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Comment by naturalgradient | Hacker News Reader

I understand the call of money but I cannot help but feel very negatively towards academics doing this with facebook of all organisations. After recent events, they cannot pretend not to know the impact and damage their work may have here. Excusing yourself with "I am just a researcher, I don't have anything to do with how my work is used" is just not good enough any more.

I would categorically reject any collaborations with FB as an academic in ML.

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Completely agree with this.

I see Facebook as the least ethical, and least useful from a civilization standpoint of all the big tech firms.

Google is driven by the same ad-clicking incentives, but the one-tricky pony has been developing other extremely societally useful tech, like self-driving cars and other moonshot projects.

Apple and Microsoft sell products, they do not make users the product (on the whole). Together they pioneered computing revolutions, and I'm confident history will judge them for making a positive contribution (on the whole).

Amazon is a leviathan whose societal value I find more difficult to classify, but I genuinely derive lots of value from their service personally. It's good for my lifestyle.

Facebook on the other hand, is a waste of my time, mental energy and a drain on society. As an academic, how can you turn your mind to furthering its goals?

That might be true, but don't confuse FAIR (their DL research lab) with FB. FAIR employs good people doing interesting and useful research. They promoted pytorch as a framework, and it is perhaps the best framework for non industrial applications.

On a parallel line of thought, I prefer FB's React to Google's Angular. In both React and Pytorch I see the same elegant design. TensorFlow and Angular on the other part are unnecessarily complicated.

I agree with the general principle, expressed fairly crudely, that - good, innovative things (React) can come out of bad places (Facebook, in my opinion).

That's historically true of lots of research innovation though.

War (generally accepted as bad thing!) has advanced technology and civilization repeatedly.

At least the scientists aiding war (on average) had some awareness that killing people is clearly not a good thing, and at absolute best a necessary evil. Can the same be said of the people at Facebook?

The culture of their management is to be in denial about how damaging their service is to the mental health of individuals and society.

FAIR is part of FB. The reason why FB invests billions of dollars into FAIR is because it supports its business model and its democracy-wrecking product. FAIR researchers are complicit in the societal damage perpetrated by FB. They're cashing the (multi-million $) checks, and in exchange they work on making FB more powerful, by giving it better AI.

When you talk to these guys (they're almost all guys), you realize they're fully aware of what they're doing, and in the back of their minds they know FB is evil. They just like the money too much.

This is 100% about money trumping conscience. FAIR researchers may be millionaires, but they're ethically challenged. I wouldn't trade place with them. These people disgust me.

The $$ they can get from anywhere else in industry given how hot research level ML experience is (and how scarce this talent is). I imagine the appeal of FAIR is much more about the academic freedom. But sure the $$ doesnt hurt.

> given how hot research level ML experience is

Interestingly the head of the Pittsburgh lab here isn't even an ML researcher -- she is primarily known for her motion capture work and for running Disney Research.

At that level, they could be making the same money at any of the other tech companies, with the same freedom and same caliber of coworkers.

I highly doubt most of them believe that FB and the work they’re doing is evil. They would have no incentive to work there if they did.

History will also judge Alphabet with a positive mindset (T&C apply!). Google did to web what Apple,MS did to computing. Google files patents but doesn't extract royalty from it unlike MS. I think next 10 years will be really crucial to Alphabet( not talking about Google here). The work Calico, Verily,Loon, Dandelion Energy are doing takes time to create impact. I think Google, Calico,Verily are going to make considerable contributions to healthcare.

Our products aren't perfect, and we understand that we have a lot of work to do.

However, the fundamental purpose of our products is to allow people to efficiently communicate with each other. Hard for me to square that with "drain on society." I have many friends who, via Facebook, found a connection that was life changing: from finding a job, a spouse, to a community to deal with the loss of a loved one or support after being diagnosed with a terminal illness.

One of the things that draws AI researchers to come work at Facebook is the opportunity to see their work make a positive impact on billions of people around the world.

The research done by FAIR is helping us do things like deliver billions of translations a day, provide automatic photo captions for people who are visually impaired, and help bring blood donors and people in need together. It also helps us spot when someone is expressing thoughts about self-harm so we can alert first responders.

But we also believe there's even more we can do to help bring the world closer together, to give people a voice, and to open up new opportunities for everyone. AI is a key part of that and we believe pretty deeply in the power of open research to help not just us but the whole industry.

Is this what you tell yourself in order to sleep at night? From the perspective of an external observer, this talk of "making the world more open and connected (and making billions in the process)" seems shockingly disconnected from the reality of the damage that FB is causing in America and in the world.

You talk about impact. There's no doubt FB is making a big impact. Unfortunately, it's overwhelmingly destructive impact. As someone in position to change that, it would be great for you not to dismiss out of hand the valid concerns of the people in this thread. Personally, it's because of replies like this (in particular zuck's attitude) that I have zero confidence in FB's potential to fix its products in the future. Bye bye democracy I guess.

One day you may be held responsible for your impact on the world. I hope the talk about making the world a better place will work out then.

> The research done by FAIR is helping us do things like deliver billions of translations a day, etc...

All for the purpose of increasing buy-in to an increasingly Orwellian digital surveillance regime.

> But we also believe there's even more we can do to help bring the world closer together...

What brings people closer together is real human interaction and connection. Face to face communication with visible emotion. Vulnerability. FB's video chat is the only thing serving that interest, but that's better served elsewhere with less tracking. Posts that broadcast one-way to an invisible audience are inhuman. Filter bubbles are toxic. Widespread use of FB is cancerous on the social fabric of society.

