A Rebuttal to some CS Academics’ “Free Speech” Open Letter to the ACM
There is a “free speech” petition circulating right now in my academic community. I feel that simply not signing it is insufficient; here…
Hasnain says:
“The same holds true for the isms. Our rejection of false positives, our refusal to push back on ambiguous isms, has directed all the damage at specific groups in our community, such as minorities and women. That is unfair at a huge scale. The shift we’re seeing now, being more sensitive to these isms when we see them, is a significant improvement, a way to shift some of the burden of those false negatives off of these historically targeted groups. It comes at a cost: those of us (like me) who have historically been untouchable *and* given the benefit of the doubt are suddenly being hit by false positives — -we didn’t mean it, but they’re coming after us anyway. But at least some amount of that cost is worth bearing. A system with no false positives, only false negatives, is not an optimally configured system. We have to balance out the impact of our imperfect assessments, making sure that everyone shoulders a part of the burden.”
Posted on 2021-01-03T17:18:12+0000