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Comment by thundergolfer | Hacker News Reader

People are protesting it because she's unqualified and holds abhorrent positions on issues like climate change and LGBTQ rights.

This is a board concerned with AI Ethics, and so diversity isn't really an important part of the game. If she forwards positions which are unethical, and would forward a vision of AI that is unethical, then she should not be on the board.

Google shouldn't be so meek as to pretend that she has a valuable perspective on these issues merely being being conservative. Conservatives have been wrong on incredibly important issues many times before.

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Isn't the point of having different viewpoints so that they can argue over what is ethical? What's the point of a board to make decisions if everyone fundamentally believes the same thing? At that point, you already made your decisions and are trying to reinforce them in an echo chamber.

When some people say they want a diverse field of thought, what they really mean is they want a diverse field of thought that they agree with. I don't agree with some of her views, but that doesn't mean she shouldn't have a voice.

Not every viewpoint deserves equal space or time. One such useless viewpoint is that "Trans people shouldn't exist"

The UN human rights council has Saudi Arabia and the US on it, and they vehemently disagree on issues all the time.

This appears to be a better argument for excluding Saudi Arabia from the UN HRC than the position that all viewpoints are worth hearing.

It's the Human Rights Council after all, not the Human Rights Skeptics Council.

I'm pretty sure that's one of the reasons the UN human rights council is considered a useless organization

This fact is normally used to discredit the UN Human Rights Council.

Did the ex board member actually say this exact statement?

Or are you paraphrasing and dramatising for effect?

Such an inflammatory quote should surely have a reference to be taken seriously

From the horse's mouth: https://twitter.com/KayColesJames/status/1108365238779498497

That tweet doesn't include anything even close to "trans people shouldn't exist"

What's wrong with this tweet? This is a common view. Gender identity is a very extreme concept that erases sex as a protected characteristic.

Just as I suspected, she said nothing like "Trans people shouldn't exist" - you simply made up that quote. You are clearly not arguing in good faith.

Unfortunately everyone that replied to you was unable to understand clear bigotry when it isn't stated in comically brazen form.

I often see this hyperbolic statement ("Trans people shouldn't exist") being attached to anyone that doesn't go along with the entirety of the far-left progressive views on trans people. Most people who they attribute such a statement to are not saying "these people should not exist". There is a wide spectrum of views, most of which agree that trans people have a right to exist without threats to their person. The push back on the modern trans movement is often about nuances like whether trans women are women or a different category of their own.

I won't bother listing out the various reasons people might have to disagree with the modern trans movement. But attaching hyperbolic statements to make someone out to be genocidal is not appropriate and seems like a bad-faith rhetorical attack.

I've never seen anyone believe "Trans people shouldn't exist". The arguments tend to be around when and to what extent others must accept a trans person's gender identification.

No one wants to erase trans people from existence Thanos style.

From the horse's mouth:

https://twitter.com/KayColesJames/status/1108365238779498497

I grep'd for the words "exist" and "trans" in there and got zero matches. Please try again.

You're assuming that you know what "the" ethical position is, or at least that Google does. If that were really true, AI ethics, and indeed ethics in general, would not be an issue, and there would be no need for this board. Everyone would just consult the ethics authority to tell them what was ethical.

Do I need to spell out the problems with that?

You don't have to be absolutely confident in any particular moral system to have an extremely high degree of confidence that all sensible moral systems tell us to treat LGBT individuals with basic dignity (and to not destroy the planet, for that matter).

The point of an ethics board is, presumably, to work out the hard problems in ethics.

> You don't have to be absolutely confident in any particular moral system to have an extremely high degree of confidence that all sensible moral systems tell us to treat LGBT individuals with basic dignity

This assumes that you know what "basic dignity" means. But that's what the disagreement in the case you mention (LGBT) is about. To people who fundamentally oppose LGBT-ness, LGBT people are making a serious ethical mistake, one that affects society as a whole, not just them as individuals, and treating them with basic dignity requires taking that into account.

> The point of an ethics board is, presumably, to work out the hard problems in ethics.

All problems in ethics are hard problems. Thinking that that isn't true, that there are some ethical questions that are so obvious that a board of AI ethics doesn't need to consider them, is itself, I would say, an ethical mistake.

> This assumes that you know what "basic dignity" means.

