Live data from Hacker News

I Am Deleting the Blog

slatestarcodex.com

881–890 of 1001 posts

Re: I Am Deleting the Blog

#881

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hm, I don't know if I'd draw the cause/effect so directly. To me, these are two separate problems: 1) NYT doxxes sources, 2) NYT serves advertisers rather than readers. There might be some relation between these two problems but I don't personally have enough information to conclude that. I didn't make that clear in my previous post, my apologies. No implication was intended.

>NYT doxxes sources not to defend the NYTimes here, they're definitely in the wrong. but doxxing a source for an article and doxxing the subject of an article are very different things. The subject of this article is not a "source".

the object of the article is an intentionally anonymous blog tho

Re: I Am Deleting the Blog

#882

I would encourage people to stop linking to and submitting New York Times articles, I didn’t read Slate Star Codex but having just read the clear reasons Scott wanted to keep his anonymity I am disgusted the NYT would abuse someone’s trust like this. I’m going to pretend they don’t exist from now on and I expect a lot of others will too. I won’t read another article by the New York Times no matter how click baity the…

[deleted]

Re: I Am Deleting the Blog

#883
post #642

I am genuinely baffled how Scott Alexander's post has turned into hundreds and hundreds of comments on cancel culture, as if it was anything near the #1 reason why he'd be in danger if his name was revealed. Being famous is dangerous in every era, doubly so in an era where anybody unhinged basically has access to the same level of information you used to need a private investigator to get. Tim Ferris said it well: "T…

Ya. And even if he was writing on totally un-emotional topics, like a food blog or something, his job is such that patients being able to discover these aspects of his personal life would be likely to pollute his doctor-patient relationship with them. Psychiatrists understandably want to limit what their patients know about them, to keep the focus on the patient and their needs, rather than the personality of their psychiatrist.

I think this is what Scott's more concerned about than anything. I'm sure he worries about canceling and stuff too, but this is really out of concern for his ability to treat patients effectively at his day job.

Re: I Am Deleting the Blog

#884

I have to wonder why no one here seems to be ignoring the most obvious interpretation: Scott Alexander's identity is probably newsworthy. We might very well know him or her from other associations and the authorship of this blog would be notable and interesting. I mean, obviously it's not the case that newspaper policy demands identifying sources. The Times writes about anonymous people all the time. If this article…

His real identity is not particularly hard to find, and as far as I know, he is actually just a psychiatrist and the author of SSC (among other things).

Re: I Am Deleting the Blog

#885
post #264

Anyone saying that it would be a non-issue because people could find out the information is they looked hard enough obviously haven't personally or had their friends/family subject to the Times' entirely unaccountable abuse of power and absence of ethics. There is a big difference between something being buried where people with the interest and competence could go find it and it being put up in lights. Particularly…

"people could find out the information is they looked hard enough" is also ridiculous because, yeah, that's trivially true - the journalist already found the information.

I propose an experiment.

Create two separate web servers. Open both of their ports to the internet. Put a bitcoin on each one. Only publish the IP/URL to one of them on a website with millions of DAUs.

My hypothesis is the address you publish will see its bitcoin disappear more quickly than the other.

There's a difference between being able to easily find an answer, and knowing which question to ask. This is basically the entire point of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Re: I Am Deleting the Blog

#886
post #768

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both of those are right on point, and match my observations within my own circles. For me stallmans cancellation was a big turning point. I'm using a pseudonym everywhere now. I can't risk someone pulling up a comment or post years from now and using it to ruin my reputation or career, simply because i may have voiced an unpopular or controversial opinion that did not age well. It seems, too, that making jokes is ver…

> People aren't allowed to make mistakes, it seems. Not even mistakes. Things that were considered progressive as little as 15-20 years ago have now been flipped into "microaggressions".

The most infuriating to me is that educational curriculum drilled into people's heads that color blindness and treating all people equally was the key to ending racism, and now there's been a complete 180 on that

Re: I Am Deleting the Blog

#887

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interestingly in https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/23/style/women-gaming-stream... from today they seem to possibly withhold discoverable legal names: > (The streamers did not provide their legal names to The New York Times. In years past, women gamers who have spoken out against the industry using their legal names have been subjected to further harassment, hacking and doxxing.)

One wonders what criteria the Times must be using to determine that it's worth putting Scott at credible risk for further harassment but not women gamers. Is the Times really more sympathetic to gamers than psychiatrists or bloggers? That seems like an unlikely policy, but what else could explain it? I'm stumped.

