In addition to helping other countries, which I think they should rightfully do and am happy to hear about. I wonder if the A.I. community will invest in educating the lesser privledged in their local communities? Mainly those from poor areas that don’t have access to technology and educational resources?
Can someone please trace the origin of this imbecilic response? It comes up on practically every HN discussion now and proceeds from the assumption that the presence of contrary data is a logical fallacy.
I'm growing nostalgic for the days when HN posters just blindly asked for "citations" or suggested "imposter syndrome" as reflexive and ostensibly-intelligent counterarguments.
Maybe its time for vacuous catchphrase responses to be autoflagged as postmodern gibberish.
This is a problem with the local politics of your country, nothing to do with the "A.I. community".
This conference is not going elsewhere to "help poor people", but because it is too difficult for international researchers to go to the U.S.A., and many do not bother at all, resulting in a worse conference. I for one would not even consider going to the states for a conference, but often go to other countries.
> in science there’s no place for identity politics
Sounds like a "theory vs practice thing". Do you believe that identity should not, and/or does not affect a person's ability to practice science to the best of their potential?
Of course I believe that in theory it should not but in practice it does. Organizations that try to correct, compensate, steer, etc. things towards where they should be, need to exist because things are not where they should be. There is nothing unscientific about it, but maybe you have data to prove otherwise. (I personally have no idea if BlacksInAI does this job well or not. The choice of Ethiopia in this case does not look great)
>Are you seriously trying to claim that science is a perfect meritocracy?
I'm not making any particular claim about science. I'm making a general claim about reason: someone making a moral argument must provide some reason or evidence to support that argument. In this particular case, it means that if someone wants to make a claim that there is something morally wrong with the distribution of scientists with respect to some particular characteristic, the onus is on them to support their claim (refute the null hypothesis).
If this was an academic paper then maybe but it's a comment on a forum on a website and life is too short to marshal supporting evidence for every stated opinion.
So I put it to you again, do you agree with the statement or do you disagree?
I highly doubt that you apply this principle consistently yourself. In fact I just skimmed your comment history and there's a wealth of arguments presented without supporting evidence.
Very true. But you made a controversial statement without backing it up. Then you replied with a typical "just a forum" excuse. Which probably means: You can't find sources to back up your statement, or available sources contradict your statement.
If someone wants a source to my comments, I'll provide it as best I can.
> But you made a controversial statement without backing it up.
1. I didn't make the original statement
2. The reason I became involved in this debate is because the original statement seemed very far from controversial to me and I was rather dumbfounded that anyone felt the need to ask for supporting evidence.
The original claim was "things are not where they should be" and the context was "a person's ability to practice science to the best of their potential" irrespective of their nationality, gender, ethnicity etc.
For this to be controversial someone would have to be making the rather extreme counter-claim that scientific achievement is based solely on ability.
> You can see by the responses that this is quite controversial.
I don't think the tangent this discussion has taken is any indication that the original claim was controversial - merely that it's very easy to get bogged down in meta-discussions that detract from the actual issue being discussed. I don't think anyone could reasonably dispute the original statement - unless their interpretation of it was wildly different to mine. If that's the case then it's not lack of supporting evidence that's the problem - it's clarity of communication.
>If this was an academic paper then maybe but it's a comment on a forum on a website and life is too short to marshal supporting evidence for every stated opinion.
The reason academic papers require rigour is because such rigour is necessary to make a convincing argument. Without rigour, people end up just talking past, misunderstanding or shouting at eachother; nobody's going to convince someone else to change their mind just by stating an opinion.
>So I put it to you again, do you agree with the statement or do you disagree?
Personally, I agree that science is not a perfect meritocracy, but I'm not convinced it's due to discrimination by scientists: I've never met a scientist I could imagine making a hiring decision based on race. If there is a problem I'd suspect it's due to other factors; if there are fewer people with a particular characteristic studying science in university or high school, then seems like the root cause of that would be the real problem. You can't expect scientists to hire a certain percentage of people with that characteristic if the percentage of science graduates with that characteristic is much lower.
I made a similar point in another comment below but I'll repeat it here. I think it's unlikely you provide supporting evidence every time you make a factual claim because if you did it would be astonishingly laborious to carry out any kind of conversation.
And a brief look at your post history shows many examples of statements unaccompanied by supporting evidence.
As laudable as your sentiments are, they are rather unrealistic. We make unsupported claims all the time because normal human communication is not the same thing as rigorous chains of deductive statements.
