Comment by joshuamorton | Hacker News Reader

Comment by joshuamorton | Hacker News Reader

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Could you cite what part of the paper you're talking about? Since it's now public[0], it's fairly easy to verify what you're talking about. The word "woke" doesn't appear in the paper.

If I'm interpreting your argument correctly, I think you're criticizing either section 4.1 Size Doesn’t Guarantee Diversity, or section 4.2 Static Data/Changing Social Views. But your criticisms don't track with either of those sections. 4.2 seems the best fit (since they discuss keeping models up to date with modes of communication). The claim made in the paper seems to be that an LM trained today will fail to keep up with shifts in language (and these can happen quickly, in months, not years in many contexts). This is true whether the context is "woke vocabulary" whatever that means, reclaimed slurs (such as "queer"), or memetic slang/shibboleths ("kek" or "do you listen to girl in red"). I don't see anyone saying that language models or designers are required to agree with "woke vocabulary". The closest I can come is the authors suggesting that models which fail to stay up to date with shifts in vocabulary (including, I guess, woke vocabulary) will be less effective. That seems trivially true. Can you clarify?

[0]: https://faculty.washington.edu/ebender/papers/Stochastic_Par...

I feel my comment tracks extremely well with the sections you cite and that it takes some mental gymnastics to read exactly the link you provided and then act like my comments somehow don’t track. The original criticisms were about failure of source data for large models (eg reddit for GPT) to account for fast shifts in social activism language specifically.

The other major problematic section is on energy use and unqualified comparison of units of large model training with carbon emissions of other activities (with no attempt to account for societal value of ML model research or training, nor economies of scale as training technology democratizes it and makes it cheaper). It is similar to the incredibly specious diatribes from Stephen Diehl lately balking at the raw energy numbers of Bitcoin mining, as if those numbers mean anything or relate to any conclusions on their own.

I wrote up a lot more of my thoughts on Gebru’s bad article when it was first leaked. Here’s that comment:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25314824

I also feel you are very commonly involved in lengthy downvote / flagging threads with disingenuous takes on others’ comments and deliberate unwillingness to apply charitable takes or avoid taking things out of context. I am sure from your POV you don’t feel that way and I’m not asking anyone to agree with my assessment; I have zero goal of citing things to back it up. I am just going to preemptively drop off from replying to you any further.

> I feel my comment tracks extremely well with the sections you cite and that it takes some mental gymnastics to read exactly the link you provided and then act like my comments somehow don’t track. The original criticisms were about failure of source data for large models (eg reddit for GPT) to account for fast shifts in social activism language specifically.

I think this is a completely fair summary of the paper.

But you described the paper as suggesting that people are "required to agree with or accept woke vocabulary" or previously your criticism was "Nobody is required to accept “wokeness” vocabulary".

I don't see how you can justify those criticisms from the paper. They aren't there. There isn't a place where they paper says that anyone needs to use or agree with a particular kind of vocabulary.

I don't know if it's intentional or not, but the claims you're making about what the paper says just aren't in the actual document. Hence my question: where are you getting that criticism from? Where does the paper suggest that people need to agree with woke vocabulary? I think it's uncharitable for you to criticize the paper based on a mischaracterization, and so I think it's completely reasonable for me to clarify by what reasoning you came to make that criticism. Because again, despite trying I can't find an interpretation of the paper where your criticism makes sense.

I'd implore anyone else reading to look at sections 4.1 and 4.2 as well. They just simply don't say this.

I’ll just add that I agree - I also implore readers to read sections 4.1 and 4.2 of the link because it explicitly and unequivocally backs up and confirms what I said about the “woke vocab” critique.

I hope people will read it, because a direct reading of it does support my position and does not support your position.

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