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We read the paper that forced Timnit Gebru out of Google

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Re: We read the paper that forced Timnit Gebru out of Google

#671

Post by vimy »

ALittleLight wrote: post #670
vimy wrote: post #669

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? That's a shame. I use it whenever I want to experience the indie web. I shared it with a friend and he's also a fan. I have even submitted a couple of websites. If you do turn it off, would you mind sharing your list of websites?

Glad to hear that. I'm learning django right now and for my first project (after the tutorial project) I will recreate stumblingon. When I do I'll add a logging/metrics system of some kind. That way, I won't make premature decisions about turning it off in future. I'll also commit to replacing the website with a list of the index for a month or so before (if) I turn it off for good. Now that I'm thinking about remaki…

It’s pretty much perfect as is. Maybe add some contact info? Not everyone will be able to track you down on HN. :p

Re: We read the paper that forced Timnit Gebru out of Google

#672

Post by vfclists »

remote_phone wrote: post #459
vfclists wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Timnit wrote that if we didn’t meet these demands, she would leave Google and work on an end date. We accept and respect her decision to resign from Google. This means the date of her leaving was not set in stone, ie both parties would agree to the date or a date when she would leave. She had a vacation coming up and they would discuss it when she returned from vacation. >According to Ms Gebru, Google replied: "We…

She was not fired. She offered to resign if her demands were not met. The only difference is that the timeline was not of her choosing. She knew exactly what she was gambling for when she wrote those words. Why would Google want someone around who doesn’t want to work at Google? Better to accept their resignation and let them go immediately. It happens all the time. I once gave 2 weeks notice and my boss said I might…

If they decided the date of the "resignation" without informing her then they fired her. That is pretty obvious.

And it wasn't because of her demands concerning the paper, it was on account of the way they interpreted of an email she sent to her colleagues.

Re: We read the paper that forced Timnit Gebru out of Google

#673

Post by MrBuddyCasino »

dash2 wrote: post #319
MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is turning true ai research into a masquerade to push certain political agendas. Spot on. Naive scientism is used as cloak to advance political agendas, instead of searching for truth: "When a domain becomes respected source of Truth, there is incentive for hijackers. There is a huge window of opportunity (from decades to centuries) until the public opinion figures it out. Many (not all) still trust Harvard cr…

Calling Stephen Pinker a fraud is way over-the-top. He’s published a large number of extremely serious papers, including the paper introducing the ngrams dataset you just linked to.

He got challenged on his statistics [0], and didn't engage, correct or retract. This is antithetical to scholarly behaviour. Pinker is an ideologue and absolutely "the Mozart of bullshit vendors".

[0] https://www.academia.edu/26772813/The_Decline_of_Violent_Con...

Re: We read the paper that forced Timnit Gebru out of Google

#674

Post by vimy »

ALittleLight wrote: post #670
vimy wrote: post #669

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? That's a shame. I use it whenever I want to experience the indie web. I shared it with a friend and he's also a fan. I have even submitted a couple of websites. If you do turn it off, would you mind sharing your list of websites?

Glad to hear that. I'm learning django right now and for my first project (after the tutorial project) I will recreate stumblingon. When I do I'll add a logging/metrics system of some kind. That way, I won't make premature decisions about turning it off in future. I'll also commit to replacing the website with a list of the index for a month or so before (if) I turn it off for good. Now that I'm thinking about remaki…

I asked my friend what features he wants and he said seeing your history and favorites. Funny you added those today.

Re: We read the paper that forced Timnit Gebru out of Google

#675

Post by npteljes »

495636483 wrote: post #554
machinelabo wrote: post #547

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is one of the most illuminating assessments of Twitter. It’s virtue signaling , as cliche as it sounds to use that term - that’s what Twitter has become. No fault of Twitter, we’ve created a culture in our society where persons with their open identity cannot easily voice dissenting opinions and going against the grain without getting cancelled. What a fucked up world we live in.

I am not on twitter. What's with this canceling? Who got cancelled? What does that mean for them? Could you illustrate some examples?