If you look at the original post I was responding to, it asked the post it was responding to to supply scientific evidence to refute the claim it was making. It's one thing to make unsupported statements, it's another thing entirely to make an unsupported statement then claim the burden of proof is on somebody else to supply scientific evidence to refute one's claim (a claim for which no evidence has been provided).
> I've never met a scientist I could imagine making a hiring decision based on race.
Do you mean "race would never have any effect on their hiring decision" - even unconsciously? There's a fairly robust body of work on the topic of unconscious bias that would have to be almost entirely invalid for that statement to be true.
>Do you mean "race would never have any effect on their hiring decision" - even unconsciously?
By "making a decison based on race" I mean making a conscious decision in which race is a significant factor. If you want me to be more specific, I'll restate that as: in my estimation, any racial bias that may exist among the scientists I've met is not significant enough to in aggregate result in a difference greater than 1% in the ratio of people of any particular ethnicity hired compared to people of other ethnicities. I'd suspect other biases have far greater effect, e.g. against people from no-name universities.
I find your answer confusing. You initially clarify that you're talking about conscious decisions but your later claim is broad enough to include both conscious and unconscious bias.
I might agree that conscious racial bias is rare but I would find it harder to accept that unconscious racial bias is as uncommon as you claim. Does that sound reasonable?
That’s a bit silly though. A citation can’t somehow “prove” a moral statement. I think it’s clear that the commenter was assuming the reasonable moral claim that ethnicity/gender/etc. should not affect one’s opportunities in science, and then claiming that there is still work to be done in achieving that goal.
>A citation can’t somehow “prove” a moral statement.
A moral statement doesn't prove itself. Someone has to prove it, either by providing an argument themselves, which the poster didn't do, or citing an external source of proof.
>ethnicity/gender/etc. should not affect one’s opportunities in science, and then claiming that there is still work to be done in achieving that goal.
That claim still requires a supporting argument: evidence to support that ethnicity/gender/etc. is affecting peoples' opportunities in science.
I believe that identity may affect a person’s ability to do science, since there’s a correlations between identity and economic status.
That said, science is about equality of opportunities, not about equality of outcomes.
This means that we should of course strive for having easier access to universities for people of all backgrounds.
But after that Academia is PURE meritocracy.
Anyone who fights for more graduates with a certain identity, or more researchers with a certain identity, or more professors with a certain identity is SEVERELY misguided.
Are you claiming it is a pure meritocracy or that it aspires to being such? If the former then I think that's remarkably optimistic to the point of naivety so I'll presume you mean the latter.
There's no such thing as an absence of identity politics. Only the politics of the status quo, which as we know has not been fantastic for PoC, women, LGBT+, ...
Sure, the concept exists but you'll be hard-pressed to point to instances of it existing currently... Overcoming historical biases doesn't happen just by deciding to be a meritocracy.
Two candidates for a position in the academia are not evaluated in terms of historical bias, they are evaluated looking at their CV, track record, publications, etc...
That’s meritocracy. And there’s no place for this “historical biases” in the decision making process in the academia. At least not in science.
Biases exist for more reasons than biased interviewers. Within certain structures, well-meaning people doing their jobs will inadvertently propagate injustices and biases. There is evidence for this. This isn't hard.
Meritocracy and identity politics are different things, not antonyms. In fact, I'd argue that the goal of identity politics is to establish a meritocracy that enables all people to flourish.
If there are institutional barriers to identity groups participating in scientific communities then there is a need for “identity politics” in those scientific communities to identify and remove the barriers. For example, I think the increased participation of women in science over the past century happened because of “activist” scientists acknowledging there were real barriers to women participating in science and then consciously dismantling those barriers.
As a scientist from a minority I would say that I found no barriers in science, except for merit. Talking about today’s science of course, no 19th century one.
I can accept that maybe there are still some barriers in some situations I am not aware of, but then the message should not be “more blacks in science” or “more women in science”.
That’s countereffective and humiliating for minority people: the focus should be on the barriers, if any, not on the headcount. We are not pandas in need of protection.
AI, particularly when we consider applications and algorithms that impact policing, medical applications, loan servicing, ad targeting, etc. is inherently an enterprise that cannot be divorced from structural issues intersect with race (among other issues). That scientists from impacted communities are drawing attention is an important step forward.
Note that for a lot of people (me included), Africa is a social and legal black box and that is a major cause of concern for such issues (justified or not). Some countries have unreliable courts and/or people/tribal justice on the street is common, other are more modern, and except for a few specific countries I don't know which ones falls into which group.
