The greatest marketing trick the NYT has ever pulled off is presenting themselves as the last bastion of objectivity in the trump era.
Nothing could be further from the truth. I think the most recent Sarah Jeong controversy and virtually all reporting on migration, feminism, campus politics etc shows this. Mind you this is from a European perspective where I see almost all reporting about politics here as copying off talking points from the far left.
This is the true genius of their marketing though: They are actually as polarized as any other source in the culture war, but market themselves to an audience that likes to think of themselves as rational, objective, sensible.
"Far left" is a pretty polarising way to describe them.
I'm from the UK, which is a country which is firmly on the right of most of Europe, and policy in the US is extremely far right of here. The reporting I've seen from the New York Times is barely left, let alone "far left".
The right seems to have moved so far out to the far right, and yet people act like the centre-point of the Repbulicans and Democrats is still somehow the neutral position.
"UK is on the right of most of Europe". That's a wrong premise in my opinion. While economic policy is definitely more liberal than the average, social left is pervasive in both main political parties, and there's a solid consensus around open borders, gender equality and other forms of egalitarianism.
Uh... you really haven't been paying attention if you think there is a "solid consensus" on open borders in the UK. We have never had "open borders", and Brexit is going to mean reduced immigration.
Economic policy is a part of people's lives - public spending is a big issue (e.g: healthcare spending), and we are very far from left in that regard. We aren't terrible for social policy, no, but we aren't leading the pack either.
I said their reporting on EUROPEAN politics ("politics here") copies points from the far left (e.g. all mass migration is unquestionably good, parties against it must be right wing populists if not racists, etc).
I think their reporting on campus politics, identity politics is also far left, but other than that their stance on Iraq war etc is more Hillary-left than traditional 'left'. It's pointless semantics though, outrage mode is already engaged in this thread and it will probably soon turn into a dumpster fire.
Someone cannot just be wrong or inaccurate, they must be the enemy ('right rant'), and culture wars demand I first clarify I am on 'the right side of the issues' before saying anything. The more objective people think they are, the blinder towards their own bias. Of course I am biased too, but what people engage with in my post is the 'far left' comment on European politics instead of the actual point.
My point was that the NYT engages in culture war because it sells. I can agree with many issues on the NYT but still observe that and be annoyed by it, but that does not matter in tribalistic discourse.
Maybe we have seen different articles from them - I admit I'm definitely not an avid reader - but I haven't seen what you are describing.
You claim they write articles saying "mass migration is unquestionably good" but even googling now, I can't find anything of the sort - just articles that try to point out the negative effects of migration are massively overstated and flat-out-lied about. Nowhere do I see them arguing that we want more migration or should have no controls, just that migrants are used as scapegoats and the issue is misrepresented a lot of the time by right-wing parties.
Your point just appears to be "they report on some stuff and I don't agree with them on it", therefore you they are intentionally causing a "culture war"?
Policy progresses - the idea that this is some new thing that has never happened before is flat-out wrong. I see the democrats very gradually shifting left, while I see the Republicans sprinting to the right. Blaming the gap, the "culture war" on the left seems disingenuous.
At some point, when the Republicans are actively calling for discriminating against and reducing the quality of life of friends and family: denying them healthcare, kicking them out of the army, etc... You can't expect people to just sit back and accept it. It hurts. Just saying "this is wrong and it's wrong to support it" really doesn't seem excessive.
Saying it's a "culture war" and that they need to stop calling people out on supporting this policy sure sounds like an attempt to shut people up, rather than saying why the policy is actually good.
"Uncontrolled immigration" isn't something they are arguing for, and feminism is a "far-left" viewpoint now?
This "far-left" talk just seems fabricated to create a "both sides" narrative with the alt-right.
The idea that immigrants are people who deserve respect and opportunity, and the idea that women deserve equality are not "far-left", they are cornerstones of the underlying values of the left - that people are people and deserve rights and opportunity, regardless of factors out of their control.
This makes sense to me as a characterization, thank you, although I don't understand why people get so upset about these distinctions as if I had personally offended them. Where I am from dragging the US into wars is naturally seen critically across parties, so far left is just about the issues you mentioned.
You're just saying you don't like their editorial. So.. don't subscribe!
There is no trickery here.
Far left.. you really have no idea how silly you look. There is almost no institution in the USA which actively publishes a broadsheet newspaper you could call left, let alone "far" left. Middle of the road looks pretty left from a ranty right view maybe.
There is almost no institution in the USA which actively publishes a broadsheet newspaper you could call left, let alone "far" left. Middle of the road looks pretty left from a ranty right view maybe.
You are correct and GP betrays his bias here. You want to see far left check out Chapo Trap House, thats far left and it's a far cry from what NYT is publishing. Discouraging to see this here.
To be honest I think you are just proving my point by getting upset and calling me 'ranty right'. Tribalism sells because it triggers emotions like these. It works for the Guardian just as well as it works for the NYT, Fox news or anyone else.
Oh please. You said far left. You invited the response. The NYT is simply not left, or far left. To clarify can you self identify your position in this spectrum? You think you are middle-of-the-road and the NYT is far left journalism?
