convincing argument. Without rigour, people end up just talking past, misunderstanding or shouting at eachother; nobody's going to convince someone else to change their…

I made a similar point in another comment below but I'll repeat it here. I think it's unlikely you provide supporting evidence every time you make a factual claim because if you did it would be astonishingly laborious to carry out any kind of conversation. And a brief look at your post history shows many examples of statements unaccompanied by supporting evidence. As laudable as your sentiments are, they are rather u…

If you look at the original post I was responding to, it asked the post it was responding to to supply scientific evidence to refute the claim it was making. It's one thing to make unsupported statements, it's another thing entirely to make an unsupported statement then claim the burden of proof is on somebody else to supply scientific evidence to refute one's claim (a claim for which no evidence has been provided).

Re: Major AI conference is moving to Africa in 2020 due to visa issues

#63

Post by aerovistae »

throwawayvisa wrote: post #37
gmueckl wrote: post #28

Stories like this make me realize how unfairly privileged I actually am by having the passport that I have. I can go damn near anywhere in the world without much fuss. But I was just lucky enough to be born on the right side of some line that somebody drew on a map at some time in the past. The folks a few km distant - on the other side of that line - don't have that same luxury. It is kind of sad that we have this w…

I'm someone who was born with a "shitty" passport. It's not the visa part, but rather I can't spontaneously just "go somewhere". All my travels need to be planned weeks, if not months, ahead. Fortunately, I'm on a path to acquire another citizenship and my children will have a "good" passport at birth.

Which two countries, if you don't mind saying? I don't think it would compromise your throwaway status.

Re: Major AI conference is moving to Africa in 2020 due to visa issues

#64

Post by logicchains »

andybak wrote: post #54
logicchains wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If this was an academic paper then maybe but it's a comment on a forum on a website and life is too short to marshal supporting evidence for every stated opinion. The reason academic papers require rigour is because such rigour is necessary to make a convincing argument. Without rigour, people end up just talking past, misunderstanding or shouting at eachother; nobody's going to convince someone else to change their…

> I've never met a scientist I could imagine making a hiring decision based on race. Do you mean "race would never have any effect on their hiring decision" - even unconsciously? There's a fairly robust body of work on the topic of unconscious bias that would have to be almost entirely invalid for that statement to be true.

>Do you mean "race would never have any effect on their hiring decision" - even unconsciously?

By "making a decison based on race" I mean making a conscious decision in which race is a significant factor. If you want me to be more specific, I'll restate that as: in my estimation, any racial bias that may exist among the scientists I've met is not significant enough to in aggregate result in a difference greater than 1% in the ratio of people of any particular ethnicity hired compared to people of other ethnicities. I'd suspect other biases have far greater effect, e.g. against people from no-name universities.

Re: Major AI conference is moving to Africa in 2020 due to visa issues

#65

Post by beginningguava »

gmueckl wrote: post #28

Stories like this make me realize how unfairly privileged I actually am by having the passport that I have. I can go damn near anywhere in the world without much fuss. But I was just lucky enough to be born on the right side of some line that somebody drew on a map at some time in the past. The folks a few km distant - on the other side of that line - don't have that same luxury. It is kind of sad that we have this w…

>It is kind of sad that we have this way of carving up the world into arbitrary pieces and calling us "us" and them "the enemy".

It's not arbitrary, our ancestors in many cases fought and died to establish those lines so that they could live their lives how they wanted within those lines. They worked hard so that their children and grandchildren and fellow citizens could have better lives within those lines. To discount that as luck is demeaning to the sacrifices of the people who came before you

Re: Major AI conference is moving to Africa in 2020 due to visa issues

#66

Post by rtpg »

beginningguava wrote: post #65
gmueckl wrote: post #28

Stories like this make me realize how unfairly privileged I actually am by having the passport that I have. I can go damn near anywhere in the world without much fuss. But I was just lucky enough to be born on the right side of some line that somebody drew on a map at some time in the past. The folks a few km distant - on the other side of that line - don't have that same luxury. It is kind of sad that we have this w…

>It is kind of sad that we have this way of carving up the world into arbitrary pieces and calling us "us" and them "the enemy". It's not arbitrary, our ancestors in many cases fought and died to establish those lines so that they could live their lives how they wanted within those lines. They worked hard so that their children and grandchildren and fellow citizens could have better lives within those lines. To disco…

The reality of these lines are usually less noble than you describe in many cases.

As an example, if you read about the motivations of specific actors in the American revolutionary war, many of the top dissenters were basically interested in not paying taxes and being the boss of their own piece of land (instead of having oversight from across the pond). Nobody is ethically pure, of course, but the main push for the revolutionary war was done out of massive self-interest from people in power.

"There was a time that we were noble" is something that rarely plays out in practice. Why should it? If anything humanity has gotten more, not less, ethical and noble over time.

There's an idea of fighting for justice and truth, and then there's trying to die to establish lines on a map. They're not the same thing, and I'd say that it's rarely coinciding in practice

Re: Major AI conference is moving to Africa in 2020 due to visa issues

#67

Post by mikeash »

baddox wrote: post #33
homarp wrote: post #8

from https://mobile.twitter.com/jm_alexia/status/1064206569141923... "Homosexuality is a criminal offense in Ethiopia, there's no way I'm ever submitting an abstract to #ICLR next year... I can't risk my life. I guess there will be more racial diversity, at the cost of no more #LGBT diversity."

Note that many US states also have sodomy laws, so in those states you’ve just got to hope that the 2003 Supreme Court decision sticks around.

Those laws have been overturned. That they’re still on the books means nothing.

Re: Major AI conference is moving to Africa in 2020 due to visa issues

#68

Post by Kye »

jfk13 wrote: post #47

Why would the issue even come up? Do people go to AI conferences expecting to have sex there?

There's so much more to sexuality than sex. What if a computer scientist wants to bring his boyfriend? And they probably blab about their relationship on social media like most couples regardless of orientation. No one should have to go back in the closet just to attend a conference.

Re: Major AI conference is moving to Africa in 2020 due to visa issues

#69

Post by cauldron »

It's easy to just blame the authorities, but people should also see that almost any existing hurdle in the visa applying process is set up to solve a problem, while it's unfortuanate that these measures have unintended/undesirable effects, it also forestalled many visa fraud attempts.

People from certain effectively balck-listed Chinese regions are much harder to get it done.

I know here in China people would exploit every loophole and weak point they can find to get a visa to the US etc, either to study, born babies, or apply asylum. They would exchange latest info about where and which VO is easier to pass, how to best frame your story, like white middle-aged woman is more likely to pass etc, these behaviors in turn are pushing the bars higher and higher every year.

It's like that border wall, there are realistic problems on field that need to be solved.

Re: Major AI conference is moving to Africa in 2020 due to visa issues

#70

Post by aligshow »

Africa is not a safe or friendly nation. Africans in the USA are hostile. I am a racist and am proud of the fact that I view Africans in the USA as enemy combatants and advocate for euthanizing Africans. Yep. You heard that right. I am proud to defend the USA against the Africans. I hate them and I want the ones if the USA dead or gone or enslaved. The Emancipation proclamation was a mistake. Africans need to be enslaved or they will kill whites. They are killer humans, not normal people.

Each African is a murderer. Africa is the murder continent.

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