Regulation - Too Much or Too Little?

[PizzaSnake]

You ever run across someone with a fancy degree that know what they are doing

of course occasionally. But I remained dumbfounded by the percentage of these types who just love the smell of their own farts......

degrees aren’t as smart as those without them.

That is an interesting assertion about education and the distribution of intelligence.

Or perhaps your definition of “smart.”

Sarcasm. I am not sure how the fancy degree attracts kids that are not as competent and the more competent pursue less fancy degrees….Not sure how that works. How are this pools distinguished? Hoping Hoodatis can explain how that works.

I was waitlist accepted to brown but ended up at Hobart due to a combination of money and my football host had to pick me up from a girls dorm room when I visited Geneva fall of my senior year of HS. And the latter honestly probably drove it more than the former. I didn’t do as well again until late soph year as that weekend if were ranking aesthetics.

So there is one reason an occasional kid might “trade down”. Then again Brown was lucky to avoid a dumba** like me who was so motivated by the wrong head

I received no encouragement to consider Brown when they inquired about hoops. Anyway….I am not sure if Hoodatis means fancy degrees or fancy schools.

Don’t forget I’m a rent seeking POS banker with a MBA as well. Not fancy but then again I really really hate that word. Something about it grates at my nerves even if I can’t explain why.

Also could be fancy people.

Who said that men don't use birth control...

[Farfromgeneva]

You ever run across someone with a fancy degree that know what they are doing

of course occasionally. But I remained dumbfounded by the percentage of these types who just love the smell of their own farts......

degrees aren’t as smart as those without them.

That is an interesting assertion about education and the distribution of intelligence.

Or perhaps your definition of “smart.”

Sarcasm. I am not sure how the fancy degree attracts kids that are not as competent and the more competent pursue less fancy degrees….Not sure how that works. How are this pools distinguished? Hoping Hoodatis can explain how that works.

I was waitlist accepted to brown but ended up at Hobart due to a combination of money and my football host had to pick me up from a girls dorm room when I visited Geneva fall of my senior year of HS. And the latter honestly probably drove it more than the former. I didn’t do as well again until late soph year as that weekend if were ranking aesthetics.

So there is one reason an occasional kid might “trade down”. Then again Brown was lucky to avoid a dumba** like me who was so motivated by the wrong head

I received no encouragement to consider Brown when they inquired about hoops. Anyway….I am not sure if Hoodatis means fancy degrees or fancy schools.

Don’t forget I’m a rent seeking POS banker with a MBA as well. Not fancy but then again I really really hate that word. Something about it grates at my nerves even if I can’t explain why.

Also could be fancy people.

Who said that men don't use birth control...

Jamie Fox’s did it better in Booty Call

https://www.pinterest.com/pin/623818985879894023/

[HooDat]

I am REALLY enjoying the discussion:

Sarcasm. I am not sure how the fancy degree attracts kids that are not as competent and the more competent pursue less fancy degrees….Not sure how that works. How are these pools distinguished? Hoping Hoodatis can explain how that works.

see the quote from Pizzasnake below, add in a dash of my response to you below about fancy people, stir it all up in a hubris sauce and there you have it...

So there is one reason an occasional kid might “trade down”.

there are so many reasons a kids may trade DOWN (?!?!?). That right there is where the fancy comes in....

Anyway….I am not sure if Hoodatis means fancy degrees or fancy schools.

I mean FANCY people, who think their degrees from FANCY schools make them more important than regular people....

Don’t forget I’m a rent seeking POS banker with a MBA as well. Not fancy but then again I really really hate that word. Something about it grates at my nerves even if I can’t explain why.

I used the word fancy for all the reasons you imply here.... By the way, I am also a POS banker with an MBA, staring at my wall sized degree from a school that likes to dabble in fancy-ness..... (I made up another word!)

Also could be fancy people.

ding, ding, ding

"Credentialing" for subject matter expertise is just one part of the process. Establish a standard, in this case subject matter mastery, then measure adherence, then enforce. In the cases cited above, what happened when the deficiency was determined (measured)? Was meaningful, corrective action taken that would improve the state of those whose well-being was served by the standard? Certain professions, medical doctors, appear to be the worst in the "corrective" phase of the process due to either "tribal" loyalty to members of the "club" or, most probably, fear of litigation. Even informal mechanisms for quality control have been debased by the rise of the Internet and false review production.

