Thread by @_alialkhatib

for me the thing about the face/politics paper isn't the paper or the author. he's been doing unrigorous, shoddy, offensive work for years

what's wild to me is the apparent credulousness of the reviewers. like 5 people have to generally agree on the paper not being garbage

‽!?

i mean i know exactly how it happens; draw reviewers from an intellectually shallow pool and this is what you get.

but it always surprises me that from a group of ~5 people not 1 is like "are you people fucking serious? there's not even a mechanism. it's just gee whiz bullshit"

i think i just don't understand what this contribution is even trying to be. like

"didn't invent anything new, no new insight into the human condition, but here's a bricolage of generic components that'll say if someone's gay or liberal or smth. <ethics>privacy 👻</ethics>"

like thanks yes we've known for a while that systems could be made to make shitty guesses with shitty data & these systems can cause tremendous harm.

so many people have managed to work in this space without designing and promulgating these systems as a sort of... ironic joke???

like this is "evil scientist points death ray at city to illustrate how dangerous death ray that he constructed is"

thank you now please put down the death ray gun

man i'm just tired as fuck it's been such a long year