(what I'm saying is, you're more scared of the unknown, and the various countries of Africa is much less known by the average hn'er than the american system)
I’m afraid I was misunderstood. I didn’t intend to minimize the threat to LGBT people in Ethiopia. I meant to point out that the threat is also still potentially just around the corner in many places.
That’s precisely the Supreme Court case I was referring to. The fact that the laws are still on the books in many states is certainly an indicator the priority those state governments give to protecting LGBT rights.
It means nothing. Repealing those laws would be a nice symbolic gesture but it’s also a waste of time. It’s normal to leave overturned laws on the books.
When I read Africa I assumed they would be hosting it in South Africa which would be a much better choice for LGBT. Pretty much every other country would be a bad choice.
Unfortunately this sounds more like a gimmick than anything else.
I have a small suspicion that those who decided for that never set foot in the countries considered for this (though I might be wrong).
Though it is undeniable that there is talent there and we should try to make things easier to them, there is a limit and a compromise in making things not harder for other people as well.
As someone familiar with 3rd world country business, a lot of things people take for granted is not trivial
I love Daniel and the amazing work he’s done over the last several years ... but that blog reads like a parody. He’s complaining about filling forms like it’s the worst thing that’s ever happened to him. Meanwhile, for folks who aren’t American/Canadian/European/Australian, this is just a regular Tuesday.
Typically when I file for visas I have to give detailed statements of all my bank accounts, all my investments, my income tax statements for the last 3 years, a list of all the places I’ve travelled, medical insurance, a letter from my employer guaranteeing that I’ll be back and god knows what else. This was for an Australian visa btw, that allows visa free travel if you’re American, Canadian or European.
That’s not even the half of it. A friend of mine applied for a Schenghen visa for a 6 day trip and got a 5 day visa. The border agent then harassed him on his way out for “overstaying” his visa.
Heaven forbid that people with privilege are subjected to the horrors of filling forms.
you have a point, but the issue is not the amount of forms he has to fill out, but rather the fact that he is neither getting a visa, nor being rejected with some explanation why.
The locations seem like gimmicks to me quite a lot of times, and I don't mean ICLR conferences specifically. This time it happens to be politically motivated. At other times, it seems like they are picking exotic locations (Hawaii, Bahamas, etc.) because they know their university or company is going to fund it.
Exotic locations make sense - no matter where on globe you put the conference pretty much everyone has to fly there, and half of the people have to fly around half the world; and renting a large venue in such a location generally is cheaper than the major metropolises, where costs sometimes are extreme.
Well, it's usually an extra stop to reach Bahamas as compared to a major city in the US/Canada (thinking about people that are "close", let's say North America/South America/Europe/Africa). Hawaii is easier for Asia/West Coast/Oceania and hard for everybody else.
not sure why they dont do India - has significant consular presence in African countries (african medical tourism is huge in India) as well as being much easier to reach from Western countries.
We also have constitutional protection for LGBT communities and privacy - something that Ethiopia lacks.
The Indian govt will throw money at you if you do something like this here.
Lest you think this is a problem only for Africans & USA:
I was denied visa, going to present my paper at NIPS 2010 in Vancouver, Canada. Czech citizen (EU), PhD student at the time, with obvious ties to CZ.
I fully respect each country's right to refuse anyone, including without providing a reason (as was the case with me). I see it as "their loss" :-) You pesky computer scientists, stay away!
Yes, this distresses me the most, these random refusal are 99% caused by the person failing some arbitrary checkbox list, or edicts like "reduce number of visas to country N by N percents" so they feel pain
I don't buy it. Because it focuses too much on "supposed" rights of the immigrant and not the rights of the one already there (which, as much as the "no borders" people deny that more crimes and bad stuff happens with unchecked migration, it does happen).
When large swathes of the work force suffer falling income sure to competition from immigrants, anger will rise to dangerous levels.
3.7 Maintenance of Social Capacity for Self-Governance
Rule of law through government institutions, rather than by an elite of cronies through hired thugs, is possible only under certain conditions. Foremost of these being: 1) Engagement of citizens in government, going beyond the minimum of showing up at a polling booth every four years, and 2) Sufficient education to understand what's being voted upon.
Though both of these are questions of degree rather than Boolean propositions, both nevertheless remain requirements of existential gravity for any free society.
The election of 2016 shows just how imperiled 3.6 and 3.7 have become here in the United States.
The author, writing back in 2010, lacked the 2016 evidence.
