
Yann LeCun is leaving Twitter - tmabraham
https://twitter.com/ylecun/status/1277373793443463168
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nmfisher
I’m no Yann LeCun, but I’ve been wondering whether I should do the same.

Twitter seems hyperoptimized for smug, self righteous character assassinations
and group pile-ons. It’s not a place for nuanced discussion (bizarrely, I
actually find Reddit far better for that, though it’s not without its own
problems too).

Opening the app feels like unleashing thousands of shrieking voices telling
you why you’re horrible person. I’m not sure the benefits outweigh the
emotional drain.

~~~
duxup
The medium is the message, and the medium of Twitter is curt and obnoxious.

I've tried for a long time to curate some twitter feeds with various types of
content but the negative and fingers in ears yelling (even when being
'positive') is endless / unavoidable.

I'll follow some folks I really respect and like and then they get in a nasty
spat and it is like being at a dinner party where a couple has a fight in
front of everyone.

Even folks who say stuff that generally I would 'agree' with post it in such a
trite and bizarre way that I don't want anything to do with it.

~~~
nilkn
I was told that the trick to making Twitter tolerable is to only follow
interesting people in specific fields of interest.

I tried that and was immediately disappointed. It makes it obvious that
someone who is an expert in one topic can be extremely naive about everything
else. This isn’t really a _surprise_ , but I’d rather not have a feed that
seems to specialize in showing me all the emotional and largely political
rants of people I respected. Twitter feels like one huge, awkward Thanksgiving
dinner where everybody is looking to pick a political fight with everybody
else over anything at all.

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jdonaldson
ML exists in a murky grey area between variance and bias. This has profound
effects on how it handles classifying people. If the variance is too high, it
is overfitting on individual characteristics, potentially leaking PII. If the
bias is too high, it is likely inappropriately lumping an individual in with a
disadvantageous crowd/outcome.

There's nothing "intrinsic" about bias, and there's no way to effectively
measure it universally. Simply handling African American facial features in a
GAN would satisfy the situation in TFA, but there's undoubtedly another
related bias issue lurking in the model.

Inevitably, handling bias in ML winds up being akin to playing whack-a-mole,
handling only the situations where people are noisily complaining about
something. This has always bothered me, but I've never found a satisfactory
approach for dealing with it.

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tmabraham
Discussion on reddit:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/hhonq4/d_y...](https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/hhonq4/d_yann_lecuns_last_substantial_post_on_twitter/)

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geronimoe
It's clear that woke culture is driving people to stop engaging with it, as
many of us here have probably also done in the name of preserving our mental
health.

What I'm questioning is, what happens when everyone just stops fighting it? Do
people think they can out-vote it?

It has control over academia (with STEM fields barely holding on), the major
tech corporations, mainstream culture, and soon politics. This isn't an
endorsement of Trump, I'm just stating facts.

All I see here is people saying "man, social media is really unhealthy smh"
and no one seems to realize that they are willingly vacating all of the
platforms where they can oppose what they deem to be unhealthy.

On Hacker News I still see people debating things like the handling of the
coronavirus, the BLM movement, and other politically charged issues. I see
some comments that make me angry, but mostly I either agree or disagree. I
think it's quite well balanced and civil. I really like the moderation here,
and I like that most people are willing to approach others' opinions with
sincerity.

With the current trend, how long will that realistically last? Now that
mainstream news, Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit are falling to toxic ideology,
coercion and censorship, what's to stop it from happening here too?

~~~
akshasrivastava
I agree. It's a damned if you do damned if you don't situation. Ethics is the
one field in which you shouldn't be unwilling to listen to counterviews
because the premise of the field itself is so subjective.

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eeh
Some earlier context:
[https://twitter.com/ylecun/status/1275194055257919495](https://twitter.com/ylecun/status/1275194055257919495)

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boromi
Can someone clue me in on the whole story?

~~~
gowld
People are exceedingly obnoxious on Twitter, and LeCun got sick of it.

~~~
boromi
Isn't he uniquely qualified to help rectify bias issues. It seems odd to just
leave.

~~~
redis_mlc
I don't think AI is fixable when applied to humanity.

For example, laws have been passed at the city level (Santa Cruz, Boston)
against facial recognition, but we need federal laws.

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throwaway4666
Good for him. I still have no idea what that website is for and why people use
it in earnest (i.e. not for joke or 'bit' accounts like dril)

