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Comment by joshuamorton | Hacker News Reader

> whereas she repeatedly encouraged her supporters to attack LeCun, and avoided his points.

This is historical revisionism, colored by your misremembering of the events. If you go back and look, you'll be unable to find Gebru encouraging anyone to attack LeCun.

Nor will you find LeCun making an effort to engage with Gebrus research. He never so much as acknowledges the existence of her publications when asked to read or comment on them.

E: as an amusing example of the importance of this kind of research, my phone decided that when I typed "Gebru", I meant "Henry".

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So as I recall, you're right that she didn't encourage people explicitly, but she kept retweeting other supporters attacking LeCun, whereas LeCun kept telling his supporters to not attack her, and talked very positively of her. I agree my phrasing is muddying the waters, I should have been more precise.

On another note, it's interesting to me that I keep seeing the LeCun debate come up here again and again as an example of her being a bad-faith debater, given that it technically doesn't have anything to do with this Google debate.

Whether we agree with her on the substance, I feel like it strengthens my point that she badly damaged her perception amongst the ML/AI crowd, and their willingness to give her the benefit of the doubt in the way she chose to debate LeCun.

I think twitter is a better representation of the actual ML community than HN. Yes, her reputation suffered amongst a group predisposed to consider her area of research to be something between not real and propaganda (both sentiments I've seen expressed and upvoted!).

It's possible, I'm not on twitter so don't really know how it played out there. I agree there's definitely a large population on HN with simplistic and reactionary political inclinations[1] that's predisposed to dislike her. I guess I'm going off the fact that I myself was put off by the way she argued, and I consider myself more progressive then the median HN-er.

[1] The fact that you're getting downvoted without explanation (at this particular moment) is a good example of that to be honest. Your responses are just providing further context and understanding about the issue, there's no reason it should be downvoted other then the fact that people don't like that you're supporting Gebru.

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