751–760 of 926 posts
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It sounds to me like Google has a policy that papers must be internally reviewed before they can be "published". She understood publish in the academic sense, while Google views sending the paper out for conference review as publishing. The paper ends up failing internal review, so per policy it must be promptly retracted. This is confusing to the academic who expects to get access to the raw review responses so that…
I don't think it's miscommunication in anyway. Timnit had submitted dozens of papers before and unless the process requirements are completely new, she would be well aware of them. This seems more of a case of selective enforcement, where she had been allowed to go around the process in the past (or felt that she has enough leverage to be able to do so now) and then not being allowed to do so this time. This feels li…
Jeff's email explicitly says the paper was "approved" then submitted, albeit perhaps in one day. The two-week thing might be a policy but would be immaterial if it ended up approved anyway within whatever timeframe. It sounds like a red-herring to emphasize the time-in-advance; in any case the blame, if any, is to be on whoever flipped the approval bit and did not wait for other reviewers (possibly her manager?)
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> Her point is more than that. I think that she was trying to say that ML systems have an inherent bias that is independent of their data. In general I take these types of tropes to be cloaked (politically correct) way of saying "fuck x group".
Eh. I think there's some legitimate concern that AI isn't fair to marginalized groups for a variety of reasons. Dataset bias is only one way this occurs, though. Even if you include more colored faces, you still may be taking pictures with a camera that doesn't capture as much contrast. Or even if you retrain, you may have chosen model structure to optimize behavior in a biased dataset. Or... if you're considering th…
In France, since you have to be able to explain in plain words the algorithm that was used to help to make an administrative decision, it indirectly makes these black box learning systems illegal.
(And yet they probably already have been used by the police?)
Now, the naive response is that the engineer that implemented a system should take responsibility for any harm done by the system - and I guess that if these engineers could lose their license to use a computer and face jail time, they might also start to put pressure upstream on researchers to provide better systems ?
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"feedback" here seems to refer to feedback on the scientific paper that is being retracted, not personal performance feedback or anything like that. When I red this first, wasn't immediately clear what this was about.
The problem was her almost incoherent email that failed to communicate her thoughts in any way a sane person could understand. I guess I'm not woke enough to comprehend these people.
OMG HN comments is a much more honest place than Twitter. Thank you all.
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This Alex Hanna person accusing Dean is certainly not to be taken seriously. I’ll go with Dean over someone with a twitter feed that looks like that. Managing these people must be a nightmare.
What is wrong with Alex Hanna's Twitter feed? To me, it looks like Alex Hanna is very woke, and would probably hold Timnit Gebru's back no matter what - but that's just my guess, and even if so: that doesn't necessarily imply they're wrong. I guess managing people is a nightmare, so managing these people is just a subset of that?
> is very woke
You answered your own question.
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It sounds to me like Google has a policy that papers must be internally reviewed before they can be "published". She understood publish in the academic sense, while Google views sending the paper out for conference review as publishing. The paper ends up failing internal review, so per policy it must be promptly retracted. This is confusing to the academic who expects to get access to the raw review responses so that…
That sounds like a horrible use of human hours, especially at Google salary level. Paper writing is painstaking and mentally tiring. It would be much more efficient if they reviewed results and an abstract and then decided based on that "Go ahead and write the paper and publish it" or "Don't waste time writing it up".
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I think the subtle part might be "It was approved then", I read that somewhere too and it was not clear whether it was approved by google despite it not following the normal 2 week process or if it was talking about some other form of approval.
From Dean's email: > Unfortunately, this particular paper was only shared with a day’s notice before its deadline — we require two weeks for this sort of review — and then instead of awaiting reviewer feedback, it was approved for submission and submitted. Not sure what to make of that - maybe that Gebru submitted the paper and then immediately clicked the "approve" button herself?
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I do not know the details of this case and I can't speak to the subject's character. However I can't help but note that people who study the effects of race and gender tend to bring race/gender into anything and everything, because well, that's their job. If your response is that race and gender should be brought into only the areas where race and gender are relevant, I'd respond that the prevailing opinion among gen…
I've thought about that filter through which we view the world a lot recently, and I think you may have identified part of where the conflict comes from. People viewing the world through fundamentally different filters. The problem is that if you focus on race, gender and/or sexual orientation as an important factor underlying interactions, if you're not careful you can soon come to see race and gender as the primary…
Anyone noticing the irony of this seeming to be pretty much what the paper author seems to be blaming the machine learning systems for ?