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_y5hn

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_y5hn
·5 years ago·discuss
It's complicated. CO2 and other greenhouse gases raise evaporated water concentrations and initial warming, which trigger several one-way thresholds that we can never undo. It gets complicated/impossible after each threshold breakage, as warming will mostly drive itself and chaotic flux from there on.
_y5hn
·5 years ago·discuss
Depends what it is. If it's something creative, this can become pretty much like writer's block. Ie. you know there's something you want or need to write, but it's such a huge task, it's hard to get down to it. This can lead to overindulgence in research and distractions.

One solution is to set yourself a goal to just do this one thing, to get started, and do that thing. No matter how bad, just make that draft, POC, whatever. Start breaking up things into smaller pieces, and set yourself to accomplish one piece at the time, no matter the state of results. Iterate on this to improve quality and scope, and keep your focus on the smaller, managable things, while getting more clear about the whole over time. If something is too much, just break it up.

Another take is how to manage your expectations and associations. If every time you visit the dog is to give it medicine, it'll become suspicious of you. So every time you visit your projects, make sure to leave room for some cuddle time, while making sure it's also supporting progress on that same thing. For very difficult goals, transform it into a spike and celebrate it no matter what the results. No matter what, you learned something new. You want to associate with progress.
_y5hn
·5 years ago·discuss
Being arbitrary, the goals have nothing to do with anything you state above. In most companies, nobody even reads them.
_y5hn
·5 years ago·discuss
Sorry, but most managers have negative interest in you advancing your career.
_y5hn
·5 years ago·discuss
Useful to whom? Who reads that fluff?

Sorry, but unless there's a larger multi-year strategy, which would be ill-suited for ICs, this is just HR incompetence at work.
_y5hn
·5 years ago·discuss
There are two obvious answers:

1) Companies wants work done for free and managers heard some rumor "setting goals is good". Anyway, there's no choice for every party involved: Mythical work gets added in addition to work where employee is supported. This lets employees that are already supported to have another bragging list, while employees who are not supported are held down by yet another instrument.

2) Managers never heard of or actually been part of agility and teamwork.
_y5hn
·6 years ago·discuss
Bribes functions as oil in the machinery of society, and empowers strong men against rampant decadence. So is working for good when it is sanctioned and goes to the right people and their agendas, comprising of: terrorist attacks, slavery, eugenics, facism, child labour, and of course sexism.
_y5hn
·6 years ago·discuss
The best rebuttal so far has been to decline to comment.

However, without revealing names the paper outlines internal company matters, presenting opinions and tautology that do not fit proper format of professionally published research. Instead of reworking a flawed paper, the researcher escalated and exposed individual opinion, publicly. Such company representation is out of scope for research positions. As Google could not agree to terms of email, it was taken as resignation notice.
_y5hn
·6 years ago·discuss
Modern ethical AI / ML, is both that and beyond that. Issues range vastly in how complex algorithms can be used, misused and misinterpreted. There are also issues of uncovering hidden biases, unfairness, manipulative effects, privacy issues, risk and impact analysis, explanatory AI, who is accountable for accidents and malicious acts, etc. The list goes on covering both the legal and the political. This may not be unique to ML / AI, but is harder to quantify and prove, with more prevalent usage of complex algorithms.

https://analyticsindiamag.com/how-is-ethical-ai-different-fr...

https://www.kdnuggets.com/2016/03/ethics-machine-learning-ta...
_y5hn
·6 years ago·discuss
My strongest argument is AGAINST managers at Google getting to micromanage, censor and to revenge-fire a researcher, just because they personally disagree with their published AI Ethics Research. A job said researcher was tasked with and leading.

Such behaviour, unless corrected, undermines Google's entire AI/ML and cloud operations.
_y5hn
·6 years ago·discuss
Yep. People mistake means for the ends.

Anybody may be susceptible to such ideology and short-circuited bias. However, technical people are often so focused on their details, we are probably even more vulnerable to this than most.
_y5hn
·6 years ago·discuss
We haven't heard any arguments, only that management can do as they please when they don't like results of AI Ethics Research. We'll likely not get anything substantial, ever, either.

As I've stated in other post, this is very, very troublesome for AI and Google.

OTOH, Google has much emphasis on ethics in AI/ML otherwise. But the whole company, especially management, need to put actions in alignment with their words on this matter.
_y5hn
·6 years ago·discuss
Yeah, but "The Middle Path" is a hard sell to the masses.
_y5hn
·6 years ago·discuss
"Old men's club" is real and need a shakeup. However, the elite clubs hurt both genders, not just one of them. It is not balanced by an equally forceful swing the other direction, but by emphasis on mutual respect for diversity of people. Sometimes measures need to be put in place to get the ball rolling, but they should be temporary.
_y5hn
·6 years ago·discuss
Is insubordination to have a different opinion, and then offer paths to agreement between professionals?

Is insubordination to represent your responsibility area, as Ethical AI Researcher?

Is insubordination to send an email in order to establish dialogue around matters of disagreement between professionals?
_y5hn
·6 years ago·discuss
Threatening to leave is often times the ONLY leverage a worker has. What other leverage can a human utilize, in order to get their concerns addressed?

And how seriously does Google managers really take AI ethics, when they fail to resolve such an issue internally?

This is troublesome on so many levels and a huge red flag anything to do with AI and Google.
_y5hn
·6 years ago·discuss
[flagged]
_y5hn
·7 years ago·discuss
Why name the company?