An interview with someone who left Effective Altruism
Mathbabe
by Cathy O'Neil, mathbabe
1w ago
C: Tell me a little bit about your college experience. How did you get interested in this work originally?  E: Good question. It kind of started for me in high school actually. I took my first philosophy class when I was 16 or 17, and I loved it. But one of the things that we read in that class was an article by Peter Singer, who was a key member in starting effective altruism or at least inspiring it in the first place. The article was called Famine, Affluence, and Morality. And that was kind of my first introduction into the ideas of effective giving, which is kind how EA started origin ..read more
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Google’s mistake with Gemini
Mathbabe
by Cathy O'Neil, mathbabe
2w ago
You have probably heard that Google had to suspend it’s Gemini image feature after showing people black Nazis and female popes: Well I have a simple explanation for what happened here. Namely, the folks at Google wanted to avoid an embarrassment that they’d been involved with multiple times, and seen others get involved with, namely the “pale male” dataset problem, that happens especially at tech companies dominated by white men, and ironically, especially especially at tech companies dominated by white men who are careful about privacy, because then they only collect pictures of people who g ..read more
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The AI Fairness Hype is Real
Mathbabe
by Cathy O'Neil, mathbabe
2w ago
Who knew that CBS works for Silicon Valley? And yet, when I watched their show Eye on America this morning, that’s what I discovered: an entire hour devoted to hyping the likes of Meta and Boston Scientific. Titled Emerging AI and robotics tech, the hour was devoted to asking the most powerful folks in BigTech to report on how cool, useful, and yet fair AI is. For example, they interviewed the “godfathers of AI:” Yann Le Cun at Meta, Geoffrey Hinton who until recently was a big deal at Google but is now calling for regulation, and Yoshuo Bengio at MILA in Montreal, who is one of those long-ter ..read more
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Tampon Tax update
Mathbabe
by Cathy O'Neil, mathbabe
1M ago
Do you guys remember when I was a plaintiff in a New York State lawsuit against the tampon tax? My blog was entitled, Holy shit I look amazing holding tampons After that I even designed and knitted a hat to go along with the theme: Period Equity Tampon Hat! Well my best friend Laura Strausfeld is the genius behind all of this (all of it! She’s a freaking GENIUS!) and now she has an op-ed on the front page of the Washington Post talking about how amazingly successful she’s been doing this good work: Goodbye, tampon tax. Hello, MDCDs. It’s a hilarious description (“womansplaining”) of why a rid ..read more
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Abortion rights and paternity tests
Mathbabe
by Cathy O'Neil, mathbabe
1M ago
This morning my thought is pretty simple: abortion is seen as a woman’s issue, which of course it historically has been, but with the advent of paternity tests, it could easily and quickly become a man’s issue. Back before abortion was legal, and especially if the women were unwed or otherwise shameable, the fathers could just deny paternity. But what with the science we now have, men who are proven to be fathers will be on the hook for caring for their babies much more. Of course DNA tests are not new, but we’ve had abortion rights for a while now. So for the past few decades if a man were wo ..read more
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Black box auditing is fine
Mathbabe
by Cathy O'Neil, mathbabe
1M ago
Last week I read this paper entitled “Black-Box Access is Insufficient for Rigorous AI Audits” with some excitement, since I do black box algorithmic auditing at my company and I was looking forward to knowing what more I could do with even more access. Also, it was written by a bunch of smart people from MIT, Harvard, Northeastern, Stanford, and so on. But I’m not very impressed! Actually I think this paper is a weird result of what happens when academics write about stuff that mostly happens outside of academia. In particular, and I’ll skip a lot of things, I want to focus on their section e ..read more
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Why people hate Wegovy
Mathbabe
by Cathy O'Neil, mathbabe
1M ago
I’ve been on Wegovy now for seven months. I’ve lost a ton of weight – about 60 pounds – and my risk of getting diabetes has gone way *way* down. I think it’s a total fucking miracle. But there are people on the left and the right that hate what’s happening. I have been observing these arguments with interest. On the right, it’s a matter of not being sufficiently ashamed. It’s the notion that losing weight should be a form of repentance for sin, and if you take the easy way out, by just taking in chemicals, it’s not honest (read: painful and doomed to failure) enough. That’s why you see lots of ..read more
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Fat shaming food columnist in WaPo
Mathbabe
by Cathy O'Neil, mathbabe
1y ago
It’s kind of amazing but here we are: a food columnist writes about how diets are shams, how they statistically don’t work, and they play on people’s desires to live a different life – all good things to point out – and yet – yet!! – the piece ends with her describing how she, in fact, loses weight on diets anyway, because, and I quote: My hat is off to the people who are comfortable at whatever weight they are and focus on other aspects of their health. Unfortunately, I’m not one of them; being fat made me unhappy.  https://www.washingtonpost.com/food/2023/01/23/weight-loss-diets-fastin ..read more
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Can we embed dignity into social media?
Mathbabe
by Cathy O'Neil, mathbabe
1y ago
I’m working on a philosophy paper with an ethicist named William Cochran. I’ll post a link to it once it’s written but in the meantime I have decided to use this neglected space to think through parts of my work on the paper. Namely, I’m trying to work out whether it’s possible or practical to embed dignity into social media. That sounds like a hard question to make precise, and my approach is to make use of Donna Hick’s amazing work, which came out of peace treaty negotiations, and you can learn about here or read her book Dignity. Specifically for our purposes, Donna has a list of required c ..read more
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ChatGPT: neither wise nor threatening
Mathbabe
by Cathy O'Neil, mathbabe
1y ago
There’s been a huge amount of hubbub in the tech press lately around the newest generation of chatbots, with ChatGPT being the version that is most celebrated and/or feared. I don’t think the celebration or the fear is warranted. First of all, we don’t need to fear that ChatGPT is going to replace humans. It doesn’t have a model for truth; it’s simply writing words and phrases that are akin to the patterns it has observed in the historical speech it was fed. So in other words, it’s not actually answering a question thoughtfully or relevantly. Any kind of thoughtfulness that might be observed i ..read more
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