An Open Letter to the Communications of the ACM
docs.google.com
docs.google.com
https://newdiscourses.com/2020/09/first-amendment-case-freed...
The non-believers are just unlucky enough to be within the blast radius.
Once you see it as a religious war it's by far the best analogy to understand the dynamics, at least to me. It's also potentially more than an analogy to the point where the underlying belief system ought to be treated as a religion from a legal standpoint, for the benefit of everyone involved, including the believers.
If "religious war" means a sectarian war, in which both sides are believers, just believers in different sects (often different only in details so minor that outsiders can't even see what the fuss is about), then I agree. I'm not aware, historically, of anything called a "religious war" that wasn't a sectarian war in that sense.
This might just be a difference in terminology. However, it might not. If you think one of the sides in the "religious war" we are talking about is "unbelievers", then we disagree on something of substance. "Unbelievers" in this context would mean people who just think we should have free speech, period; that nobody should be suppressed simply because of what they are saying. But, as I said in my previous comment, I don't think either side in the current "religious war" meets this criterion; both sides agree that some speech should be suppressed, they just disagree on exactly which speech.
Note that this applies not just to the particular "dustup" referenced in the open letter, but to the larger "cold war" you describe. Nobody is fighting for free speech, period. The different sides are just fighting for different rules about what can be suppressed. One side's rules currently seem a lot more draconian than the other's, but both sides want some such rules.
In this specific back-and-forth in academia, the underlying difference once you get past superficialities and rhetorical tricks to pull people into one side or the other by glossing over fundamental premises, is not about what speech is permissible or not. Both sides have their views on that claim emerge from their underlying worldviews around how racism, discrimination, gender stereotypes, and things inject themselves into human interactions and what levers exist for affecting those influences.
My use of 'sects' in this example was a bit of a misnomer, I consider the situation going on here to just be a conflict that's emerging due to these divergent worldviews that is localized around a specific community and domain, and the rift is cast in stark relief when situations like this finally manifest.
"Scientific work should be judged on the basis of scientific merit, independent of the researcher's identity or personal views"
This stands in direct opposition to the (increasingly common) belief that scientific merit is at best just one aspect, at worst a complete myth, and that the "lived experience" of the author (particularly through their racial and gender experience) contributes as much, if not more, to the validity and weight one ought to give to their scientific contributions and the conclusions they draw from them.
This may sound ridiculous and you may think "surely they don't actually mean what it sounds like they are saying" but indeed they do, strongly. This is why it ought to be treated as a religion.
The reason it ties back to the worldview I mentioned is if you believe that all human experience is merely an expression of oppressive forces and cultural constructs then "lived experience" ought to be the primary determinant of truth, since the scientific method itself is one such cultural construct, and likely a tool of oppression at that given its Euro-centric origins, and hence deeply flawed and broken in comparison to the "truth" of the collective experiences of diverse people.
Yes, I get what the writers of the letter say they are arguing for. I'm just not buying it.
What is this "scientific merit"? What it turns out to mean, on closer inspection, is "consensus of people who have scientific credentials in the applicable fields". Which is just as much of an "artificial social construct" as the BS they are complaining about.
In other words, the problem is actually much worse than these letter writers realize. As I said: the problem is not that a bunch of "unbelievers" who just want to decide things rationally are fighting against religious zealots. The problem is that all of the sides who are fighting are religious zealots--just of different religious sects. In science, for example, nobody is fighting for "scientific merit is judged by predictive track record, and nothing else--if your theory makes wrong predictions it is wrong, period, no matter how many credentials you have or how many papers you have published or how many other scientists agree with you".
Note that this is not directly articulated in the letter either; but if you look at how science is being done today, including the science these letter writers are doing, that's what you'll see. At least, that's what I see.
Which science as an institution is supposed to help protect us against, yes. But science as an institution as it currently exists, which is the institution that all these academics are working in, does not do that. And these academics are simply not talking about that at all; I doubt if they even realize it.
It's interesting that the "lived experience" of artists is fully factored into the personal branding and marketing of those artists. I wonder if academics just have an expectation that this is what diversity inclusion looks like.
Could not find that part of the letter—mind quoting the passage supporting this claim?
If they were really for free speech, period, that's what they would say. But they don't say that. They say they are for "the free and unfettered conduct of scientific research and debate". But who gets to decide what counts as "scientific research and debate" and what doesn't? They do.
Also: who says they do decide what’s scientific research and debate?
Because that is how academia works. And they're all academics.
No, they're not. Scientific research and debate are not the only topics that get discussed at academic institutions; in fact no topic should be off limits for discussion at academic institutions. Nor should the institutions themselves have any privileged position in deciding what counts as relevant for a particular topic, whether it's scientific research and debate or anything else.
Do you think that these same scientists would claim that researching, say, eugenics, is an acceptable use of an academic institution's resources and brand name? If not, who's drawing the line and what is the line?
The ranking is simply a comparison of that number.
So you’d first have to define the relevant part of the population, which is hopeless. And then you have debates about who should be part of the debate, which is not much better than what we have now.
Did I suggest otherwise?
It may be hard to do accurately, but that doesn't make it hopeless. If both sides want to exclude "crackpots" and people who's contributions lack technical quality, that is simply accounted for in the estimate. Whether you think that's fair to therefore characterize everyone as "intolerant" is another matter . I certainly wouldn't characterize them that way, though I get the impression the parent poster might, though perhaps only as a way to claim moral equivalence between all sides. I would expect there to remain quantifiable differences between those who claim they want a "healthy debate from all sides" and those who want to achieve social progress by limiting access to the debate.
