Thread by @emilymbender

Fantastic talk and Q&A by @timnitGebru at #ICLR2021

Among other things I really appreciate how Timnit is unerasing the contribution of our retracted co-authors and how key their contributions & perspectives were to the Stochastic Parrots paper.

@timnitGebru And so much else: @timnitGebru is absolutely brilliant at drawing connections between the research milieu, research content, geopolitics and individual, situated lived experience.

@timnitGebru On interdisciplinarity and the hierarchy of knowledge:

“If you have all the money, you don’t have to listen to anybody” —@timnitgebru

@timnitGebru Long discussion (with moderator @haldaume3 also doing an excellent job) about what individuals can do, given all of the incentive structures, in industry & academia. @timnit emphasized the need for structural change & the hope of power in numbers.

@timnitGebru @haldaume3 @Timnit And @haldaume3 reflected on how even tenured faculty (supposedly those with the most academic freedom) are subjected to various pressures, in terms of securing funding or jobs/internships for their students. Lots of reasons not to rock the boat!

@timnitGebru @haldaume3 @Timnit This was in response to a question about the bystander effect, & I think it's important not to treat this as all or nothing: there are often small things we can do to exercise what power we have towards shifting power, & each time we do that, it gets easier to take the next step.

@timnitGebru @haldaume3 @Timnit Among other things: positive steps towards shifting power taken in solidarity build community, which is back to @timnitGebru 's point about strength in numbers. Stronger community means more ability to take the next steps.

.@haldaume3 also brought forward a question about what we should do vis a vis the language communities not benefiting from this tech and pointing out that indiscriminately scraping data from languages the researchers don't speak doesn't work.

See: arxiv.org/pdf/2103.12028…

@haldaume3 .@timnitGebru 's reply pointed out that the choice isn't between ignoring a community or performing research on them: what about allocating resources to support the work being done by those communities, that meets their needs?