Yann LeCun is leaving Twitter | Hacker News Reader

Yann LeCun is leaving Twitter

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45 pointstmabraham19 comments

I’m no Yann LeCun, but I’ve been wondering whether I should do the same.

Twitter seems hyperoptimized for smug, self righteous character assassinations and group pile-ons. It’s not a place for nuanced discussion (bizarrely, I actually find Reddit far better for that, though it’s not without its own problems too).

Opening the app feels like unleashing thousands of shrieking voices telling you why you’re horrible person. I’m not sure the benefits outweigh the emotional drain.

The medium is the message, and the medium of Twitter is curt and obnoxious.

I've tried for a long time to curate some twitter feeds with various types of content but the negative and fingers in ears yelling (even when being 'positive') is endless / unavoidable.

I'll follow some folks I really respect and like and then they get in a nasty spat and it is like being at a dinner party where a couple has a fight in front of everyone.

Even folks who say stuff that generally I would 'agree' with post it in such a trite and bizarre way that I don't want anything to do with it.

I was told that the trick to making Twitter tolerable is to only follow interesting people in specific fields of interest.

I tried that and was immediately disappointed. It makes it obvious that someone who is an expert in one topic can be extremely naive about everything else. This isn’t really a surprise, but I’d rather not have a feed that seems to specialize in showing me all the emotional and largely political rants of people I respected. Twitter feels like one huge, awkward Thanksgiving dinner where everybody is looking to pick a political fight with everybody else over anything at all.

Reddit has huge moderation and organized shill issues. It's not uncommon to open up a contentious thread and see an ocean of [deleted] posts that were heavily upvoted.

Some of the power mods are, in my opinion, working for or are owned by advertising/PR/political agencies. Some power mods regularly violate their own subreddit rules to post hyper-partisan news (/r/worldnews for example explicitly forbids internal US news and politics but its mods regularly post such material).

That's completely why I've never used twitter in the first place. It's just a place for people to loudly shout their opinion into the void, no matter how incorrect or misinformed it is.

Then no-one can really argue against you because there's no real conversation threads in the UI, and the character limit isn't long enough to post a well thought out response.

ML exists in a murky grey area between variance and bias. This has profound effects on how it handles classifying people. If the variance is too high, it is overfitting on individual characteristics, potentially leaking PII. If the bias is too high, it is likely inappropriately lumping an individual in with a disadvantageous crowd/outcome.

There's nothing "intrinsic" about bias, and there's no way to effectively measure it universally. Simply handling African American facial features in a GAN would satisfy the situation in TFA, but there's undoubtedly another related bias issue lurking in the model.

Inevitably, handling bias in ML winds up being akin to playing whack-a-mole, handling only the situations where people are noisily complaining about something. This has always bothered me, but I've never found a satisfactory approach for dealing with it.

Discussion on reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/hhonq4/d_y...

It's clear that woke culture is driving people to stop engaging with it, as many of us here have probably also done in the name of preserving our mental health.

What I'm questioning is, what happens when everyone just stops fighting it? Do people think they can out-vote it?

It has control over academia (with STEM fields barely holding on), the major tech corporations, mainstream culture, and soon politics. This isn't an endorsement of Trump, I'm just stating facts.

All I see here is people saying "man, social media is really unhealthy smh" and no one seems to realize that they are willingly vacating all of the platforms where they can oppose what they deem to be unhealthy.

On Hacker News I still see people debating things like the handling of the coronavirus, the BLM movement, and other politically charged issues. I see some comments that make me angry, but mostly I either agree or disagree. I think it's quite well balanced and civil. I really like the moderation here, and I like that most people are willing to approach others' opinions with sincerity.

With the current trend, how long will that realistically last? Now that mainstream news, Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit are falling to toxic ideology, coercion and censorship, what's to stop it from happening here too?

I agree. It's a damned if you do damned if you don't situation. Ethics is the one field in which you shouldn't be unwilling to listen to counterviews because the premise of the field itself is so subjective.

Some earlier context: https://twitter.com/ylecun/status/1275194055257919495

Can someone clue me in on the whole story?

People are exceedingly obnoxious on Twitter, and LeCun got sick of it.

Isn't he uniquely qualified to help rectify bias issues. It seems odd to just leave.

I don't think AI is fixable when applied to humanity.

For example, laws have been passed at the city level (Santa Cruz, Boston) against facial recognition, but we need federal laws.

There was a Twitter kerfuffle about bias in AI: https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/hdi9hq/dis...

Even after reading through the discussion I don't understand why he was "wrong". He merely made a statement based on his expertise and offered a direction to fix bias in implementing AI systems.

I hope we can still follow him somewhere where he will not be attacked groundlessly while sharing the newest AI research progress. His research is inspirational.

There is more context here: https://venturebeat.com/2020/06/26/ai-weekly-a-deep-learning...

I appreciated this response thread by Nicolas Le Roux on twitter: https://twitter.com/le_roux_nicolas/status/12754857362597928... especially this: "Why did you reply by repeating what you thought was true, even after many explicitly told you that what you believed to be true was incorrect?" ... "did you watch the tutorials or read the papers that were pointed to you. What did you think of them?"

>"did you watch the tutorials or read the papers that were pointed to you. What did you think of them?"

As if he doesn't have better things to do then give opinions on people's papers and random tutorials about something he doesn't even disagree with. What would it accomplish?

Also: "Fourth, you asked to assume good intent (https://twitter.com/ylecun/status/1275174556152586240), which is known to maintain the balance of power"

Asking to assume good intent is now a power move to the left? This is "known"? Awesome.

Well, mission accomplished, Yann LeCun won't be participating in this discourse any more, and we're all better off, right?

Good for him. I still have no idea what that website is for and why people use it in earnest (i.e. not for joke or 'bit' accounts like dril)

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