>> But that's the point, Lecun didn't reject the social impact, he was just not interested in that discussion. He was interested in a scientific discussion on the main cause of the bias.

This isn't allowed anymore, for better or worse. If you don't talk about things with a social justice lens on Twitter, you're liable to get called out as ignorant. It's the #1 subject on the site right now, and no place for discussing anything remotely adjacent to it without invoking it.

Aka “Silence is violence”.

Well yeah that's somewhat of a separate thing. If you say something but don't mention the right stuff, you get yelled at. If you are silent, you get yelled at.

In fairness, if you're gonna post a statement, you better go full bore with it with all the keywords in it. People were circulating rubrics on Twitter to grade social justice statements and brigading those who didn't hit all the notes.

https://twitter.com/peterhassett/status/1267452984432173058

He has the privilege to ignore that discussion. That doesn't mean everyone else does, or that other people can't be frustrated with that choice.

Wait...ignoring a discussion on Twitter is a privilege now? Some people don't have the privilege to do so? Just...put down your phone? I guess that makes me super privileged, seeing as I don't visit that cess pool of a site.

I'm not talking about ignoring the Twitter thread itself, but rather ignoring the issue it discusses. What I was getting at when I used the word "privilege" is that LeCun is not a member of a group which tends to experience negative effects from these kinds of technological tools -- quite the opposite. If you're a member of one of those marginalized groups, as Gebru is, those issues might become a little more interesting to you. For instance, these kinds of issues, https://www.propublica.org/article/machine-bias-risk-assessm..., https://themarkup.org/locked-out/2020/05/28/access-denied-fa..., https://www.ruhabenjamin.com/race-after-technology

Well, can you help me understand how the conversation was detoured in the first place? I tried to read it, but as mentioned I don't use Twitter so it's confusing to me.

If I read it right...a person posted a photo that turned pixelated Obama, a half white person, into a fully white person.

A person, who I assume is some ML expert, explained that it's because the training set used uses too many white faces.

A person replied very negatively to this answer, saying she's tired of it, that he doesn't listen, and talking about injustices in the world.

I don't think either of them are wrong, I just don't understand the leap. Turning pixelated Obama into some random white guy isn't a social injustice. I kinda felt like both weren't even participating in the same argument.

I think it does mean that other people can't be frustrated with that choice. It's very toxic behavior for me to jump into a conversation and tell people they're bad for not discussing other topics I find more important.

To be fair, LeCun started a discussion around bias in ML -- Gebru's reply is on topic, since statistical bias in ML is a narrow way of understanding the social impact of an algorithm. Gebru is one of the foremost scholars on that issue.