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It's quick to sample 10-20 accepted NeurIPS papers randomly and realize that almost all of those have useless platitudes as impact statements.

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.

The Gebru paper’s discussion of wokeness vocabulary and rapid changes in activist language is a deep embarrassment to science and utterly says nothing whatsoever about ethics in large NLP models or implicit biases from biased corpora. It’s sheer embarrassment to see anyone taking that section of her paper with any seriousness. That is politics and tribalism 100%, completely devoid of critical analysis that holds it up to basic levels of rigor.

I wasn't speaking about any particular section of the paper. Happy to hear your thoughts on it though!

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.

The subtext of the letter is not clear to me. There have been two recent controversies among machine learning people: 1) Gebru getting fired/resigning from Google (depending on who you ask), and 2) Anandkumar fighting with Domingos on Twitter and Tweeting a list of a bunch of people she had blocked and encouraging her followers to try and change their minds. My perception is that this letter is about 2), not 1), given the closing statement that

> 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.

Domingos most definitely is not supportive of Grebru.

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

As an outside observer to both these political and political cultural camps, often "woke" means different things to each camp.

> 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.

Which actions?

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.

https://web.archive.org/web/20201214014408/https://twitter.c...

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.

I'm quite aware, which I why I wanted someone to try and bring up the particular transgressions. From context, it's clear that "cancelling" in is being used as personal thing. That is, a list of people someone can choose not to interact with. Bad phrasing, yes, nothing more.

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.

"Educate" != "harass", though. The suggestion was much more along the lines of "all of you beat up on these people until they cave". That's harassment, not education.

Based on what evidence do you make that claim?

Did you see anyone harass anyone on the list? Was that behavior condoned?

Based literally on what she asked her supporters to do.

Where do you get "harass them" from "We need to get them away from fanaticism...We need [allies] who can engage with them."

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.

The part you didn't quote. The part about "re-educating" them. (This leaves two options. 1) She didn't know the history of the term. I find that condescendingly insulting; an educated person should know that. Or 2) she knew full well the use of the term in history, and used it anyway.)

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?

Replying to your update. (Editing a parent post to reply to a child makes the conversation rather confusing, but I suppose you were rate-limited.)

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.