Gebru did not engage LeCun in a reasoned debate. She said he should stop taking, listen to her and her allies (and only them). She said "Let us lead here and you follow" and "Just listen", essentially telling the inventor of convolutional neural nets that it was now his role to sit and shut up.

That's how woke Twitter works: you define the group of people who are allowed to speak as only you and your allies. You pursue the meta-argument whenever someone not in your group attempts to speak.

Some links to specific comments here would help?

> Let us lead [here] (I'm assuming "her" was a typo) and you follow.

Aggressive, sure, but also seems:

a. reasonable for AI ethics experts to "lead" in issues surrounding AI ethics

b. not the cardinal sin of discussion that it appears to be viewed as here.

You'll see people here defending Linus or Elon Musk for saying objectively way worse stuff than this.

Somehow Timnit is defined by this discussion, but Elon isn't defined by calling a rescue diver a pedophile with no evidence or Linus telling someone to kill themselves.

OK, but imagine that you are the expert in your field and you have work for this person, who controls your career and compensation, who has a tendency to say that domain experts need to shut up and defer to her.

If the domain is AI ethics, then Yann is not a domain expert, she is. Indeed, it seems like this exact expansion of Yann's "domain" is what she is frustrated by, and you are playing exactly into it.

> the expert in your field and you have work for this person, who controls your career and compensation

Must be harder when your CEO boss has a tendency to call domain experts pedophiles, yet I see Musk praised frequently here.

> Indeed, it seems like this exact expansion of Yann's "domain" is what she is frustrated by, and you are playing exactly into it.

Your description above sounds like gatekeeping to me - not saying that is the researcher’s intent - but it doesn’t seem to make for good science

I'm not the one saying people who criticize "domain experts" deserve to be fired. I think both are within the realm of discourse and shouldn't be retaliated against.

I think your sounds ask her actual reports what they think of her management (hint: essentially all of them have said "she's the best manager I've ever had" or the equivalent in the past week).

If you work in an area that is written off, you need a strong advocate, and from everything I've seen, she was that strong advocate both for herself and for those who reported to her.

> Even amidst of world wide protests people don’t hear our voices and try to learn from us, they assume they’re experts in everything. Let us lead her and you follow. Just listen.

She says talking down to an actual expert in ML who gave an opinion on ML

Unclear what the usage of "actual expert" means in the context of an AI ethics question, when Timnit is an "actual expert" in AI ethics.

I can see how this would get frustrating fast if your opinion is held among many Google engineers.

"Ethics" does not really encompass the topic. The topic was that a net trained mostly on white people's faces upsamples a downsampled photo of a half-black man (Barack Obama) into a generic white face. LeCun's point is this is no surprise. If you trained it on leopards, it would upsample pixelated human faces into leopard faces instead. LeCun is an expert on how these nets work.

And nowhere did Timnit disagree that the cause he identified was a cause of bias in the system. Her contention is that there are others, and reducing the problem to just "get better datatsets" is a bad idea (and a way for researchers to abdicate responsibility).

To use an example that comes up: do we solve the ethical qualms of a system that predicts incarceration rate based on facial structure by getting a better dataset? Is it even ethical to attain such a "better" dataset, what does "better" even mean in the context?

Not sure why you are being downvoted. I see how reasoned your response is to what I said. It is a clear contrast to how the AI ethics researcher engaged in the Twitter thread. Two totally different hypothetical conversations:

  A: Training data is a cause of this bias
  B: But not the only cause
  A: True

vs.

  A: Training data is a cause of this bias
  B: I am so sick of this. You are not permitted to speak.
  A: I am deleting my Twitter account.

Any support for Dr. Gebru seems to be against the HN ethos at the moment, I have some theories as to why ;)

> You are not permitted to speak.

I really don't think this is a fair reading of her tweet. I don't see any way to read her actual tweet claiming Yann can't speak at all on the subject. I do see a plea to engage more with domain experts (which to reiterate: my understanding is that Yann has a history of ignoring on the subject)

Reading these threads is really disappointing. I can in may ways already empathize with Timnit -- its exhausting seeing people who are typically bright just completely miss the point.

But if you change to a different topic like privacy then these same people really get all of this nuance that they completely seem to miss here...

Also, to put the double standard here into context, HN comment threads always had plenty of people defending Linus Torvalds tone.

And plenty of people attacking him. Every Linus thread has a massive debate about him being an asshole. Just like in this thread there are plenty on each side. Where’s the double standard?

A quick look through a few of the last Linus threads and there is a lot more "taking his word as gospel" over calling him an asshole:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23739076

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22176032

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22005181

I was thinking threads from before his big "shit, i'm an asshole, sorry. gonna take time off" phase. Maybe I have a selective memory, but I'm remembering threads from those couple years before and after Susan Fowler and Uber's culture implosion. It felt like there was a shift in how the whole industry felt about brilliant assholes around then (thank god).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18000698

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18083859

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16508921

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8415603

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2372096

I think the threads in articles specifically about Linus are better comparisons to this, rather than articles about computing that involve him. But, hey, folk like Torvalds and Gebru both really rub me the wrong way, so it's reasonable that I might be selectively remembering threads where HN said I'm right and that he's an asshole (and I did a lazy googling of "linus torvalds asshole site:news.ycombinator.com" which is biased too), so who knows.

Communities are not monoliths. Otherwise, it would be incredibly easy to charge any sufficiently large community of blatant hypocrisy.

Agreed, there's even an article floating around that purports to summarize the most offensive tweets. In my opinion, this whole thing is being vastly blown out of proportion.