Open letter from computer scientists to ACM opposing cancel culture
docs.google.com
docs.google.com
One of her targets is Pedro Domingos, who is a professor at the University of Washington and a well-known expert in the space (he authored "The Master Algorithm"). Domingos is also known for being against the infiltration of "woke" culture into academic institutions, because it corrupts the purity of research and introduces political biases. This came up recently because NeurIPS (an AI conference) is going to require an "impact statement" for all submitted research papers, which has raised concerns about political bias at the conference, since researchers will likely include pandering progressive impact statements just to get through the process without controversy. Anandkumar has been one of the prominent activists pushing for NeurIPS to include impact statements, and was formerly involved in a campaign to push NeurIPS to be renamed from NIPS to NeurIPS (https://www.wired.com/story/ai-researchers-fight-over-four-l...).
This new letter to ACM was already discussed on Hacker News (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25575321). The letter includes Domingos as an initial signatory, and the group the letter is being sent to (Communications of the ACM) lists Anima Anandkumar (who tried to cancel him) on their Editorial Board (https://cacm.acm.org/about-communications/editorial-board/).
It's a cesspool of lunatics.
Depressing that this even has to be said. Reality has no obligation to be politically acceptable.
Scott Aaronson David J. Bruton Centennial Professor Department of Computer Science University of Texas at Austin
That's the guy who writes the quantum computing posts that regularly show up on the HN front page.
Sometimes you just have to fight fire with fire.
I don't believe canceling culture is culture, even when the culture being canceled is bad.
It's much better to make them illegal, like we did in Italy with facism and nazism, than to "cancel" them.
They are still available as a subject of study, they haven't been cancelled, they have been found inappropriate and as such only a minority still believes that they've been made illegal in absence of good motivations, because anybody can check what are the reasons why it happened.
But the majority of people that were fascist before the war ended in Italy haven't suffered discrimination for being wrong, after it was obvious they were.
Cancel culture should be perhaps be renamed cancer culture, because history has shown that these things never end well.
(I happen to agree with the bans on Nazi symbology, but that has actual force of law and far more consequences than merely complaints on twitter)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25597144
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25597142
Another possibility is that political topics (in this case "cancel culture") tend to be controversial enough, to be flamebait, that these topics tend to get flagged
This is in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html.
Honest question ; why is this thread [flagged] ? I get the answer might be obvious and disappointing, but surely the thread is not being cancelled right ?
The term is "useful idiots". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useful_idiot
Cancel culture doesn’t accept any arguments - that’s the whole point of the cancel culture - you don’t discuss with the opponent, instead you ask a platform, where the interaction happened, to ban the opponent.
>calls for academic boycotts, attempts to get people fired, inviting mob attacks against ‘offending’ individuals, and the like.
These are all referring to the many coming down on the few, not the other way around.
I’d argue that’s not the point of cancel culture. I think cancel culture is the result of unethical actors not getting punished by the people in charge any more. The only way you can punish them is to not buy their products.
I'm sure that's related to the definition of cancel culture in some contexts, but none of the people signing or intended to be swayed by this letter sell any products. This letter is specifically talking about academic bullying as a means of intellectual suppression. That has little if anything to do with products like Facebook, I really don't see the connection.
I'm surprised that this basic foundation of the popularity of "cancel culture" doesn't get pointed out more. It's dead obvious, and something virtually everybody can sympathize with, whether they admit it or not - but people want to find other, more easily attackable qualities to describe cancel culture as being "about". Like most topics that consist mostly of irrational side-taking, it would be a lot less messy to just criticize specific examples, instead of making it into culture war on purpose by forcing it into the mold of the monolithic "them" vs the monolithic "us".
[1] https://twitter.com/pmddomingos/status/1344215079890272257
One way to find that out would be to look at https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=docs.google.com.
Another is HN search, of course. e.g. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
I doubt the authors of the letter would so vigorously defend against the ‘cancelling’ of advocates of genocide, exploitation of minors, or cannibalism.
And where are the footprints of this supposed cancellation sasquatch anyway? Brendan Eich? Doesn’t seem to be doing that poorly to me.
sigh One of those things is not like the others. I agree that people should not be hounded out of science. That means not publishing papers, articles or comments to the effect that "women can't do science" or bell curve arguments about some races being less intellectually capable than others. That is also hounding people out of science.