[Disclaimer: The following is a description of my current thoughts on the topic. I could very well be wrong, but I thought sharing them might make for an interesting discussion.]
That said, I have an anti-PC view on this topic that AFAICT is somewhat a-religious. My perception (i.e., I very well may be wrong) has been that the pro-PC arguments I've heard contain some logical inconsistencies that I've been unable to resolve. And that some organizations with pro-PC policies use ad baculum or ad hominem attacks to avoid serious debate about their position's weaknesses. I think it's obnoxious to force others to obey their moralizing while refusing to submit their views to serious debate.
I agree, but it is even more obnoxious than that. Watching from the sidelines of Twitter, anyone who challenges a 'canceller' just gets bombarded with name calling (racism, sexism, phobic, etc) even if they're not and even if the comments were well intention ed
Each belief is to some extent unfalsifiable. There's no scientific or first-principles reasoning that tells us which value should take precedence in a given situation.
The actual nonbelievers are the ones who have no interest in the war, and will go along with whichever position their social circles deem acceptable.
Core values can't be falsified, but a belief system built atop these values can be shown to be inconsistent, meaning it can essentially be used to argue for anything. Like in mathematics, an ideal system would pick core axioms/values that don't lead to inconsistency.
yeah, i dont mind losing freedom of speech, i never had any. why should everyone else have freedom?
except it didnt work. "freedom of speech" was narrowly defined and limited to only some groups which had real freedom. meanwhile, other topics were taboo either explicitly with laws, through threads, or by blacklisting in newsmedia.
consider black rights. the BLM movement didnt start now because it just happened now, it started now because we finally got to a point where more people stood up to demand rights. in the 1980s and 1990s, if you had a black criminal on a tv show or movie, it was "artistic freedom" but if you had a jewish villain, it was "anti-semitism"
for decades, those with power decided what freedom was allowed (criticizing arabs) and which would be legally disallowed (boycotting israel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-BDS_laws
except now people got smart, basically now no one has freedom of speech because everyone can cancel everyone. is it productive? no, but it is more fair than only some groups getting freedom of speech and pretending the country was fair
since the principle of falsibiability itself is unfalsifiable, I can't accept it on the basis of hypocrisy.
For example, You can believe that structural inequality is real and very bad while still holding academic freedom and freedom of speech as more important (its not like they are even conflicting views. Entrenched power structures hinder the abilities of the descriminated to effectively exercise their freedoms). Or you can believe that there are power structures (invisble and visible) that reenforce inequity, but blindly tearing them down in a revolutionary fashion will just replace them with an even worse systems, just like how in politics most revolutions against oppression result in a new government that is even more oppressive. I'm sure there are even more views then that.
I think that the two sides come into conflict when each believes theirs is the supreme ideal. There are some who believe that destroying inequitable power structures justifies overriding freedom of speech[0]. Many feel strongly that no cause is worth sacrificing that freedom. Most of us may have a more nuanced view, but the war is mostly fought between the absolutists.
> most revolutions against oppression result in a new government that is even more oppressive
A lot of freedoms were also won through rebellious or revolutionary action. "Revolutions usually aren't worth it" could be a valid reading of history, but it's not the takeaway from my (admittedly limited) reading.
[0]https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/11/20/40-of-mille...
For example: https://www.mpd150.com/faq/
Not really, just more of the same. Sounds completely delusional.
Defensive violence (or a credible ability to project it) is the best cure for offensive violence. It exists in every society, either officially (cops) or unofficially (gangs, mafia, warlords, private guards, ...).
All these "no police" proposals fail when trying to answer the most basic question, "what do I do when someone steals my car with my kid in it". Mind you - they're fully aware that the only possible answer is "violence" - either cops or private guns - which is why they're desperately trying to avoid having to answer this question. But this also makes all these proposals completely unworkable in reality.
It's basically the same as idealistic communes - yeah, you can "peacefully coexist" in a "free for all, cooperative, no ownership, no conflict" society - as long as you outsource enough of the essentials (military, police, social security, emergency medical & fire services, ...) to the rest of the society. But there's no examples (and plenty of counter-examples) of an actual society (large, post-industrialized one) existing in this way.
> The root cause of people wanting to steal cars is not a lack of police
If your idea takes as preconditions solving greed, poverty and mental illnesses, you're better of finding a different idea, one that's even remotely possible.
"Defund the police" is accomplishing nothing other than making mainstream voters deeply suspicious that any "reforms" are actually designed to benefit gang members. You are creating a political climate which makes the problems nearly impossible to "take on" effectively.
For what it's worth, the "woke" people that I know in the real world (not twitter) are in fact advocating the sorts of "actual solutions" you mentioned. I know some people pushing hard for police reform but not dismantling or defunding of police. Actually none of those ideas strike me as very controversial. The more controversial "real-world" woke ideas I've seen are around affirmative action, forced pay equality, etc. And yes, I understand the arguments against those things.
Notably, Pedro Domingos recently fought against NeurIPS' ethics/social impact requirement in research papers. The argument here is likely related, that science be portrayed in a vacuum and not be diminished based on possible societal harm or political biases.
We've seen that go terribly wrong in other fields, and in the ML field.
I think a system where area chairs skim abstracts and solicit these ethics paragraphs where they seem necessary -- so, not for the billionth paper obtaining pretty bounds for some variant of convex optimization -- makes more sense.
