leftyted
In the paper, another paper is summarized describing the environmental costs of training large models. It is then argued that global warming will disproportionately affect marginalized people. This constitutes "environmental racism" because the main beneficiaries of these models are rich white people whereas the people bearing the costs are poor people who live near the equator. In my mind, this is two-points-make-a-line thinking.
The rest of the paper is more interesting. It argues that machine learning is conservative in that it "reinforces hegemonic language". I think this is true. Models are trained using data, data is what exists rather than what we would like to exist. If you're unhappy with what exists (as Gebru is, terribly), this represents a problem. Two of her solutions are "curating" data (censoring data) and "working with panels of experiential experts through the Diverse Voices methodology" (constituting powerful groups made up of her ideological allies). I think these solutions are dead-ends. It seems to me that we have to make peace with the conservatism inherent in these models (and maybe all models).
The paper also argues (I think rightly) that problems will materialize "should humans encounter seemingly coherent language model output and take it for the words of some person or organization who have accountability for what is said". In other words, we grant other humans responsibility for what they say and do but what about models that can mimic humans very accurately? A similar problem exists today when a Google or Youtube account is erroneously locked by some algorithm. There's a sense that, really, no one is responsible for this outcome because an algorithm did it. Even if the owner manages to get his account restored, there's no clear way to assign responsibility for the mistake. Perhaps this problem will become even worse if we start to see algorithms powered by models that are near-indistinguishable from people.
Anyway, the paper doesn't seem controversial to me. It seems clear that Gebru's strident tone and personal style were the cause of her firing/resignation. Jeff Dean's claim that the paper was rejected for not citing other papers may be false. The truth seems much simpler: based on her own public communications, Gebru felt she was the subject of "harassment" and "dehumanization" but those grievances seem to be hyperbole, and the personal injury that she felt became an excuse for her to treat her coworkers poorly. In other words, she didn't drop her twitter persona at work.
If I felt I was being under-compensated, working in poor conditions, and had my back against the wall, I'd want a union too. But describing my job like that is hysterically funny, much less Google programmers.
What's really going on here is simple. If you work at Google, your job is too good. There's no struggle. People want a struggle and so they invent one by LARPing as Marxists.
The programmers where I work have too much power. We're exploiting the company. If I don't feel like writing code, I just do github stuff and answer questions. In fact that's what I did yesterday and the day before. No one notices or cares because, among other things, they couldn't replace me because there aren't thousands of hyper-educated new college grads after my job. I think many of the Google employees who are unhappy at Google due to "exploitation" would be happier working at a smaller, less famous company. Of course there's a pay cut and you lose that special feeling when everyone instantly recognizes you employer and assumes you're a genius.
There is no reason why someone can't support the welfare state and also demand efficiency. That demand represents an ideal; there will always be errors, but the insistence that all errors are unavoidable and that (as the parent suggested) we shouldn't even talk about them is extremely irritating. It provides the enemies of the welfare state with the best possible arguments ("you don't even care if the money is going to people who need it").
In other words, blithe dismissals like "I accept some inefficienies and waste" provide the other side with the best possible ammunition against the idea of a welfare state.
It's laughable to see the number of people here who, straight-faced, say nonsense like "Nitpicking efficiency is for the capitalists".
My point was not that the welfare state is shoddy but that, if you support the welfare state, mistakes like this should bother you more, not less.
Does Sweden send welfare checks to Americans who aren't Swedish citizens? If not, perhaps that partly explains why the Swedes are more comfortable with an expansive welfare state than Americans.
> Horne's writings aren't about history: they're a form public of agitation so that "the USA will do less racist shit".
As you let slip here, Horne's writings aren't about history: they're a form public of agitation so that "the USA will do less racist shit". Which would be fine if he was a social critic or a politician. But he's been passing himself off as a historian.
In this kind of history, all nuance (like Adams' views on slavery) is lost and all historical events are made to fit a predetermined narrative. In addition to being wrong, it's incredibly boring stuff.
You'd think that would be something small-government republicans progressive democrats could agree on...
This is nonsense. The US was a left-wing experiment. It was a repudiation of the way things were done in Europe. The fact that it didn't solve every single inequity in one blow is not an interesting observation.
It's fair game to criticize the US, but to misunderstand its history to this extent is just sad. The US was radically egalitarian at its founding and served as the example for the rest of the world for at least a century and a half.
John Adams: "I always consider the settlement of America as the opening of a grand scheme and design in Providence for the illumination and emancipation of the slavish part of mankind all over the earth."
This only follows if we accept the axiom "Jews aren't Russian". I'm not convinced that he thinks that (and I certainly don't).
> Also, after the Holocaust it is extremely inappropriate for any non-Jew to suggest that the Jews as a people have done anything bad or negative. The sole appropriate thing Solzhenitsyn could have done with regard to the Jews is either say something nice or not say anything at all.