Look, I really don't care. Go talk to people with a range of views but saying the NYT is left wing journalism just beggars belief. Have you ever read a left wing paper? Here's a hint: the guardian is not a left wing paper. The morning star, which was the daily worker. That's a left wing paper.
I think your disagreement mainly stems from using different terminology: naturalgradient uses "left" as in "socially left/socially progressive", while you use "left" as in "economically left/socialism".
Plausible. On either choice, is the NYT a far left paper?
Btw, I don't think the accusation of its political leaning holds water, in saying plausible I mean I think you're right that the other person believes social justice headlines indicate left wing when to me, they just indicate normal middle of the road democrat positions.
They aren't bridging any gaps or increasing understanding in society. They are playing the same game everyone else is playing in amplifying an us VS them narrative. Because that is what the underlying social media architecture of likes/clicks/views/upvotes produces in everyone.
There is no genius about this.
It's just their method to survive. Obv it benefits them temporarily but the costs are accruing to society.
Journalism cannot be built on top of likes/views/clicks/retweets/upvotes. Stuff that is built on top of that architecture conditions journalists and talking heads to pander.
That architecture must change. There is no sane reason for these numbers to be shown to journalists and their readers in real time.
It's like watching E.B.Skinners behaviour experiments with rats.
Changing this architecture of real time counts used as behaviour conditioners can be changed only by the tech world.
Maybe in the past the NYT had earned their reputation as a trustworthy source, but they're certainly eroding that reputation at a blistering pace. They might survive as a partisan publisher, plenty do, but I always go into NYT articles expecting bias in reporting.
> Keep in mind that the life expectancy of people before the advent of agriculture 15,000 years ago rarely reached or exceeded 40, so their risk of developing the so-called diseases of civilization is unknown.
To completely ignore how infant mortality affects life expectancy shows a complete lack of knowledge of history or statistics.
I don't understand your point about the Paleo diet.
I just Googled, and apparently the "ignore how infant mortality affects life expectancy" is a talking point of pro-Paleo websites. This is a good point (although it seems to ignore the high mortality rate of women during childbirth), but seems pretty irrelevant to the rest of the article.
Ignoring that, it seemed a reasonably well thought-out counterpoint to another fad diet.
I think the issue is that 40 years seems to be extrapolated from an average, but the distribution of human lifespans (especially in pre-modern times) is bi-modal so the average doesn't tell you much about how long they lived conditioned on reaching adulthood. I found mostly questionable-looking paleo-diet related results as well, but to their credit the chain of citations led back to peer-reviewed research such as this:
> we see that on average 57 percent, 64 percent, and 67 percent
of children born survive to age 15 years among hunter-gatherers, forager-horticulturalists, and acculturated hunter-gatherers. Of those who reach age 15, 64 percent of traditional hunter-gatherers and 61 percent of forager-horticulturalists reach age 45. The acculturated hunter-gatherers show lower young adult mortality rates, with 79 percent surviving to age 45, conditional on reaching age 15.
Sure, I agree it's a good point. But it does seem to be a fairly minor point in the whole article, and I really don't understand what the OP's point was.
Was it just they didn't like the criticism of paleo? Because honestly, to me publishing reasonably well thought out criticism of anything seems exactly what a good newspaper should do.
> There have been no studies of large groups of people who have followed the currently popular versions of the Paleo diet for decades to assess their long-term health effects.
You could say similar things about climate change. The science is, and always will be, out. That's the nature of science.
>> There have been no studies of large groups of people who have followed the currently popular versions of the Paleo diet for decades to assess their long-term health effects.
> You could say similar things about climate change. The science is, and always will be, out. That's the nature of science.
This is a false equivalency.
Science requires experiments to support or refute hypotheses. The fact that new experiments may cause us to revisit a theory does not mean that one can assert any arbitrary theory to be correct.
I can echo that. Their journalism feels predictable, not only the opinion, but also the writing of it. The way they approach the subject from an observer, and possibly assumed superior perspective make me feel detached and indifferent as with the reporter. Other left-learning publication, like Guardian, suffers less from such formulaic problem, make me wonder this might be intentional.
This is why these big papers still exist despite questionable profit mechanisms. They are propaganda mouth pieces. There's a reason billionaires buy newspaper companies.
The NYT keeps popping up on UK focused subreddits in the last few months with articles extremely critical of our conservative politicians.
I knew NYT by reputation but never knew they took such an interest in another countries politics. Is there really an appetite for this content across the pond?
If they're trying to appeal to a broader international market then they seem to be doing a good job. Personally if i want X person bashed for 2000 words i already have far too much choice as is.
I don't know how old you are, but from a 40-yo perspective, the NYT being seen as "leftist" is a terrifying signal of how right-wing the mainstream political window has gone in the US. The traditional megaphone of the East-Coast moneyed, the newspaper that sold the Iraq War to the public with lie after lie, is now seen as a bastion of liberalism.
The US is in a very dark place right now. Last time it happened, it took Katrina to briefly break the spell. I wonder what it will take this time.