I know that "think of the machine learning researchers!" is not a take that engenders sympathy, but we're probably talking thousands of human hours spent writing these things. It's not nothing.
But the subtext of this letter goes fairly deep (and to be clear this isn't meant as a response to you specifically):
- While it doesn't specifically say it, this letter does appear to be at least somewhat anti-ethical concerns in general, which isn't good.
- At least one of the signatories of this letter has not, in my opinion at least, followed the guidelines in this letter. Insinuating that a colleague of holds an opinion because they watch too much online porn is in no way civil, and is absolutely a personal attack.
- Given the "disagreement" between Domingos and Anandkumar, who as others mention, sits on the ACM editorial board, this could be an attempt to censure or "cancel" her for her personal views. This is antithetical to the values held in the letter itself, and leaves a sour taste.
Shouldn't her actions at least be censured? Her behavior has corrupted the science community, limited speech, created a culture of fear, and is ultimately inhibiting others' from freely disseminating their findings to the rest of the community (at NeurIPS and elsewhere) unless the author and/or their work passes a political purity test, effectively. If that's not discouraged, then I think science and open discourse will continue to be under attack.
What specifically has she done that "corrupted the science community", that "limited speech", that "created a culture of fear", and that is ultimately "inhibiting others from freely disseminating their findings"? List the particular actions she took that did such things. I don't think there are any.
The closest you can get, I feel, is that Domingos and perhaps some anonymous others felt that her list of people who she wished to educate and discuss with was going to be used to attack them. This never actually happened though. Domingos claimed that the list would be used in such a way, and then it was deleted.
I could just as easily claim that Domingos created a culture of fear by making hyperbolistic claims about the things that Anandkumar would do.
Don't know what you were hoping to show with this comment, maybe you were unaware that there were archive links of her tweets.
In any case, Domingos wasn't wrong, yet for some reason you seem far less willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, while asking others to do so for people you seem to agree with. Even in this case, for a person who clearly doesn't deserve it. I am curious as to why.
And yes, I think this is pretty clear since in other contexts Anima notes that she's trying to use this as a list of people to engage with and educate, and someone asks well what if I don't want to spend effort educating people, and this is her response. The idea that she should spend time trying to educate and engage with these people, but if you don't want to do that, you should try and get them fired doesn't really make much sense.
> In any case, Domingos wasn't wrong
I certainly think he was, and unlike Anandkumar, he's made no attempt to apologize and continues to grandstand.
Did you see anyone harass anyone on the list? Was that behavior condoned?
What part of that suggests harassment? I saw more than one case of positive interactions between Anandkumar and others who initially disagreed or were on the fence who then discussed things offline. That certainly didn't appear to be harassment.
In response to your below comment:
> The part you didn't quote. The part about "re-educating" them
The full tweet I'm quoting is
> I am looking for volunteers to try and change the minds of fanboys of Pedro (real people and not bots, everyone I saw is male). Especially junior people. We need to get them away from fanaticism. I can share my blocked list. We need #ALLY who can engage with them. Please DM me.
Heck, in another tweet she noted "My blocked list is not meant to be punitive."
There's nothing about "re-educating", and even searching up discussions here and on reddit that contained quotes of her tweets, I couldn't find anything mentioning "re-education", except your comment and one other in this thread. Neither references an originating tweet, and, not for lack of trying, I can't find anything on waybackmachine that includes the term, and I'd have assumed that someone would have taken the time to either comment on it or capture it at the time.
Could you please point out her use of the term, because I'm unaware of it. So the rest of your comment doesn't make much sense as it appears to be based significantly on words that weren't actually said, and further based on subtext and implications of words that, again, were never actually written.
> And if all that is fine, why did she apologize?
Perhaps because she's willing to apologize when she's made others feel uncomfortable. That's essentially what her apology says.
So: First try to re-educate them, and if that doesn't work, then cancel them. Said to a relatively large group of supporters.
And if all that is fine, why did she apologize?
I saw "re-education" in (at least) one of the posts here. It seemed to be a direct quote. I took that as being accurate. I have not gone groveling through every possible tweet that she sent to check the wording.
So either the quote was accurate, in which case it was bad wording (at least) and the apology is perhaps a bit lacking. Or the quote isn't accurate, but is someone's projecting their own opinion on what she said, and I'm a sucker for falling for it. Naturally, I'd prefer to believe the former, because it makes me not the bad guy, but... you very well could be right.
I am not so sure the letter attempts to cancel Anandkumar. Although her blacklist clearly went too far, it's quite difficult to find the context that led to the letter (as several comments show in the thread).
The sad truth is that expressing publicly any opinion on diversity/politics/AI ethics is currently a minefield for anyone's career and online safety. It shouldn't be the case and that's how I understand the letter.
> challenging and debating ideas is always acceptable and ought to be encouraged. Marginalizing, intimidating, or attacking the holders of those ideas is not.
If anything, that statement reads as supportive of Gebru. But I don't know.
For a while he had "anti-woke" in his Twitter bio, and his recent tweets[0] are lamenting AI ethicists and negatively commenting on how "science is under attack from politics"[1]
[0] https://twitter.com/pmddomingos
[1] https://twitter.com/pmddomingos/status/1341966137576198144
Ultimately though, they're irrelevant to my point, which is that even if you personally dislike the conclusions of the paper, even if you disagree, it is an existence proof of thoughtful and deep analysis of broader impact.
You are more than welcome to dislike the concept. But it still remains present.
If they didn't have an amazing canned answer it's because they weren't thinking about it enough to have something interesting to say.
