Inequality

was written in a period when NLP practitioners are producing bigger (# of parameters; size of training data) language models (LMs), and pushing the top scores on benchmarks. The paper itself was controversial because it led to Gebru being fired from Google, following disagreements with her managers on conditions (withdraw, or remove Google-affiliated authors) for publishing the paper. A lot changed since mid-2021, when I initially wrote this page....

#meritocracy #inequality #socioeconomics Our Lot in Life Not recognizing your blessings feeds into the dark side of capitalism and meritocracy: success is a choice, and that those who haven’t achieved success are not unlucky, but unworthy. I’m relatively lucky. I don’t know how much of the techie hubris that I bear. I have unresolved feelings about meritocracy and fairness. Race is usually used as a proxy for bridging the gap, e....

It’s hard to give pessimistic answers when ’s title says “Things Are Better Than You Think”… Educational Attainment Q1. In all low-income countries across the world today, how many girls finish primary school? There has been lots of efforts to get girls to finish primary school, e.g. providing sanitary towels. Surely, they must be at \( \ge 40% \) completion rates. 🔲 A: 20 percent ❌ B: 40 percent...

LaGuardia. Nnedi Okorafor; Tana Ford; James Devlin. 2019. body { background-image: url('/img/fiction/okorafor-laguardia.jpg'); } Winner of the 2020 Hugo Award for Best Graphic Novel, and the 2020 Eisner Award for Best Graphic Album - Reprint. Aliens exist (first landed in Nigeria); human-alien in the world. Main character: Future, a Nigerian-American doctor. Future sneaks in LetMeLive, an alien, into America to escape a genocide (largely imperceptible to humans) on LetMeLive’s kind....

Criticism/Defense Of Billionaire Philanthropy Taxes will probably not go to the same causes, e.g. reforming the bail system, grassroot efforts for migrants, etc. Admittedly, these are things that the government should be doing, but it seems that the government doesn’t do enough. Furthermore, some of these issues so politicized, e.g. immigrants, that government support can be fickle. Foundations are more effective than governments as they do their due diligence, e....