As I like to say, "build a better mousetrap and I'll build you a better fool." Humans as a group are very, very clever. Any sort of system designed by other humans to modify or correct anti-social behavior will quickly be circumvented. Ever wonder why legislatures never finish their work? Vive la innovation...

and the basis of me starting this conversation is that I see little evidence of subject matter mastery. Instead I see evidence of system mastery - experts at playing the game to get the fancy degree from the fancy school and get a job with the fancy people. (ffg - are your teeth on edge with all those fancies in there?)

[Typical Lax Dad]

I am REALLY enjoying the discussion:

Sarcasm. I am not sure how the fancy degree attracts kids that are not as competent and the more competent pursue less fancy degrees….Not sure how that works. How are these pools distinguished? Hoping Hoodatis can explain how that works.

see the quote from Pizzasnake below, add in a dash of my response to you below about fancy people, stir it all up in a hubris sauce and there you have it...

So there is one reason an occasional kid might “trade down”.

there are so many reasons a kids may trade DOWN (?!?!?). That right there is where the fancy comes in....

Anyway….I am not sure if Hoodatis means fancy degrees or fancy schools.

I mean FANCY people, who think their degrees from FANCY schools make them more important than regular people....

Don’t forget I’m a rent seeking POS banker with a MBA as well. Not fancy but then again I really really hate that word. Something about it grates at my nerves even if I can’t explain why.

I used the word fancy for all the reasons you imply here.... By the way, I am also a POS banker with an MBA, staring at my wall sized degree from a school that likes to dabble in fancy-ness..... (I made up another word!)

Also could be fancy people.

ding, ding, ding

"Credentialing" for subject matter expertise is just one part of the process. Establish a standard, in this case subject matter mastery, then measure adherence, then enforce. In the cases cited above, what happened when the deficiency was determined (measured)? Was meaningful, corrective action taken that would improve the state of those whose well-being was served by the standard? Certain professions, medical doctors, appear to be the worst in the "corrective" phase of the process due to either "tribal" loyalty to members of the "club" or, most probably, fear of litigation. Even informal mechanisms for quality control have been debased by the rise of the Internet and false review production.

As I like to say, "build a better mousetrap and I'll build you a better fool." Humans as a group are very, very clever. Any sort of system designed by other humans to modify or correct anti-social behavior will quickly be circumvented. Ever wonder why legislatures never finish their work? Vive la innovation...

and the basis of me starting this conversation is that I see little evidence of subject matter mastery. Instead I see evidence of system mastery - experts at playing the game to get the fancy degree from the fancy school and get a job with the fancy people. (ffg - are your teeth on edge with all those fancies in there?)

Fancy people from “non fancy” schools get a pass?

[Farfromgeneva]

I am REALLY enjoying the discussion:

Sarcasm. I am not sure how the fancy degree attracts kids that are not as competent and the more competent pursue less fancy degrees….Not sure how that works. How are these pools distinguished? Hoping Hoodatis can explain how that works.

see the quote from Pizzasnake below, add in a dash of my response to you below about fancy people, stir it all up in a hubris sauce and there you have it...

So there is one reason an occasional kid might “trade down”.

there are so many reasons a kids may trade DOWN (?!?!?). That right there is where the fancy comes in....

Anyway….I am not sure if Hoodatis means fancy degrees or fancy schools.

I mean FANCY people, who think their degrees from FANCY schools make them more important than regular people....

Don’t forget I’m a rent seeking POS banker with a MBA as well. Not fancy but then again I really really hate that word. Something about it grates at my nerves even if I can’t explain why.

I used the word fancy for all the reasons you imply here.... By the way, I am also a POS banker with an MBA, staring at my wall sized degree from a school that likes to dabble in fancy-ness..... (I made up another word!)

Also could be fancy people.

ding, ding, ding

"Credentialing" for subject matter expertise is just one part of the process. Establish a standard, in this case subject matter mastery, then measure adherence, then enforce. In the cases cited above, what happened when the deficiency was determined (measured)? Was meaningful, corrective action taken that would improve the state of those whose well-being was served by the standard? Certain professions, medical doctors, appear to be the worst in the "corrective" phase of the process due to either "tribal" loyalty to members of the "club" or, most probably, fear of litigation. Even informal mechanisms for quality control have been debased by the rise of the Internet and false review production.