Why should a country’s government prevent you from traveling to/on a piece of land owned by a person who wants you there? What is there to respect about using violent force to prevent peaceful innocent people from freely associating and gathering? Why should they have that “right” to prevent you from peacefully traveling from A to B?
This may not apply to your case but a lot of these conference immigration issues come from getting paid to speak. Depending on how you phrase it the inspector may treat it as “work” which is a big no-no.
Stories like this make me realize how unfairly privileged I actually am by having the passport that I have. I can go damn near anywhere in the world without much fuss. But I was just lucky enough to be born on the right side of some line that somebody drew on a map at some time in the past. The folks a few km distant - on the other side of that line - don't have that same luxury.
It is kind of sad that we have this way of carving up the world into arbitrary pieces and calling us "us" and them "the enemy".
As an extension to that, as someone else who has a french "powerful passport", you get so used to it that you feel very bothered when you actually need to get a visa for some place. Or worse, when you plan to go somewhere and a member of your group is not from such a country and needs a visa for a place that you didn't expect him to need one for.
I'm glad it's like this for me, and I hope the world can keep moving forward in that direction (as an european I'm kind of used to no borders between countries, the same way US people move between states); but at the same time I'm not sure how healthy it is to have such privileges and not even recognize them as such anymore.
I guess this is what causes the people from "our" countries calling themselves expat rather than immigrants (we've had a case this week again, where an english immigrant in France complained on twitter about immigrants coming to France ...).
I believe remembering what is a privilege you are lucky have is important, maybe if we were better at that we would have less on the modern "social stupidity" issues (another matter entirely but if people knew how lucky they were of not having polio and/or knew someone related to them who got it, they would be much less likely to avoid vaccination ...).
I'm someone who was born with a "shitty" passport. It's not the visa part, but rather I can't spontaneously just "go somewhere". All my travels need to be planned weeks, if not months, ahead. Fortunately, I'm on a path to acquire another citizenship and my children will have a "good" passport at birth.
>It is kind of sad that we have this way of carving up the world into arbitrary pieces and calling us "us" and them "the enemy".
It's not arbitrary, our ancestors in many cases fought and died to establish those lines so that they could live their lives how they wanted within those lines. They worked hard so that their children and grandchildren and fellow citizens could have better lives within those lines. To discount that as luck is demeaning to the sacrifices of the people who came before you
The reality of these lines are usually less noble than you describe in many cases.
As an example, if you read about the motivations of specific actors in the American revolutionary war, many of the top dissenters were basically interested in not paying taxes and being the boss of their own piece of land (instead of having oversight from across the pond). Nobody is ethically pure, of course, but the main push for the revolutionary war was done out of massive self-interest from people in power.
"There was a time that we were noble" is something that rarely plays out in practice. Why should it? If anything humanity has gotten more, not less, ethical and noble over time.
There's an idea of fighting for justice and truth, and then there's trying to die to establish lines on a map. They're not the same thing, and I'd say that it's rarely coinciding in practice
I never said it was noble, but doing something in your own self-interest can still be positive. Even if the US revolution was for the founders financial benefit, the side effect was the spread of democracy and self-determination across the globe.
They might just be "lines on a map" but they mean something to people, just 50 years ago those "lines" were the difference between living in a communist hellhole and freedom and prosperity. There's a lot of cubans and eastern europeans who risked their lives to get on the other side of some lines on a map and get a better life for themselves and their children.
If people hadn't been willing to fight and die to defend those lines and their ability to live how they want, we wouldn't be able to have this discussion right now
The historical reality check being that it's been a few hundred thousand years now since land was won in wholesale quantity by any other means, sabre-toothed cats having lost their place at the top of the food chain quite some time ago.
if you believe in genetics/evolution it's not luck. The smarter and stronger side wins. Is it luck that you weren't born as a squirrel or some other animal?
My family members fought in wars, paid taxes, and helped build up the country so their descendants could have a better life, calling that nothing but luck is disrespectful to the sacrifices they made.
You are free to give up your unfair privilege and move to the less privileged parts of the world.
> It is kind of sad that we have this way of carving up the world into arbitrary pieces and calling us "us" and them "the enemy".
Is it? Is it also sad that we carve up "homes" and "money" for ourselves? Would you give us your address and let any individual just walk into your home?
Instead of crying over your privilege and virtue signaling on social media, why not do something about it? You only have your unfair privilege because you choose to keep it. Why?
Why do you think they wouldn't? What an odd default assumption – that a country wouldn't enforce its laws.