I see a couple things that are choices. A couple that are innate. A couple that are considered sensitive information, and a couple that are public information. No one of these things sticks out to me as different from the others.
I completely agree on the topic, but why shouldn't they be published and disproved by someone else with better arguments?
Bad science has always been fought with good science.
Suppose you manage a school district and you find that, after controlling for socio-economic income, your students' SAT scores are drastically predicted by race. Suppose you don't publish it, because you fear it might be used as fuel for some racist. What if it turns out that a geographic area that happened to correlate with race was getting an inferior water supply with lead in it, and because nobody was willing to look any further, the problem went on for an extra decade before being fixed?
Publishing a study that concludes that, because of this, black people are innately less intelligent than others (and not, for example, that environmental or social factors are to account), would be controversial.
That's how science should operate. The comment I was responding to seemed to indicate such statements were problematic, even without attributing the cause to innate biology.
"Women can't do science" and "bell curve arguments about some races being less intellectually capable than others" are both causal arguments. "The SAT exhibits racial bias" is an observational statement. You took the GP's argument about causal misattribution and turned it into one about hiding observational conclusions, but that wasn't present in the original comment.
I'm done responding to you though because you're tone is confrontational and emotional.
Science is better served when such papers are published, and then are debunked using scientific standards of inquiry.
Proving those views wrong is much more powerful than censoring them -- anytime someone puts forward those views we can now say "nope, that's been debunked, here is an article that proves it wrong."
Censorship creates a chilling effect on science in general. People will be afraid to do gender or IQ studies. Some of those studies might end up with results that are true, but not politically popular at the time.
We should not forget that scientific orthodoxy was racist not that long ago. If scientific journals had been censored in the early 1900s, for example, anti-racist papers would have been suppressed. Today is no different -- many of our current scientific views are likely to be disproved 100 years from now, but only if we allow contrary views to be published.
Your argument is so broad that you will insist that flat-earth, young-earth creationists ("YEC"s), and other crack-pot pseudosciences be accepted as if they were serious and reasonable.
Where should a YEC get to publish their papers? If the paper isn't accepted (because it's contrary to all evidence and has no strong evidence to support it), do you call that decision "censorship"? In 100 years do you expect that we might discover the YECs are right?
And yes, people are "afraid" now to do YEC studies because of the effects of being laughed at for crackpot science and denied funding.
Thing is, when YECs manage to get something published (sometimes by subterfuge), yes, there are articles debunking them. But that doesn't matter because YECs use the publication itself as evidence that their ideas are accepted as scientific. Their goal is to be treated as an equal ("teach the controversy"), not do good science, and their real audience isn't the scientific readership.
We see that as well with "bell curve arguments about some races being less intellectually capable than others", where the goal is not to be intellectually honest (See Shaun's video essay at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBc7qBS1Ujo which goes deep into some of the dishonesty) but to provide a veneer of scientific-ness to justify racist policy decisions.
Thing is, we do allow contrary views to be published. But they have to be supported by evidence. And the evidence that (for example) "women can't do science" isn't there.
When people want to hold a view, out-sciencing them won't work.
Ultimately
> Will use a smidgeon of an expert's time and help a lot of people.
Yes, if you have to spend all your time responding to cranks, you'll have no time to be productive, and you'll embolden the cranks. Bullshit is produce to spew than to refute, so trying to counter bullshit with intellectual honesty is a loosing proposition. At some point you have to set a bar for bullshit, and ignore anything below the bar. The bullshit-artists call that "censorship", because at that point they've lost and the only way they can continue to spew bullshit is to find popular support with contrarians or free-speech absolutists who don't actually have a deep knowledge or care about scientific discourse.
I once made the mistake of “debating” with a fundamentalist young-Earth Baptist Creationist who set up a microphone and speaker in the middle of Cambridge some time around 2008. He said too many wrong things too quickly for me to actually counter them all.
One that still sticks in my mind was him saying “Ladies and Gentlemen, I have found the kernel of this man’s beliefs. Either you believe in eternal energy or eternal God.” - literally every part of that sentence is false, but the dumb was too shocking for me to respond to.
