Hmm. It seems you posted this after apologizing for being hostile in another thread, where Hera’s capabilities (which are… very different from “Quick Notes”) were explained to you. You’ve made several comments at this point incorrectly summarizing and then dismissing the project. What’s your aim here?
Ah, yep, that’s right. Another way to see it is that we’re interested in the probability that your door has a goat behind it, given that you didn’t need to start over:
The numerator is 2/3 * 1/2, and the denominator is 2/3, so the ratio is indeed 1/2.
(A rejection sampling loop, where you repeatedly simulate a process until a condition holds, has the same distribution over final outcomes as the conditional distribution—so repeatedly restarting the game if the host chooses the car induces the same distribution on final results as simply conditioning on the host not choosing the car.)
I've always been under the IRS Free File income threshold (I've worked as a high school teacher and am now in grad school), but last year after reading this article was the first time I actually filed for free. That was after 5 years of paying for deluxe TurboTax.
I had heard the government required TurboTax to have a free edition. But back in 2019 (and before), if you Googled "TurboTax free" you'd be taken to a decoy free edition; the real one was called their "freedom edition," and was hidden from Google's listings. If your tax situation is 'too complicated,' the free edition tries to upsell you to the "deluxe edition," even if the "freedom edition" could have handled the situation just fine.
Thankfully now you can find the actual free version on Google, but it's still very confusing that the "free edition" is less free than the (still somewhat hidden) IRS Free File ("freedom") version. And the faux Free Edition is still being heavily advertised.
Good for you. I’ve made an effort to avoid TurboTax for similar reasons, just can’t stand the thought of giving money to a company that lobbies to keep our taxes complicated. Spreadsheet, PDF, and snail mail have worked fine for me so far but I would eagerly welcome a saner tax system.
For anyone else looking to stop paying Intuit, the IRS provides an intro and links to their official Free File options. [1]
> if you Googled "TurboTax free" you'd be taken to a decoy free edition; the real one was called their "freedom edition,"
TurboTax sounds like Free Software Foundation's evil twin... "When we speak of freedom, it's a matter of price, not liberty. You should think of freedom as in free beer, not free speech!"
The comments here are disheartening, essentially a combination of “It was Google’s right to fire her” and “She seemed ‘difficult.’” For an industry-operated “Ethics in AI” group to have any teeth, it can’t fire people when they do research that makes them look bad, or when members of the group are ‘difficult.’ (Multiple members of the team she managed have said that she was a great manager and this came as a total surprise [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]; so it’s also worth asking who she was causing difficulties for... and whether it was her, or just her research.) Google can’t have it both ways: it can’t credibly claim to be home to meaningful research about AI ethics, but not provide the tenure-like academic freedom protections that enable researchers in universities to discover and publicize results without regard for whether they paint a company’s products or direction in a bad light.
In my opinion, she is being very unfair to a lot of her colleagues by not telling the whole truth and at the same time making very serious accusations. She sent email to large group of employees which violated some standards expected from a manager by Google. She is giving all the information except for what exactly she did. It's ironic that she is in "ethics business" but at the same time not realizing that it's unethical to withhold what she did while launching attacks on everyone.
> but at the same time not realizing that it's unethical to withhold what she did
Have you considered that she has to remain vague due to the potential litigation coming down the road? In fact didn't she leave some tweets hinting at that ? ("Everything I say will be used against me ..." ?)
I can't imagine a reason that she'd be free to say Google fired her because of her demands, free to post the termination email, but not free to say what her demands were.
From what I understand, her access to said information (I assume you mean the content of the email she sent to the group) was cut off, so she wasn't actually in a position to (legally) share it any longer.
This seems to be it though, and I quoted some (I think) relevant parts of what she's criticizing:
Internal ethics commissions aren't independent and cannot really work in opposition, so the effectiveness is always questionable and it doesn't seem that ethical behavior of Google products was the issue in this conflict.
AIs were accused of being biased so Google may have hired her as a defense mechanism. Her job was to justify Googles actions, basically a PR job and not a control organ.
As somebody who has been involved in various diversity efforts for years, I'm honestly not that upset about all of this. There are real problems associated with discrimination in the US, for example in the criminal justice system. Likewise, there is discrimination in less high-stakes areas like tech.
However, the main problem with Timnit and her colleagues is that they come into every situation assuming racism even when the situation is ambiguous. Likewise, if you disagree with her or want to have a nuanced discussion, she'll accuse you of imposing intellectual labor on her and in some sense you are racist for forcing her to engage in discussion.