It does indeed. And I do, indeed: basic dignity entails treating a person as an end in themselves, and never merely as a means.

> All problems in ethics are hard problems.

I don't think this is true. It's not particularly hard for me to answer that skinning cats alive for pleasure, pointlessly hurting other human beings, and irrationally loathing oneself are all obvious moral wrongs, in the sense we would not be willing to accept any moral system that permits them (much less encourages them).

As you mentioned in your parent comment, an ethics board should have a point. In order to have a point, we need to admit of at least some ethical baseline[1]. If not, we'll continue the most pointless ethical pursuit of all: re-litigating arguments that reduce to the ones we give philosophy undergraduates for practice. We have bigger fish to fry.

[1]: Even, as I have said, if that ethical baseline adheres to no particular moral system.

> basic dignity entails treating a person as an end in themselves, and never merely as a means

But this does not mean agreeing with every choice that person makes, or even agreeing that that person should be able to make all possible choices without getting disapproval from others or even without legal penalties. Even a murderer who is convicted on conclusive evidence can still be treated with basic dignity as you describe it; that doesn't mean we will give any weight to the murderer's complaints about being incarcerated.

> It's not particularly hard for me to answer that skinning cats alive for pleasure, pointlessly hurting other human beings, and irrationally loathing oneself are all obvious moral wrongs, in the sense we would not be willing to accept any moral system that permits them

Who is "we"? All of the activities you describe have been practiced by some human societies.

I think you are very overconfident in the universality of your particular ethical beliefs.

> But this does not mean agreeing with every choice that person makes, or even agreeing that that person should be able to make all possible choices without getting disapproval from others or even without legal penalties. Even a murderer who is convicted on conclusive evidence can still be treated with basic dignity as you describe it.

Absolutely. But what should I conclude about our ethics board from that? I don't think I'm undermining the anybody's dignity by claiming that the board should focus on more salient issues than how much dignity to grant various gender/sexual minorities.

> Who is "we"? All of the activities you describe have been practiced by some human societies. I think you are very overconfident in the universality of your particular ethical beliefs.

We is you and me, on today, 2019, benefiting from the moral failures of those that precede us. Those that follow us will no doubt benefit from our moral failures.

We humans have done lots of bad things. I don't feel as if any worthy moral system (again, without committing to any system in particular) is threatened by the historicity of unjustified cruelty towards animals, other humans, and ourselves.

I also haven't presented any of my particular ethical beliefs, i.e. views that follow directly and uniquely from the particular moral system that I think is right. I've only presented ethical claims that I think all sound ethical systems uphold.

> what should I conclude about our ethics board from that?

That you should not believe you know the "right" answer to any ethical question.

> I don't think I'm undermining the anybody's dignity by claiming that the board should focus on more salient issues than how much dignity to grant various gender/sexual minorities.

Thinking that that question is not "salient" is the same mistake--you think it isn't salient because you think you already know the right answer. But what if you don't? You're not even considering that possibility, and that, I think, is a fatal mistake for an ethics board.

> We is you and me, on today, 2019, benefiting from the moral failures of those that precede us.

You're assuming you know which past beliefs were moral failures and which weren't. An ethics board shouldn't assume that.

> Those that follow us will no doubt benefit from our moral failures.

You're assuming you know that those particular things you cited aren't moral failures. An ethics board shouldn't assume that.

> I also haven't presented any of my particular ethical beliefs

Sure you have. You've made claims that you know certain things are wrong. Every such claim is an ethical belief.

> I've only presented ethical claims that I think all sound ethical systems uphold.

And your claim that "all sound ethical systems" uphold these beliefs is an ethical belief of yours.

Do you mind if we continue this in the other thread? I think they're essentially duplicate conversations, and just one would be easier to follow.

Yes, agreed.

> all sensible moral systems tell us to treat LGBT individuals with basic dignity

100% agreed. But in context, GP said:

> holds abhorrent positions on issues like climate change and LGBTQ rights

and comments of a similar sentiment appear elsewhere. Yet nowhere do I see it specified what she actually said! Even many of the news articles I could find seem to be guilty of this as well. I did find one which links to some Tweets she made (https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/apr/01/google-ka...).

> .@Heritage’s DACA solution is simple: take care of American dreamers first, build the wall, and implement these 3 basic fixes to current policy.

