I think Facebook hate is clouding out reasonability in this thread. E.g., there's even a comment asserting that people who collaborate with facebook (a.k.a., Jessica Hodgins, Andrea Vedaldi, and Jitendra Malik) are "not worth their salt" (?!?!?!).
IDK. Maybe -- just possibly -- there do exist researchers who have their choice of funding spigots and are choosing to work with Facebook. Either that or HN has some damn high standards for what it means to be "worth their salt".
There's nothing intrinsically wrong with industry collaboration, even when it involves companies whose impact on the world you might not like. The big oil companies are, unlike FB, an actual existential threat to humanity. But I wouldn't fault renewable energy researchers for taking research dollars from those companies.
The question is: will the funded research agendas push science forward in the direction it was headed anyways, or will this money distort the type of research being done?
In any case, in a week we'll be back to our regular programming bemoaning the fall of the industry research lab and the paltry salaries offered to phd students...
You are referring to my comment about 'worth their salt' in a gross misreading. I said anyone worth their salt has other choices, so going to FB is a deliberate choice on these professors.
Serious question: Is it wrong to work for organizations that have done horrible things? The US government has plenty of blood on its hands from the past few centuries. Yet I don't think it follows that everyone should quit. Rather, if you're a moral person, it seems better to think about you can enact positive change from within, rather than seeking to morally disentangle yourself from an organization you find unethical and thereby allowing it to become even more unethical.
And of course, the US governement is different from Facebook in many ways. Perhaps the same logic of not working for them doesn't apply. But if it doesn't, I think it would be helpful to explain why.
> By choosing to work with facebook you're literally working for a company that has stoked mob killings and enabled genocide.
Okay, granted.
> Anyone working there needs to be called out.
I'll take this seriously when you start "calling out" IBM employees for working for a company that in the past enabled genocide.
I'm unsure how research on "visual and robot learning" or on "geometric 3D reasoning" is supposed to be enabling genocide. Those seem more akin to "green energy researchers taking money from big oil cos". Which is very different, ethically, from actively helping build and maintain the core business. Unless you want to suss out the link between geometric reasoning and genocide for me?
And in the case of Facebook, your opinion is worse than just hyperbolic. There is an entire research field that focuses on detecting speech sentiment. Your position, as stated, is that those people should not work with Facebook, even if 100% of their time is spent designing algorithms and processes to detect and remove hate speech/calls to violence during active genocides.
I think that advice is actively dangerous because I don't believe in a magical world where Facebook disappears tomorrow.
Facebook is an evil company that has harnessed and unleashed an ugliness in humanity which they take no responsibility for and is literally getting people killed.
IDK. Maybe -- just possibly -- there do exist researchers who have their choice of funding spigots and are choosing to work with Facebook. Either that or HN has some damn high standards for what it means to be "worth their salt".
There's nothing intrinsically wrong with industry collaboration, even when it involves companies whose impact on the world you might not like. The big oil companies are, unlike FB, an actual existential threat to humanity. But I wouldn't fault renewable energy researchers for taking research dollars from those companies.
The question is: will the funded research agendas push science forward in the direction it was headed anyways, or will this money distort the type of research being done?
In any case, in a week we'll be back to our regular programming bemoaning the fall of the industry research lab and the paltry salaries offered to phd students...