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Comment by foota | Hacker News Reader

Her previous papers look pretty serious to me, along with her resume. I see nothing to suggest she's not qualified.

https://ai.stanford.edu/~tgebru/

What do you mean by pretty serious? I looked at three, two are about better documenting ML models/data, and one is about inferring the political leanings of an area by what type of cars are parked in it. None seem particularly groundbreaking to me...

Her work on identifying bias in facial recognition has won quite a number of awards.

Ground-breaking might be a strong word but it does move the industry forward.

Do you have a link to that paper? I'd like to read it, though I wasn't thrilled by the way she handled (or didn't) Yann LeCun.

You can see some of the recognition on her Wikipedia page:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timnit_Gebru

Honestly? I don't have much experience with ML and in particular issues of bias in ML (though I have a general understanding of a lot of the former), so I don't really feel qualified to evaluate her more recent work, but her older stuff definitely appeared like what I'd expect from a machine learning practitioner, so I don't think attacking her as someone that only understands social sciences (which I perceived the parent as doing) to be fair.

> I see nothing to suggest she's not qualified.

Your argument sounds like a red herring. Qualified for what? I didn't noticed the OP making any remark on the author's qualifications.

And by the way, you should think things through before pulling appeals to authority to try to defend the credibility of researchers. See James Watson, a nobel laureate and a founder of modern genetics, and his comments on race and gender.

> I didn't noticed the OP making any remark on the author's qualifications.

Did you not read the first sentence of OP's post?

"Ok, so basically she is a bullshit social engineer, masquerading as an 'AI ethics researcher'"

If you take a step back and read the snippet you cherry-picked, I believe you'll be able to understand that it referred to how the author is trying to pass opinions on social engineering under the guise of research on AI ethics.

That does not mean at all that the author lacks qualifications.

When you accuse someone of pretending to be an "AI ethics researcher" you are stating that they lack the qualifications to hold that title.

Pretty obtuse to suggest otherwise.

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