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Comment by cavisne | Hacker News Reader

We know large language models are super important to google, and there are lots of competitors.

If they approved the paper the message would be "google thinks language models are a waste of resources and racist". There would be no academic debate on this topic as its been framed as woke and published by a militant activist, so any disagreement would be racist (see prior interactions between this researcher and other researchers [1]).

Thats why the standard process of publishing, peer reviewing, academic critique etc would not work.

Why would their researchers working on language models stay? when they can go to Facebook, OpenAI etc. Why would new researchers join?

[1] https://syncedreview.com/2020/06/30/yann-lecun-quits-twitter...

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Academic debate is, in fact, done through conferences and journals. You saying there can be no debate is a strawman position with no basis in reality. The idea that standard rigor cannot be applied to ethics research is absurd, and seems to insinuate that the entire field is absent discipline.

The proper response to her position would be to publish a response or critique. Attacking her entire field does nothing to further the conversation.

The statement that "Academic debate is, in fact, done through conferences and journals" is not strictly true. Specially given that a lot of reviews in more popular conference are very hit and miss. You can submit the same paper to the same conference multiple times and get wildly different opinions on the same paper.

The variation in reviewers' response is often due their lack of knowledge and unfamiliarity with the problem. Take a look at the recent reviews on some of the more popular conferences on OpenReview.net. Most of the reviews don't have any substance and are often vague/generic.

I'd take the reviews from peers that I trust and are aware of my work more seriously than reviewers of conferences.

She's got solid STEM credentials. If google managed to hire a "woke militant activist" instead of what they wanted... is that really much better?

Demand the best from your multi-billion dollar corporations.

I have to assume both sides here are adults that can deal with criticism of their chosen discipline without immediately resigning, or not joining a specific company over it.

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