Given what I know now, I think he technically blasphemed against his own faith multiple times… but I don’t think I convinced anyone who was on the fence.
So if YECs don't make a good argument, they shouldn't be accepted for publication in a scientific journal, and therefore it's not censorship, right?
I recently saw a paper get accepted by a biology journal, and then rejected because the editors found out the authors were associated with intelligent design. That is inappropriate in my opinion.
Eg, using terms that obfuscate the YEC aspects of the paper, which isn't obvious enough for the reviewers to understand what it actually means.
There are also journals which accept anything, with little or no review (eg, some conference papers) and societies which allow their members to publish anything, and use post-publication review to retract papers.
Or sometimes someone with YEC beliefs gets editorial control and start green-lighting YEC papers not on merit but because of those personal beliefs.
Can you point to the incident?
Do you think it was rejected merely because it was YEC? Or because the evidence presented didn't actually support a YEC claim?
The key questions are: Do you think it was controversial merely because it was on ID? Or because the evidence presented didn't actually support a ID claim?
It appears that paper falls solidly in my description of how such works get into print, eg, cherry-picking quotes:
1) added the keywords "intelligent design" after editorial review
2) "naive to the point of being silly"
3) "I can only speculate, but inattention to the details and unfamiliarity with the references might have played a role [in how the article made it into print]."
If the conclusions of the paper have already been demonstrated to be incorrect, but the authors both know those objections and leave out discussion of them, then it's a seriously flawed paper.
Reviewers and editors cannot catch all merit-less papers. The acceptance system is based on a system of trust, including trust that the authors have highlighted possible flaws in their argument. There's also the post-publication review process, including retractions.
Moreover, most reviewers will not have experience with creationist literature (because it's a pseudoscience with no predictive ability), so are not likely to notice a paper which uses certain terms which only have meaning to creationists.
For example, "design" could mean "the result of natural evolutionary processes", but to a creationist it might mean the design of a creator, that is, as short-hand for "intelligent design."
Had they used "intelligent design" at the start, it would have helped the reviewer understand the context. Leaving that out until after the review process ended makes me suspicious that this omission was deliberate.
> William Dembski, who mainly belongs to the frequentist’s school in statistics, regards the fine-tuning argument as suggestive, as pointers to underlying design.
Dembski's "design" is specifically "intelligent design". The blurb for the book cited starts. 'How can we identify events due to intelligent causes'.
Is that the same type of design as the authors mean? Let's go back to the long discussion of what 'design' means:
> A design is a specification or plan for the construction of an object or system, or the result of that specification or plan in the form of a product. ... Humans have a powerful intuitive understanding of design that precedes modern science. Our common intuitions invariably begin with recognizing a pattern as a mark of design.
So, is DNA a 'specification or plan for the construction of an object'? For many proteins it certainly is. So, is DNA a design? According to this definition, yes!
But Dembski's argument is that there must an intelligent designer. While biologists often use phrases like "evolution designed" to describe the results of standard evolution.
Picking one paper from a Google Scholar search, https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-71152-7_... says "Immunology is frequently the prisoner of its own semantics. Evolution designed an immune system equipped to recognize all foreign antigens, the structure of which it cannot know in advance." Or in a summary from https://stm.sciencemag.org/content/5/202/202ec148.short "In modern times, we turn up the thermostat if we’re cold, but evolution designed our bodies to acclimate to cold temperatures and maintain euthermia (normal body temperature) without the assistance of external climate control."
Neither claim an intelligent designer involved, so that "powerful intuitive understanding of design" must include designs that were not created by a designer, yes?
Which means that Dembski's use of the term 'design' is not shared by the general readership a biology journal, and omitting the qualifier intelligent design when talking about Dembski's work is a form of white-washing - just like I described when I wrote 'most reviewers ... are not likely to notice a paper which uses certain terms which only have meaning to creationists'.
You write 'they have a large section devoted to ... intelligent design, and the surrounding criticisms and responses'.
I see one paragraph which specifically calls out intelligent design. The next paragraph is on William Dembski. Is Dembski's work specifically ID? Then why wasn't Dembski's earlier work described that way?
