A large part of them believe that a researcher has to be an activist, i.e. research=activism. Many recent textbooks on social science see the following as credible resarch:
"Emancipatory research: Research that exposes underlying ideologies in order to liberate those oppressed by them."
(Zina O'Leary textbook, used by many schools, over 2K citations for multiple editions)
So if a corporate behemoth such as Google wants to ethicswash itself by hiring individuals with the above approach, what outcome did it expect?
It was clearly a mistake. They don't act in a constructive way.
Let's take Timnit's paper for example. She found out that Google had been using a biased language model in search. The bias was like - 'male' association with 'doctor' as opposed to 'woman' association to 'nurse'. But she didn't show how this is harming anyone in a concrete way. Just theoretical. And then she offered no solution, just blaming the work of others, using her paper as a soap box to raise scandal and make herself holier than thou.
While I am not a fan of Gebru's handling of her own firing, this is a mischaracterization of her work.
She routinely offered suggested methods, experiments, and even new datasets [1] that fixed what she saw as wrong. She does have a fair bit of practical ML experience as shown in the computer vision papers in her publication list.
1. Buolamwini, Joy, and Timnit Gebru. "Gender shades: Intersectional accuracy disparities in commercial gender classification." Conference on fairness, accountability and transparency. 2018.
Of course I was aware of her Gender Shades paper. It's a small bias evaluation benchmark dataset.
> We developed the Pilot Parliaments Benchmark (PPB) to achieve better intersectional representation on the basis of genderand skin type. PPB consists of 1270 individuals from three African countries (Rwanda, Senegal, South Africa) and three European countries (Ice-land, Finland, Sweden) selected for gender parity in the national parliaments.
A dataset of 1270 images is hardly a breakthrough, the kind I expect to see in a small university project. But it doesn't lead to better models because it's not nearly large enough to train on. What it can do is rate existing models. Basically - useful to critique, not to improve.
A small nitpick: why just two races in a de-biasing dataset? Where are the Asians?
With the hard realism approach, a corporate entity would fund an independent body of research, and then re-use publications that match their agenda.
Hiring someone (perhaps with aspirations to buy their loyalty?) entails risks. Instead of pulling funding from the "independent think-tank", google now finds itself in the midst of a potential discrimination/political scandal involving an employee.
> But she didn’t show how this is harming anyone in a concrete way.
To roll with the example “man” ~ “doctor”, “woman” ~ “nurse”, the harm is having a giant and widely used search engine reinforce baseless gender biases, ie that there is no underlying reason why women should be nurses and men doctors. What is the harm you may ask? The harm may be subtle, eg being surprised when you find out your next doctor is a woman or your next is a man. It could suppress career choices and aspirations, and it could even be financial, eg reinforcing systemic pay gaps.
That particular "bias" isn't actually a bias, it's an accurate learning about the distribution of genders between jobs in the real world. Very few professions have an exactly 50:50 balance of men and women. Most are tilted towards one gender or the other. The purpose of a correct search engine is not to reduce my "surprise" at arbitrary events but rather to give me the information I'm looking for, which will more often than not be questions about the real world - not the fever dream of some hard-left activist.
Indeed. To intentionally skew the data such that, for example, men are over represented as nurses, is in fact introducing bias to the data based on prejudice.
You’ve essentially created a fictional data set because it’s biased due to the underlying prejudice (preconceived opinion that is not based on reason or actual experience) that men ought to be nursing more, despite that not being reality.
We’re in a strange situation where we have large concerted efforts by activists to inject fiction in to our facts (whatever the medium) with the aim of distorting perceptions in such a way as to some how correct what they perceive to be injustice in the real world.
This kind of hypothetical effects should be documented in concrete cases by a good ethical scientist instead of just described from imagination. For example, when someone searches for a doctor, let's say a male comes up first - who stops at the first Google result? They would probably need to go deep and read about the doctor's experience and find patient reviews.
Part of the issue is that the harms of gender bias (and other types of bias) should not need to be made explicit, but part of the research canon. Should a security researcher outline the harms of an attacker obtaining user credentials, or is our imagination sufficient because the harms are well known to us? And if you were looking for more in depth studies, then there is a ton of published research, maybe not all of it on arxiv or in machine learning journals.
At some point imagination has to make touch with reality otherwise it can become unhinged. Yes, security researchers can enumerate concrete cases where "the harms of an attacker obtaining user credentials" caused damage.
