Ask HN: Thoughts about this conversation?

This thread is on a public forum(Twitter) between two scientists.

Person1 - [Director of #AI #research @nvidia, Bren #Professor @Caltech, Fmr Principal scientist @awscloud] Person2 - Research Scientist at Deepmind

Both are entitled to their own opinions. Here's how the thread goes...

Person1(talking about her newly published work): DeepLearning is only good at interpolation. But applications need extrapolation that can reason about more complex scenarios than it is trained on. With current methods, accuracy degrades rapidly when complexity of test instances grows. Our new work aims to overcome this...

Person2: This tweet really downplays prior work. NTM, memory nets, Neural GPU, MANN, graph nets, and many, many other related methods also degrade gracefully. Your work looks like an important next step, but this rhetoric is unhelpful.

Person1: What you are doing is rhetoric and rude. We have mentioned all prior work in our paper. You don't want to engage in science. It is inevitable to get attacked online as a woman. #deepmind can engage in all kind of media hype that is unethical but I get attacked for stating facts. As a woman stating science, I get accused of engaging in rhetoric.

I personally feel this response by Person1 to be extremely out of the blue. Putting aside the fact that Person1 is a Director @ NVIDIA + some title at Caltech and Person2 is a scientist as well @Google, let's look at the simple conversation here. The thread started with a tweet about an interesting work. That was followed by a review directed only at the tweet being rhetoric. And it was then replied with something unimaginable. Am I the only one looking at this all confused?

Source post: https://twitter.com/AnimaAnandkumar/status/1194338388221972480

3 comments

[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 22.5 ms ] thread

itronitron 6y ago ↗

Person2 is out of line by chastising Person1 for commenting on the limits of DeepLearning. Person1 therefore is completely within their rights to call out Person2. I am not familiar enough with Person1's history to know whether they are universally a jerk or reserve that behavior when commenting on women's tweets.

FullMetalJason 6y ago ↗

I myself am a woman and pursuing my graduate studies in this field. There's no gender bias here in calling out flaws in work that's deeply technical. I have given similar reviews to some enormous claims put forward by my peers(men and women). I agree that person2 could have been more subtle on a public forum. But not even for a second did I associate a gender dimension until person1 brought it into the context.

Since we are talking history - with some search - I found out that Person1 has recently put out a #metoo experience and called out some incidents at Caltech. Don't you think there's not even a little bias here against every possible "person2" who happened to be a male and just gave a technical feedback? Not like that's an invalid statement. He does have valid points in what he said(just the way he said it might not have been ideal). But it escalated very quickly!

So, Person2 acknowledges the importance of Person1's work but then publicly passes judgment on the manner in which they presented it as a way of dismissing Person1's main point. Person1's behavior would be widely ridiculed and probably booed if this happened at a conference.

The more professional approach is to simply present one's case without commenting on the quality, style, or manner of the other's presentation.

My two cents, best of luck in your studies :)