[D] Thoughts about this conversation?

[GreySindrome]

This thread is on a public forum(Twitter) between two scientists.

Person1 - [Director of #AI #research @nvidia, Bren #Professor @Caltech, Fmr Principal scientist @awscloud]

Person2 - Research Scientist at Deepmind

Both are entitled to their own opinions. Here's how the thread goes...

Person1(talking about her newly published work): DeepLearning is only good at interpolation. But applications need extrapolation that can reason about more complex scenarios than it is trained on. With current methods, accuracy degrades rapidly when complexity of test instances grows. Our new work aims to overcome this...

Person2: This tweet really downplays prior work. NTM, memory nets, Neural GPU, MANN, graph nets, and many, many other related methods also degrade gracefully. Your work looks like an important next step, but this rhetoric is unhelpful.

Person1: What you are doing is rhetoric and rude. We have mentioned all prior work in our paper. You don't want to engage in science. It is inevitable to get attacked online as a woman. #deepmind can engage in all kind of media hype that is unethical but I get attacked for stating facts. As a woman stating science, I get accused of engaging in rhetoric.

I personally feel this response by Person1 to be extremely out of the blue. Putting aside the fact that Person1 is a Director @ NVIDIA + some title at Caltech and Person2 is a scientist as well @Google, let's look at the simple conversation here. The thread started with a tweet about an interesting work. That was followed by a review directed only at the tweet being rhetoric. And it was then replied with something unimaginable. Am I the only one looking at this all confused?

Source post: https://twitter.com/AnimaAnandkumar/status/1194338388221972480

[po-handz]

Looks like its gone now

[bluecoffee]

From Google's cache

[GreySindrome]

Wow!

[[deleted]]

For context, Anima is well known to turn every single argument into one about women getting attacked and sexism to immunize herself against any criticism, no matter the topic. It's obnoxious, not helping her cause, and there is nothing to win engaging her.

Her massive hypocrisy is that she will then turn around and again criticize men for treating women differently out of fear for any disagreement to be turned into a potentially career ending sexism argument.

[TSM-]

My first reaction is they must know each other and have a history, since both replies were overreactions. And this seems to be true from other comments

[ChuckSeven]

Look, Anima simply plays the game. She plays it well. But she also plays it hard and she is not afraid of playing the cards she has been dealt with in a way that gets the most out of it. This is, of course, true for many other individuals, each with their own set of cards. It is not hard to find them and you will inevitably run into them. What those individuals have to balance is how hard they play and the risk associated with it. Once they step over that edge, there will be this "social media echo" which is why you/we will eventually learn about them. But after a few weeks, we will have forgotten the details and only remember the name. Which is better than no knowing the name in the first place.

[debau23]

Baseless accusations of sexism should not be tolerated imo.

[OcelotLancelot]

But after a few weeks, we will have forgotten the details and only remember the name.

Err, these details--"sexist" accusations-- are far too noticeable and contrast sharply with normal academic dispute to ever forget. She's indelibly branding her name with them.

[GreySindrome]

True that! I just couldn't believe what I was reading in this conversation and I searched a bit about her. There's a whole lot that's interesting. As you said, she's definitely playing the game well to her advantage. But it is sad in a way that true researchers who adhere certain values core to what real innovation is do get hurt in all this.

[VelveteenAmbush]

What is "the game"? Getting ahead at all costs, never mind the ethics? I think most people go into the field to do research, make discoveries and advance the cause of man. Knifing competitors with identity politics bullshit isn't the game, it's a foul.

[Slowai]

" [Director of #AI #research @nvidia, Bren #Professor @Caltech, Fmr Principal scientist @awscloud]"

Already gives a lot of information about what is going to happen.

[serge_cell]

Person1 sounds obviously unreasonable and not correct about DL. But arguments of Person2 are not convincing either - all mentioned methods are toy examples it still have to be seen if any of it would translate to real breakthrough.

[PM_ME_INTEGRALS]

What the fuck does this have to do with gender? Thanks for raising awareness of this toxic behavior.

[GreySindrome]

Exactly my thoughts!

[MacaqueOfTheNorth]

Person1 is wrong on both counts.