My guess is this will garner attention for use of AI — that's where my attention went as well initially. But there's another layer to this, which is whether a grant should be terminated just because it pertains to DEI, regardless of AI being involved or not.
My guess is you couldn't get a roomful of experts to agree on what "DEI" means; I doubt AI could do better, and even if it could, I'm not sure I'd want that to be the determining factor about whether it would get funded. To the extent it was, I'm not sure it would be a bad thing.
> But there's another layer to this, which is whether a grant should be terminated just because it pertains to DEI, regardless of AI being involved or not.
Another layer?
I think it's the same level of stupidity/shadiness.
I remember (the one time I snuck into NIPS) a buuunch of papers on "fairness", and it was basically: "We have decided that this input should not affect the outcome. Does it? If so, how?"
So that seems like a pretty good actual "what's DEI?" - Does race/gender/sexuality/etc affect some outcome? Should it? If it does affect it and shouldn't, what we can we do about it?
That said... yeah, not gonna get a room full of anyone to agree on that. Starting with that "should".
If you can use a criteria to finance academia [1] you can use the reverse to define what DEI is. Every major corporation had DEI departments and yet it doesn't exist, it's a ghost.
I really hope the backlash to this bullshit finally reaches europe.
Same song and dance for 14 years straight, there is no SJW you're just imagining them, it's just called being a decent human being, they say as they kick me repeatedly in the face.
I think it's questionable whether the censorship has ceased. It's just done less transparently and blamed on "the algorithm". There's an article about it now on the front page of HN.
Not disagreeing with the need of a reminder that there was censorship from the left though.
I agree that government restrictions usually help if they're implemented well, but part of the issue is the government is benefiting from this kind of thing.
Also, most people don't actually need something like Amazon. Not to minimize the level of investment in it, but I don't see Amazon or Google as being quite the same as Bell or Standard Oil. Maybe between Google and Apple there's some kind of duopoly like that?
My impression is people don't value — either because they don't understand or minimize — things that protect privacy and anonymity. This is a standard refrain on these kinds of forums and elsewhere — "your typical person doesn't know or care about [feature X that preserves privacy, choice, and autonomy], they just want something that works and is fun". It's been belittled as unfashionable or paranoid or performative or something, when it's really something that's had short term costs that pale in comparison to the long-term costs.
I'm not saying governments don't need to be on the "right side" but I think people need to see security as involving not just encryption and so forth, but also decentralization, anonymity, demonopolization, and censorship resistance. It needs to be seen as part of the product or service benefits.
A lot of this reminds me of stuff from the 90s, when network security was ignored for awhile for customer convenience's sake. It seems really similar now, only the thing that's been ignored is like user control and privacy or something like that.
I think the thing that's surprising to me, for example, is that it takes a Super Bowl ad for people to realize that maybe there are downsides to letting a monopoly have access to video throughout the neighborhood everywhere.
There's always the question of where exactly you're referring to and what kind of crime you're referring to. But I assumed that's what the parent post was referring to.
The link between compsci and math is pretty obvious and foundational, but I think there's been studies (out of Carnegie Mellon?) showing that logical reasoning is more predictive of compsci performance academically speaking than math achievement.
Yeah I saw this blowback coming, but two wrongs (to the extent you see the first as a wrong) don't make a right.
There's no reason to be hindering availability of safe and effective vaccines because a previous administration made it mandatory for some people to get some vaccines.
Yeah this paper came across to me basically as "if you ignore environmental causes of death, the heritability of death goes up"... which seems kind of circular.
Not necessarily. It could be the case that randomness plays a huge part in non-environmental caused deaths, and if that were the case we would see very little heritability.
No, you randomly get cancer since cancerous mutations happens randomly. Environment can just affect chance of getting cancer, it doesn't give you cancer directly and there is no way to completely avoid cancer risk.
For example even if you live the best life possible you will still have an inherent cancer risk based on your genes and that affects the random chance of you getting cancer, it isn't a clock that says exactly when cancer will happen.
I really like everything Uri Alon (last author) publishes, but these types of studies have a history of inflating genetic contributions to phenotypes. Decoupling genetics from environment is not easy as they are both highly correlated.
In fact, the article discussion states: "Limitations of this study include reliance on assumptions of the twin design, such as the equal environment assumption". My take on this is that the main result of the article is probably true, but the 50% figure is likely to be inflated.
I hit the jackpot with the ultrasound technician who spoke passionately about what she believed about lifestyle risk for cardiovascular conditions and she believed quite strongly that heart disease runs in families more because lifestyle runs in families than because of genetics. She's not at the top of the medical totem pole but I can say she inspired me to take responsibility for my health than the specialist who I talked to about the results.
If the environment was significantly more varied in health impact between twin comparisons than expected, then the correlations they found under estimate the genetic component.
Some randomness is part of the signal being studied, and some is undesired measurement noise to be controlled for. And it is only the latter that is beneficial to be carefully removed or otherwise controlled for.
There's no prior reason to expect the cited conditions to have any specific relation to genetics. Any of them could easily be caused or accelerated by environmental conditions.
Yeah, it’s important to note that heritability is a statistic about today’s population, not a deep natural parameter that tells you about causality. Heritability of smoking went up when smoking became less socially approved, for example.
My guess is you couldn't get a roomful of experts to agree on what "DEI" means; I doubt AI could do better, and even if it could, I'm not sure I'd want that to be the determining factor about whether it would get funded. To the extent it was, I'm not sure it would be a bad thing.
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