The NY Times recently hired an editor who tweeted things like "kill all the men", "fuck the police", "it's sick how much joy I get out of being cruel to old white men".
I'd like to think that's well outside the mainstream political window.
This is because there is a massive confusion of the political spectrum which is better divided as 4 parts rather than 2.
The NYT isn't left at all when it comes to its views on how the economy should be run. But on social issues it certainly is a left rag. In fact, in what kind of environment but the leftomost extremist side could one tolerate the presence of an employee like Sarah Jeong who said such nice things as "white people are only fit to live underground like groveling goblins"? Not only did they not fire her but they even came to her defense.
The NYT is the poster child of the new generation of leftists, whose core obsessions are not whether the proletariat earns enough to make a decent living but whether they can dye their hair blue and still find a job.
Arguably, the kind of environment in which one elects a President who generalises an entire nationality as criminals and rapists except for "a few, [who] I assume, are good people." If you want to find how low the bar has fallen, understand that one side of the political divide lowered it long before Jeong got there.
By "one side of the political divide" I'm not referring to Trump specifically, but the online subcultures that dovetailed into the alt-right, which most certainly existed before Jeong's tweets.
EDIT: To further clarify, I'm not saying "they did it first" is a defence. I'm explaining that this is the context that Vox article going around is saying is missing when people want to condemn those tweets -- the tone and vocabulary of a certain part of Twitter. Jeong's mistake was posting those tweets with a particular audience in mind - one that understood the touchstones of these conversations (e.g. "kill all men" being obviously not a serious rallying cry to murder males) - when, although Twitter can sometimes feel like a clubhouse, it's still a public forum. At the time, I, and many other people situated within that context, understood Jeong's meaning perfectly, and even as a white man I empathise with what she's saying. Others may not be aware of that context, or choose to ignore it, which is where the fraughtness of her comments lay, not the content itself.
I'm certain the response to this will be along the lines of "Then why are white men persecuted for making racist jokes?" and the answer is because young Asian-American women have a lot more to fear from young white men than vice versa, which is the power dynamic at the heart of why Jeong's comments can only be called "racist" in the strictest definition of the term, disregarding the present situation. But this is all getting too complex to outline in a comment unambiguously, so I hesitate to say even that much.
In response to your edit, I don't agree that white men should be expected to endure such racist abuse just because "young Asian-American women have a lot more to fear from young white men than vice versa". It's worse for some than for others but it's bad for everyone.
But I doubt I'll change your mind about that.
The left mostly seems to want a selective silencing of right-wing voices. They defend Sarah Jeong, but the NY Times fired Quinn Norton under similar circumstances. Alex Jones is being silenced without a word of protest from the people defending Sarah Jeong. Twitter suspended Candice Owens for rephrasing Sarah Jeong.
If the NY Times wants to be left-wing publication, that's fine, but we should recognize it as such.
> The greatest marketing trick the NYT has ever pulled off is presenting themselves as the last bastion of objectivity in the trump era.
Considering most of the nation doesn't trust the NYT, not sure it was much of a trick. People trust foxnews more than the NYT. Think about that.
The real trick that the NYT ( along with CNN, MSNBC, etc ) pulled was forcing google, youtube, facebook and much of social media to give it an unfair privileged position to increase network traffic. They got a short term boost but it wasn't as significant as they'd hoped and it certainly won't last. Already, the subscriber growth has declined along with overall traffic.
Keep in mind that if we get a recession, the first thing the new subs will cut is the NYT subscription. I'm speaking from experience here. Also, as people get older and have more experience reading the NYT, their mistrust of NYT increases. Not a good sign for a trust based product.
And their activities ( hirings, stories and agenda pushing ) isn't helping.
It need not be a trick. I subscribed the day Trump won because I wanted to support what is generally considered “left-wing” sources. I am also strongly anti-conservative and anti-libertarian, and generally agree with the NYT stance on most issues.
Weaponizing old, out-of-context tweets is just the new alt-right playbook. James Gunn is the other obvious example.
Yes, these people posted things that were bad ideas. They also apologised, made it clear they were not serious about what was said, and moved past it.
To claim it makes their entire coverage of racism incoherent is... misleading at best. Imitating the masses of people trolling you as a joke may be a bad idea, but it's not comparable to the racism sustained by minorities that regularly damages their quality of life. Pretending the two things are the same is severely downplaying the severity of the latter.
People grow, change and learn. I've known people who used to be racist, and I don't hold it against them, because they have changed and deserve a chance to be a part of society, as long as they don't act like that any more.
Trying to stop anyone on the left who has ever made a mistake from having a voice, long after they made those mistakes is insane. The fact that alt-right voices arguing in bad faith are actively targeting the people trying to change the very issues at hand shows the issue.
Oh, please. "Weaponizing old tweets", writings, or politics is not a phenomenon particular to the alt-right. Examples abound:
Kevin Williamson, formerly of the National Review, was recently fired by The Atlantic for old tweets.
James Damore, a Google engineer, was fired for making controversial statements about gender science that feminists at the company didn't like.