Keep in mind that official enforcement isn't the only concern. Illegality can make people feel justified in taking matters into their own hands, and there have been anti-homosexual mobs and attacks in countries that recently criminalized homosexuality.
Oh well, just recently there was a thread about Canadians instructed to lie on US border that they never ever tried weed in their life unless they want to be banned. What makes you believe the same logic can't be applied here?
You are going to have a great time if you ever travel to the US and other countries that force you to surrender social media usernames and in some case passwords.
There's so much more to sexuality than sex. What if a computer scientist wants to bring his boyfriend? And they probably blab about their relationship on social media like most couples regardless of orientation. No one should have to go back in the closet just to attend a conference.
Hopefully not only AI conferences will follow. For many it is a big problem to obtain a visa in time. Others just prefer even to skip the conference just to avoid the trouble.
It's easy to just blame the authorities, but people should also see that almost any existing hurdle in the visa applying process is set up to solve a problem, while it's unfortuanate that these measures have unintended/undesirable effects, it also forestalled many visa fraud attempts.
People from certain effectively balck-listed Chinese regions are much harder to get it done.
I know here in China people would exploit every loophole and weak point they can find to get a visa to the US etc, either to study, born babies, or apply asylum. They would exchange latest info about where and which VO is easier to pass, how to best frame your story, like white middle-aged woman is more likely to pass etc, these behaviors in turn are pushing the bars higher and higher every year.
It's like that border wall, there are realistic problems on field that need to be solved.
Someone requested me to provide evidence for my claims, but deleted? I'll post it anyway.
I'm not a detective and don't have "evidence", all I said is what I saw first hand the accounts of people doing it. It's an entire industry, I'll just keep it simple and short.
Americans genarally don't realize how much their passport worth in other parts of the world.
The key is entering America, any other thing doesn't matter, if you want to smuggle you way in through Russai-Cuba-Mexico etc, you need to pay around 70-100K or something and it's not guaranteed.
So how to legally enter America? Either through universities, medical reasons, or tourism. Like applying any for-profit American language school to "learn English", PHD and extend it endlessly.
Once you entered, you can do what you wanted, to study then go back home, or to earn money, illegal overstaying waiting for citizenship amnesty, or applying for asylum. Chinese make up the majority of asylum seekers there.
The recent hot topic of birth tourism, there are two ways, do it on a tourist visa and be possibly black-listed and visa revoked afterwards; or state your intention to the VO, you need to frame a perfect story here to convince the person that it's a medical cause, agencies will teach you to say American hospitals are better, pain-free whatever, just don't say you want that passport, but in reality all these people are there for the American passport. It's best to delete any related things on your phone such as Wechat opon entering in case evidence of visa fraud were found.
There's also a service that agencies would help you to apply for EB1-A (Alien of Extraordinary Ability), publish paid papers, acquire paid awards etc. It's said (by his former friend) this guy paid audiences to fill an entire American theater for his show to help him apply it. https://www.scmp.com/news/world/united-states-canada/article...
You guys remember couple months ago, America said they no longer accept domestic abuse as the reason for asylum?
I can't say it's definitely related, but it's a known easy way to get quick green card, you pay for a short term sham marriage, then call the police for domestic abuse, go to court, then you can divorce, not having to wait out 2 years' marriage.
Africa is not a safe or friendly nation. Africans in the USA are hostile. I am a racist and am proud of the fact that I view Africans in the USA as enemy combatants and advocate for euthanizing Africans. Yep. You heard that right. I am proud to defend the USA against the Africans. I hate them and I want the ones if the USA dead or gone or enslaved. The Emancipation proclamation was a mistake. Africans need to be enslaved or they will kill whites. They are killer humans, not normal people.
Each African is a murderer. Africa is the murder continent.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 198 ms ] threadI'm growing nostalgic for the days when HN posters just blindly asked for "citations" or suggested "imposter syndrome" as reflexive and ostensibly-intelligent counterarguments.
Maybe its time for vacuous catchphrase responses to be autoflagged as postmodern gibberish.
This conference is not going elsewhere to "help poor people", but because it is too difficult for international researchers to go to the U.S.A., and many do not bother at all, resulting in a worse conference. I for one would not even consider going to the states for a conference, but often go to other countries.
As a scientist, however, I abhor organizations such as BlacksInAI: in science there’s no place for identity politics.
Sounds like a "theory vs practice thing". Do you believe that identity should not, and/or does not affect a person's ability to practice science to the best of their potential?