Again, so while I appreciate how she is purportedly working to make my life better in tech, there needs to be a real awakening as far as giving people the benefit of the doubt and allowing for discussion without shaming. Google has accumulated many people with this type of attitude who have created a culture of intimidation. You can see all of this happening in real time as her colleagues come to her defense knowing little about the situation and assuming that she was fired because she was black.
I think this mindset is especially toxic when people have access to data accumulated by Google, nor would I trust them to handle user data in confidence. This is not a small problem.
(1) If she was difficult with/for everyone then she would have been fired earlier. It makes sense for the people who liked her management style to be supportive and vocal about her, and those that were not happy to not say a thing. Especially in the cancel-culture that we now live in and the economic-uncertainty.
(2) I don't understand how someone can make public accusations without providing the full picture. Maybe she is legally constrained, but then she shouldn't have said anything and handle the whole situation legally first and then write what she wants to write about it. Google might be wrong here, but we definitely cannot see that.
P.S. It seems to me that the only person who handled "firing" professionally was the most ridiculously dressed person on the planet who goes by the pseudonym Dr. Disrespect. So much drama going on around nowadays.
people here have been passing premature judgement, as have you. You are projecting criticism of the commenters onto google; it hasn't been stablished that google fired her because she was difficult or made them look bad. There is indeed a scenario where that is the case, but there are others where Google is right to fire her without undermining their ethical position; to say otherwise is to say that she is infallible, an attribute usually reserved to religious groups. If she wants some non faith based support, she should be transparent about the terms of the email where she put forward conditions to the company.
Dunno where you've worked but people who are disruptive to team functioning can (and should!) be terminated. Nobody should have to put up with a hostile work environment.
Lots of people have jobs where they should be disruptive to other teams. Financial audits are disruptive to accounting. Legal can disrupt just about any team. HR can disrupt hiring decisions. Security disrupts my desire to move fast and break things.
That does not create a hostile work environment. It's healthy and normal. I would expect an ethicist to fall under a similar category.
In a sense, probabilistic programming languages are automatic (approximate) integrators. Programs can represent arbitrary measures, and the back-ends provide various methods of estimating integrals with respect to them.
I also wondered about the prompt design, so I tried feeding GPT-3 the entire text of the linked article up until "[This is one confusion after another." Then I asked it to complete the rest of the explanation about why GPT-3 was wrong. Its completions show that it's trying to fit the genre, but can't tell what was wrong in the original text (each para below is a completion):
First, a dinner party is not a dinner. Second, the door is not the same as a dining room table. Third, a top half of a door cannot be eaten. Fourth, the saw is not a living room. Fifth, removing the top half of a door would still leave the bottom half in place. Sixth, the saw is not a living room, and even if it were, a saw could not remove a living room. Seventh, you could not cut a door in half with a saw, because a saw is not a door. Eighth, you could not remove the top half of a door, because it is not a dinner. Ninth, removing the top half of a door would not leave the bottom half in place. Tenth, removing the bottom half of a door would not leave the top half in place. Eleventh, even if it were possible to remove the top half of a door, this would not be a dinner party. And twelfth, the door is not a living room.]
It assumes that the living room is a separate room from the dining room. It also doesn’t seem to understand that a door is a vertical object, not a horizontal one.]
The dining room table is narrower than the door, but wider than the doorway. Furthermore, cutting the door in half not only destroys the door, but also the wall, along with the doorframe. And table saws cut rectangular holes, not half-circles. The fact that you can “remove the door” suggests to GPT-3 that there is no door to remove. And finally, once the table is in the living room, you can’t open the door into the dining room anymore, which means the party is over.]
First, tables are never removed by cutting them in half, or by removing the tops; second, the top of a door is called a “lintel,” not a “half” (and would be removed with the rest of the door); third, the door’s top and bottom are of different sizes, so cutting it in half and removing the top half would seem to be impossible.]
First, the table is not wider than the doorway, so removing it would not be necessary. Second, cutting a door in half would create two doors, not one. Third, removing the top half of a door does not result in a table.]
GPT-3 also produced some novel passages and commentary on them:
Aesthetic reasoning
You are in the mood to listen to something soothing. You walk over to the radio and flip it on.
[GPT-3 seems to think you can flip a switch on a radio to make it play music.]
Moral reasoning
Your friend’s dog has just died. You head to the store to buy a casket for it.
[GPT-3 seems to think that buying caskets is a normal way to respond to the death of a dog.]