Brendan Eich, a software developer who created JavaScript and was a co-founder of Mozilla, was forced to resign as the CEO of that company after making a political donation.
And there are many more instances of "repressive tolerance" in Big Tech, which Herbert Marcuse and others have described as a tolerance for 'all viewpoints' which actually contributes to social oppression in our culture.
The weaponizing of alternate viewpoints in the interests of "social justice" isn't owned by any one political faction, it's deployed nowadays by all of them, and it leads to a corrosive and toxic public discourse and environment.
There is a big difference between pointing out someone is actively acting in bad faith, and taking content they have apologised for and say they disagree with now when they don't act in that way any more.
> Kevin Williamson, formerly of the National Review, was recently fired by The Atlantic for old tweets.
He spoke with the editor who fired him because that was still his viewpoint, not an old tweet he apologised for or regretted.
> Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg forced to conclude that his new hire did, in fact, believe what he said he believed. “The language he used in this podcast — and in my conversations with him in recent days — made it clear that the original tweet did, in fact, represent his carefully considered views,”
> James Damore, a Google engineer, was fired for making controversial statements about gender science that feminists at the company didn't like.
He stood by his comments, in fact, he doubled down on them.
> Brendan Eich, a software developer who created JavaScript and was a co-founder of Mozilla, was forced to resign as the CEO of that company after making a political donation.
This isn't historic, that's current behaviour.
> And there are many more instances of "repressive tolerance" in Big Tech, which Herbert Marcuse and others have described as a tolerance for 'all viewpoints' which actually contributes to social oppression in our culture.
> The weaponizing of alternate viewpoints isn't owned by any one political faction, it's deployed nowadays by all of them, and it leads to a corrosive and toxic public environment.
Your examples are different things - it's perfectly reasonable, in fact, I would argue a moral obligation, not to accept bad actions and support of abhorrent policy from those around you.
My point was that people can and do change - if any of these people renounced their viewpoints, acted in good faith and changed, I would happily support them in any endeavour. That isn't what happened in these cases - there is a fundamental difference.
Even if this does happen to people on the right (and I'm sure there must be cases of it, as with all things), that doesn't justify the recent spate of cases being intentionally pushed by the alt-right. The particular instance being discussed here is wrong in the same way it would be wrong if it was someone on the right.
> Weaponizing old, out-of-context tweets is just the new alt-right playbook
No, it was the cultural mainstream that made it acceptable to fire people over communication mistakes. See the "Just kidding, I'm white" tweet[1], Tim Hunt getting fired by Twitter before even getting off his plane[2], or in tech: Donglegate, where people on both sides were fired.
NYT should totally hire Sarah Jeong, but as a leftie, I have to agree with the "alt-right" that the double standard is ridiculous. The Verge sums it up pretty well[3]: Nobody should attack our journalists for their tweets, with the implication that firing everyone else was a great idea.
It isn't a double standard, because the standard is consistent:
- People are responsible for what they say and can and should be fired if they support abhorrent policy or abuse people.
- People should always be able to reform and come back into society if they apologise, state they don't support their previous actions, and act differently.
These things are not contradictory.
Right now, there is an intentional effort by the alt-right to dig up these kinds of things from people who fit the latter category and raise them and promote them to try and minimise the voices of people who are now promoting things they dislike. It has nothing to do with the original issue, just the means to an end.
I'm not saying that the problem doesn't exist elsewhere, but that doesn't mean it's right that these people are targeted.
> Weaponizing old, out-of-context tweets is just the new alt-right playbook. James Gunn is the other obvious example.
They merely adopted left's usual tactics.
Personally, I don't support firing people over their private views, but in this case it's blatant hypocrisy. For example, a few months ago NYT fired Quinn Norton for almost the same thing[1]. Almost, because her old racist tweets weren't targeting white people.
>Yes, these people posted things that were bad ideas. They also apologised, made it clear they were not serious about what was said, and moved past it.
Sarah did not apologize. All she did was claiming that she's a victim.
Yes, she was a victim, she also admitted she was wrong, and said she would not do it again, and she has not.
> They merely adopted left's usual tactics.
> Personally, I don't support firing people over their private views, but in this case it's blatant hypocrisy. For example, a few months ago NYT fired Quinn Norton for almost the same thing[1]. Almost, because her old racist tweets weren't targeting white people.
If it was the same, then maybe it was wrong with her too. I can't find an apology, however, so it seems different to me.
Come on, even if what you said wasn't absurd,i.e you can be racist if someone attacks you on Twitter, the NYT fired people for much, much less than the disgusting vitriol the woman posted for years.
> i.e you can be racist if someone attacks you on Twitter
That is not what I said. I said she admitted what she said was wrong, publicly renounced the tweets, and stopped doing it. That is literally the opposite of what you are claiming I said.
Yes, it also matters that her intent at the time was not a belief that white people are inferior but to mimic the style of people abusing her to point out the absurdity. Was it the wrong course of action? Yes, but not all wrong things are equal. As I just said, the fact she has apologised, not repeated the action, and renounced what she did matters.
> the NYT fired people for much, much less than the disgusting vitriol the woman posted for years
Then give those examples, they don't change the facts of this case.