Women gamers compared to white male psychiatrist bloggers who occasionally criticise feminism? Yes.

There's no mystery here. Scott belongs to a class of people for whom sympathy is not culturally trendy at the moment.

Re: I Am Deleting the Blog

#888

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The implication being that the NYT wants to use real names to drive clicks and appease advertisers?

I think it's best to hear from NYT about why they strictly only use real names.

The NYTimes is filled with anonymous sources as well as pseudonymous sources -- look at many articles about Banksy.

This is just a hit on someone the reporter viewed as not sufficiently an ally in the culture war.

Re: I Am Deleting the Blog

#889

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has been this way for a while. Outrage/cancel culture is an absolute pox upon our population that really needs to stop.

It reminds me of the (nearly cliche, but timeless) quote from MLK about riots: "I think that we’ve got to see that a riot is the language of the unheard" I don't think anybody, even "cancellers," think it's a remotely ideal solution. But when groups go unheard, feel a system is unjust, and feel unable to change the system they understandably seek to go outside the system. Please note that I have specifically used the…

Is this not victim blaming? If you attempt to ruin someone's life because they said "guacamole nigga penis" I don't think you can use "we live in a society" as justification. Seems like a flimsy excuse. Literal KKK members feel like they need to "go outside the system" to harm black people, does that make lynching okay?

Beyond that, characterizing cancel culture as "going outside the system" is silly. It's literally tattling, how much more sucking up to the system could one be? If "the system" (aka the overall collection of people in positions of power) was a-okay with sexual assault and racism cancel culture wouldn't exist because you wouldn't be able to complain to bosses, schools, etc. about people raping or being racist.

Re: I Am Deleting the Blog

#890
post #852

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in the field - though not as prominent as Yann (who has been very nice and helpful in my few interactions with him) - and your interpretation is off. People are disagreeing with his stance that researchers should not bother exploring bias implications of their research. (He says this is because bias is a problem of data - and therefore we should focus on building cool models and let production engineers worry abo…

So, your argument is that you disagree with data being the root of the problem by arguing that data "shapes research directions in a really fundamental way", research is "empirical" (i.e. based on data) and his research can't be isolated from data it'd be used on in production? Looks to me that you're argumentatively agreeing with Yann.

Not really, Yann's original claim (which he sort of kind of partially walked back) was that data is the only source of bias [0][1]. He walked that back somewhat to claim that he was being very particular in this case[2], which is perhaps true, but still harmful. The right thing to do when you make a mistake is apologize. Not double down and badly re-explain what other experts have been telling you back at them.

So then Yann notes that generic models don't have bias[3]. This is, probably, true. I'd be surprised if on the whole, "CNNs" encoded racial bias. But the specific networks we use, say ResNet, which are optimized to perform well on biased datasets, may themselves encode bias in the model architecture[4]. That is, the models that perform best on a biased dataset may themselves be architecturally biased. In fact, we'd sort of expect it.

And that all ignores one of the major issues which Yann entirely skips, but which Timnit covers in some of her work: training on data, even "representative data" encodes the biases that are present in the world today.

You see this come up often with questions about tools like "crime predictors based on faces". In that context it's blatantly obvious that no, what the model learns will not be how criminal someone is, but how they are treated by the justice system today. Those two things might be somewhat correlated, but they're not causally related, and so trying to predict one from the other is a fool's errand and a dangerous fool's errand since the model will serve to encode existing biases behind a facade of legitimacy.

Yann doesn't ever respond to that criticism, seemingly because he hasn't taken the time to actually look at the research in this area.

So insofar as data is the root of the problem, yes. Insofar as the solution is to just use more representative data in the same systems, no. That doesn't fix things. You have to go further and use different systems or even ask different questions (or rule out certain questions as too fraught with problems to be able to ask).

[0]: https://twitter.com/ylecun/status/1203211859366576128

[1]: https://twitter.com/ylecun/status/1274782757907030016

[2]: https://twitter.com/ylecun/status/1275162732166361088

[3]: https://twitter.com/ylecun/status/1275167319157870592

[4]: https://twitter.com/hardmaru/status/1275214381509300224. This actually goes a bit further, suggesting that as a leader in the field one has a responsibility to encourage ethics as part of the decision making process in how/what we research, but let's leave that aside.

Post reply on HN