Maybe not needed for every venue every year forever, but I like this better than requiring it just from ethics sensitive papers. Presumably the people writing about swarms of killer drones have some justification or are fine with being supervillains, the field is trying to figure out where the other blindspots are and that requires broader search efforts.
Edit: I just want to add this is the first I'm hearing about this letter and I'm not entirely sure what it's even in response to. Since my work is health adjacent, I haven't had time this year to know much about conferences I wasn't involved in.
As far as I know, those are for experiments that directly interact with humans as part of the experiment itself. They exist because of a long history of unethical researchers testing interventions (or lack thereof) on people without their knowledge or informed consent - e.g. Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, MK-ULTRA, Stanford prison experiment (there are a lot). The closest equivalent in CS of directly-interacting experiments would be HCI research as you said. I could also see a strong argument being made for research that uses the creative or copyrighted output of a person without their consent - for example, their face as part of training facial recognition software, their written words as part of training GPT-3, their voice as part of training voice recognition software, etc.
However the incident in question is really about a different kind of thing - it's asking researchers to speculate on the future ramifications of their research as it pertains to progressive ideals - in practice this means, "How could this negatively affect minorities or the environment?" These aren't inherently bad things to think about, but as you get further and further away from concrete applications of ML, it begins to look more and more like a religious ritual than something that is actually trying to address the stated problems.
Or use certain kinds of data from humans. For example, a machine learning project on medical data (even anonymized medical data) probably needs an IRB approval to gain access to, say, a dataset of cancer imaging. A facial recognition model doesn't. What makes those fundamentally different (arguably the facial image is more identifying).
> However the incident in question is really about a different kind of thing - it's asking researchers to speculate on the future ramifications of their research as it pertains to progressive ideals
I see no actual support for this claim in any of the actual documentation on the broader impact statement or its use.
The Neurips docs link to 4 blog posts and papers for inspiration/advice to a broader-impact-statemet-author[0][1][2][3][4]. None focus on minorities or the environment in the way you describe, unless you mean "environment" in the broadest sense of "society".
[0]: https://nips.cc/Conferences/2020/PaperInformation/NeurIPS-FA... ("How should I write the Broader Impact section?"_
[1]: https://brenthecht.com/papers/FCADIscussions_NegativeImpacts...
[2]: https://brenthecht.medium.com/suggestions-for-writing-neurip...
[3]: https://medium.com/@GovAI/a-guide-to-writing-the-neurips-imp...
>it's asking researchers speculate on the future ramifications of their research as it pertains to progressive ideals - in practice this means, "How could this negatively affect minorities or the environment?"
The framing appears to be far broader than just that, and the "ritualistic" concern you note appears to be unsubstantiated given the other areas for broad impact, and in practice given that for a lot of concrete ML applications, the broader impact statements appeared to be mostly focused on things like efficiency (or just platitudinal), as noted by other commenters.
If they're just platitudes or remarks about efficiency, why are some people so strongly opposed to including them, and some people so strongly in favor of including them? Basically, why does anyone care?
And a lot of people gave a huge amount of backlash to this experiment for, as far as I can tell, reasons that amount to this being a form of liberal/leftist censorship.
We're talking about, in this case, at least one person who is so scared of "wokism" that after Neurips changed its name from Nips to Neurips, he advocated for them to change it back, to, uhh, stick it to woke people I think?
Parent comment has been edited to address my comment.
Edit: it's a very long thread of screenshots of blocked users, followed by "In that case use it as a #cancel list".
I haven't used Twitter since 2011 or so, and I didn't realize how deep the rabbit hole goes.
I've been vaguely following this, and neither side comes off well -- a few people decide winning Twitter points is more important than anything else, and ramp themselves up into a frenzy by Tweeting dozens of times a day.
As Yoda says, a Jedi uses the Force for knowledge and defense, never for attack.
The defense vs attack comparison seems very inappropriate, I don't know where's the line between the former and the latter, but trying to get someone fired seems like an attack to me.
Is it hypocrisy to have someone arrested for kidnapping?
Some of the tweets are still accessible via archive.org: https://web.archive.org/web/20201214014408/https://twitter.c...
Do you have any examples of social justice standing for equality, mutual understanding, and respect?
All I have encountered is hatred and witch-hunts but I would like to believe there's more to it than that.
The witch hunts we are seeing are actually from the standard totalitarian playbook, or straight up from Animal Farm. They ape the progressive ideals and turn them into a stick to hit people they don't like.
That's a rather uncharitable way of framing his argument.
> condemn all attempts to coerce scientific activities into supporting or opposing specific social-political beliefs, values, and attitudes, including attempts at preventing researchers from exploring questions of their choice, or at restricting the free discussion and debate of issues related to scientific research. (from the letter)
Clearly the issue is the current academic orthodoxy. We are very much seeing a rapidly collapsing overton window, where any inquiry or worse the person that is at odds with a very particular liberal belief is immediately cancelled. It largely asks that ad-hominem attacks and slippery slope arguments be avoided and discourse around heated topics be civil.
Tech has largely jumped head first, siding with the hyper-liberal wing of politics in American discourse. This is when the conclusions reached by the said political groups are heatedly argued in both political, academic and societal spheres. I myself feel the air of fear and the prescription of though at my BigN workplace. The argument that it is indeed stifling tech+research at large is entirely reasonable.
Yann LeCun got chased away from twitter by Gebru. Anima Anand kumar's tweet displayed an active participation in cancelling and chasing out anyone who does not fall in line with a very narrow definition of equality in society.