To me, this is intellectual cowardice.
As far as I know, Solzhenitsyn's controversial view about Jews in the USSR is that they were viewed as less likely to be counterrevolutionary, and therefore quickly climbed the party hierarchy...at least initially. Stalin eventually adopted various anti-semitic measures (and Solzhenitsyn mentions this in The First Circle).
Der Spiegel tries to pin him down as a reactionary Putinist and anti-semite. I think the attempt fails but judge for yourself. I don't think we have a category for people like Solzhenitsyn anymore but "jew-hater, authoritarian, reactionary" doesn't seem accurate to me.
These days science is viewed as a means to various ends. These ends are all wonderful...eliminate poverty, curtail climate change, cheaper energy, etc. But what's missing is the idea of doing something for the sake of doing it. It's not totally clear what landing on the moon or maintaining a space station really accomplished in terms of material goals. They're glorious accomplishments because of their difficulty.
I think that attitude is what's missing. Listening to JFK's "we will go to the moon" speech is almost unbelievable today. Politicians of either party absolutely cannot talk like that today.
If you want a word to describe what atheism and religion have in common, I'd go with "spirituality". Not in the sense of "burning incense" or "believing in ghosts" but rather in the sense of holding beliefs that are not rational and deciding to care about the world and about humanity in particular.
Or we could save ourselves the trouble and ask ourselves why it is that we don't allow cameras in those places to begin with. And then we could extend that reasoning to Congress. Turns out treating your government like a reality tv show is a bad idea.
Removing the cameras isn't going to fix everything...but it will be a positive change.
In the presence of cameras, politicians become instagram celebrities.
I agree with you.
They need to get the cameras out of congress. Everyone involved in these hearings is mining them for clips for their campaign ads and it's sickening.
Are any of them arguing for an ethnostate? For shipping non-whites "back to where they came from"? For re-establishing anti-miscegenation laws?
Your perspective is absurd. Of course the court has a left wing. It's just not radical enough for your liking and, similarly, the court's right wing isn't radical enough for David Duke's liking.
While your question is interesting, isn't this exactly the problem? People didn't know where things were headed.
> How is this to be avoided, among ordinary men, even highly educated ordinary men? Frankly, I do not know. I do not see, even now. Many, many times since it all happened I have pondered that pair of great maxims, Principiis obsta and Finem respice—‘Resist the beginnings’ and ‘Consider the end.’ But one must foresee the end in order to resist, or even see, the beginnings. One must foresee the end clearly and certainly and how is this to be done, by ordinary men or even by extraordinary men? Things might have. And everyone counts on that might.
We know things can go off the rails but we can't know when that process is occurring. We can only look back and decide that it has already occurred. If we manage to stay on the rails, we'll tell ourselves that we were never close to the edge.
Foucault, Irigaray, Rorty, and Butler to name a few.
These thinkers believe that distinctions are bad, that the borders between things should be dissolved, that concepts like rational-irrational, true-false, objective-subjective, man-woman are oppressive.
Chomsky is not radical in the sense I mean. He's a liberal who believes in progress, responsibility, knowledge, and the possibility of relations between people that are not coercive. He's just pessimistic about human relations as they exist today. There's a Chomsky-Foucault debate on youtube. Chomsky sees a distinction between the responsible-irresponsible use of power and Foucault does not. You can also look up the Habermas-Rorty debates.
But by writing this, Barack Obama seems to saying that this isn't the case.
> I recognize that there are those who believe that it’s time to discard the myth—that an examination of America’s past and an even cursory glance at today’s headlines show that this nation’s ideals have always been secondary to conquest and subjugation, a racial caste system and rapacious capitalism, and that to pretend otherwise is to be complicit in a game that was rigged from the start. And I confess that there have been times during the course of writing my book, as I’ve reflected on my presidency and all that’s happened since, when I’ve had to ask myself whether I was too tempered in speaking the truth as I saw it, too cautious in either word or deed, convinced as I was that by appealing to what Lincoln called the better angels of our nature I stood a greater chance of leading us in the direction of the America we’ve been promised.
> I don’t know. What I can say for certain is that I’m not yet ready to abandon the possibility of America—not just for the sake of future generations of Americans but for all of humankind.
I see this as a philosophical debate boiling over into the public. Radical philosophers have been saying for a long time now that everything is a question of power and domination, that anyone pretending otherwise is complicit, and that -- in the final analysis -- the mere classification of things is a violent act. On the other side, you have people who are essentially liberal pushing back, insisting on the usefulness of ideals, pointing out that incremental progress is possible, and arguing for the necessity of a common language to talk about the world we have in common.
This too is a problem we can solve with technology: