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Is there a specific incident that this letter is protesting?

It seems to be at least partially in response to the blacklist of researchers/students that Anima Anantkumar prepared and circulated and then eventually retracted about three weeks ago.

And presumably because she is one of many on the ACM Communications Editorial Board: https://cacm.acm.org/about-communications/editorial-board/

I understood the point directly.

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.

Edit:

There is NO way to support liberty and deny the right to be a ninny.

Only if you hold the view of absolutism, which is incongruous with society on a fundamental level.

I'm not sure we're communicating.

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.

>But technology should be about the code.

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.

. . .which point I intended to go after when I said:

> It is better to be diverse, because being a cool, gentle, adult human being is simply the Golden Rule applied

> But technology should be about the code

Science does not get a special exception to turn off one's moral compass and ignore the ethical impact of research and publication.

Indeed, my next sentence addresses the moral compass in the form of the Golden Rule.

Any formulation of my point is that action excels words.

Yeah, I'm trying to find some context but it's difficult. Many keywords paired with "Communications of the ACM" just result in articles from CACM instead of about CACM. I'm checking out the blogs of some of the signatories but haven't seen anything yet.

I'm confused as well. I think a letter like this would be improved by adding some supporting references or examples.

Yeah - I'm confused if this is a general sentiment going on, or a recent incident going on. I did like "Quantum Computing Since Democritus"

This is all fall out from the Timnit Gebru firing (I'm including Anima Anandkumar posts are also part that fall out.), and specifically a Twitter fight between Pedro Domiguez and Timnit Gebru, and others.

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

From another comment: https://www.geekwire.com/2020/retired-uw-computer-science-pr...

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