this is in reference to super-alignment & safety, but my cousin also had her DEI team disbanded and “distributed” in the same way
on the surface, i think safety, DEI, and similar topics should be embedded in the culture and not centralized into a specific team. centralization would cause people to say, “oh that’s not my job”.
then again, any time a centralized team is disbanded, my immediate thought is, “apparently safety/DEI/etc. doesn’t matter to this company”. it’s a paradox, i suppose
@kellogh I always feel a little conflicted about reports like this. Like, it's 100% a good and important thing in general, but that doesn't mean a specific person or team or culture engaged with AI safety automatically inherits that value regardless of what they're actually contributing.
That said, I do think it might need a dedicated if small team to ensure that things are widely embedded.
@bespacific I've always had a special hatred for a particular kind of review request/paper, where you can feel so clearly there's something wrong with it, but it's very hard to put your finger on what exactly. It's just slightly rotten everywhere. I found them hard to reject in a review becasue they're slippery in that way, "it's stinky" probably won't cut it.
Had one of those review requests a day or so ago and I strongly suspect AI was used from the Abstract, but how do you nail it down?
Isn't it weird that acceptance rate is a thing we look for in a conference/journal?
Publishing a paper should not be competitive like "we take the top 20% paper", it should be "we take all papers that are good enough according to our standards". Sometimes it can be a very low or very high number depending on the quality of the paper submitted.
@solalnathan@academicchatter@phdstudents I wonder if it's all due to a lack of substantive understanding and expertise (or concern), at the level of decision-makers. "Top x% is excellent!", whether it's accepted papers or grants provided, is a totally substance-free metric. Any monkey can apply it and claim they're measuring exceptionality (just not what kind exactly).
To publish a paper if and only if it's "(a bit/very/extremely) valuable to a scientific field" requires much more judgment.
Probably idiot question.
If I were to make a #Mastodon bot* in #python as a learning project, do I need a machine running constantly to run it, or should I do it on a cloud service?
I got a #raspberrypi sitting around, would that do?
(*One that regularly posts a Josephine Baker photo, if you're interested)
In an era of post-truth, the strategy of rigidly defending your version of truth and attacking other people's view of the truth is a largely self-destructive excercise that just creates a never ending argument
Understanding the logics and rationales of those people we disagree with is a far better way but requires humility and nuance
Naomi Klein in Doppelganger and Büscher in The Truth About Nature show us how this can be done with #Covid, #Palestine and #ClimateChange
@Alexlee@GhostOnTheHalfShell@samohTmaS@academicchatter I coincidentally read a foreword by Ian Hacking to Kuhn's Structure, which you might find interesting. Part of it specifically denies this interpretation of Kuhn (leaving aside whether it'd be convincing).
"And so Kuhn was accused, in some quarters, of denying the very rationality of science. In other quarters he was hailed as the prophet of the new relativism. Both thoughts are absurd. Kuhn addresses these issues directly." (cont)
"Theories should be accurate in their predictions, consistent, broad in scope, present phenomena in an orderly and coherent way, and be fruitful in suggesting new phenomena or relationships between phenomena. Kuhn subscribes to all five values, which he shares with the entire community of scientists (not to mention historians). That is part of what (scientific) rationality is all about, and Kuhn in this respect is a 'rationalist.'"
Someone stole a, fortunately not too valuable, package today - either the delivery person themself after taking the "proof of delivery" picture or someone in the short period before I got to the porch. Upside: It reminded me of the existence of Amazon Lockers of which I've got one a few minutes walk away, so that's the new plan going forward.
Did anyone receive this kind of review invitation? Perhaps you @j_bertolotti ?
Apparently, they started paying 20 $ for reviewing! It seems that finally, someone paid attention to all the complaints and the quality of the existing peer review process. The fee may seem too low, but here in Turkey 🇹🇷 it equals 650 Turkish lira, which is about one week's groceries. @academicsunite#academia#research#publishing#journals#peerreview
@MahmutRuzi@j_bertolotti@academicsunite I wasn't familiar with peerx-press (it seems to be a service used by some journals rather than a publisher? It's not my field though), but just wanted to mention in case it matters - as I read the email it's only a chance of getting $20, via some random draw.
#AI#GenerativeAI#Creativity#Capitalism: "The recent emergence of generative AI software as viable tools for use in the cultural and creative industries has sparked debates about the potential for “creativity” to be automated and “augmented” by algorithmic machines. Such discussions, however, begin from an ontological position, attempting to define creativity by either falling prey to universalism (i.e. “creativity is X”) or reductionism (i.e. “only humans can be truly creative” or “human creativity will be fully replaced by creative machines”). Furthermore, such an approach evades addressing the real and material impacts of AI on creative labour in these industries. This article thus offers more expansive methodological and conceptual approaches to the recent hype on generative AI. By combining (Csikszentmihalyi, The systems model of creativity, Springer, Dordrecht, 2014) systems view of creativity, in which we emphasise the shift from “what” to “where” is creativity, with (Lievrouw, Media technologies, The MIT Press, 2014) relational-materialist theory of “mediation”, we argue that the study of “creativity” in the context of generative AI must be attentive to the interactions between technologies, practices, and social arrangements. When exploring the relational space between these elements, three core concepts become pertinent: creative labour, automation, and distributed agency. Critiquing “creativity” through these conceptual lenses allows us to re-situate the use of generative AI within discourses of labour in post-industrial capitalism and brings us to a conceptualisation of creativity that privileges neither the human user nor machine algorithm but instead emphasises a relational and distributed form of agency." https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00146-024-01921-3
@remixtures That looks interesting, thanks - one question (I did very quickly scan to see if you addressed what I'm wondering in the paper), why the "falling prey to" type of terminology towards universalism?
@remixtures Ahaha, sorry, I fully assumed you were an author :D Curious what you think of it then when you've had a chance to look - it read to me as quite a negative framing, while I'd also tend to "naturally" look for what they seem to be calling universalist points of view, just for understanding. It seems like it could be more complementary.
"…there is no way reviewers and journals are going to be able to keep up. Reviewers are typically unpaid academics who are already stretched to their limits; tripling their workload would not be feasible. […] the total number of articles may radically spike, many of them dubious and a waste of reviewers’ time. Lots of bad stuff is going to sneak in."
@brembs@matthias_aulbach@ivan_herman That's exactly my response to it. Did people at some point lose all sense of scientific scepticism? Back as an undergraduate it was 100% the default assumption you didn't automatically just... believe... stuff you read in a paper.
@matthias_aulbach@brembs@ivan_herman My version of "people" here - it's the subset of researchers who seem so shocked about the unreliability of individual papers, while it was always like this.
It's maybe like there's now a stronger tendency to treat a paper as an isolated separate object. As opposed to always considering the professional meta-information as a matter of course; e.g. you'd ideally know who wrote the paper and have met them or have some connection with them, even if indirect.
@matthias_aulbach@brembs@ivan_herman So I wonder whether there's an element of "death of subject matter expertise" going on. Like a random person should expect to be able to pick up a paper and acquire knowledge, without being part of a whole complex field of relationships and caveats. I suspect that trying to force that reality into existence might not be the best way forward, as opposed to fixing the ecosystem.