It's not hypocritical to do different things in different situations. You keep stating this, but you still can't show me what they got wrong in this case.
Their stance is Jeong used to imitate the language of her harassers, has since learned that was wrong, and has apologised. We should all be seeking rehabilitation, not retribution, and although I personally don't think her tweets were particularly objectionable, her remorse should earn her a second chance.
Is being neutral reporting on facts or is it reporting a viewpoint at the middle of the two parties? Those are two very different things.
As someone from the UK, a country that is pretty far to the right of most of Europe, and yet still far to the left of the US, the idea that these publications are biased to the left is, frankly, laughable.
I'm afraid I stopped reading that 1/3rd of the way through after 50 paragraphs just repeating "liberals [American democrats, they mean] are smug" in slightly different ways without really delving into detail. (disclaimer: I'm European)
>presenting themselves as the last bastion of objectivity in the trump era... Nothing could be further from the truth
They seem fairly objective to me. Can you suggest any other news sources that are more objective? Re Sarah Jeong - ok they have a columnist who dislikes Trump but that's hardly a very rare viewpoint in the US these days.
>Sarah Jeong - ok they have a columnist who dislikes Trump
Wait what? She's an avowed racist with a 5 year trail of comments to prove it, she doesn't merely "dislike" Trump. The fact that NY Times actively sought her and threw their support behind her is despicable. I cancelled my digital subscription because of that alone.
That's exactly what every racist's apology looks like, including Roseanne Barr. Also the above is utter bullshit. She posted a link to one tweet where she was responding to someone disregarding hundreds upon hundreds of racists tweets that weren't direct responses to anyone. You realize this was going on for about 5 years?
The Washington Post. The NYT is unapologetically taking a side in the culture war and on many issues (campus politics, feminism, title IX, migration..) will ever only let one side make their point. The Wapo in my observation has a much better mix of both sides.
The thing about declaring a war is that you force people onto sides, even if they want nothing to do with your war. And you can then use this to feed your own propaganda even more.
If tomorrow for some strange reason half of the UK decides that actually the old testament is right and we should demolish all the Egyptian statues in Kensington, that doesn't make the Guardian part of a war if they say that's ludicrous. It just makes them sensible.
This is not a proper representation of NYT's opinion board. Beyond the absolutely dishonest stuff of more recent hires to the op-ed board, they have multiple conservatives on the board repeatedly publishing their "actually the problem is the leftist college students" every couple of months. They also have a couple "mainstream liberals" publishing inoffensive (but rarely courageous) pieces that usually match what centrists want to hear.
the WSJ subsidizes a lot of bow-tie conservatives, but the NYT is also granting credibility to a lot of bankrupt lines of thought that have no actual real support in this country. Banning abortion has less than 20% support in the US, yet if you read the opinion pages of the NYT you could only think that both sides have roughly equal support.
Really newspapers shouldn't have opinion pages. It's literally the comments section of their newspaper. Just let journalists call a duck a duck, so then you don't need the opinion pages to point out that, maybe X is bad.
Also notable from that poll, 48% of respondents consider themselves pro-choice, 48% pro-life.
If rtpg means banning abortion even when it would save the life of the mother or in cases of rape, it's true that few people support a ban that extreme.
But if rtpg means banning abortion except when it would save the life of the mother or in cases of rape, both sides do have roughly equal support.
Your argument buys into the core of identity politics, namely creating a hierarchy of oppressors and victims, where the supposed victims can do no wrong. I find this an incredibly patronising worldview.
I would disagree with 3 because there are many in 2 and 3 which can go to 1 just by losing their job and e.g. having one high medical bill (in the states at least).
So surely there must be differentiation on whether any given job or emergency can affect your standard of living significantly.
Medical bills aside (the US system is batshit!!) good financial planning should make going from 2 and 3 to 1 far less likely. Unfortunately many people don't bother to save significant backup funds while things are going well.
I'd say look at this generically, without adding exceptions for outliers. Even for #3, a multi-million dollar medical bill could be a huge setback. I'm talking more along the lines of standard happenings. Say if a kid gets sick and the parents need to fork out a few hundred/thousand dollars for treatment. #2 would be able to rely on their cushion to avoid being cast down into #1.
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.
I understand the call of money but I cannot help but feel very negatively towards academics doing this with facebook of all organisations. After recent events, they cannot pretend not to know the impact and damage their work may have here. Excusing yourself with "I am just a researcher, I don't have anything to do with how my work is used" is just not good enough any more.
I would categorically reject any collaborations with FB as an academic in ML.
I see Facebook as the least ethical, and least useful from a civilization standpoint of all the big tech firms.
Google is driven by the same ad-clicking incentives, but the one-tricky pony has been developing other extremely societally useful tech, like self-driving cars and other moonshot projects.
Apple and Microsoft sell products, they do not make users the product (on the whole). Together they pioneered computing revolutions, and I'm confident history will judge them for making a positive contribution (on the whole).
Amazon is a leviathan whose societal value I find more difficult to classify, but I genuinely derive lots of value from their service personally. It's good for my lifestyle.
