[HN Gopher] An Open Letter to the Communications of the ACM
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An Open Letter to the Communications of the ACM
Author : alokrai
Score : 45 points
Date : 2020-12-29 21:33 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (docs.google.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (docs.google.com)
| 323454 wrote:
| Is there a specific incident that this letter is protesting?
| smitty1e wrote:
| I understood the point directly.
|
| The culture at large is going to do what it does. There is way
| to support liberty and deny the right to be a ninny.
|
| But technology should be about the code. It is better to _be_
| diverse, because being a cool, gentle, adult human being is
| simply the Golden Rule applied; rather than _flogging_
| diversity.
|
| We see endless codes of conduct, statistical analyses, and
| innocents getting thrashed for some purely Kafka-esque
| infraction.
|
| I would say: "to hell with that" except that in many ways, hell
| has arrived.
| DoofusOfDeath wrote:
| I'm confused as well. I think a letter like this would be
| improved by adding some supporting references or examples.
| navait wrote:
| Yeah - I'm confused if this is a general sentiment going on, or
| a recent incident going on. I did like "Quantum Computing Since
| Democritus"
| AlanYx wrote:
| It seems to be at least partially in response to the blacklist
| of researchers/students that Anima Anantkumar prepared and
| circulated and then eventually retracted about three weeks ago.
| threwaway4392 wrote:
| Related discussion
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25419844
| incompatible wrote:
| And presumably because she is one of many on the ACM
| Communications Editorial Board: https://cacm.acm.org/about-
| communications/editorial-board/
| [deleted]
| Jtsummers wrote:
| Yeah, I'm trying to find some context but it's difficult. Many
| keywords paired with "Communications of the ACM" just result in
| articles _from_ CACM instead of _about_ CACM. I 'm checking out
| the blogs of some of the signatories but haven't seen anything
| yet.
| [deleted]
| say_it_as_it_is wrote:
| Many industries are having the "and then they came for me"[1]
| moment, but it is particularly pronounced in academia.
| Intellectual giants such as Steven Pinker are attacked regularly
| by fellow academics on the basis of not conforming. People such
| as the group here must take a stand to stop this behavior.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came_..
| threwaway4392 wrote:
| Important context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25419844
|
| The author of the blacklist retracted the list and apologized.
| itronitron wrote:
| Might be the right time for any associated professional
| associations to review their code of conduct.
| google234123 wrote:
| Is she still trying to cancel stephen pinker? I found it ironic
| that she associated a jewish scientist with neo-nazism.
| sjcoles wrote:
| Funny, I get the feeling someone who looked different would be
| immediately dismissed from their position.
| gfodor wrote:
| This stuff is just a cold religious war, between the believers
| and non-believers. The sooner we recognize it as such, and
| properly cap the blast radius as we have with prior religious
| differences, the better. Until then this category error will
| plague us all.
|
| https://newdiscourses.com/2020/09/first-amendment-case-freed...
| rosstex wrote:
| The only reference to this I can find:
| https://twitter.com/pmddomingos/status/1344028996850180097
|
| Notably, Pedro Domingos recently fought against NeurIPS'
| ethics/social impact requirement in research papers. The argument
| here is likely related, that science be portrayed in a vacuum and
| not be diminished based on possible societal harm or political
| biases.
| joshuamorton wrote:
| Which is truly an exceptionally dumb position to take. Many
| other sciences have IRB and human factors approvals for
| experiments that involve or may involve humans. Computer
| Science (and specifically ML, a lot of HCI research _does_
| involve human subjects approval) ignores all of the potential
| for harm here.
|
| We've seen that go terribly wrong in other fields, and in the
| ML field.
| croissants wrote:
| I agree with the general conclusion that machine learning
| (just like any way of making decisions) involves ethics, but
| I disagree with the conclusion that every NeurIPS submission
| should have a concluding 1-2 paragraphs about the ethics of
| the submission. I reviewed for NeurIPS this year, and almost
| all of the ethics sections consisted of vacuous stuff along
| the lines of "uh, I guess...being efficient is good, might
| save some energy? and our method is pretty efficient, so
| that's nice".