Of course I believe that in theory it should not but in practice it does. Organizations that try to correct, compensate, steer, etc. things towards where they should be, need to exist because things are not where they should be. There is nothing unscientific about it, but maybe you have data to prove otherwise. (I personally have no idea if BlacksInAI does this job well or not. The choice of Ethiopia in this case does not look great)
Citation needed.
>There is nothing unscientific about it, but maybe you have data to prove otherwise.
If you make a claim that something should be done, the burden on proof is on you to substantiate that claim.
Are you seriously trying to claim that science is a perfect meritocracy?
Seriously?
I'm not making any particular claim about science. I'm making a general claim about reason: someone making a moral argument must provide some reason or evidence to support that argument. In this particular case, it means that if someone wants to make a claim that there is something morally wrong with the distribution of scientists with respect to some particular characteristic, the onus is on them to support their claim (refute the null hypothesis).
So I put it to you again, do you agree with the statement or do you disagree?
If someone wants a source to my comments, I'll provide it as best I can.
1. I didn't make the original statement
2. The reason I became involved in this debate is because the original statement seemed very far from controversial to me and I was rather dumbfounded that anyone felt the need to ask for supporting evidence.
The original claim was "things are not where they should be" and the context was "a person's ability to practice science to the best of their potential" irrespective of their nationality, gender, ethnicity etc.
For this to be controversial someone would have to be making the rather extreme counter-claim that scientific achievement is based solely on ability.
Maybe, but the burden of proof lies with the person who made the argument. ("things are not where they should be")
I don't think the tangent this discussion has taken is any indication that the original claim was controversial - merely that it's very easy to get bogged down in meta-discussions that detract from the actual issue being discussed. I don't think anyone could reasonably dispute the original statement - unless their interpretation of it was wildly different to mine. If that's the case then it's not lack of supporting evidence that's the problem - it's clarity of communication.
The reason academic papers require rigour is because such rigour is necessary to make a convincing argument. Without rigour, people end up just talking past, misunderstanding or shouting at eachother; nobody's going to convince someone else to change their mind just by stating an opinion.
>So I put it to you again, do you agree with the statement or do you disagree?
Personally, I agree that science is not a perfect meritocracy, but I'm not convinced it's due to discrimination by scientists: I've never met a scientist I could imagine making a hiring decision based on race. If there is a problem I'd suspect it's due to other factors; if there are fewer people with a particular characteristic studying science in university or high school, then seems like the root cause of that would be the real problem. You can't expect scientists to hire a certain percentage of people with that characteristic if the percentage of science graduates with that characteristic is much lower.
And a brief look at your post history shows many examples of statements unaccompanied by supporting evidence.
As laudable as your sentiments are, they are rather unrealistic. We make unsupported claims all the time because normal human communication is not the same thing as rigorous chains of deductive statements.
Do you mean "race would never have any effect on their hiring decision" - even unconsciously? There's a fairly robust body of work on the topic of unconscious bias that would have to be almost entirely invalid for that statement to be true.
By "making a decison based on race" I mean making a conscious decision in which race is a significant factor. If you want me to be more specific, I'll restate that as: in my estimation, any racial bias that may exist among the scientists I've met is not significant enough to in aggregate result in a difference greater than 1% in the ratio of people of any particular ethnicity hired compared to people of other ethnicities. I'd suspect other biases have far greater effect, e.g. against people from no-name universities.
I might agree that conscious racial bias is rare but I would find it harder to accept that unconscious racial bias is as uncommon as you claim. Does that sound reasonable?
A moral statement doesn't prove itself. Someone has to prove it, either by providing an argument themselves, which the poster didn't do, or citing an external source of proof.
>ethnicity/gender/etc. should not affect one’s opportunities in science, and then claiming that there is still work to be done in achieving that goal.
That claim still requires a supporting argument: evidence to support that ethnicity/gender/etc. is affecting peoples' opportunities in science.
If you can solve any of the outstanding problems no one is going to care where you come from, gender, political views, socioeconomic status etc.
That seems quite meritocratic to me. Compare that to say a distinguished position such as a Supreme Court judge appointment.
That said, science is about equality of opportunities, not about equality of outcomes.
This means that we should of course strive for having easier access to universities for people of all backgrounds.
But after that Academia is PURE meritocracy.
Anyone who fights for more graduates with a certain identity, or more researchers with a certain identity, or more professors with a certain identity is SEVERELY misguided.
Are you claiming it is a pure meritocracy or that it aspires to being such? If the former then I think that's remarkably optimistic to the point of naivety so I'll presume you mean the latter.