Facebook on the other hand, is a waste of my time, mental energy and a drain on society. As an academic, how can you turn your mind to furthering its goals?
That might be true, but don't confuse FAIR (their DL research lab) with FB. FAIR employs good people doing interesting and useful research. They promoted pytorch as a framework, and it is perhaps the best framework for non industrial applications.
On a parallel line of thought, I prefer FB's React to Google's Angular. In both React and Pytorch I see the same elegant design. TensorFlow and Angular on the other part are unnecessarily complicated.
FAIR is part of FB. The reason why FB invests billions of dollars into FAIR is because it supports its business model and its democracy-wrecking product. FAIR researchers are complicit in the societal damage perpetrated by FB. They're cashing the (multi-million $) checks, and in exchange they work on making FB more powerful, by giving it better AI.
When you talk to these guys (they're almost all guys), you realize they're fully aware of what they're doing, and in the back of their minds they know FB is evil. They just like the money too much.
This is 100% about money trumping conscience. FAIR researchers may be millionaires, but they're ethically challenged. I wouldn't trade place with them. These people disgust me.
The $$ they can get from anywhere else in industry given how hot research level ML experience is (and how scarce this talent is). I imagine the appeal of FAIR is much more about the academic freedom. But sure the $$ doesnt hurt.
Interestingly the head of the Pittsburgh lab here isn't even an ML researcher -- she is primarily known for her motion capture work and for running Disney Research.
I agree with the general principle, expressed fairly crudely, that - good, innovative things (React) can come out of bad places (Facebook, in my opinion).
That's historically true of lots of research innovation though.
War (generally accepted as bad thing!) has advanced technology and civilization repeatedly.
At least the scientists aiding war (on average) had some awareness that killing people is clearly not a good thing, and at absolute best a necessary evil. Can the same be said of the people at Facebook?
The culture of their management is to be in denial about how damaging their service is to the mental health of individuals and society.
Even if Facebook were completely evil, why not take their money? They will benefit from your research just as much even if you don't take it, because you're publishing it. Are you concerned that Facebook is telling the scientists what to work on?
History will also judge Alphabet with a positive mindset (T&C apply!). Google did to web what Apple,MS did to computing. Google files patents but doesn't extract royalty from it unlike MS. I think next 10 years will be really crucial to Alphabet( not talking about Google here). The work Calico, Verily,Loon, Dandelion Energy are doing takes time to create impact. I think Google, Calico,Verily are going to make considerable contributions to healthcare.
Our products aren't perfect, and we understand that we have a lot of work to do.
However, the fundamental purpose of our products is to allow people to efficiently communicate with each other. Hard for me to square that with "drain on society." I have many friends who, via Facebook, found a connection that was life changing: from finding a job, a spouse, to a community to deal with the loss of a loved one or support after being diagnosed with a terminal illness.
One of the things that draws AI researchers to come work at Facebook is the opportunity to see their work make a positive impact on billions of people around the world.
The research done by FAIR is helping us do things like deliver billions of translations a day, provide automatic photo captions for people who are visually impaired, and help bring blood donors and people in need together. It also helps us spot when someone is expressing thoughts about self-harm so we can alert first responders.
But we also believe there's even more we can do to help bring the world closer together, to give people a voice, and to open up new opportunities for everyone. AI is a key part of that and we believe pretty deeply in the power of open research to help not just us but the whole industry.
> The research done by FAIR is helping us do things like deliver billions of translations a day, etc...
All for the purpose of increasing buy-in to an increasingly Orwellian digital surveillance regime.
> But we also believe there's even more we can do to help bring the world closer together...
What brings people closer together is real human interaction and connection. Face to face communication with visible emotion. Vulnerability. FB's video chat is the only thing serving that interest, but that's better served elsewhere with less tracking. Posts that broadcast one-way to an invisible audience are inhuman. Filter bubbles are toxic. Widespread use of FB is cancerous on the social fabric of society.
This post kind of reminded me of one of those drug commercials with old people happily skipping hand-in-hand through a field of flowers. The only difference is that you forgot to quickly list the many terrible side effects of your product at the end.
Tell your PR team the appeal to emotion was a nice touch. If I didn't know anything about your company I might have even been able to get through it without feeling absolutely nauseated.
> the fundamental purpose of our products is to allow people to efficiently communicate with each other
No, the fundamental purpose of your products is to efficiently surveil, profile and manipulate your users on behalf of your customers.
> It also helps us spot when someone is expressing thoughts about self-harm so we can alert first responders
What happens when those first responders bust someone's door down and your "helpful" feature essentially becomes algorithmic swatting?
On a semi-related note, did you guys ever figure out how many of the hundreds of thousands of people you enrolled in an emotional manipulation study without their consent ended up killing themselves as a result? It's a given that the figure isn't zero across that number of people.
All of these goals are positive. I also assume that's all of the goals that you focus on.
But it's an abuse of power to only look at one side of the equation.
