111–120 of 125 posts
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Many of the people in this field aren’t ethicists, they’re activists.
True, they only support their own political faction under the guise of "identity politics", not all people. For example Andrew Ng is considered "white adjacent" because he's the only non-white in an article about the history of AI. Asians are not favored with this group of activists.
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> But she didn’t show how this is harming anyone in a concrete way. To roll with the example “man” ~ “doctor”, “woman” ~ “nurse”, the harm is having a giant and widely used search engine reinforce baseless gender biases, ie that there is no underlying reason why women should be nurses and men doctors. What is the harm you may ask? The harm may be subtle, eg being surprised when you find out your next doctor is a woma…
This kind of hypothetical effects should be documented in concrete cases by a good ethical scientist instead of just described from imagination. For example, when someone searches for a doctor, let's say a male comes up first - who stops at the first Google result? They would probably need to go deep and read about the doctor's experience and find patient reviews.
Are all ethicists as unethical as these two? I wonder if this one collected all those internal threads where Timnit was being toxic, that insiders kept describing. No? I guess this ethicist thought it best to only exfiltrate things matching her narrative?
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> What about Mitchell's violation towards Google? If we accept Google's own claims, they have an automated indication which leads to suspicion of that and on ongoing investigation, not even something where they are prepared to claim an actual violation. i.e., exactly the circumstances where every half competent organization would decline comment (potentially citing “personnel matters” until they'd actually completed…
So you say you suspect they have an ongoing investigation, and that would be "circumstances where every half competent organization would decline comment" What substantiates this conclusion? They can have an investigation ongoing, and share the cause for said investigation. In the statement they explicitly establish that this doesn't imply guilt of the account owner. Why are you so triggered by this clarification?
My experience over a lifetime as a news consumer of seeing how organizations deal with media inquiries about personnel matters.
> Why are you so triggered by this clarification?
Grow up.
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While I am not a fan of Gebru's handling of her own firing, this is a mischaracterization of her work. She routinely offered suggested methods, experiments, and even new datasets [1] that fixed what she saw as wrong. She does have a fair bit of practical ML experience as shown in the computer vision papers in her publication list. 1. Buolamwini, Joy, and Timnit Gebru. "Gender shades: Intersectional accuracy dispariti…
Of course I was aware of her Gender Shades paper. It's a small bias evaluation benchmark dataset. > We developed the Pilot Parliaments Benchmark (PPB) to achieve better intersectional representation on the basis of genderand skin type. PPB consists of 1270 individuals from three African countries (Rwanda, Senegal, South Africa) and three European countries (Ice-land, Finland, Sweden) selected for gender parity in the…
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So you say you suspect they have an ongoing investigation, and that would be "circumstances where every half competent organization would decline comment" What substantiates this conclusion? They can have an investigation ongoing, and share the cause for said investigation. In the statement they explicitly establish that this doesn't imply guilt of the account owner. Why are you so triggered by this clarification?
> What substantiates this conclusion? My experience over a lifetime as a news consumer of seeing how organizations deal with media inquiries about personnel matters. > Why are you so triggered by this clarification? Grow up.
Have a good day, stay safe.
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It was clearly a mistake. They don't act in a constructive way. Let's take Timnit's paper for example. She found out that Google had been using a biased language model in search. The bias was like - 'male' association with 'doctor' as opposed to 'woman' association to 'nurse'. But she didn't show how this is harming anyone in a concrete way. Just theoretical. And then she offered no solution, just blaming the work of…
> But she didn’t show how this is harming anyone in a concrete way. To roll with the example “man” ~ “doctor”, “woman” ~ “nurse”, the harm is having a giant and widely used search engine reinforce baseless gender biases, ie that there is no underlying reason why women should be nurses and men doctors. What is the harm you may ask? The harm may be subtle, eg being surprised when you find out your next doctor is a woma…
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The only way I can read your argument is if I were in the spirit of "the big guy is always wrong". If you're accused of a SECOND action taken against an ethicist, and AGAIN it's not because of anything you did that was bad, then yes your hand is actually being forced to say more than "no comment". It's absolutely incredible how much Google has not spoken out to defend itself against the lies upon lies upon inconsiste…
> The only way I can read your argument is if I were in the spirit of "the big guy is always wrong". How about “the guy burning the person they are currently in a business relationship with without getting all the facts is wrong”. Or “a wrong by party A against party B does not justify a wrong by B against C.” > It's absolutely incredible how much Google has not spoken out to defend itself against the lies upon lies…
I don't even know what you think are the actions people have been taking, to make you interpret things in a way to make you say that.
> Er, nothing in Google’s story, even taken as gospel truth, indicates that either Gebru’s fact claims in this case were lies or that her speculations were unreasonable or inconsitent in her position given the observable facts.
It's very damning that she chose to call out Jeff Dean as being the person who fired her.
Her manager was not a man. Her manager's manager (who actually delivered the news) is not a man. The CEO is not white. She chose probably the ONLY person in her entire reporting chain who happens to be a white man (and in engineering circles famous), and she points to him and says "He! He did this!".
And that's just a start.
Face it, you don't even have to read Google's official account, much less believe it, without seeing that her story absolutely does not add up.
Even the headline does not match the content in any article about her.