What do you mean by pretty serious? I looked at three, two are about better documenting ML models/data, and one is about inferring the political leanings of an area by what type of cars are parked in it. None seem particularly groundbreaking to me...

Honestly? I don't have much experience with ML and in particular issues of bias in ML (though I have a general understanding of a lot of the former), so I don't really feel qualified to evaluate her more recent work, but her older stuff definitely appeared like what I'd expect from a machine learning practitioner, so I don't think attacking her as someone that only understands social sciences (which I perceived the parent as doing) to be fair.

Her work on identifying bias in facial recognition has won quite a number of awards.

Ground-breaking might be a strong word but it does move the industry forward.

Do you have a link to that paper? I'd like to read it, though I wasn't thrilled by the way she handled (or didn't) Yann LeCun.

You can see some of the recognition on her Wikipedia page:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timnit_Gebru

The paper referenced ("Gender shades: Intersectional accuracy disparities in commercial gender classification") has been cited 1000+ times per her Google Scholar page (https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=lemnAcwAAAAJ). For a 2-year old paper, this is easily a top 1% most cited paper.

Take for example a retrospective look at 2017 NeurIPS papers done in 2019 (https://archive.is/wip/77YrB).

You can disagree with how she and/or Google has handled this whole situation, but please do not denigrate work that has been cited (https://scholar.google.com/scholar?oi=bibs&hl=en&cites=14954...) by papers accepted at the most competitive/prestigious ML conferences.

EDIT: I also do not see how in good faith you can say that VentureBeat, a company who makes the bulk of its revenue from running conferences catering to C-suite execs who can shell out thousands of dollars for a ticket, is "leftist".

Are you really making the argument that people with money can’t be leftists? Do you know liberals are on average richer? https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/19/economic-divide-in-the-us-is...

Most executives of tech and news companies would bend over backwards just to show how leftist they are in 2020.

(I’m only replying to the part of your comment that answers mine)

"Left" and "right" carry little meaning when it comes to analyzing the divide between people. The "with/without money" bit is of a much higher order than the global "left/right" bit to me.

I don’t really care about the paper author’s fate, but it seems unsettling to me that she is discussed more than the paper itself.

In the United States, liberal and leftist are distinct terms.

Even someone like Ben Shapiro recognizes a difference between liberals and leftists (https://twitter.com/benshapiro/status/966081078166421504).

Silicon Valley types would hardly be described as leftists. Numerous studies have been done on the attitudes of Silicon Valley founders and execs (https://www.vox.com/2015/9/29/9411117/silicon-valley-politic...). The distinctions are dramatic.

We see that on average, tech founders are less likely to support vs. even Democrats generally (not just progressives):

* Banning the Keystone XL pipeline (60% vs 78%)

* The individual healthcare mandate (59% vs 70%)

* Labor unions being good (29% vs 73%)

This is to say, the average Silicon Valley type, particularly the C-suite exec or founder, tends not to be on the left wing of the Democratic party.

During the 2020 Democratic primary, even the Silicon Valley billionaires who are openly Democratic-leaning donated to candidates who were not to the left of the field (i.e. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders) (https://www.cnbc.com/2019/08/13/2020-democratic-presidential...):

* Eric Schmidt -> Cory Booker and Joe Biden

* Reed Hastings -> Pete Buttigieg

* Marc Benioff -> Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, and Jay Inslee

* Reid Hoffman -> Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand, Amy Klobuchar

* Jack Dorsey -> Andrew Yang, Tulsi Gabbard

* Ben Silbermann -> Pete Buttigieg

I'm engaging with you in good faith, and because I was intrigued that in a previous comment you mentioned that you live in Spain (though who's to say you're not a US ex-pat). But calling US tech companies "leftist" is a stretch at best.

I see, they are the same thing to me, hence the confusion.

> I see nothing to suggest she's not qualified.

Your argument sounds like a red herring. Qualified for what? I didn't noticed the OP making any remark on the author's qualifications.

And by the way, you should think things through before pulling appeals to authority to try to defend the credibility of researchers. See James Watson, a nobel laureate and a founder of modern genetics, and his comments on race and gender.

> I didn't noticed the OP making any remark on the author's qualifications.

Did you not read the first sentence of OP's post?

"Ok, so basically she is a bullshit social engineer, masquerading as an 'AI ethics researcher'"

If you take a step back and read the snippet you cherry-picked, I believe you'll be able to understand that it referred to how the author is trying to pass opinions on social engineering under the guise of research on AI ethics.

That does not mean at all that the author lacks qualifications.

When you accuse someone of pretending to be an "AI ethics researcher" you are stating that they lack the qualifications to hold that title.

Pretty obtuse to suggest otherwise.

Keen to understand what "masquerading as" is doing in that sentence if it's not meant to imply "pretending to be"?

masquerade /ˌmɑːskəˈreɪd,ˌmaskəˈreɪd/

pretend to be someone one is not.

Let's look at the dictionary, shall we?

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/masquerade

"an action or appearance that is mere disguise or show"

As in social engineering masquerading as AI research?

Honestly, is there any room for doubt at this stage?

I don't expect honest and well-meaning people to continue insisting on this at this point. It feels that these attempts to distort what was said are simply attempts to attack the OP based on misreprentations of what he did said.

> If you take a step back and read the snippet you cherry-picked

Cherry-picked? It's literally the first sentence, the central thesis of OP's entire "argument". If they can't get that down on paper correctly, they're not worth taking seriously.

> You would do well to work on your literacy and reading comprehension skills.

Ascribing unsubstantiated sentiments to someone's post in lieu of what they actually said doesn't fall under literacy or reading comprehension, sorry. It's actually the polar opposite of that.

Why are you claiming to know OP's intentions (despite their own words) better than everyone else here? Is OP your alt account?

> I don't expect honest and well-meaning people to continue insisting on this at this point. It feels that these attempts to distort what was said are simply attempts to attack the OP based on misreprentations of what he did said.

It's extremely bizarre that you're questioning the literacy of people when you're projecting your own unsupported sentiment to OP's post while simultaneously claiming that people who are directly quoting the OP's post verbatim are "misrepresenting" what OP said.

You're being very disingenuous here (as well as borderline manipulative) by trying to shut down any dissent against your flawed position by questioning the good faith of the people doing nothing but directly quoting the OP's words.

>If they can't get that down on paper correctly, they're not worth taking seriously.

Amusingly, the OP got shirty at someone* further down this thread for calling them names, but with an unfortunate textual blunder which exposed the hypocrisy of their own name calling (not to mention total lack of self awareness).

I pointed this out but got downvoted to oblivion of course. Classic goose / gander politics.

* (and rightly so btw, that kind of conduct has no place on HN)