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I wrote a post about de-biasing efforts in machine learning, which got a bit long, so I decided to turn it into an article instead. It's about how corporate anti-bias solutions are mostly only designed to cover their asses, and does nothing to solve the larger (actually important) issue.
(As an aside: does it still count as a "bare link" if I point to my own content, just hosted elsewhere?)
Well yes corporations just want to cover their asses from criticism, but the worst is that the criticism is so powerful that the discussion ends up shallow. I'm so annoyed that we had a cancellation of a language model that produced rap lyrics. FN Meka had a record contract which was later torn up because it was a "appropriator" using words reserved for someone with "lived experiences". It was just reported on and everyone glossed it over and forgot about. I'm like what did just happen? They cancelled a pile of math... There are slightly more deeper philosophical problems with the way it was cancelled. It cuts directly into postmodernism and its issues with treating the inauthentic the same as the authentic. Because at the end of the day the language model is just a mirror of the language used by those with the "lived experiences" and should be understood as such. https://youtube.com/watch?v=vYmfnfljvnM
Clearly they didn't. They "canceled" actions of people for (to them) socially relevant reasons.
This kind of "they canceled math" reminds me when pirates said that "a number was banned", meaning that the sharing of an encryption key was banned (my point is independent of agreeing with that ban), or "I just used words" or "I just moved a mouse and clicked on things". Or saying "it's just pixels" if you were caught with CP.
(Another somewhat similar trick is "no person is illegal", making it seem as if someone who uses the phrase "illegal immigrant" meant that the person themselves is illegal besides being an immigrant, when clearly it means a person who immigrates illegally. The person isn't illegal, but their actions are. Similarly here, it's not the math that is canceled but an action performed through math.)
It's an annoying rhetorical tool. It's not "just" that, and the fuss isn't about that "just" part but the consequences, the context, the intent, the usage, etc. Everything is, at the end of the day, "just" something. A bomb is just some chemicals, just some molecules. Everything is just a bunch of quarks and electrons and so you can make any action sound absurd.
One can be annoyed at reductionism but when people decry the object for itself, it's no longer reductionism.
"Guns aren't banned, only possessing guns is banned" is about as stupid as the converse.
The people who don't like this AI don't like it for essential reasons, not because of actions taken with it.
I wonder if they would be okay with it if it (the rapper AI) was operated by black people. If yes, then it's not merely about the AI as an object or the math. You have to argue (and I don't think it's hard) that blacks don't have a monopoly on rap, it's not enough to say "hurr durr it's just math".
So I didn't pay much attention to this controversy, mostly out of lack of interest, but also partly out of unfortunate paucity of coverage, but I think the main issue the "cancelers" had with the AI was that it was generating lyrics implying some sort of personal struggle as a black man facing police brutality, and also possibly using certain slurs that are common in rap songs produced by black people. I'm not sure if the "cancelers" would be okay with the AI if it had been operated by black people, or if they would require that the AI also be written by black people. And if the latter, does it have to be written from scratch with no use of, say, open source code created by white or Asian researchers?
Or would even that not be enough, and the mere fact that it's a computer generating these lyrics instead of a human brain belonging to a black man who had actually suffered police brutality generating them is a problem? If so, it seems reasonable to characterize that as people "canceling a pile of math;" however, it's not clear to me that this is so.
I see it totally opposite. What they are doing is precisely not about canceling the math but the social context, the use. That people made a black man imitator robot, which they consider some kind of blasphemy/taboo, like depicting the prophet for Muslims or how some tribes don't want to be photographed. It's a sacred thing for them. Just like putting some fancy Native American headdress onto some random robot or scarecrow would probably be.
You can argue against that view and that it's bad to consider such things sacred. But it's strawmanning them to pretend that they are simply arbitrarily canceling a bunch of math. They are canceling the building of software tools that impersonate black rappers, as a legitimate endeavor out of quasi religious reasons.
No, that's not a strawman, that's a description. By your reasoning, the concept of "canceling a bunch of math" simply doesn't seem to exist; if I decided that "2+2=4" is blasphemous and demanded that all books and teachers making such statements be "canceled," I wouldn't be "canceling a bunch of math," but rather, say, "canceling the expression of certain mathematical equations out of quasi religious reasons." Mathematical equations and algorithms - whether they state some arithmetic fact or they allow the creation of some string of letters that some people find meaningful - aren't just lying around for people to discover; they are expressed and created by humans. Objecting to people expressing and creating such things is exactly what is described when something is described as "canceling a bunch of math."
If I oppose you shooting a bunch of cannon balls at my house, I'm not canceling ballistics, I'm canceling your use of ballistics in this particular way.
"Cancelling" math would be something like what the Pythagoreans did (though cancel isn't the best verb) when trying to suppress the proof/discovery that root 2 isn't rational (please let's not get bogged down in the historicity of my characterization of this particular example, it's an analogy). To consider mathematical facts themselves as dangerous or harmful. These people didn't cancel machine learning or convergence proofs or gradient descent. They cancelled an application of machine learning. If I say that a Chinese style social credit system or all encompassing surveillance infrastructure are bad or should not be implemented, I'm not cancelling the math. Just the application area.
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