91–100 of 307 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe your parent commenter confuses PhD ("Doctor of Philosophy") with a graduation in philosophy?
No, he was just being a racist, misogynistic ass.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I didn't talk bad about the company that I was getting my paycheck from Have you ever been in a union workplace?
> Have you ever been in a union workplace? why would he want to be in a union when he is a top earner compared to great majority of people in the same country? and aside from a relative freedom of speech he works in very favourable conditions with a lot of perks and a generous severance package if he gets fired? working at google is the very definition of privilege.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, Google removed "Don't be evil" as their slogan quite some time ago. Don't think that was by an error.
Though they did replace it with the motto "do the right thing". Which to me is even more scary, as it means that Google decided to stop being a neutral entity within the boundaries of not causing harm, and decided to become a political actor that is committed on advancing its own idea of "right". What if (as it happens) my idea of what is right doesn't match that of a 1.7 trillion company that controls much of the in…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Public institutions tend to observe the same policies, even when there's no direct commercial interest. For example, if you join a Math department and start publishing papers that cast the department's research interests in a negative light, that's often a good way to get fired. I mean, seriously, go ask just about any professor of any topic at any university if their field is undervalued or overvalued. They'll almos…
General proposition may be true, but how can a math publication place the department interests in a negative light? Like "Doesn't matter how hard we try, there are always undecidable facts in our own system"? :p I still have faith in the research done by hard science research teams.
With Math, the sensitive topic is utility. Math departments would tend to be upset by someone pushing papers that, say, call attention to the lack of social benefit relative to other fields of research that taxpayers could be funding instead.
I guess a researcher could also spin a narrative about mathematicians' contributions to cryptography, examining the negative consequences enabled by stuff like Bitcoin.
---
> I still have faith in the research done by hard science research teams.
That gets kinda complicated.
I mean, hard-science teams often rely on their expertise, as it's their unique source of value: if the area that they excel in is shown to be sub-optimal, admitting it would mean losing their current career path (and often taking a significant tumble down-the-ladder after transitioning).
So hard-science teams are often largely academically honest in what they do publish, though they're often biased toward casting what they do in a positive light.
For a common example, have you ever met an older computer tech who insists on using a legacy, obsoleted technology because it's what they know best? A lot of academics basically do the same thing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, but my work life was amazing. There are important things to address at Google, like not having enough sitting toilets for men (there's 3 times as much for women even though there are much less women in the office where I was working) that an union may help with, but that's different from the product PR.
I've seen these comments on internal email threads, but this is the first time seeing one out in the wild. Still blows my mind people who make >300k a year can't be bothered to walk 100ft to cut a shit.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
When I was young and (more) idealistic, my department chair pulled me aside after I’d been dogmatic about something and said “everything is political... The sooner you realize that, the better off you’ll be.” It took 10 years for that to really sink in, but I knew that every paper has an angle well before that. There’s a position of inevitability about AI around Google, and, to an extent, I agree. Unlike tobacco, alc…
>Some things are going to be hard to explain. Some skin tones, hair styles, accents, pitches, timbres, writing styles, etc. may have more/less separable entropy, and that’s going to inevitably make models seem racist/sexist for some applications. We all know that if you have garbage as an input the output can be anything. So a professional data scientist should do his job and analyze the data first , identify the pro…
IMHO, a scientist capable of striking any tone in their work, positive or negative, is doing marketing / PR work rather than science. There's nothing wrong with that. Just like any other member of society, a scientist may want to contribute to a (for-profit or non-profit) organization of their choice, be it for material or spiritual rewards. However, I think it's important not to get science and marketing confused. S…
When I was young and (more) idealistic, my department chair pulled me aside after I’d been dogmatic about something and said “everything is political... The sooner you realize that, the better off you’ll be.” It took 10 years for that to really sink in, but I knew that every paper has an angle well before that. There’s a position of inevitability about AI around Google, and, to an extent, I agree. Unlike tobacco, alc…
Not really sure if this is true in general. May be true of commercial entities, but I really hope this isn't true in general.
> Furthermore, ceding the technological lead and removing the business incentive likely has defense (read: offense) implications on the global stage.
Does it though? Uncovering faults and cracks of a system does exactly the opposite. Discouraging experts from looking for those faults may give the perception of lead, for a while, but is a dangerous mistake to make in the long run.
Interfering with experts by pulling them out of, say, academia by paying them more and turning them into your PR tools, I think, is detrimental to the advancement of technology. We may be losing a whole generation of scientists to AdTech when they could have been doing more worthwhile work elsewhere(which, by the way, is why we are here in the first place - someone toiled away at a university to come up with a genius idea to design an artificial perceptron).
As to your claim about whether these companies will play a pivotal role in paradigm shifting technology advancements like fundamental research has in the past remains yet to be seen.
I deal with this on a regular basis in the research world, there is what is a really toxic and dangerous bias towards constructing the positive, i.e., making things seem, appear, and even fabricate outcomes that will be affirming of desired outcomes or other group biases. It is not research, let alone science when you are striking a positive tone, it’s fraud.
This is a really important point. Executive-land is all about image and framing, so I can totally see how execs think it's not a big deal to "just make the case" or frame things less negatively. But while that's ok in a slide deck, it's _not_ ok in a research paper. Researchers aren't (shouldn't be) accountable to business outcomes, but rather the truth of what they argue. It's tough to see this play out real time.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you show me five philosophy graduate turned AI researcher who thinks if statements are racist? If AI research teams are "full of" them, as you say, it should be trivial to find such people.
def approve_home_loan(applicant): if applicant.residence.average_medium_value
Google is a for profit corporation, not a college campus, news at 11.