Companies are run by people, and at the end of the day, no person would want to dump their money into a technology that couldn't yield any financial gains. Where do all the large companies get most of their revenue from? From figuring out how to trigger dopamine to be released into our brains, and we're starting to see the negative effects it's having on people.
Also, you aren't giving people voices. You're opening up a door to a world where they have no control over. In their outrage, and futility, they focus more and more time trying to fix something that doesn't exist.
Is this what you tell yourself in order to sleep at night? From the perspective of an external observer, this talk of "making the world more open and connected (and making billions in the process)" seems shockingly disconnected from the reality of the damage that FB is causing in America and in the world.
You talk about impact. There's no doubt FB is making a big impact. Unfortunately, it's overwhelmingly destructive impact. As someone in position to change that, it would be great for you not to dismiss out of hand the valid concerns of the people in this thread. Personally, it's because of replies like this (in particular zuck's attitude) that I have zero confidence in FB's potential to fix its products in the future. Bye bye democracy I guess.
One day you may be held responsible for your impact on the world. I hope the talk about making the world a better place will work out then.
Fb's research in computer vision has produced works like training a neutral net on large datasets in 1 hour, instance segmentation neural nets, and many more, and made the code and research public with nonrestrictive licenses. These are pushing the state of art! Check out the work yourself and then come back and criticize these scientists if you feel that their work is a net negative on the world.
The question as you so rightly point out is whether there is a net value added.
If we took their AI contributions and JS frameworks on one side of the equation, do you really think it balances the other side of the equation?
On that right side lies encouraging general disinformation leading to broken elections and even aiding genocide. Academic studies on happiness show using Facebook and Instagram correlates with poor mental health; that research has been replicated.
What product actively damages those that consume it?
Facebook is the digital equivalent of the Tobacco industry; good business that's bad for people.
I think you can go even farther, to, "intentionally malicious".
Mark hasn't taken back his comments about his users being "dumb fucks" for "trust[ing]" him, as far as I know, although he has apparently said that he regrets saying it[0].
Well said, and totally agree. They've had too many whoopsie moments and seem entrenched in not learning or changing what is fundamentally broken in their management and business model. They have no legitimate place in research or academia.
It's a bit of a poisoned grail, though. On the one hand, you're selling your soul. On the other hand, they have data beyond your wildest dreams and you can use it all for anything as long as it might make money.
Would you take that offer? Would I? Probably not. But I can see the appeal, and plenty of people wouldn't hesitate.
But I can see the appeal, and plenty of people wouldn't hesitate.
It will keep happening until these companies are a black mark on your CV, like say a tobacco company might be. Will people be so eager if it means they will be shunned by the wider research and engineering communities?
FB and Google are the only ones pushing the industry forward. The huge amount of data and computing power is what brings these researchers, its not all about money. In the long run the scientific advancements from these companies is a much higher positive than the negatives they have in the present.
Any researcher in this area worth their salt can easily get cloud credit grants and collaborations from Google, Microsoft, Amazon. I pose if you go to Facebook, it's very much about money.
But can they get the huge volumes of data they have tagged out? The real time pipelines and internal tools? The community of people they will be working with?
>>> FB and Google are the only ones pushing the industry forward. The huge amount of data and computing power is what brings these researchers, its not all about money. In the long run the scientific advancements from these companies is a much higher positive than the negatives they have in the present.
> But can they get the huge volumes of data they have tagged out? The real time pipelines and internal tools? The community of people they will be working with?
It's highly problematic when a researcher pushes ethics aside in order to gain access to data and chase "long run ... scientific advancements."
This is incorrect, in my opinion. FB and Google are where capital is currently concentrated in the software industry; therefore, they are able to hire a lot of the top software talent out there. This talent is responsible for pushing the industry forward, and it often does so in a manner that is largely company-agnostic. This is why we get React help pages telling us to use Enzyme from AirBnb for running tests - because the work is being done by software developers who are building general infrastructure for the web, and who would probably end up doing the same basic work regardless of who was paying their salaries.
It's best to think of Silicon Valley as two entities: a mass of technology workers who build software, and a financial extraction function that attempts to extract value from the work they do.
tell that to the royhinga who were betrayed by facebook and subsequently killed.
i'll be waiting for the scientific advancements to be useful to the public. so far they've increased rates of depression, anxiety, etc while enabling totalitarianism.
I completely disagree. You can find Google's pricing tactic aggressive, but it made me think about the entitlement there.
They complain that Maps at new prices would be more than the cost of their infrastructure, when actually their entire startup revolves around this data, and 5k to be able to use an amazing piece of high tech software that is ahead of the competition is..peanuts.
No matter what other business interests and strategies Google follows, there is no right to using such valuable tech for less than the monthly salary of an engineer. I find this incredible entitled.
The problem is that antitrust laws like these are very selectively enforced. Selection and prosecution of these cases is hence inherently political as these are non-standardized arguments or verdicts.
The ones I know about have all been the result of a complaint made by competitors. I would be surprised if the regulator could selectively reject such complaints without good reason.
That is a fair point, but isn't it built into this particular field?