There is immense value in exploring the effects of tech and progress on society. There is immense value in commitment to being fair and accountable. It is incredibly important for the people with the power to wield such a hammer, be most level headed, civil and create policies based on consensus. There is a reason that supreme court justices are lawyers and not activists. As of now, the bearers of power display none of those properties.
The open letter merely points that out and asks for equal representation of ideas without threat of being fired or sidelined in entirity.
> We support discussion of policies aimed at a more diverse and inclusive society; a range of opinions is natural. We condemn all attempts to coerce
It is bizzare to see people of science fall in line with claims that don't satisfy even the basic requirements of rigor. Scepticism and inquiry are the foundations of this entire field. As of now I see a very political section of the community making 'extra ordinary claims'. As is customary around these parts, it isn't unreasonable to ask for "extraordinary evidence."
Yann is still active on twitter. He claimed to leave twitter, but didn't for any reasonable definition of "left". Yet people continue to claim that Gebru "cancelled" him or something. He's had like 15 twitter interactions today.
Be as skeptical of Yann and Domingos as you are of Gebru.
> There is a reason that supreme court justices are lawyers and not activists.
Lots of people would claim that many supreme court justices are activists, and depending on who you ask, exactly which judges are activists would change (both Ginsburg and Scalia have been called "activist" judges, not to mention Roberts, which I find hilarious)
> The open letter merely points that out and asks for equal representation of ideas without threat of being fired or sidelined in entirity.
I'd think someone calling for this would strongly support Timnit Gebru. That would be the ideologically consistent position, yes?
I'm guessing LeCun wasn't trying to trick people with an elaborate hoax, but quit the usual way people quit social media, smoking, etc. But hating it and wanting to quit, then coming back anyway. The point is the interaction made him temporarily want to quit...
Like I keep saying, I just really hope you extend that same amount of benefit of the doubt to everyone. Both Yann and Timnit. Both Domingos and anandkumar.
I can’t see why you’d pin that on liberalism. This is just a totalitarian mob justice that is also prevalent in alt-right circles. Whining about how academics tend to be liberal is asinine, considering how anti-intellectual conservatives have become.
> siding with the hyper-liberal wing of politics in American discourse
There is nothing left-wing in American politics, much less “hyper-liberal”.
> Yann LeCun got chased away from twitter by Gebru. Anima Anand kumar's tweet displayed an active participation in cancelling and chasing out anyone who does not fall in line with a very narrow definition of equality in society.
That I can agree with, and it should not be tolerated. Calling for mob justice and encouraging your followers to “re-educate” people is utterly appalling (dammit, they even re-use the Nazi and Stalinist newspeak), and she should be treated the same way she’d be, had she called to harass anyone else.
> It is bizzare to see people of science fall in line with claims that don't satisfy even the basic requirements of rigor.
Completely agree with that. These people should also learn some history; it is rife with persecuted people who turn tormenters when the circumstances change.
Agreed. However, people in alt-right circles have no power in tech peer groups. The totalitarian mob-justice wing of liberal circles has all the power. Be that Robyn-De-Angelo and Ibrahim Kendi being paraded around these firms despite having incredibly extreme ideas or people like Anima leading committees at the top of CS hierarchy.
If I was in rural kentucky working in a coal mine, I would be shouting about how the reactionary wing of the right has completely taken over discourse. But, I'm in tech/grad-student/urban/academic circles, so I speak about the bad actors there.
> There is nothing left-wing in American politics, much less “hyper-liberal”.
I was careful to never mention the word 'left' in my comment. Hyper-Liberalism and Left ideology are tangential to each other. This wing of ultra-prescriptive / thought-policing 'hyper-liberal' left is very "North American college campus phenomenon". It doesn't map onto left movements around the world at all.
Note that this is very much a social movement. So, the economic aspects of left-ideology are only important insofar as to facilitate the social aspects of the movement. So, I reserve my criticisms of it to the social goals of the movement and their 'ends justify the means' approach.
But that mob behaviour is not left or right; it is totalitarian.
> people like Anima leading committees at the top of CS hierarchy
Yeah that’s a travesty.
> If I was in rural kentucky working in a coal mine, I would be shouting about how the reactionary wing of the right has completely taken over discourse.
As you bloody well should. They voted for it, but these people are still getting the short end of the stick again.
> I'm in tech/grad-student/urban/academic circles, so I speak about the bad actors there.
As you should, too! But I think you mis-diagnose when you attribute this to leftist tendencies. This is a religious war and the real losers are reasonable people caught in the crossfire. The problem is the cult system, not the liberal flavour of one side.
> I was careful to never mention the word 'left' in my comment.
You’re right, sorry. ”liberal” is a centrist ideology, even though apparently some people think it’s communism (which is absolutely not liberal).
> This wing of ultra-prescriptive / thought-policing 'hyper-liberal' left is very "North American college campus phenomenon". It doesn't map onto left movements around the world at all.
Yes! The contexts are very different. Although this has bothered me quite a bit recently, seeing the same sound bites getting translated for local consumption in several European country. It seems this behaviour is contagious.
This is not what liberalism is, though, any more than neocons or the alt-right are actually about conservatism. Liberalism is about individual freedom. Thought police is an aspect that some supposedly progressives imported directly from Stalinism.
Do you have the original tweet where "re-educate" was used? I see lots of people using the term in this thread, and none of the original tweets seem to include it. As far as I can tell "re-education" terminology appears to have been an editorialization by Anandkumar's detractors.
https://web.archive.org/web/20201214014408/https://twitter.c...
