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Google told its scientists to ‘strike a positive tone’ in AI research

reuters.com

271–280 of 307 posts

Re: Google told its scientists to ‘strike a positive tone’ in AI research

#271

There are many comments that identify the work by corporate sponsored researchers as fraud and not research. I have the unpopular opinion, and I vehemently disagree. There is no altruistic, sponsored research, no matter of the sponsor, be it corporate, government, non profit, or the Holy See. There is always a specific outcome the sponsor hopes for. The question is, how much pressure the sponsor puts on the researche…

This is nonsense. Publically funded research does not have the same issues as commercially funded research, full stop. A properly designed experiment (one capable of receiving public funds from the DOE, for example) will produce useful data regardless of the outcome. Not observing something vs observing something with a well-quantified uncertainty in either case are equally important results. If a certain experimenta…

Yep. Sometimes I see these type of comments online (mostly on libertarian leaning subs in Reddit for example) and the commentators fail to grasp the error behind their reasoning - not everything in this world is a zero sum game.

Re: Google told its scientists to ‘strike a positive tone’ in AI research

#273
It is almost 2021 and the only stuff ai has “solved” is annoying customer support chat bots, endless youtube videos and funny deep fakes. Just like IE it will be 2022 by the time ai will predict covid and 2030 by the time it will find something useful. What happened to them 10 per day ai startup posts in here?

Re: Google told its scientists to ‘strike a positive tone’ in AI research

#274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm referring to the posting guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

I knew what you were referring to. I simply don’t agree. Just like when I _know_ someone didn’t read the article, I will call them out on it. It really is ok. To be honest, I find it sort of lame whenever someone says “The guidelines say you’re not supposed to do that.” This isn’t elementary school. I think these sort of rules actually do a disservice to intellectual dialogue and aren’t working as intended. Why shoul…

I only have 9 karma so it's not me downvoting you

Re: Google told its scientists to ‘strike a positive tone’ in AI research

#275

There are many comments that identify the work by corporate sponsored researchers as fraud and not research. I have the unpopular opinion, and I vehemently disagree. There is no altruistic, sponsored research, no matter of the sponsor, be it corporate, government, non profit, or the Holy See. There is always a specific outcome the sponsor hopes for. The question is, how much pressure the sponsor puts on the researche…

Can you name a single occurrence where a publicly funded university in the US or Europe forced a researcher to retract a paper because it conflicted with the universities' commercial interests? From my time at academia I also don't recall the university or research institute asking to check a manuscript before submitting it to a journal, I'd even go as far as saying that this was unheard of as it would go against the…

Okay, so what do you call the hiring process at university if not selecting for what kind of papers will be submitted? Mostly selections for good reasons, sometimes less so (nepotism and indeed politics).

Besides, your basic point is not valid: retractions by employer are forcibly demanded commonly in cases of, first, plagiarism, fraud, error and in many cases there are political undertones of this. Granted, in the vast majority of cases it is the researcher using shady research practices because of the researcher's strong political persuasion, but the reverse happens too: universities with (large departments with) strong political opinions that punish researchers or force retractions.

The most famous of these, in my opinion, is the one study claiming vaccines cause autism. Of course, everybody who has family on Facebook is still angry this particular researcher for good reason, and he was definitely grinding a political axe, and well paid to do so:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lancet_MMR_autism_fraud

Second, I would argue that a lot of fields of study have "existential problems" that cannot be discussed in papers, or too much in public at all, without consequences for the researchers. What I mean is that there are a bunch of disciplines that have particular vulnerabilities in their foundations, which boils down to famous, extremely authoritative papers that should have been retracted a very long time ago, but weren't. Of course there's easy targets here, such as the Taylor papers [1]. But it goes pretty far: the original autism research was found to have one purpose only: to justify killing children to purify aryan blood lines (research happened right before WW2) [2]. These essentially invalidate a (large part of) a field of study, expose it as a fraud, but they are too enmeshed and refuse to die despite being exposed (and of course, you could more benignly argue they have since expanded and while they don't reject exposed fraudsters like Taylor and -much worse- Asperger, or you could argue they help people, unfortunately for autism treatments research disagrees with that). But you will find them equally in more "pure" research subjects: 99.9% (sorry) of statistics applies only in number series where the law of large numbers applies (which boils down to meaning there is no change in the underlying phenomenon being measured). There's 2 problems with that: first, upon careful inspection it never does, everything is changing. Second, there is an extremely common case that is always excluded: you can measure a "proxy" number for a phenomenon (say, number of theft convictions indicates something about crime rate), but as soon as you make any modification of the source system you are not allowed to use the same measure again, because this act invalidates the law of large numbers by explicitly changing the underlying phenomenon. The problem is that this is a valid criticism of 99% of applied statistics, and we have no resolution to this issue. You could argue that applied statistics works and has positive results, and I would agree. But ... it doesn't make it right.

There are entire fields that are coopted by political attitudes: the medical study of drugs is one example. The relationship between violence and imagining/experiencing violence (famously through TV and/or video games). Just search for long term effects of LSD on Google scholar and you will realise there is more going on than mere mistakes, and it is not really different, but much harder to tell, for most psychiatric drugs, even Valium and Methylphenidate. Many papers that are obviously bullshit are not retracted and some papers that definitely aren't bullshit are forcibly retracted because of the position they defend (such as, for example, that the average use of any given psychoactive medication is fraudulent, and exceed dosage and duration limitations of the medicines, with full knowledge of a psychiatrist who doesn't see a good alternative, which results in extreme damage to patients).

