Dear @emilymbender—and @Abebab—you need to keep “reminding” people of your viewpoint because it is not an argument that is convincing to all or a self-evident truth. It is a particular academic position, which lots of people support but a good number of others disagree with. 1/8

https://twitter.com/emilymbender/status/1598115234530885632

The position of Bender & @alkoller is that of 20th century formal semantics, based on Anglo-American philosophy of language & formal grammar, the approach we were both brought up on. However, it had already been rejected by Ludwig Wittgenstein in 1953: topologicalmedialab.net/xinwei/classes… 2/

I’m happy to share the published version of our ConVIRT algorithm, appearing in #MLHC2022 (PMLR 182). In 2020, this was a pioneering work in contrastive learning of perception by using naturally occurring paired text. Unfortunately, things took a winding path from there. 🧵👇 The paper (Contrastive Learning of Medical Visual Representations from Paired Images and Text, @yuhaozhangx @hjian42 Yasuhide Miura @chrmanning & @curtlanglotz) shows much better unsupervised visual representation learning using paired text versus vision alone (SimCLR, MoCo v2)

I would suggest that this thread errs by over-representing the proportion of the time in which human “reasoning” is actually anything akin to mathematical reasoning, such as the example of solving SAT instances. 1/

https://twitter.com/rao2z/status/1553082695852298240

To start with a Go analogy: A moderately skilled player can exhaustively read out a 6–10 move life-and-death problem or end game sequence—or usually work it out more quickly using pattern-based shortcuts! But for longer, more complex things such as fuseki (opening) sequences, 2/

It’s great getting to read my colleagues @robreich, @mehran_sahami & Jeremy Weinstein’s book, System Error. Building a broad understanding of problems with big tech and techno utopianism is such an important topic for this decade.
harpercollins.com/products/syste…
Some thoughts below. 🧵👇 The authors rightly stress many key problems that have emerged: deficiencies of simplistic metrics, dangers of tech monopolies, balancing innovation against status as a public utility, what should become of privacy and free speech in a world of corporate-owned public squares?

@yoavgo @ChrisGPotts I take primary blame for advocating the anonymity period. It was an honest attempt at a compromise middle ground. With the passage of time, I admit that it seems a bit flawed, as more people aim for “the anonymity period deadline” but the real question is what would be better? @yoavgo @ChrisGPotts Your suggestion, @yoavgo, is to move the dial all the way to the left or to the right, but such extremist positions seldom are optimal in a complex and varied world. We could survey again, but I suspect the situation is similar to where it was 3 years ago: one large group, ...