So when you said
> Calling for mob justice and encouraging your followers to “re-educate” people is utterly appalling (dammit, they even re-use the Nazi and Stalinist newspeak)
It was based on what exactly?
Rather, I'm alarmed by what I perceive to be a collapse over recent years of the Overton window when it comes to any topic vaguely in the vicinity of politics, ethics, or DEI; especially (but not only) on Twitter. Expressing anything short of the consensus "right" opinion (even on matters of ethics or moral values that are inherently personal and subjective) has become a gamble, with the stakes your job, reputation, and online and offline safety. Probably the most eye-opening moment for me was the recent attempt to "cancel" Steven Pinker---a rigorous thinker who has devoted a not insignificant portion of his time and influence to advancing inclusion in science---over the flimsiest of reasons (out-of-context tweets from literally decades ago). Of course, he has not been the sole target of the Twitter mob (see also: Yann Lecun, Scott Aaronson, etc.)
I have great respect for my conservative colleagues and respect their opinions, though I myself am a liberal and my personal politics likely has little overlap with that of Domingos et al. I also strongly support broadening inclusion in STEM and have not hesitated to lend my support to victims of harassment and abuse. But there is vast difference between holding people accountable for misconduct, and silencing people who merely dissent by expressing unpopular or "wrong" opinions. CS faces many challenges ahead at the intersection of ethics and technology, and we will need an open and respectful forum, tolerant of ideas from a wide spectrum of political beliefs and personal values, to make progress.
Relevant WaitButWhy, where academic Twitter currently lies very much in the right column: https://28oa9i1t08037ue3m1l0i861-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-...
The author of the blacklist retracted the list and apologized.
much more of the back story: https://www.geekwire.com/2020/retired-uw-computer-science-pr...
That's a lie. NVidia should let the author go
Honestly, I would like to hope this example gets elevated and shown to everyone, especially in tech, as to why this behavior and everything that surrounds it is abysmal. Then everyone who has participated in this behavior can write out their own full throated apologies, we accept them, drop the issue, and move on.
I doubt that will happen though.
As such, canceling the cancelers would likely be useful under the following constraints:
1) Publicly state your intention to cancel anyone who cancels you; and 2) Only cancel people defensively, never on offense; 3) If the canceler professes a change of heart, cease the cancellation, accept the apology (forgiveness/mercy and relatively simple reintegration for offenders is one asymmetric advantage the free speech side has going for it); 4) Form a mutual-aid alliance with likeminded people, such that the cancelation of one implies the cancelation of all; 5) Never under any circumstance apologize or "bend the knee" to a cancel mob, even if you are not completely in the right - you are not dealing with people who want to treat you as an equal, but totalitarians who want to control you.
I think if people who are in favor of free speech (myself included) followed those rules, cancel culture would at least plateau. A couple of prominent cancelers like Anima Anandkumar getting stung would probably allow cooler heads to prevail.
This is a vitally important principle in a great many scenarios. Sun Tzu mentions it, saying that when you surround an enemy, you should leave them an [apparent] avenue for escape. Backing people into corners they cannot escape from is generally a bad strategy since it will make them fight back twice as hard. I think this applies to nearly anything from casual conversation to actual war.
This doesn’t seem to be something that everyone can do. "Cancellation" irradiates someone as a racist or sexist. It’s a power reserved to those who can appear to credibly make that claim.
The bigotry thing is not actually essential, just like support for Irish republicanism or Islamic fundamentalist extremism is not an essential aspect of terrorism, or even being a Russian or Chinese government agent is not essential to spreading disinformation. (And in most cases, charges of sexism happen to be untrue.) Bullying and serial harassment may not be as "irradiating" as charges of sexism and racism, but they are still considered bad in our culture. And besides, most of the wokes themselves are actually themselves quite racist, and in some cases (e.g. Robin DiAngelo) they admit it.
The end goal of retaliatory cancelation should be to get the organizations being pressured to take a stand to instead wash their hands of the whole thing. It increases the cost of taking the cancel swarm bait, since a counterswarm may also appear at any moment.
The one aspect I don't know about is the sophisticated attacks involving journalist-activists.
And that gives me pause as to whether your proposal is actually a good idea...
Well, yes, that's one hell of a difference. Their definition of "aggression" is basically expressing any disagreement with their ideas, because they're totalitarians and totalitarians can tolerate no dissent. The symmetry is thus false. This would be a bit like saying that China and Japan had a defensive stance at the outset of WWII, but that Japan merely had a much looser set of criteria for what constituted Chinese aggression than vice versa. I'm sure from the Imperial Japanese perspective, they saw themselves as defending their way of life, even though they were obviously aggressors to all other parties.
How is it dangerous? I suspect that the logic of it drives you more and more into open conflict and warring camps. I'm not sure that's the best response to cancel culture.
Good that we basically agree about the nature of the enemy.
> Still, to me, starting from a more reasonable starting point and then following the exact same playbook seems like a bad idea. I think it likely that the playbook is dangerous, not just the starting point.
But it's not the exact same playbook. For example, when do woke mobs forgive and leave their targets alone? It's pure domination from them.
> How is it dangerous? I suspect that the logic of it drives you more and more into open conflict and warring camps. I'm not sure that's the best response to cancel culture.
Yes, of course it's dangerous. There will be people who simply hate the wokes just as much as the wokes hate them, and they'll bask in power games just as much as the wokes do. I reject and disavow that now and will continue to. That being said, I think following the conditions I laid out would prevent my "side" from going overboard. The biggest danger IMO is in operational problems like falsely accusing someone of being a cancel culture warrior, which could cause serious harm. It could also be weaponized by the wokes themselves.