In case you're still curious: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancel_culture#Examples

Re: We read the paper that forced Timnit Gebru out of Google

#676

Post by joehl »

bisectable wrote: post #643
d_e_solomon wrote: post #533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We're talking about tech firms that have access to the entire internet and use it. I think you're trying to say that a large enough dataset will be free of bias. I don't see how that follows. If I train a model on home mortgage decisions, I will replicate the bias on that currently exists on that dataset - https://news.northwestern.edu/stories/2020/01/racial-discrim... - unless there are conscientious choices to re…

Given the current public discourse climate in academia, where 99% of the researchers are politically left or extreme left, I recommend a grain of salt for any research that makes claims racial discrimination. The report you quote has at least a couple of strange holes. The paper itself is behind a paywall, thus beyond mere mortals reach. > For example, in about 10% audits in which a white and an African-American audi…

In causal modelling thou shallst not control by consequences of the causal treatment (the causal treatment here is being born black). Read your Rubin&Rosenbaum.

Re: We read the paper that forced Timnit Gebru out of Google

#677

Post by joehl »

thu2111 wrote: post #376
hezag wrote: post #49

I did not read the paper (just like most people here), but by the title — “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?” — it does not look like the CO2 emissions thing is the main topic of this research. BTW, "Stochastic Parrots" is a very descriptive name for the problem > Moreover, because the training datasets are so large, it’s hard to audit them to check for these embedded biases. “A me…

Why? It sounds like ideologically driven circular reasoning. If you train an AI on the largest dataset it's possible to obtain then you have, almost by definition, done the most you can to avoid bias of any sort: the model will learn the most accurate representation of reality it can given the data available. Gebru is the type of person who defines "bias" as anything that isn't sufficiently positive towards people wh…

If your data set is biased for the purpose of answering your question, then having more data doesn't make things better. In this case 'big data' just becomes 'big bias'. Go to wikipedia and read on Simpsons Paradox.

Re: We read the paper that forced Timnit Gebru out of Google

#678

Post by HarryHirsch »

jka wrote: post #321
HarryHirsch wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1438 pounds of CO2 is 250 liters of gasoline, or thereabouts, that's pumping gas five times. How long does a tank of gas last the average Google employee? Less than a week, considering what East Bay traffic looks like. People get paid to publish that stuff?

Could you share your calculation for that?

You have 1438 pounds of CO2, roughly 1/3 of that mass is carbon, so that's about 500 pounds or 250 kilograms of carbon.

Gasoline is a hydrocarbon, but the mass of hydrogen is neglegible compared to that of carbon, so it's not too wrong to say that this mass of carbon came from the same mass of gasoline, 250 kg. The density of gasoline is around 1 kg/l, so we are talking about 250 liters of fuel. The typical tank of a compact car holds about 50 l.

Re: We read the paper that forced Timnit Gebru out of Google

#679

Post by johnzabroski »

sontek wrote: post #636
kenjackson wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem here is that AI and race now intersect in non trivial ways. It’s like having privacy as political discourse when you are scanning emails for marketing purposes. There’s a line at which not having the discussion is equivalent to taking a political stance.

I think you are confusing her previous work (which was on race) and the work this article is discussing. This research paper in question was about AI and natural language processing and its carbon footprint and all that. Nothing to do with race or political agenda. Google also has done a ton of work on creating renewable datacenters, so I think they are definitely onboard with making tech have less of a carbon footpr…

This is not true. She does discuss how some countries and regions of the world use the Internet less, or not at all, and thus Transformer/BERT are training on the linguistic habits of the most affluent of the world.

Re: We read the paper that forced Timnit Gebru out of Google

#680

Post by johnzabroski »

danielheath wrote: post #627
jpm_sd wrote: post #391

Here's why I have absolutely no sympathy for Google in this situation. They hired Gebru as a professional thorn in their side. "Come up in here and be a pain in the ass! Tell us what we're doing wrong!", they said. "We're Enlightened Corporate America, after all!" She is a chess piece in the game of Wokeness Street Cred. She then proceeded to do the job she was hired for, and now they're all "Hey lady, Here At Google…

She had been doing that job for awhile. IMO the reason this particular paper got the treatment it did is subtle but simple, based on the following observations: * Many jurisdictions impose strict controls on the use of racially biased methods (eg: redline laws like the fair housing act in the US). * Different advertising companies have access to different targeting methods (eg facebook has your social graph, apple ha…

What do you do for a living?
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