So... she approves of the border wall. I don't personally agree, but hey.

> The #EqualityAct is anything but equality. This bill would shut down businesses and charities, politicize medicine, endanger parental rights, and open every female bathroom and sports team to biological males. Learn more here:

So she is against the EqualityAct and whatever that entails (I don't know anything about it) on the grounds that she doesn't want people who were once male in a female bathroom. Again I don't agree with her, and there are indeed strong arguments against her position, but I don't buy the argument that such views are abhorrent or entirely unreasonable.

> Today @heritage will critique gender identity @UN_CSW because powerful nations are pressing for the radical redefining of sex. If they can change the definition of women to include men, they can erase efforts to empower women economically, socially, and politically.

Well that's certainly a complicated issue, and one not well suited to a Tweet. But again, agree or disagree with her, I hardly think it's abhorrent or entirely unreasonable.

On the whole I probably wouldn't have selected her myself, but this outrage is all beginning to look rather silly to me. I suspected as much when no one quoted her up front though.

> But again, agree or disagree with her, I hardly think it's abhorrent or entirely unreasonable.

This critically misstates the claim. I don't have to (and don't, in fact) find her "abhorrent" or think that her reasoning is invalid (although it is unsound). I think she's wrong, and that everybody should be on the same page about that. I don't want dawdling on my ethics committees.

> I think she's wrong

And that's precisely why she should be on your ethics committee. If the only people you allow on your committee are those you think are "right", you are shutting out precisely the people whose views your committee most needs to hear. If you hear their best arguments, and are able to rebut them, then you can have confidence that their views are indeed wrong. Or if you hear their best arguments, and realize you can't rebut them, then you will have learned something. But if you don't hear their arguments at all, how do you know whether you can rebut them or not? It's like having a trial where only the prosecution gets to speak.

> If the only people you allow on your committee are those you think are "right", you are shutting out precisely the people whose views your committee most needs to hear.

This is an annoying failure of language, and I'm mostly to blame for it. I mean that she's wrong in an undercutting sense: her position undermines the moral endeavour, rather that offering a valid alternative moral claim.

An ethics committee should obviously have people who disagree about the ethicality of a topic -- that's the point, after all. But it's an ethics committee, not a metaethics committee: it assumes that all humans have dignity, and doesn't admit of positions that reject that assumption.

Of course, none of this means that we can't debate the metaethical validity of "dignity." In fact, we should! But we shouldn't confuse that debate for ethics, and we especially shouldn't allow metaethical claims to undermine moral argumentation that has already assumed a basic framework.

> I mean that she's wrong in an undercutting sense: her position undermines the moral endeavour, rather that offering a valid alternative moral claim.

This is an ethical claim that you are making, and the board should not prejudge the answer to it. It should hear arguments on both sides.

> it assumes that all humans have dignity, and doesn't admit of positions that reject that assumption.

And your claim that the views you are excluding "reject the assumption" that all humans have dignity is an ethical claim, to which the board should not prejudge the answer.

> none of this means that we can't debate the metaethical validity of "dignity." In fact, we should! But we shouldn't confuse that debate for ethics

Meta-ethical debates are ethical debates. You can't prejudge the framework any more than you can prejudge any other ethical question. That's a key reason why all ethical questions are hard.

> Meta-ethical debates are ethical debates.

I think this is the fundamental disagreement.

Ethical debates are debates over ethical claims. Ethical claims are normative claims, i.e. claims about what ought to be the case. Metaethical debates are debates over metaethical claims. Metaethical claims are positive claims about normative objects, i.e. claims about what the objects of ethics are.

"Should we eat meat?" is an ethical debate with various opposing positions. "Is the Good the same thing as the Right?" a metaethical debate with various opposing positions. But, crucially, individuals with opposing metaethical positions cannot present sensibly opposing ethical positions: they're simply not reasoning about the same Good or Right, even if they're using the same words. Why should our ethical committee entertain such a futile endeavour?

> Metaethical claims are positive claims about normative objects

You can't make positive claims about normative objects, because any such claim ends up being a normative claim based on your personal judgment. You can't objectively test normative objects to establish claims about them the way you can with ordinary objects like rocks.

> Why should our ethical committee entertain such a futile endeavour?