>A large part of them believe that a researcher has to be an activist, i.e. research=activism.
A large part of them believe in other delusions such as "silence is violence", coming to work on time is "Whiteness", and "objective, rational" thinking is normalized racism.
In their deranged minds, the ends justify their means, so they can be the antithesis of their being because their crusade is holy, and just.
That's the complete opposite of being a researcher.
I feel like your first two sentences are conflating the belief that research has to involve activism, and the belief that activist pursuits are worthy research.
Why is the aim of exposing ideology not worthy of being researched in your opinion?
Some concerns for social science involve the lack of replicability, publications thus becoming literature, with "credibility" often established by in-clique circular citations. Emotional and political coloring also come to mind. There is a position in social science that all research is political (Frankfurt school and those that oppose it, among others).
The belief that research has to involve activism has been demonstrated by the individuals under discussion. I cite that this is taught as a valid position in the field.
Political motivation of scientific activity is worthy of research. Both sides involved in the conflict at google may be described as demonstrating political, and apparently opposing, viewpoints.
True, they only support their own political faction under the guise of "identity politics", not all people.
For example Andrew Ng is considered "white adjacent" because he's the only non-white in an article about the history of AI. Asians are not favored with this group of activists.
I really have no problem with people being both subject-matter experts and activists. Chomsky is the prime example: world-class linguist and outspoken leftist intellectual. But the one mistake he never made was to try to established 'leftist linguistics'. Contemporary 'AI ethics' feels like leftist activism with a very superficial understanding of machine learning technologies. Versions of "ML researchers are white males, so their creations inherit their biases"[1] are objectively wrong. Biases exists, but they come from the human-annotated training data fed into ML systems and not the gender of the programmer.
I hope they are. You would not want a fire brigade that's only theoretical about putting fires out.
It seems that the occurrence of people who bemoan that social scientists are activists, that they are not supposed to actually develop solutions to what they study, has increased in recent years. It's bad logic. A sociologist studying the effects of poverty shouldn't be interested in solving poverty is a mind-boggling idea.
There's something more pressing, now. People can concur here. I've found that this line of thought, that social scientists shouldn't be activists, is an idea that's been drummed about by the so-called 'intellectual dark web'. This rag-time team of pundits propagated a lot of conspiracy theories about the 'cultural marxism', the 'Frankfurt school', etc. It feels like an attempt at policing the content of social research under the cover of conservative/christian propriety.
> people who bemoan that social scientists are activists
I'd prefer they label themselves as partizan ethicists or activists.
> , that they are not supposed to actually develop solutions to what they study
On the contrary, they should develop solutions, not just scandals. The problem is with activists who just want to criticize without contributing a solution. I suspect they are more interested in making a name for themselves and using ethics as a club.
Dismissing researchers as mere activists is a criticism made from a place of ignorance. Maybe you should learn a bit more about the topic before spouting off?
I read her paper, her Tweets, the press and almost all the conversations on this topic and that is the conclusion I ended up with. She's making a career out of trashing people who have made real contributions to the field, while she has generated mostly critique without any actionable insight, new breakthrough or solution.
Yes, a fire brigade needs to put out the fire. The analog to that in the social realm are non-profits, democratic policies, and grassroots activism. But fire brigades would be really bad at putting out fires if we hadn't studied them scientifically since about the 17th century. We would not know the difference between electrical fires, fires involving oil, and bush fires. Today, woke academics declare some social 'fires' to be bad, others to be necessary, and some to be underrepresented, instead of asking what causes them. I doubt this will lead to a coherent and ultimately actionable understanding of reality.
Fire brigades didn't stand by idly studying from the 17th century until now to act against fires.
Ethics is an old field, and also one that's been applied for a long time. It changed too. For the better even -- since social Darwinism was seen as ethical to some extent at the start of the 20th century.
If you hired a researcher to find out the most effective strategies to putting out fires you might actually want a purely theoretical researcher. Advocates for air drops might be blind to firewalls and vise verse.
There is also a reason to be cautious if a sociologist studying the effects of poverty were basing their suggestions on what would fix their own poverty.
Except social sciences aren't 'purely' theoretical. It's why it's sometimes called human science. There is a prominent human, and humane, part to it. It's a study of the human condition to some extent and it can't be separated from it.
As for your second point, that's true, but it's also why research is always open to criticism. Casting social scientists and ethicists in this case as activists feels like a political swipe.
