31–40 of 88 posts
I think Facebook hate is clouding out reasonability in this thread. E.g., there's even a comment asserting that people who collaborate with facebook (a.k.a., Jessica Hodgins, Andrea Vedaldi, and Jitendra Malik) are "not worth their salt" (?!?!?!). IDK. Maybe -- just possibly -- there do exist researchers who have their choice of funding spigots and are choosing to work with Facebook. Either that or HN has some damn h…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Completely agree with this. I see Facebook as the least ethical, and least useful from a civilization standpoint of all the big tech firms. Google is driven by the same ad-clicking incentives, but the one-tricky pony has been developing other extremely societally useful tech, like self-driving cars and other moonshot projects. Apple and Microsoft sell products, they do not make users the product (on the whole). Toget…
That might be true, but don't confuse FAIR (their DL research lab) with FB. FAIR employs good people doing interesting and useful research. They promoted pytorch as a framework, and it is perhaps the best framework for non industrial applications. On a parallel line of thought, I prefer FB's React to Google's Angular. In both React and Pytorch I see the same elegant design. TensorFlow and Angular on the other part ar…
That's historically true of lots of research innovation though.
War (generally accepted as bad thing!) has advanced technology and civilization repeatedly.
At least the scientists aiding war (on average) had some awareness that killing people is clearly not a good thing, and at absolute best a necessary evil. Can the same be said of the people at Facebook?
The culture of their management is to be in denial about how damaging their service is to the mental health of individuals and society.
QUIT USING FACEBOOK STUFF
Care to expand? Everybody in my vicinity uses messenger, no exception, it's the standard method of communication. It's like saying "quit using the Telco stuff!" 20 years ago.
Come on.
I know there's a slew of people out there happy to spout about how it's the only way they can stay in touch, but it's it's only true in the rarest of cases.
Facebook is, by numerous reports, a company you should easily dislike. I'm not going to post links. You know the stories, and if you don't it's not hard to search for them.
Using their tech is just feeding the beast. It's like a democrat staying at a Trump property.
Everyone knows better, but few have the spine to stay away.
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Honestly at this point it is also ethically "controverse" to work for facebook in any position. Obviously, in my personal opinion and I can understand that a lot of people don't care about it
Heck, you could even go as far as saying that Facebook is ethically "challenged".
Mark hasn't taken back his comments about his users being "dumb fucks" for "trust[ing]" him, as far as I know, although he has apparently said that he regrets saying it[0].
[0] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/09/20/the-face-of-fa...
Source: research and I've asked FB myself
I think Facebook hate is clouding out reasonability in this thread. E.g., there's even a comment asserting that people who collaborate with facebook (a.k.a., Jessica Hodgins, Andrea Vedaldi, and Jitendra Malik) are "not worth their salt" (?!?!?!). IDK. Maybe -- just possibly -- there do exist researchers who have their choice of funding spigots and are choosing to work with Facebook. Either that or HN has some damn h…
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Okay, granted.
> Anyone working there needs to be called out.
I'll take this seriously when you start "calling out" IBM employees for working for a company that in the past enabled genocide.
I'm unsure how research on "visual and robot learning" or on "geometric 3D reasoning" is supposed to be enabling genocide. Those seem more akin to "green energy researchers taking money from big oil cos". Which is very different, ethically, from actively helping build and maintain the core business. Unless you want to suss out the link between geometric reasoning and genocide for me?
And in the case of Facebook, your opinion is worse than just hyperbolic. There is an entire research field that focuses on detecting speech sentiment. Your position, as stated, is that those people should not work with Facebook, even if 100% of their time is spent designing algorithms and processes to detect and remove hate speech/calls to violence during active genocides.
I think that advice is actively dangerous because I don't believe in a magical world where Facebook disappears tomorrow.
I understand the call of money but I cannot help but feel very negatively towards academics doing this with facebook of all organisations. After recent events, they cannot pretend not to know the impact and damage their work may have here. Excusing yourself with "I am just a researcher, I don't have anything to do with how my work is used" is just not good enough any more. I would categorically reject any collaborati…
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Any researcher in this area worth their salt can easily get cloud credit grants and collaborations from Google, Microsoft, Amazon. I pose if you go to Facebook, it's very much about money.
But can they get the huge volumes of data they have tagged out? The real time pipelines and internal tools? The community of people they will be working with?
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fruit_of_the_poisonous_tree
I understand the call of money but I cannot help but feel very negatively towards academics doing this with facebook of all organisations. After recent events, they cannot pretend not to know the impact and damage their work may have here. Excusing yourself with "I am just a researcher, I don't have anything to do with how my work is used" is just not good enough any more. I would categorically reject any collaborati…
Completely agree with this. I see Facebook as the least ethical, and least useful from a civilization standpoint of all the big tech firms. Google is driven by the same ad-clicking incentives, but the one-tricky pony has been developing other extremely societally useful tech, like self-driving cars and other moonshot projects. Apple and Microsoft sell products, they do not make users the product (on the whole). Toget…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Completely agree with this. I see Facebook as the least ethical, and least useful from a civilization standpoint of all the big tech firms. Google is driven by the same ad-clicking incentives, but the one-tricky pony has been developing other extremely societally useful tech, like self-driving cars and other moonshot projects. Apple and Microsoft sell products, they do not make users the product (on the whole). Toget…
That might be true, but don't confuse FAIR (their DL research lab) with FB. FAIR employs good people doing interesting and useful research. They promoted pytorch as a framework, and it is perhaps the best framework for non industrial applications. On a parallel line of thought, I prefer FB's React to Google's Angular. In both React and Pytorch I see the same elegant design. TensorFlow and Angular on the other part ar…
When you talk to these guys (they're almost all guys), you realize they're fully aware of what they're doing, and in the back of their minds they know FB is evil. They just like the money too much.
This is 100% about money trumping conscience. FAIR researchers may be millionaires, but they're ethically challenged. I wouldn't trade place with them. These people disgust me.