As I like to say, "build a better mousetrap and I'll build you a better fool." Humans as a group are very, very clever. Any sort of system designed by other humans to modify or correct anti-social behavior will quickly be circumvented. Ever wonder why legislatures never finish their work? Vive la innovation...

and the basis of me starting this conversation is that I see little evidence of subject matter mastery. Instead I see evidence of system mastery - experts at playing the game to get the fancy degree from the fancy school and get a job with the fancy people. (ffg - are your teeth on edge with all those fancies in there?)

For reply to my comment tell it to my mother who kept reminding me of that option well after I finished grad school…

Thought you were an attorney for some reason.

Fancy? Yeah, although I can appreciate “pounding a trade” as much as anyone.

[HooDat]

Fancy people from “non fancy” schools get a pass?

are you trying to imply that I am a reverse snob?

[Farfromgeneva]

I am REALLY enjoying the discussion:

Sarcasm. I am not sure how the fancy degree attracts kids that are not as competent and the more competent pursue less fancy degrees….Not sure how that works. How are these pools distinguished? Hoping Hoodatis can explain how that works.

see the quote from Pizzasnake below, add in a dash of my response to you below about fancy people, stir it all up in a hubris sauce and there you have it...

So there is one reason an occasional kid might “trade down”.

there are so many reasons a kids may trade DOWN (?!?!?). That right there is where the fancy comes in....

Anyway….I am not sure if Hoodatis means fancy degrees or fancy schools.

I mean FANCY people, who think their degrees from FANCY schools make them more important than regular people....

Don’t forget I’m a rent seeking POS banker with a MBA as well. Not fancy but then again I really really hate that word. Something about it grates at my nerves even if I can’t explain why.

I used the word fancy for all the reasons you imply here.... By the way, I am also a POS banker with an MBA, staring at my wall sized degree from a school that likes to dabble in fancy-ness..... (I made up another word!)

Also could be fancy people.

ding, ding, ding

"Credentialing" for subject matter expertise is just one part of the process. Establish a standard, in this case subject matter mastery, then measure adherence, then enforce. In the cases cited above, what happened when the deficiency was determined (measured)? Was meaningful, corrective action taken that would improve the state of those whose well-being was served by the standard? Certain professions, medical doctors, appear to be the worst in the "corrective" phase of the process due to either "tribal" loyalty to members of the "club" or, most probably, fear of litigation. Even informal mechanisms for quality control have been debased by the rise of the Internet and false review production.

As I like to say, "build a better mousetrap and I'll build you a better fool." Humans as a group are very, very clever. Any sort of system designed by other humans to modify or correct anti-social behavior will quickly be circumvented. Ever wonder why legislatures never finish their work? Vive la innovation...

and the basis of me starting this conversation is that I see little evidence of subject matter mastery. Instead I see evidence of system mastery - experts at playing the game to get the fancy degree from the fancy school and get a job with the fancy people. (ffg - are your teeth on edge with all those fancies in there?)

There was a lady my partner at a boutique hired to run a loan trading business that he had worked with at sunTrust. She’d talk all this “ish” about this and that and her time at Alliance Bernstein.

Now I know credit investment, analysis and loan markets pretty well but historically tried to stay away from residential mortgages for a million reasons. But that was her background so I’m talking with a bank with a large mortgage subsidiary and they had a bunch of “kick outs” and were already perilously thin on capital where holding these long duration, otherwise classified as available for sale and subject to mark to market assets is an existential problem (30yr 4% current coupon mortgages intended to be sold through to endorsement by Fan/Fred). So I tell the CFO, “why while I’m spread thin we’ve got a mortgage expert, let’s see what we can do with these”. He gives me the mortgage head and a $40mm tape. I ask this new colleague what these are roughly worth. All I’m looking for is “yeah non QM is high 70s low 80s area and the market is thin” or “oh there’s a special bid for XYZ type of collateral and get to a 9 handle” or some demonstration of understanding. Instead I get a deer in headlights look with open mouth stare and ended up having to drop/set aside a bunch of other mattes to go educate and find out myself and deliver something to bank client.

That lady used fancy all the time. Anecdote one of many of folks who use that term I want to smash. And not in the cool, sexy meaning of the term smash…

[HooDat]

That lady used fancy all the time. Anecdote one of many of folks who use that term I want to smash. And not in the cool, sexy meaning of the term smash…

I hope it is clear that whenever I am using the word fancy, it is with the intent of conveying as much negativity and sarcasm as humanly possible.