I looked at (Olofsson, 2008). It says outright "In a way, the ideas in The Design Inference and No Free Lunch are examples of an exaggerated belief in mathematical methods in the sciences." And cites other publications describing problems in Dembski's work.
The third and last paragraph in this section claims that Dembski's work has been re-formulated as ASC, and implies that the re-formulation overcomes those criticisms.
So, has it? It's not hard to find criticisms of ASC: http://theskepticalzone.com/wp/evo-info-4-non-conservation-o... and https://pandasthumb.org/archives/2019/12/Is-Algorithmic-Spec... , for examples, the latter arguing "the connection to evolution is lacking".
Given Dembski's earlier 'exaggerated belief in mathematical methods in the sciences' and the strength of the many previous criticisms, why are Thorvaldsen and Hössjer confident that ASC overcomes those criticisms? They don't say.
You'll be hard-pressed to find a reviewer diligent enough to go through all of the citations to check for this level of undue optimism.
"Axe also elaborates on the massive improbabilities of anything like functional proteins arising by natural selection (Axe, 2016). The search space turns out to be too impossibly vast for blind selection to have even a slight chance of success. The contrasting view is innovations based on ingenuity, cleverness and intelligence."
I really don't see any sneakiness going on here.
Also, is it normal to respond to blog post criticisms in a journal article? Otherwise, I'm not sure why you think it is a problem the journal authors didn't respond to blog posts. I've not seen such a requirement before, and I've spent a fair amount of time in academia. On the other hand, from what I see, the authors do respond to published criticisms of ID theory, e.g. papers by Wilkins, Elsberry and Olofsson. So, at least regarding your concern they do not mention the criticisms of ID and provide responses, hopefully this should set you at ease.
Finally, the authors explain why they think ASC overcomes, or at least addresses the previous criticism of ID:
"However, it is hard to apply to many interesting biological applications or contexts, because a huge number of potential but unknown scenarios may exist, which makes it difficult to phrase a null hypothesis for a statistical test."
with the fact that ASC is measured in regards to a specific probability distribution:
"ACS incorporates both Shannon and Kolmogorov complexity measures, and it quantifies the degree to which an event is improbable and follows a pattern."
and this approach is further improved by a later result they mention by Montañez. At any rate, I recommend giving the article a careful read before coming to conclusions.
So, I still do not understand why it is within normal scholarly protocols to post a warning about the article. It is very forthright about its ID connection, in fact forming almost the entirety of the paper around ID arguments and authors, addresses criticisms, cautions about its own conclusions, and seems to be pretty mathematically rigorous and written by well credentialed authors.
As the rebuttal paper puts it, "neither fine-tuning nor intelligent design is required when sample spaces are viewed through the lens of evolutionary dynamics."
I agree. Where in their paper do they consider this standard criticism to ED, and point out that the criticism is un-founded?
Indeed, as they themselves point out (when talking about the creation of the universe, "A probabilistic argument presumes adequate knowledge of (the limits on) the space of possibility. It presupposes that current knowledge provides an accurate, unbiased statistical account of, or means of determining, what may or may not happen by chance." And we don't have that, so can't use this approach to determine if there was intelligent design.
Where has ASC been shown to be an effective of model for evolutionary processes? The relevant paper by Montañez says:
> Following Behe, let us say a system is irreducible if it contains at least three well-matched components that contribute necessarily to a core function, such that removal or mutilation of any of the components causes the system to cease functioning with respect to the core function.
That is a definition, which is good enough for a mathematical model. But does it model biology? No!
It's well-known that evolutionary systems may lead to such systems, therefore the existence of irreducible complexity in a given biological system does not mean evolution couldn't have happened, or that intelligent design must have occurred.
So how does ASC connect to the goals of this paper? Shrug. You're the one who read it carefully enough, yes?
As to "is it normal to respond to blog post criticisms in a journal article".
Why are you even asking that question? My pointing to a blog post was because it was easy to find. I am not an expert in pseudo-scientific research fields like ID or YEC, nor am I an expert in the counter-refutations of that research.
Are you saying that no such counter-arguments have been published in the scholarly literature? Or are you saying that you will ignore me unless I can point to specific literature?
