During closing remarks, Yan Liu says that #ICLR2022 had 4800 attendees from 81 countries. Thank you to the @iclr_conf organizers who volunteered to do this and during a pandemic.
She also briefly mentions zoom fatigue.
I definitely have one. I haven't found the right strategy to be fully present at virtual conferences. But I also really appreciate having the talks available afterwords.
Maybe if we believed that conferences would be fully virtual forever, we would re-configure all of our events differently?
Maybe we'd only have like 3 hours a day type of content and have stuff live? I don't know.
As it is, the amount of travel that is normalized in the research/academic world is not sustainable anyways.
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This shit is literally the ideology throwing money at "AGI"
"If you want to do "the most good," should you focus on helping people who are alive right now or these vast numbers of possible people living in computer simulations in the far future? salon.com/2022/04/30/elo…
"The answer is, of course, that you should focus on these far-future digital beings. As longtermist Benjamin Todd writes:""
"There is a reason that Musk is on the scientific advisory board of the grandiosely named Future of Life Institute (FLI), to which he has donated millions of dollars. It's the same reason why he has donated similar sums to Bostrom's Future of Humanity Institute (Oxford) ...
How can we let it be known far & wide that there's a religion in Silicon Valley (longtermism/effective altruism & similar) that has convinced itself that the best thing to do for "all of humanity" is to throw as much money as possible to the problem of "AGI"...
and this is the religion of the billionaires which conveniently makes them feel good about themselves. And its all for the mostly white men, incredibly privileged (and of course don't let the undersampled majority through the door or make them miserable if they do),...
to save all of humanity. I had this exact reflection when Open AI was announced in 2015 & it only seems to be exploding after they've surely proven to us they do anything but "AI safety first"?
Now offshoots are raising literal HUNDREDS OF MILLIOINS.
Short article if you scroll down all the way to the bottom discusses @emilymbender's thread:
"On Thursday, the University of Washington computational linguist Emily M. Bender cracked her fingers and typed out a lengthy thread... politico.com/newsletters/di…
"The incident is telling not because...the author of the blog post, overtly expresses some maniacal, Promethean desire to upend the order of humanity. It's because he describes astonishingly ambitious goals — and his dismissive frustration with any non-tech institutions...
I'm excited for this. Sad that we weren't able to have it in Addis Ababa in 2020. Hope for better days in the country where my time can be spent thinking about how to bring conferences like this there. Glad that ICLR will be in Kigali, this will benefit so many students... 1/6
Image description shows Kigali convention center, a dome structure with spirals lit in blue, yellow and green. Next to it says:
ICLR 2023 1-5 May, 2023
Kigali Convention Center and Radisson Blu Hotel
Kigali, Rwanda
2/6
It will not only benefit African scholars but many others constantly denied visas to attend these conferences.
So many scholars were emailing us in anticipation of ICLR being in Ethiopia. So many excited students, not just from all regions in Ethiopia but all over Africa. 3/6
"A yearlong Times investigation, including dozens of interviews with government officials, leaders of intelligence and law-enforcement agencies, cyberweapons experts, business executives and privacy activists in a dozen countries, shows how Israel’s ability to approve or deny...
...access to NSO’s cyberweapons has become entangled with its diplomacy. Countries like Mexico and Panama have shifted their positions toward Israel in key votes at the United Nations after winning access to Pegasus."
Its not an understatement to say that the publication approval process at Google is an exercise in pushing out writing akin to company propaganda (no matter how harmful to many groups of ppl) & suppressing perspectives of marginalized groups if they're not akin to propaganda.
There really need to be publication processes in academic conferences, journals, etc that account for this. Otherwise they will also be complicit in misleading the field and publishing mostly propaganda.
At the very least, there needs to be transparency into what types of process went into editing the papers and who was involved.
However, this doesn't account for the papers that weren't submitted because of censorship by said companies.