I Am Deleting the Blog

Post by jimbokun » Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 2:21 PM UTC

underwater wrote: post #488

gringoDan wrote: post #394

Reading this made me think of two essays I've recently revisited. 1. The Sound of Silence, by Jessica Livingston Three years ago she argued that the smartest people are silencing themselves because the downside risk of being attacked for (misinterpretations of) their opinions are too high. People are wary of sharing useful information outside of trusted circles, which serves to consolidate power with insiders – those…

Paul's post has always felt like a wordy defense of the "well, actually". Lots of us passionate techies like to weigh in on every topic and forget that not everything is academic. Sometimes the world doesn't need to hear our opinion. That doesn't mean we're being censored.

Post by blaser-waffle » Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 2:27 PM UTC

mlcrypto wrote: post #480

gringoDan wrote: post #394

Reading this made me think of two essays I've recently revisited. 1. The Sound of Silence, by Jessica Livingston Three years ago she argued that the smartest people are silencing themselves because the downside risk of being attacked for (misinterpretations of) their opinions are too high. People are wary of sharing useful information outside of trusted circles, which serves to consolidate power with insiders – those…

The silent majority!

Post by stefantalpalaru » Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 2:29 PM UTC

entropyneur wrote: post #495

gringoDan wrote: post #394

Reading this made me think of two essays I've recently revisited. 1. The Sound of Silence, by Jessica Livingston Three years ago she argued that the smartest people are silencing themselves because the downside risk of being attacked for (misinterpretations of) their opinions are too high. People are wary of sharing useful information outside of trusted circles, which serves to consolidate power with insiders – those…

I love "What You Can't Say" and have incorporated the conformist test into my moral compass. But I think the shift to use of shame for society regulation is a positive development. I'd much rather be downvoted on HN or called names on Twitter than beaten up or deprived of freedom. But maybe that's just me.

Post by Consultant32452 » Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 2:30 PM UTC

dragonwriter wrote: post #573

nradov wrote: post #558

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Left-wing social movements, while initially well intentioned, tend to eat their own in escalating purity spirals. Total ideological purity is demanded, and valued above competence or actual results. The apotheosis tends to be something like Communist "self-criticism" sessions where people are forced to confess their thought crimes. https://unherd.com/2020/01/cast-out-how-knitting-fell-into-a...

> Left-wing social movements, while initially well intentioned, tend to eat their own in escalating purity spirals. That's not particularly true of left-wing movements; to the extent it's true of them it's also true of right-wing movements. The relevant factors are orthogonal to the left-right axis.

Post by tinyhouse » Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 2:30 PM UTC

nlpprof wrote: post #619

tinyhouse wrote: post #578

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was just thinking about this now after reading attacks on Yann Lecun on twitter. He's a prominent AI figure (head of facebook research and turing award recipient). My interpretation - he was saying that bias in AI is mostly a problem of data. He didn't say there's no bias or that you can't solve bias with modeling. Just that the model itself isn't what causing the bias. One woman researcher started attacking him an…

I'm in the field - though not as prominent as Yann (who has been very nice and helpful in my few interactions with him) - and your interpretation is off. People are disagreeing with his stance that researchers should not bother exploring bias implications of their research. (He says this is because bias is a problem of data - and therefore we should focus on building cool models and let production engineers worry abo…