I never would have heard of these ID arguments and authors had I not been following the blog of an evolutionary biologist for 15+ years who has a special interest in pointing out flaws in creationist arguments. Do you really think most biologists are trained to recognize ID authors, or understand when "design" is meant to only mean "intelligent design"?
I get the paper's arguments are debated by biologists. But I still don't understand how this at all relates to the big disclaimer about the authors' connections and claiming because of these connections the paper is not suitable for publishing in the journal, which they have published after a peer review. Makes no sense to me, and I'm really not tracking your explanation.
> Do you really think most biologists are trained to recognize ID authors, or understand when "design" is meant to only mean "intelligent design"?
Why do biologists have to be trained to recognize ID authors? They don't have to be trained to recognize information theorists, or computer scientists, or any other hosts of independent disciplines that could be relevant to biology. And don't the authors clearly point out they are intending 'design' in the sense we attribute to humans, i.e. intelligent designers? Seems that way to me. Sorry, I am dense, I am really not understanding your point. It sounds to me like you want to imply some sort of deception on the part of the authors, but for all the reasons I've stated, this is entirely non obvious to me, and the journal's disclaimer still comes across as light censorship in the form of well poisoning, so I will have to disengage from this discussion. I wish you well.
And you didn't answer my questions: Where should a YEC get to publish their papers? If the paper isn't accepted (because it's contrary to all evidence and has no strong evidence to support it), do you call that decision "censorship"? In 100 years do you expect that we might discover the YECs are right?
Experience with YECs, flat-earthers, and the like show that it's far more than "a smidgen of an expert's time". As you yourself pointed out, it requires learning a different set of rhetorical skills than are needed for a scientific paper.
And that takes a lot of time. (And it seems you have no experience in dealing with crackpots to know this.)
A scientist who enters a "debate" with a creationist, but who is not trained in the specific rhetorical techniques (eg. "Gish gallop", as another commenter pointed out) is going to get trounced - because scientists aren't trained in dealing with charlatans, and rhetorical style can trump competence.
As a result, charlatans gain fame for being able to out-debate a scientist. I'll stress this point, the point of these crackpot publications and "debates" is NOT to advance science but to establish credentials as being a viable alternative.
So, will you answer my questions now?
I'm perfectly fine with that latter viewpoint and don't see where we have any disagreement.
twblalock's argument appears to be that editors are obligated to publish all pseudoscience dreck in order to refute it.
Now, there are plenty of pseudoscientific beliefs which are widely held, but are clearly not backed by evidence.
Consider Hollow Earth theory - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollow_Earth - which is outright untenable; there is no evidence in favor of it and plenty of evidence against it.
Why should I worry about implications of a Hollow Earth when there are so many other more interesting things to worry about?
Going back to pjc50's comment, I am convinced by the evidence that 'bell curve arguments about some races being less intellectually capable than others' are bunkum. To start with, the genetic evidence over the last decades shows that the human-constructed concept we call "race" has no real biological basis. (Racial classifications is another pseudoscience. I linked to a video with more discussion about the flaws in the Bell Curve book.)
The evidence is so overwhelming that, like the evidence against YEC or Hollow Earth theory, it's not worth my time to engage in the topic, much less worth my time to develop the specific rhetorical skills to engage charlatans, frauds, grifters, and true-believers at their game.
There are certainly some who do that, and I commend them for fighting the good fight. But when a YEC proponent presents a tired argument like "If Human Beings Evolved From Monkeys Then Why Are There Still Monkeys?" or "Evolution Is Only A Theory" for the n-th million-th time - I don't have the patience. And neither do science journal editors, who use their freedom of association to decide to not publish a given paper.
I'll now focus on the word "censorship". You must be aware that supporters of pseudoscientific beliefs have all manner of ways to publish their works, hold meetings, get on TV shows, build museums, and more. So by "censor" you are not meaning censorship in any of its usual senses.
I think you mean something more like "there's an obligation to let the honorable opposition speak, in order that truth may ring out." But a YEC isn't there for the scientific truth but rather wants to be treated as honorable (even though it isn't!) in order to influence policy goals in favor of a certain religious viewpoint. I believe by jumping right to "censorship" instead of starting with "maybe it doesn't actually have merit", you end up supporting bad science.