Ultimately, I think cancel culture either dies out on its own (the cancelers begin to cancel each other, which we have seen some evidence of), or it drags literally everyone into its maw. I think the latter, esp. in the tech world, is a serious risk. Once cancel culture and social justice take root in some organization, they are polarizing. Since wokeness is totalitarian, trying to remain neutral is an unstable position (in practice, neutrality is an anti-woke position), a bit like trying to stay away from the Nazi or Communist parties in 1930s Germany or Russia.
I'm not sure the best response either, but this seems like a fairly good one, albeit one I won't act on until some of the vulnerabilities can be mitigated (such as false accusations).
While I strongly support the open letter to the ACM, and other open letters like the Harper's one, or even Bari Weiss' open letter to the NYT, I'm not sure those are much more than a wet noodle to the wokes. If anything, it just helps them organize the target list. My way at least has some teeth and gives the various parties an incentive to behave civilly again.
What's different now other than larger groups with nontraditional forms of power are trying to impose consequences in return?
People seem to be getting increasingly shortsighted these days.
Sounds reasonable. How do we define abuse? Do we have a clear notion of when consequences for your speech is abuse?
Some things are clear. Mobs threatening your children because of what you said is clearly abuse. But what about customers of your employer demanding that you be fired? There are clearly cases where that would be legitimate. Up until a couple years ago, flying the swastika and wanting to start up the Nazi party again would result in you being "cancelled" pretty thoroughly.
Freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences. It's freedom from the government taking you away because of what you said (though even that isn't universal if your speech is a direct incitement to an act, such as shouting fire in a movie theatre or calling for someone's death with an expectation that someone listening to you will go do it). You still get all the legal protections of any other member of our society.
Maybe that's a better way of coming at it? If large groups abusing non-traditional power is a problem, should we define a larger set of individual legal protections to define what the consequences of speech cannot be?
Killing a colleague's papers or grant proposals in retaliation for past slights is clearly unacceptable behavior even if it is (and should remain) legal. Likewise, calling for a colleague to be fired, or starting a petition to have them stripped of their positions on editorial boards, or putting their students on a public "re-education" list, in retaliation for expressing an ill-considered or unpopular opinion, ought to be unacceptable behavior (even if, again, it is and should remain legal).
Why? Calling for a colleague to be fired might be an ill-considered or unpopular opinion, but that just puts us in a loop. We either want no consequences for ill-considered or unpopular opinions or we don't.
> putting their students on a public "re-education" list
This I agree with, but only because it is no longer about the individual and their speech.
From the comments in this thread it seems the context is that the ACM started requiring an ethics section on papers. Hardly has anything to do with cancelling itself if you ask me.
Seems to me that nothing constructive can be accomplished without giving much more context and specific examples to discuss, while this open letter contains nothing substantial like that.
The culture at large is going to do what it does. There is way to support liberty and deny the right to be a ninny.
But technology should be about the code. It is better to be diverse, because being a cool, gentle, adult human being is simply the Golden Rule applied; rather than flogging diversity.
We see endless codes of conduct, statistical analyses, and innocents getting thrashed for some purely Kafka-esque infraction.
I would say: "to hell with that" except that in many ways, hell has arrived.
There is NO way to support liberty and deny the right to be a ninny.
Repackaged, my point is that once I set myself up un control of definitions, I can always label your behavior a threat to public safety and effectively jail you.
Should it?
Technology doesn't exist in a vacuum, it is used by people.
Ignoring that fact doesn't make the ethical implication of the technology magically go away.
> It is better to be diverse, because being a cool, gentle, adult human being is simply the Golden Rule applied
Science does not get a special exception to turn off one's moral compass and ignore the ethical impact of research and publication.
Any formulation of my point is that action excels words.
The biggest hill that Domingos has staked out is that asking researchers to include a discussion of impacts and potential abuse of systems to be "wasteful" and "ill-conveived"[0]. Also, he has decided to make a stand on the hill that the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems should not go by the acronym NeurIPS[1].
[0] https://twitter.com/pmddomingos/status/1338204976733032450
[1]https://twitter.com/pmddomingos/status/1337594183033389058
Without some Asimovian style "except where that counters the 1st principle" appended to "lower" principles it will continue to be abused by those who would constrain science that offends them.
Anyone who engages in shaming, suppression, bregading/harassment/abuse is arguably not looking for discourse. In modern politics there are entire camps of people, even pre-Trumpism, who think discourse is dead primarily because they feel galvanized by the emotionality of their views. This concept has always existed but has grown quite a bit in popularity in recent years and has begun to underpin mainstream issues in science, politics, society, and more. The irony is that people will like and despise these things simultaneously, which is why I believe it's derivative of galvanization.
The fact that science is caught up in this, where discourse is at the heart of the process, tells me some group or some thing is instigating this co-opting. I hope we begin to reject these practices and accept them for the low effort anti-democratic efforts that they are.
In it, Pink describes two competing mindsets for approaching social issues. One prioritizes analysis and understanding as first steps; the other prioritizes activism unrestrained by fact-checking.
I'd be interested to hear his accusers' response to that interview. Experience tells me to withhold judgment until I've heard from all sides, and that interview was only with him.
In my view, the letter seems to be a contradictory admixture of Progressivism and Rationalism.