It's not a futile endeavor, because if there are in fact groups of people with fundamentally opposed meta-ethical positions--for example, not agreeing on what the Good or the Right is--then figuring out how such people can coexist in the same society, or even on the same planet--or even whether they can--is an important ethical question that needs to be investigated. And it can't be investigated if only one view of what's Good or Right is represented.

> This critically misstates the claim.

Apologies, I didn't mean to imply that you personally stated exactly that (it was the GP that did). However the context (both this comment chain and the entire thread) is critically important here. The grandparent, many sibling comments, and many news articles all do state as much.

The bit I quoted from you was

> > all sensible moral systems tell us to treat LGBT individuals with basic dignity

which to me seems to imply that you think her views go against "basic dignity", which actually does seem to me to be roughly the same as claiming they are abhorrent.

> I think she's wrong

I agree.

> and that everybody should be on the same page about that. I don't want dawdling on my ethics committees.

Uhh... I vehemently disagree here. I don't want to dictate other's views, and I am very much against anyone who does want to do that. "Dawdling" on your ethics committee would be... people who don't share your views. Which isn't imo a valid reason to exclude them.

What it comes down to for me is that calling for someone's removal or exclusion on the basis of their views is to my mind an attempt to dictate moral values. On the other hand, calling for such on the grounds of poor reasoning ability citing past arguments they've made seems perfectly valid. As previously noted, if it were me she wouldn't be my first choice (or my second, or my third, or ...). But that's quite different from the current public outrage, calls for removal, claims of abhorrent viewpoints, etc, etc.

Check out my response to 'pdonis in this same thread.

I think it comes down to a distinction in kinds of views: contrasting versus undercutting. Ethics committees exist to bring together and flesh out contrasting ethical claims; they can't cope with claims that undercut the ethical endeavour itself. I take the ethical endeavour to fundamentally be about human dignity; someone who can't commit to that can't "do" ethics in any way that a committee will find useful.

I do agree that a committee likely won't be able to make meaningful progress if their views differ on too low a level.

I also suspect we would both agree that an ethics committee whose members don't hold views on human dignity that are reasonably similar to our own won't arrive at results that are useful to us personally (due to that difference in fundamental values).

I also (as previously noted) would agree that people with an established history of forwarding logically faulty arguments aren't going to prove useful and thus have no place on an ethics committee.

Where I disagree is your implication that her views are somehow opposed to our shared societal understanding (as Americans or westerners or whatever) of human dignity. Since I don't know her personally I suppose they might well be, but if so I've yet to see evidence of it.

What I see is an increasingly polarized rhetoric in the media on a number of topics. Unfortunately, that currently seems to extend to characterizing people who don't wholeheartedly agree with trans activists or who raise even reasonable questions about these things as being somehow immoral or unethical people. Such behavior seems to me only to stifle any useful discourse on the topic, drive people farther apart, and to actively push views on both sides towards ever farther extremes.

(As an aside, that last paragraph would seem to fit almost as well in any of the Facebook regulation threads of late. Looking at the history of the early 1900s, I honestly have to wonder if social media is really what's causing all these problems, including the one being discussed here, or if it simply makes visible the extreme polarization that currently exists.)

If you had a committee on space exploration with the goal of solving technical challenges in getting to Mars would you staff it with people who believed in a flat Earth? This whole idea that people with ignorant viewpoints belong on a pedestal because they have opposing views is just silly. We can reasonably say that some views are backwards and counterproductive especially in this case with the Heritage Foundation that deals in deception and the falsification of evidence.

Your emphasis on ethics is telling - you suppose there's just the one correct version? And diverse opinions are wrong opinions?

> This is a board concerned with AI Ethics, and so diversity isn't really an important part of the game.

This reads a lot like "diversity doesn't matter all of a sudden, because I disagree with some of the diverse views represented here"

It supposed to emphasise that in matters of ethics, when we have strong arguments for a particular position their isn't a need to invite weak arguments for position on the basis of promoting 'thought diversity'.

For instance on an Animal and Food ethics board it doesn't make sense to accomodate someone who denies the moral relevance of animals, because that is an indefensible view in modern philosophy. Their increasing the "diversity" of the viewpoints on the board would be of negative value, not positive value.

It is the same sort of situation here.

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