This post kind of reminded me of one of those drug commercials with old people happily skipping hand-in-hand through a field of flowers. The only difference is that you forgot to quickly list the many terrible side effects of your product at the end.

Tell your PR team the appeal to emotion was a nice touch. If I didn't know anything about your company I might have even been able to get through it without feeling absolutely nauseated.

> the fundamental purpose of our products is to allow people to efficiently communicate with each other

No, the fundamental purpose of your products is to efficiently surveil, profile and manipulate your users on behalf of your customers.

> It also helps us spot when someone is expressing thoughts about self-harm so we can alert first responders

What happens when those first responders bust someone's door down and your "helpful" feature essentially becomes algorithmic swatting?

On a semi-related note, did you guys ever figure out how many of the hundreds of thousands of people you enrolled in an emotional manipulation study without their consent ended up killing themselves as a result? It's a given that the figure isn't zero across that number of people.

All of these goals are positive. I also assume that's all of the goals that you focus on.

But it's an abuse of power to only look at one side of the equation.

Companies are run by people, and at the end of the day, no person would want to dump their money into a technology that couldn't yield any financial gains. Where do all the large companies get most of their revenue from? From figuring out how to trigger dopamine to be released into our brains, and we're starting to see the negative effects it's having on people.

Also, you aren't giving people voices. You're opening up a door to a world where they have no control over. In their outrage, and futility, they focus more and more time trying to fix something that doesn't exist.

Even if Facebook were completely evil, why not take their money? They will benefit from your research just as much even if you don't take it, because you're publishing it. Are you concerned that Facebook is telling the scientists what to work on?

Fb's research in computer vision has produced works like training a neutral net on large datasets in 1 hour, instance segmentation neural nets, and many more, and made the code and research public with nonrestrictive licenses. These are pushing the state of art! Check out the work yourself and then come back and criticize these scientists if you feel that their work is a net negative on the world.

Oh I am sure they add value.

The question as you so rightly point out is whether there is a net value added.

If we took their AI contributions and JS frameworks on one side of the equation, do you really think it balances the other side of the equation?

On that right side lies encouraging general disinformation leading to broken elections and even aiding genocide. Academic studies on happiness show using Facebook and Instagram correlates with poor mental health; that research has been replicated.

What product actively damages those that consume it?

Facebook is the digital equivalent of the Tobacco industry; good business that's bad for people.

Honestly at this point it is also ethically "controverse" to work for facebook in any position.

Obviously, in my personal opinion and I can understand that a lot of people don't care about it

Heck, you could even go as far as saying that Facebook is ethically "challenged".

I think you can go even farther, to, "intentionally malicious".

Mark hasn't taken back his comments about his users being "dumb fucks" for "trust[ing]" him, as far as I know, although he has apparently said that he regrets saying it[0].

[0] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/09/20/the-face-of-fa...

Source: research and I've asked FB myself

> he has apparently said that he regrets saying it

What's the difference between this and taking it back?

One could still think it, but regret that they said it aloud/sent it as a text message, such that others heard/read it.

Well said, and totally agree. They've had too many whoopsie moments and seem entrenched in not learning or changing what is fundamentally broken in their management and business model. They have no legitimate place in research or academia.

It's a bit of a poisoned grail, though. On the one hand, you're selling your soul. On the other hand, they have data beyond your wildest dreams and you can use it all for anything as long as it might make money.

Would you take that offer? Would I? Probably not. But I can see the appeal, and plenty of people wouldn't hesitate.

But I can see the appeal, and plenty of people wouldn't hesitate.

It will keep happening until these companies are a black mark on your CV, like say a tobacco company might be. Will people be so eager if it means they will be shunned by the wider research and engineering communities?

FB and Google are the only ones pushing the industry forward. The huge amount of data and computing power is what brings these researchers, its not all about money. In the long run the scientific advancements from these companies is a much higher positive than the negatives they have in the present.

Any researcher in this area worth their salt can easily get cloud credit grants and collaborations from Google, Microsoft, Amazon. I pose if you go to Facebook, it's very much about money.

But can they get the huge volumes of data they have tagged out? The real time pipelines and internal tools? The community of people they will be working with?

>>> FB and Google are the only ones pushing the industry forward. The huge amount of data and computing power is what brings these researchers, its not all about money. In the long run the scientific advancements from these companies is a much higher positive than the negatives they have in the present.

> But can they get the huge volumes of data they have tagged out? The real time pipelines and internal tools? The community of people they will be working with?

It's highly problematic when a researcher pushes ethics aside in order to gain access to data and chase "long run ... scientific advancements."

the huge volumes of data they have

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fruit_of_the_poisonous_tree

What actions by Facebook do you see as particularly heinous above what's done at Google?

Can't speak for the parent but for one thing I don't recall reading about Google messing with 600,000 users’ emotions without their knowledge.

In the long run the scientific advancements from these companies is a much higher positive than the negatives they have in the present.

That’s really the main question, isn’t it?

tell that to the royhinga who were betrayed by facebook and subsequently killed.

i'll be waiting for the scientific advancements to be useful to the public. so far they've increased rates of depression, anxiety, etc while enabling totalitarianism.

This is incorrect, in my opinion. FB and Google are where capital is currently concentrated in the software industry; therefore, they are able to hire a lot of the top software talent out there. This talent is responsible for pushing the industry forward, and it often does so in a manner that is largely company-agnostic. This is why we get React help pages telling us to use Enzyme from AirBnb for running tests - because the work is being done by software developers who are building general infrastructure for the web, and who would probably end up doing the same basic work regardless of who was paying their salaries.

It's best to think of Silicon Valley as two entities: a mass of technology workers who build software, and a financial extraction function that attempts to extract value from the work they do.

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