We can prosecute equally for jaywalking, but anti-competitive behavior gets worse the bigger the offender is and/or the worse offense they commit. So in that way it makes sense to prosecute "top-down", that is go after the biggest ones first.
That's at least what I prefer as an EU member state citizen and consumer.
Not only does it get worse the bigger the offender is; in law, generally there are specific actions that you're not allowed to take iff you're dominant in the market.
> The problem is that antitrust laws like these are very selectively enforced. Selection and prosecution of these cases is hence inherently political as these are non-standardized arguments or verdicts.
Following that logic, the same applies to law in general. Should we therefore abolish law?
I'm guessing that they did, and probably came to the conclusion that they'll make more money than the fine that gets imposed. I wonder if they were right?
This is a weirdly shallow article containing lots of diagrams and bullet points to just summarize the known points that RL needs a lot of data and needs to learn from scratch.
No mention of all the ongoing work in learning from demonstrations, or more generally incorporating any off-policy knowledge. Vague speculations about the philosophy of model free learning. Not really worth the read (as someone working in RL).
Says as much at the end... to be fair we did warn up front "The first part, which you're reading right now, will set up what RL is and why it is fundamentally flawed. It will contain some explanation that can be skipped by AI practitioners." But personally I think the board game allegory is fun and that most people tend to forget the categorical simplicity of Go and Atari games and overhype ; easy to say the main points are not new but the details are important here.
In your opinion, is this a solution to the "AI winter" that is often talked about? I'm an engineer but not involved in AI but things like meta-reinforcement seem, from the info/perspective you've given, to address the problem, at least partially.
Yes, some techs are overhyped (chatbots, finance stuff) but deeplearning has delivered a lot of incredible working applications. It is not just hot air or marketing hype.
Expert systems were not just hot air or marketing hype. Usefulness of a subset of new AI technology is irrelevant. A winter or contraction is caused by expectations not being met, and it seems, at least to me, that investors/funders have already started expecting superhuman performance in image/speech recognition, and there's a lot of expectation even in robotics, which will probably not be met by actual results any time soon.
Can someone familiar with the current funding climate say if standard deals at all levels involve liquidation preference nowadays? As in, if Im considering a seed-round, will there be any sophisticated investors doing no preference? Have talked to some investors in the scene (UK) but cannot seem to get a clear picture on this.
Is declining to accept a liquidation preference at seed level a red flag for any serious investor? What about subsequent rounds?
As an investor who invests at the Seed to Series A stage, I can tell you that a non-participating 1x liquidation preference is standard. I would refuse to invest in any deals that didn't include it, but won't be asking for anything more.
I think it's a pretty fair term. It prevents investors getting screwed by a sale for less than the round valuation, which could look quite attractive to a founder who could get their first million, screwing their investors in the process.
The UK tends to have stronger protection for employee shares -not that there haven't been some dodgy deals BAXI getting taken over by carpetbaggers and screwing the owners is a well know case in the UK.
And I have been on the receiving end of losing $1,000,000 at Poptel if only ICANT weren't such a bunch of ass%^&&S and the CoOp had been a bit more tech savvy - still water under the bridge.
As a comparison, the startup I helped found in 2004 had a 2X liquidation preference -- that was a bad time to raise money. And as a founder, I'll happily take 1X.
> Is declining to accept a liquidation preference at seed level a red flag for any serious investor?
Investors may be receptive to nixing liquidation preferences, particularly early on, if the founder agrees in writing to take no employment benefits. Asking an investor to relinquish their downside protection while retaining your own (a cash salary) is cause for further questions.
That said, it's awkward to (a) ask for capital while (b) prominently communicating that you see the risk of selling the business below where they've valuing it as being non-negligible. If you, as the founder, have that little faith in the venture, a better conversation may be hand about what can be done to increase your confidence in it.
Liquidation preferences aren't required, particularly later on. But you’ll give up on other terms by filtering for investors who don't care for them.
Thank you for the response. It seems like liquidation preferences really come into play at growth stage when things get 'messier' due to capital needs, and declining them at seed round would send a very negative signal because the valuation must grow for any kind of success beyond the seed round?
From what gets printed in the press, it appears that lots of unicorns are having to agree to pretty high liquidation preferences in their latest rounds.
Having recently raised a seed in the UK; there is simply no reason to accept any sort of prefs for a seed round. There is plenty of SEIS/EIS money about - and part of those tax relief schemes is the investors need to take ords or they lose the tax-relief.
And generally the UK is stricter on multishare classes - and approved share schemes have some strict rules on what sort of shares employees must be issued with.
> Just raised a seed on convertible notes, was never asked for any kind of preference
Notes are debt. They're inherently higher than stock on the capital structure. They may convert into shares with no preference. But as long as they're notes, they're higher than even preferences shares.
Nothing could be further from the truth. I think the most recent Sarah Jeong controversy and virtually all reporting on migration, feminism, campus politics etc shows this. Mind you this is from a European perspective where I see almost all reporting about politics here as copying off talking points from the far left.
This is the true genius of their marketing though: They are actually as polarized as any other source in the culture war, but market themselves to an audience that likes to think of themselves as rational, objective, sensible.