|
| I think a system where area chairs skim abstracts and solicit
| these ethics paragraphs where they seem necessary -- so, not
| for the billionth paper obtaining pretty bounds for some
| variant of convex optimization -- makes more sense.
|
| I know that "think of the machine learning researchers!" is
| not a take that engenders sympathy, but we're probably
| talking thousands of human hours spent writing these things.
| It's not nothing.
| joshuamorton wrote:
| Fair enough (I'm not a Neurips reviewer or author), but I
| can accept the idea that convex optimization papers likely
| don't need to pre-write a societal impact statement
| (although I think that, as controversial as the paper may
| be, stuff like the Gebru et. al. paper on large language
| models ethical concerns shows that there probably is room
| for more interesting thought than just "ehhh, efficiency"
| in many places).
|
| But the subtext of this letter goes fairly deep (and to be
| clear this isn't meant as a response to you specifically):
|
| - While it doesn't specifically say it, this letter does
| appear to be at least somewhat anti-ethical concerns in
| general, which isn't good.
|
| - At least one of the signatories of this letter has not,
| in my opinion at least, followed the guidelines in this
| letter. Insinuating that a colleague of holds an opinion
| because they watch too much online porn is in no way civil,
| and is absolutely a personal attack.
|
| - Given the "disagreement" between Domingos and Anandkumar,
| who as others mention, sits on the ACM editorial board,
| this could be an attempt to censure or "cancel" her for her
| personal views. This is antithetical to the values held in
| the letter itself, and leaves a sour taste.
| defen wrote:
| > Many other sciences have IRB and human factors approvals
| for experiments that involve or may involve humans.
|
| As far as I know, those are for experiments that directly
| interact with humans as part of the experiment itself. They
| exist because of a long history of unethical researchers
| testing interventions (or lack thereof) on people without
| their knowledge or informed consent - e.g. Tuskegee Syphilis
| Experiment, MK-ULTRA, Stanford prison experiment (there are a
| lot). The closest equivalent in CS of directly-interacting
| experiments would be HCI research as you said. I could also
| see a strong argument being made for research that uses the
| creative or copyrighted output of a person without their
| consent - for example, their face as part of training facial
| recognition software, their written words as part of training
| GPT-3, their voice as part of training voice recognition
| software, etc.
|
| However the incident in question is really about a different
| kind of thing - it's asking researchers to speculate on the
| future ramifications of their research as it pertains to
| progressive ideals - in practice this means, "How could this
| negatively affect minorities or the environment?" These
| aren't inherently bad things to think about, but as you get
| further and further away from concrete applications of ML, it
| begins to look more and more like a religious ritual than
| something that is actually trying to address the stated
| problems.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| [deleted]
|
| Parent comment has been edited to address my comment.
| rosstex wrote:
| Oops! Retracted, thanks for checking this.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| I can no longer delete my comment, but since you edited
| your original I'll edit my prior comment to [deleted].
| rosstex wrote:
| Much appreciated. Only on HN.
| throwawaysea wrote:
| Pedro Domingos, for those who don't know, wrote "The Master
| Algorithm" and is a professor at the University of Washington.
| Recently, Anima Anandkumar (Director of AI at nvidia) tried to
| get him cancelled/blacklisted. I wrote more about the incident
| in this comment from a past HN discussion:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25419871
| mellosouls wrote:
| Hmmm. I'm not sure how successful this can be since the 3rd
| principle about not discriminating on identity etc (though
| righteous) is often that used to suppress research in the past.
|
| Without some Asimovian style "except where that counters the 1st
| principle" appended to "lower" principles it will continue to be
| abused by those who would constrain science that offends them.
| incompatible wrote:
| Asimov himself has been accused of sexual harassment, although
| I haven't yet seen a sign that his three laws are now guilty by
| association.
| forrestthewoods wrote:
| Google Docs on iOS Safari is unreadable garbage. Here's what this
| post looks like on my phone. I wish I could hide docs.google.com
| links from HN.
|
| https://i.imgur.com/7cuifN3.png
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