Third there are results that entire field feel they just MUST find, except they never do: the big example is the (direct) physical changes resulting from various psychiatric conditions. Every single study, for decades, has been shown to have been falsified, with a bunch of retractions, but also plenty of unretracted but obviously bullshit research, and several forced retractions of research pointing out the fraud. Just to be clear: this is not talking about depressed patients, say, cutting themselves, and the cuts resulting in physical change, this is about direct physical change (usually in the brain) resulting from (usually) depression. This results in people retracting papers without consequences because all the field sort-of-kind-of-not-really-but-... agrees with the fraud. Again you will find all 3: retracted papers, retracted-but-we're-still-teaching-it-and-rewarding-the-researcher-for-political-reasons papers, and forcibly retracted despite being true papers.

[1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/10/12/not-so-fast

"Matthew Stewart points out what Taylor’s enemies and even some of his colleagues pointed out, nearly a century ago: Taylor fudged his data, lied to his clients, and inflated the record of his success."

[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-05112-1

"The Austrian paediatrician Hans Asperger has long been recognized as a pioneer in the study of autism. He was even seen as a hero, saving children with the condition from the Nazi killing programme by emphasizing their intelligence. However, it is now indisputable that Asperger collaborated in the murder of children with disabilities under the Third Reich."

Re: Google told its scientists to ‘strike a positive tone’ in AI research

#276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see how the CEO refusing to continue to say she resigned bolsters the claim she resigned. > calling it a resignation is completely correct and needs no retraction or correction. Alternatively: publicly calling it a firing is essentially an admission of guilt. That's the one thing Google's lawyers would insist Google cannot do. Presumably neither one of us are the experts on EEOC and employment litigation stra…

The CEO didn’t refuse to say she resigned. He refused to say she was fired and refused to contradict earlier statements of her resignation.

> He refused to say she was fired

I agree! He also refused to say she resigned. Fancy that!

The important thing to note is that one of these was a change in behavior and one was not.

Re: Google told its scientists to ‘strike a positive tone’ in AI research

#277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you name a single occurrence where a publicly funded university in the US or Europe forced a researcher to retract a paper because it conflicted with the universities' commercial interests? From my time at academia I also don't recall the university or research institute asking to check a manuscript before submitting it to a journal, I'd even go as far as saying that this was unheard of as it would go against the…

Okay, so what do you call the hiring process at university if not selecting for what kind of papers will be submitted? Mostly selections for good reasons, sometimes less so (nepotism and indeed politics). Besides, your basic point is not valid: retractions by employer are forcibly demanded commonly in cases of, first, plagiarism, fraud, error and in many cases there are political undertones of this. Granted, in the v…

I'm so baffled by this comment.

In what sense is retracting a deeply flawed ("fraudulent") study that was invented for a court case the same as a university pushing a researcher to not publish or retract a paper because it paints the university in a bad light? It seems like you're trying to paint all retractions as equivalently "political", but that's obviously not the case.

Re: Google told its scientists to ‘strike a positive tone’ in AI research

#278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And as we've seen, sensationalists can get cult followings. We're talking about published research papers, not people posting stuff on twitter. I have not seen anyone get a "cult following" from a research paper.

Allow me to introduce Andrew Wakefield. The father of the antivax movement.

That's a good counterexample, although I'll note that Andrew Wakefield is referred to as the founder of the "science by press conference" phenomenon - so not really his research paper that was the single thing that attracted attention.

Re: Google told its scientists to ‘strike a positive tone’ in AI research

#279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I knew what you were referring to. I simply don’t agree. Just like when I _know_ someone didn’t read the article, I will call them out on it. It really is ok. To be honest, I find it sort of lame whenever someone says “The guidelines say you’re not supposed to do that.” This isn’t elementary school. I think these sort of rules actually do a disservice to intellectual dialogue and aren’t working as intended. Why shoul…

I only have 9 karma so it's not me downvoting you

[flagged]

Re: Google told its scientists to ‘strike a positive tone’ in AI research

#280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why did you find the mention of Timnit Gebru ludicrous? The issues are closely related. In fact, I was _expecting_ the article to mention it. Google tells Researcher 1 to re-word things in X way for Y reason. Google tells Timnit Gebru to re-word things in X way for Y reason. The X and Y are the same. Based on the rest of your response, I believe you are having trouble reading the article in an objective manner. You s…

You appear to be mistaken on nearly all the facts about the Gebru situation. Given this it seems clear we would draw very different conclusions. Anyone claiming Jeff Dean lied must be so disconnected from the actual facts and so prejudiced to blame Google and view Gebru’s actions as acceptable that their opinion amounts to nothing but partisan gainsaying. To be clear, it’s ok to disagree with Jeff Dean or to dispute…

Yes, he literally lied by omission. Internally, there’s an entire data analysis available for viewing. We have literally asked senior leadership why his email does not align with facts and we have not gotten a response. Internally, you can also read the exact feedback that Timnit’s paper received. Like I said, I’m assuming you don’t work at Google because even if you didn’t like Timnit and just think she’s a whiny researcher, there’s no way possible that you could say that Jeff Dean didn’t lie.

Besides the 2 week thing, he also misrepresented the “list of demands” to make it seem like it was worse than it actually was. So much so that I’m even surprised he was allowed to publish the email publicly.

I can’t imagine a single lawyer looked at his email, honestly.

Hypothetical but likely scenario below.

Jeff Dean: “Oh, you say she made a list of demands. Ok, let me put that in the email. Oh, you said there’s this 2 week deadline that she didn’t follow. Ok, let me put that in the email. What else do you want me to add?”

I believe the question you should be asking is _who_ told him these things. Please guess.

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