I'm a bit uncomfortable with this kind of political posturing being published in Nature, the preeminent science journal. It seems the exact wrong forum for it.
Or you believe there is a more sinister reason?
So it’s yet another opaque system that might not have a sinister intention, but has a pretty sinister outcome.
1: https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/10/10/20893258/youtube-lgbt...
To be frank to me the algorithim seems to be a scapegoat for society's own fucked up norms and practices. It isn't a moral process and expecting it to act like one isn't reasonable - it would be like demanding a cargo value calculator stop listing concentrated drugs as the most profitable commodity by to transport per mass and volume because addiction ruin lives and overdose ends them. It is terrible but it is accurately describing the status quo.
- LBGTQ populations are small, about 4-7% (usually quoted at 5%) of the US, and are generally clustered in big urban areas. Like, if you're a queer kid in rural TN you're moving or Nashville or NYC otherwise you gonna have bad time. But that also means it's a niche demographic that's in a few areas. That's a big deal if I'm buying ads for Miami or Denver or The Castro, but it's not broad appeal across the country.
- LBGTQ isn't uniform in context and content; not a ton of lesbians are into boy-meets-boy stories, and not a lot of gay men are watching videos about Andrea Dworkin and S.C.U.M.
- Not a lot of crossover appeal -- I know a few straight bourgeoisie white ladies that are all about queer culture, trying hard to be allies and all, but other than that there is little crossover. Even my wokest, Bernie-Sanders loving friends aren't watching LBGTQ vids and related content on the regular. Again, it's niche thing.
- Serious flak from conservatives, be they Christian, Muslim, or Hindu, or a Communist Chinese government that's not especially LBGTQ-friendly. I can post e-sports videos that will garner millions of views, from Pakistan to China to Nigeria, but a queer critique of Harry Potter or League of Legends characters might be flagged or banned in most of those countries. There may be aggressive pushback and demonetization as well via lobbyists or religious groups.
- As another poster said, flagging words like "gay" or "lesbian" as pornographic and blocking or demonetizing them accordingly.
If you want to make a clearer example, here's one: Google's ad classifiers used to almost always classify you as a man if you frequent engineering websites, much to the chagrin of many female engineers working at Google.
I don't know if that's still the case, as I'm not a woman myself.
> Conservation could be part of the toolkit for diplomacy between China and India.
> How environmental racism is fuelling the coronavirus pandemic
> Reducing your own carbon footprint is not as powerful as calling governments and companies to account.
> Remember what science owes to child refugees
> the root problem is that power is distributed unevenly
As if that's some kind of sacred unquestionable axiom that doesn't require supporting argument.
I don't think there is anything controversial or political about the quote in the article, and certainly not about the impetus to consider the moral application of AI.
I think maybe people are a little worried of what's supposed to be a 'culturally secular' journal, turning over to the groups demanding social reforms in other areas (i.e. CNN yesterday indicating that the term 'Master Bedroom' is 'racist' etc.)
The article is fine, it's on point, very fair. The author is within reason to quote her inspiration.
That being said, sure, sometimes you have to explain why you consider something to be an axiom.
But at the same time, if you where to explain your axioms all the time you wouldn't get very far. So, I guess the question here is: Is it reasonable to assume this axiom in this context?
And I would argue that it is reasonable, otherwise it would be an entierly different text, about a very different subject, and for me personally, it would be a less interesting article.
Take 7 bigotted against Y of power X each and add an 8th Y person of power X as well. They could be lynched by them trivially. If they had 7X power he could only be matched if the bigots worked in perfect unision to combine. Otherwise he would be the effective leading power.
If we are dealing with counterfactual root solutions why not use a hypothetical world where violence is literally impossible? It would be more self consistent and just as possible.
Good luck trying to posture with the help of a white,right-wing male. Sorry Ted Kaczynski. I liked your manifesto.
The other ironic thing is the author talking about privilege by publishing in Nature and working at Stanford. Sorry Pratyusha, but you are at the belly of the beast, you are as establishment as it comes, no matter your gender or ethnicity.
> Our network emphasizes listening to those who are marginalized and impacted by AI, and advocating for anti-oppressive technologies.
So do you disagree with the idea that power is problematically unevenly distributed, and disagree that listening to the marginalized and being anti-oppression is good?
If not, and you merely disagree with being explicit about the politics of technology, why? The status-quo politics of AI is "how can we make lots and lots of money from this?". Challenging that politics is good, even if you agree with amoral capital accumulation.
None of this is science. Science does not and can not make value judgements; it cannot say that any distribution of anything is "bad", it cannot say that any particular outcome is good or bad. This has been known for over two thousand years, as the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regress_argument (mentioned by Sextus Empiricus, the father of empiricism). Moral judgements are the realm of politics and philosophy, and there are plenty of journals dedicated to that. Nature is supposed to be dedicated to science.
Everywhere you go in science you will encounter moral sentiments at the basis of research. It would be totally equally scientific to experiment on babies, yet we don't do it, and listening to scientists and ethicists on these issues is part of doing science. Ethical debate is intertwined with research.
There is in fact no iron law on how to do science at all and maybe reading some Feyerabend is in order. Science is a social process, and keeping ethics out of science in fact constraints discourse about science in a way that has no justification at all. It impoverishes science by supposing that scientists behave like sort of autistic robots outside of society at large, which they of course are not.