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Comment by yummyfajitas | Hacker News Reader

[flagged]

> because there are things man should not know

I get that you like to take contrarian positions. But you also make a habit of inserting flamebait into your posts about them. This combination is trolling. If you continue to do this we will ban you.

Specifically, we need you to stop playing the following game on HN:

  1. Post contrarian view
  2. Include provocation
  3. People get provoked
  4. Act like people can't handle your truth

Accidental trolling—e.g. triggering a flamewar with an unintended turn of phrase—is venial. But when you consistently generate such effects, you become responsible, regardless of what's wrong with others or their views. You passed that line on HN a long time ago. I'm told that self-responsibility is a conservative value and even recall you posting many criticisms of people whom you consider not to practice it. Please practice it here.

We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14116469 and marked it off-topic.

You're wildly mischaracterizing what I said. I didn't suggest "people can't handle my truth". I suggested the article we are discussing says there are certain truths that ML systems should not learn.

The article explicitly recommends building systems which can't learn those things, and suggests characterizing them is a first step:

"We recommend addressing this through the explicit characterization of acceptable behavior. One such approach is seen in the nascent field of fairness in machine learning, which specifies and enforces mathematical formulations of nondiscrimination in decision-making (19, 20). Another approach can be found in modular AI architectures, such as cognitive systems, in which implicit learning of statistical regularities can be compartmentalized and augmented with explicit instruction of rules of appropriate conduct (21, 22)."

According to the article, the most closely related work "is concurrent work by Bolukbasi et al. (6), who propose a method to “debias” word embeddings."

(Recall that in the context of the article, "bias" is something that generates true predictions that are objectionable rather than something which is false.)

I don't believe I mischaracterized anything; you did throw a gratuitous provocation in that comment (more than one in fact). Obviously, though, I'm not describing one comment but a longstanding pattern. If you want to continue commenting on HN, this needs to stop.

I've made many attempts to explain, don't believe anyone could accuse us of being impatient with you, and do believe you're more than smart enough to understand. If your account consistently produces troll effects on HN, which it does, then at some point it's you who are responsible—not people who can't handle the truth, don't want 'man' to know things, don't know math, or however else you blame others. At some point enough is enough.

If you really need a further explanation I'd be happy to try, but would need some indication that you're asking in good faith.

I would argue that if anybody is trolling, they are the authors of the article.

Alternative and less biased conclusion: language corpora reflects statistical distributions in the society.

That's a separate issue.

when you consistently generate such effects, you become responsible, regardless of what's wrong with others or their views

Sure, some of yummyfajtias comments are a bit trollish but he points out real contradictions in submissions and other comments. I have his threads bookmarked and visit them directly to check my thinking. It would be a huge loss for HN.

It's like the Socrates thing all over again. You would be banning someone offering interesting insight for upsetting the social order of the place.

Fortunately the trollish bits are easy to drop if one wants to, so we're not asking Socrates for much.

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