This is pure naivety.
There's no such thing as an absence of identity politics. Only the politics of the status quo, which as we know has not been fantastic for PoC, women, LGBT+, ...
Sure there is! Its name is meritocracy.
That’s meritocracy. And there’s no place for this “historical biases” in the decision making process in the academia. At least not in science.
I can accept that maybe there are still some barriers in some situations I am not aware of, but then the message should not be “more blacks in science” or “more women in science”.
That’s countereffective and humiliating for minority people: the focus should be on the barriers, if any, not on the headcount. We are not pandas in need of protection.
"Homosexuality is a criminal offense in Ethiopia, there's no way I'm ever submitting an abstract to #ICLR next year... I can't risk my life.
I guess there will be more racial diversity, at the cost of no more #LGBT diversity."
(what I'm saying is, you're more scared of the unknown, and the various countries of Africa is much less known by the average hn'er than the american system)
I have a small suspicion that those who decided for that never set foot in the countries considered for this (though I might be wrong).
Though it is undeniable that there is talent there and we should try to make things easier to them, there is a limit and a compromise in making things not harder for other people as well.
As someone familiar with 3rd world country business, a lot of things people take for granted is not trivial
The opaqueness of the US system is pretty high.
I do agree that other places have bigger problems. There won’t be too many conferences in Saudi Arabia I bet.
Typically when I file for visas I have to give detailed statements of all my bank accounts, all my investments, my income tax statements for the last 3 years, a list of all the places I’ve travelled, medical insurance, a letter from my employer guaranteeing that I’ll be back and god knows what else. This was for an Australian visa btw, that allows visa free travel if you’re American, Canadian or European.
That’s not even the half of it. A friend of mine applied for a Schenghen visa for a 6 day trip and got a 5 day visa. The border agent then harassed him on his way out for “overstaying” his visa.
Heaven forbid that people with privilege are subjected to the horrors of filling forms.
The Indian govt will throw money at you if you do something like this here.
here's the govt budget for AI - https://inc42.com/buzz/budget-2018-ai-ml/
NITI specifically recommends collaborative programs for funding (as well as ethics organizations) - http://niti.gov.in/writereaddata/files/document_publication/...
there's a crap ton of govt funding for initiatives like this. I interact with the NITI Aayog personally on this.
https://indianvisaonline.gov.in/evisa/tvoa.html
I was denied visa, going to present my paper at NIPS 2010 in Vancouver, Canada. Czech citizen (EU), PhD student at the time, with obvious ties to CZ.
I fully respect each country's right to refuse anyone, including without providing a reason (as was the case with me). I see it as "their loss" :-) You pesky computer scientists, stay away!
http://www.owl232.net/papers/immigration.htm
I now find this to be a very interesting and subtle ethical question
3.6 Social Peace
When large swathes of the work force suffer falling income sure to competition from immigrants, anger will rise to dangerous levels.
3.7 Maintenance of Social Capacity for Self-Governance
Rule of law through government institutions, rather than by an elite of cronies through hired thugs, is possible only under certain conditions. Foremost of these being: 1) Engagement of citizens in government, going beyond the minimum of showing up at a polling booth every four years, and 2) Sufficient education to understand what's being voted upon.
Though both of these are questions of degree rather than Boolean propositions, both nevertheless remain requirements of existential gravity for any free society.
The election of 2016 shows just how imperiled 3.6 and 3.7 have become here in the United States.
The author, writing back in 2010, lacked the 2016 evidence.
SO i guess life balances out. Sort of.
But yes. Denied visa after getting accepted really sucks. Do u still get "published in NIPS" credit or is the paper withdrawn ?
It is kind of sad that we have this way of carving up the world into arbitrary pieces and calling us "us" and them "the enemy".
I'm glad it's like this for me, and I hope the world can keep moving forward in that direction (as an european I'm kind of used to no borders between countries, the same way US people move between states); but at the same time I'm not sure how healthy it is to have such privileges and not even recognize them as such anymore.
I guess this is what causes the people from "our" countries calling themselves expat rather than immigrants (we've had a case this week again, where an english immigrant in France complained on twitter about immigrants coming to France ...).
I believe remembering what is a privilege you are lucky have is important, maybe if we were better at that we would have less on the modern "social stupidity" issues (another matter entirely but if people knew how lucky they were of not having polio and/or knew someone related to them who got it, they would be much less likely to avoid vaccination ...).