> Such actions have included calls for academic boycotts, attempts to get people fired, inviting mob attacks against ‘offending’ individuals
That's a Rationalist perspective, which I endorse. And, as a "rationalist", it's been my observation that it's the progressive that indulge in this kind of behaviour. The so-called "cancel culture".
> Scientific work should be judged on the basis of scientific merit
Sure, but obvious comment is obvious. Why bring it up?
> No individual should suffer harassment or attack based on their personal or political views, religion, nationality, race, gender, or sexual orientation.
Oh, here we go. The statement, whilst logical and indisputable enough in its expression, betrays a pushing of a Progressive agenda.
> Scientific discourse should be based on mutual respect
Sure dude, whatever. Do you really need to write that in a letter? And why the ACM in particular?
> In short, challenging and debating ideas is always acceptable and ought to be encouraged.
Imagine going up to Isaac Newton and saying this. I imagine he'd give you a puzzled look as if you were slightly backwards.
Are the signatories rationalists, or progressives? It's difficult to tell. My suspicion is that although it is rationalist on its surface, it is covertly progressive.
Progressivism: always pushing an agenda covertly, never speaking in plain words.
That's my take, anyway. I don't have much karma to burn.
Rather ironic that a letter to a group that is about communication can’t use an appropriate technology to communicate.
That makes for a Sad Panda
person A: "I want to commit genocide against Muslims"
person B: "You are fascist scum"
person C: "Woah woah, let's not resort to name calling, let's calmly discuss the pros and cons of genocide".
He is also promoting a constitutional law in israel that will say jews have more rights than non jewish CITIZENS of israel.
and by the associative property of cancel culture, we may infer that the rest of the signees are...
I'm a strong advocate for free speech. The only way that free speech works is that people feel free to vociferously disagree. Given the volume of, say, Domingos' tweets, he certainly feels free to disagree. At this point the same can be said of Gebru and Anandkumar. Great! What's the problem here? Can't we just all just argue and get along?
Where is the mob attack? Oh, someone said someone mean to you. For heaven's sake, if Anita Sarkeesian can take it then the rest of you sure can. If no one here is upset about public health directors in Kansas having their children threatened, then why the dustup about some feelings on Twitter?
Great, someone puts you on a block list on Twitter. Congrats. Until you've gotten your first rape threat you haven't really made it anyways. What a bunch of whiners.
Many of us who have been following these developments are as well. At issue is the attempt to chill speech based upon the identity of the speaker.
If more institutions adopted the “Chicago Statement," then this would be less of an issue (at least in academia).
> Great, someone puts you on a block list on Twitter.
You are being disingenuous. "Go destroy the careers of these people on my block list" is a much different thing.
Whose career is destroyed? Pedro is still doing fine. Enumerate the damage for me, please, in dollars or jobs.
Well, given that Anandkumar tried to publicly shame a number of people over these discussions, clearly we can't all argue and get along if this is what it devolves into.
And that's kind of the point. Why can't we have innocuous discussions that end in "let's agree to disagree" without someone deciding that public humiliation and threats to people's careers are now okay? Why are the stakes suddenly inflated to "the future of female involvement in STEM" in these squabbles?
We can go around and around over who said what, but clearly Anandkumar crossed an ethical boundary here, and it's important to call that out. Creating a more diverse and inclusive community does not involve public threats. I wish that didn't need to be said, but apparently it does.
And what is the recourse Anima has in this fight? Pedro tweets sexual innuendo about her porn habits, and truly, what is there to do? All these fights are asymmetrical. That is why I am angry. I see women fired for "not following procedure", women harassed out of their jobs, women failing to advance, women failing to be funded, and then on top of it any important, well-respected guy can tweet about my sexual preferences, my porn habits, what he thinks about my body, what he'd like to do to my body, ON TOP of the professional disrespect, and... that's just dismissed in this farce of a letter that says harassment is bad and is signed by people who are explicitly and publicly guilty of harassment.
There is no acceptable recourse for a woman in this fight -- you understand that, right? If I don't speak up, I'm complicit or agreed to ill treatment. If I do speak up, I'm participating in "cancel culture", haha. This letter seriously says, "Scientific discourse should be based on mutual respect, use of civil language, and professional conduct. Indeed, all disagreements in the scientific community, however heated or fraught, should be addressed through argument and persuasion and not through personal attacks or by coercively shutting down those with dissenting points of view," and is signed by a man who Tweeted, among other things, "So you get porn sites and I don't? Must be Google's personalization algorithm," and "There is no oppressor here, only deranged activists."
I frankly don't see anything wrong with shaming people online, because that's the only tool many folks have got. Always I get told that the polite, private correction that doesn't embarrass or shame is optimal; but those corrections just don't work. If that worked, "the ladies" would have had the vote in 1776 in the US, as Abigail Adams so politely requested of her husband. Instead it took marches, hunger strikes, arrests, and all sorts of unpleasantness. If it's going to be unpleasant if we speak up online or stay silent online, what is there to lose? At least one way we get to keep our integrity.
Pedro Domingos is the kind of guy who thinks he is oppressed because of his viewpoint. He is in fact disliked because of his unkindness. But it's oh so easy to cloak himself in words about "respect" while his words & actions show the opposite.
The threats she mentioned in her apology.
> And what is the recourse Anima has in this fight? Pedro tweets sexual innuendo about her porn habits, and truly, what is there to do?
As you suggested in your earlier post, she can choose to ignore a comment like that because it’s a silly argument.
And even if she doesn’t, his comments still aren’t justification for her behavior.