As a concrete example, let's stick with YEC. There are very successful scientists with credentials from top institutions that believe the evidence supports the YEC position. They argue for YEC not for religious reasons, but for honest intellectual reasons. It is worth giving such arguments a fair hearing, regardless of whether they are flawed.
Who? And what are their arguments?
And how have their arguments not been given a fair hearing and found lacking? (See http://talkorigins.org/indexcc/list.html for a list of common creationist arguments and their rebuttal.)
That's what I mean by a concrete example.
> This idea is unsupported by available evidence. In laboratory experiments, viruses saturated with mutations do not go extinct.[10] Sanford also misuses Kimura's mutation distribution; Kimura excludes beneficial mutations because they would have too large an effect, not an insignificant one.[11] Sanford has refused to acknowledge this problem, even after being directly confronted with Kimura's own words.[12] Further, Sanford's assertion that there are virtually no selectable beneficial mutations is contradicted by examples of exactly that, such as lactase persistence in humans,[13] or tetherin antagonism in HIV-1 group M Vpu.[14]
Just to outline the discussion up till now, I maintain that even non status quo views should be given a hearing, if they proceed by well established criteria for good argumentation. You questioned whether any such people/arguments exist, and if so whether they are in fact being unduly censored. I offered the biological fine tuning paper and Sanford as ID and YEC (in turn) examples to support my claim there are well argued minority views held by otherwise highly intellectually respectable individuals that are currently being censored, unjustly in my opinion.
I pointed out that Sanford's reasons do not seem to fall into that category, in that they have been refuted, and he continues.
Once they are given a hearing, and found wanting, do they get another hearing? And another? And another?
How many hearings is enough before we say it's no longer an honest reason?
You answer seems to be "as many as they want, otherwise it's censorship."
"Sanford also misuses Kimura's mutation distribution; Kimura excludes beneficial mutations because they would have too large an effect, not an insignificant one."
This makes it sound as if Sanford is excluding beneficial mutations because otherwise they would disprove his 'genetic entropy' thesis since they are very beneficial and outweigh the amassing of negative mutations.
However, from what I can understand of the original paper, Kimura actually excludes beneficial mutations from his model because they do not match the empirical data, and thus must be much less beneficial or common than his model requires. Here's the cite from his paper: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC383841/
From the abstract:
"The situation becomes quite different if slightly advantageous mutations occur at a constant rate independent of environmental conditions. In this case, the evolutionary rate can become enormously higher in a species with a very large population size than in a species with a small population size, contrary to the observed pattern of evolution at the molecular level."
From the beginning: "Note that in this formulation, we disregard beneficial mutants, and restrict our consideration only to deleterious and neutral mutations. Admittedly, this is an oversimplification, but as I shall show later, a model assuming that beneficial mutations also arise at a constant rate independent of environmental changes leads to unrealistic results."
And near the end of the article:
"To make our analysis complete, let us investigate how the evolutionary rate is influenced by assuming that a certain fraction of mutations are advantageous....This means the rate of evolution can become enormously high in very large populations, kg being directly proportional to Ne, contrary to actual observations."
Kimura is saying that beneficial mutations do not follow his model, because they must be much less common than his model requires, so he excludes beneficial mutations. This sounds to me consistent with what Sanford is saying, unless I am misunderstanding something. If you come to a different understanding of Kimura, please let me know.
At any rate, it is not intellectually dishonest for scholars to disagree. There is no requirement that scholars must agree with the status quo. In fact, that's anti thetical to the entire scientific project. Intellectual dishonesty consists of things like knowingly making logically fallacious arguments and falsifying evidence, none of which it is obvious, at least to me from the wiki article you posted, that Sanford is doing. So it is unclear to me why he should not be regarded as an intellectually honest YEC, and have his views respected as such. I am happy to be convinced otherwise.
I disagree with this: why is it hounding people out of science?
Let's say I publish a paper that literally says "Gender/race/whatever can't do science" or "Group X has N points lower IQ than group Y at the mean".
Who does that keep out of the field? And how? I think it keeps nobody out of anything.
Unlike the cancel-culture playbook (call their boss, name and shame, call the cops citing emotional violence, etc.) publishing a paper like that has virtually no effect on any members of the group in question.