It's not arbitrary, our ancestors in many cases fought and died to establish those lines so that they could live their lives how they wanted within those lines. They worked hard so that their children and grandchildren and fellow citizens could have better lives within those lines. To discount that as luck is demeaning to the sacrifices of the people who came before you
As an example, if you read about the motivations of specific actors in the American revolutionary war, many of the top dissenters were basically interested in not paying taxes and being the boss of their own piece of land (instead of having oversight from across the pond). Nobody is ethically pure, of course, but the main push for the revolutionary war was done out of massive self-interest from people in power.
"There was a time that we were noble" is something that rarely plays out in practice. Why should it? If anything humanity has gotten more, not less, ethical and noble over time.
There's an idea of fighting for justice and truth, and then there's trying to die to establish lines on a map. They're not the same thing, and I'd say that it's rarely coinciding in practice
They might just be "lines on a map" but they mean something to people, just 50 years ago those "lines" were the difference between living in a communist hellhole and freedom and prosperity. There's a lot of cubans and eastern europeans who risked their lives to get on the other side of some lines on a map and get a better life for themselves and their children.
If people hadn't been willing to fight and die to defend those lines and their ability to live how they want, we wouldn't be able to have this discussion right now
he might've been from europe though, and we really did have ... a lot of blood wasted to draw out these lines... we kept killing each other for them
bloodshed and misery of the commons is a very ... 'noble' thing. by which i mean that every noble in europes history enjoyed it.
i'd agree to the spirit of your message though, and the grandparent post probably as well. he probably didn't mean it like you interpreted it
Doesn't sound so noble then, eh?
Carthaginians, Celts, Bosnians, Tutsi, Rohingya ...
My family members fought in wars, paid taxes, and helped build up the country so their descendants could have a better life, calling that nothing but luck is disrespectful to the sacrifices they made.
Also, statistically, birthrates are higher in less developed countries with worse living conditions.
That's sort of the whole point; often improving the lives of "fellow citizens" came at the expense of everyone else
> It is kind of sad that we have this way of carving up the world into arbitrary pieces and calling us "us" and them "the enemy".
Is it? Is it also sad that we carve up "homes" and "money" for ourselves? Would you give us your address and let any individual just walk into your home?
Instead of crying over your privilege and virtue signaling on social media, why not do something about it? You only have your unfair privilege because you choose to keep it. Why?
Keep in mind that official enforcement isn't the only concern. Illegality can make people feel justified in taking matters into their own hands, and there have been anti-homosexual mobs and attacks in countries that recently criminalized homosexuality.
People from certain effectively balck-listed Chinese regions are much harder to get it done.
I know here in China people would exploit every loophole and weak point they can find to get a visa to the US etc, either to study, born babies, or apply asylum. They would exchange latest info about where and which VO is easier to pass, how to best frame your story, like white middle-aged woman is more likely to pass etc, these behaviors in turn are pushing the bars higher and higher every year.
It's like that border wall, there are realistic problems on field that need to be solved.
Americans genarally don't realize how much their passport worth in other parts of the world.
The key is entering America, any other thing doesn't matter, if you want to smuggle you way in through Russai-Cuba-Mexico etc, you need to pay around 70-100K or something and it's not guaranteed.
So how to legally enter America? Either through universities, medical reasons, or tourism. Like applying any for-profit American language school to "learn English", PHD and extend it endlessly.
Once you entered, you can do what you wanted, to study then go back home, or to earn money, illegal overstaying waiting for citizenship amnesty, or applying for asylum. Chinese make up the majority of asylum seekers there.
The recent hot topic of birth tourism, there are two ways, do it on a tourist visa and be possibly black-listed and visa revoked afterwards; or state your intention to the VO, you need to frame a perfect story here to convince the person that it's a medical cause, agencies will teach you to say American hospitals are better, pain-free whatever, just don't say you want that passport, but in reality all these people are there for the American passport. It's best to delete any related things on your phone such as Wechat opon entering in case evidence of visa fraud were found.
There's also a service that agencies would help you to apply for EB1-A (Alien of Extraordinary Ability), publish paid papers, acquire paid awards etc. It's said (by his former friend) this guy paid audiences to fill an entire American theater for his show to help him apply it. https://www.scmp.com/news/world/united-states-canada/article...
You guys remember couple months ago, America said they no longer accept domestic abuse as the reason for asylum? I can't say it's definitely related, but it's a known easy way to get quick green card, you pay for a short term sham marriage, then call the police for domestic abuse, go to court, then you can divorce, not having to wait out 2 years' marriage.
Each African is a murderer. Africa is the murder continent.