Aggressive, sure, but also seems:
a. reasonable for AI ethics experts to "lead" in issues surrounding AI ethics
b. not the cardinal sin of discussion that it appears to be viewed as here.
You'll see people here defending Linus or Elon Musk for saying objectively way worse stuff than this.
Somehow Timnit is defined by this discussion, but Elon isn't defined by calling a rescue diver a pedophile with no evidence or Linus telling someone to kill themselves.
> the expert in your field and you have work for this person, who controls your career and compensation
Must be harder when your CEO boss has a tendency to call domain experts pedophiles, yet I see Musk praised frequently here.
Your description above sounds like gatekeeping to me - not saying that is the researcher’s intent - but it doesn’t seem to make for good science
If you work in an area that is written off, you need a strong advocate, and from everything I've seen, she was that strong advocate both for herself and for those who reported to her.
She says talking down to an actual expert in ML who gave an opinion on ML
I can see how this would get frustrating fast if your opinion is held among many Google engineers.
To use an example that comes up: do we solve the ethical qualms of a system that predicts incarceration rate based on facial structure by getting a better dataset? Is it even ethical to attain such a "better" dataset, what does "better" even mean in the context?
A: Training data is a cause of this bias
B: But not the only cause
A: True
A: Training data is a cause of this bias
B: I am so sick of this. You are not permitted to speak.
A: I am deleting my Twitter account.> You are not permitted to speak.
I really don't think this is a fair reading of her tweet. I don't see any way to read her actual tweet claiming Yann can't speak at all on the subject. I do see a plea to engage more with domain experts (which to reiterate: my understanding is that Yann has a history of ignoring on the subject)
But if you change to a different topic like privacy then these same people really get all of this nuance that they completely seem to miss here...