[Farfromgeneva]

That lady used fancy all the time. Anecdote one of many of folks who use that term I want to smash. And not in the cool, sexy meaning of the term smash…

I hope it is clear that whenever I am using the word fancy, it is with the intent of conveying as much negativity and sarcasm as humanly possible.

Yeah I get it - she wasn’t. She thought it was an elegant term or something. I have a much higher opinion of you. Not that you’re worried about that one bit.

[Farfromgeneva]

That lady used fancy all the time. Anecdote one of many of folks who use that term I want to smash. And not in the cool, sexy meaning of the term smash…

I hope it is clear that whenever I am using the word fancy, it is with the intent of conveying as much negativity and sarcasm as humanly possible.

Btw I’m in the air above TX right now trying to keep the plane from revolting on me for having a fairly risqué meal along w Diet Coke and coffee before boarding…

NW north of Amarillo

[Typical Lax Dad]

Fancy people from “non fancy” schools get a pass?

are you trying to imply that I am a reverse snob?

I am just asking a question. Do you have an answer?

[HooDat]

Fancy people from “non fancy” schools get a pass?

are you trying to imply that I am a reverse snob?

I am just asking a question. Do you have an answer?

sorry, I default to assuming sarcasm when you post....

No pass for anyone who's authority/self-confidence has surpassed their competence. If that is what you are asking.

[Typical Lax Dad]

Fancy people from “non fancy” schools get a pass?

are you trying to imply that I am a reverse snob?

I am just asking a question. Do you have an answer?

sorry, I default to assuming sarcasm when you post....

No pass for anyone who's authority/self-confidence has surpassed their competence. If that is what you are asking.

So it’s not a fancy degree or a fancy school?

[HooDat]

Fancy people from “non fancy” schools get a pass?

are you trying to imply that I am a reverse snob?

I am just asking a question. Do you have an answer?

sorry, I default to assuming sarcasm when you post....

No pass for anyone who's authority/self-confidence has surpassed their competence. If that is what you are asking.

So it’s not a fancy degree or a fancy school?

I have a hard time determining whether you are engaging in good faith. So I will assume you are.

It is my experience that someone who checks the fancy degree or (and especially) the fancy school box has a harder time managing the balance I reference in my previous post.

[Typical Lax Dad]

Fancy people from “non fancy” schools get a pass?

are you trying to imply that I am a reverse snob?

I am just asking a question. Do you have an answer?

sorry, I default to assuming sarcasm when you post....

No pass for anyone who's authority/self-confidence has surpassed their competence. If that is what you are asking.

So it’s not a fancy degree or a fancy school?

I have a hard time determining whether you are engaging in good faith. So I will assume you are.

It is my experience that someone who checks the fancy degree or (and especially) the fancy school box has a harder time managing the balance I reference in my previous post.

Interesting. Hasn’t been my experience. We started a training program 5 years ago and have brought in about 100 kids. No correlation between fancy school and poor performance. Could be your selection. Maybe it’s adverse?

Also, you don’t have to be from a fancy school to do well. Baruch College in NYC punches above its weight. City College guys have done well….doesn’t mean “Fancy School” kids suck.

[PizzaSnake]

Fancy people from “non fancy” schools get a pass?

are you trying to imply that I am a reverse snob?

I am just asking a question. Do you have an answer?

sorry, I default to assuming sarcasm when you post....

No pass for anyone who's authority/self-confidence has surpassed their competence. If that is what you are asking.

So it’s not a fancy degree or a fancy school?

I have a hard time determining whether you are engaging in good faith. So I will assume you are.

It is my experience that someone who checks the fancy degree or (and especially) the fancy school box has a harder time managing the balance I reference in my previous post.

Interesting. Hasn’t been my experience. We started a training program 5 years ago and have brought in about 100 kids. No correlation between fancy school and poor performance. Could be your selection. Maybe it’s adverse?

Also, you don’t have to be from a fancy school to do well. Baruch College in NYC punches above its weight. City College guys have done well….doesn’t mean “Fancy School” kids suck.

Yeah, look at George Santos...

[Typical Lax Dad]

Fancy people from “non fancy” schools get a pass?

are you trying to imply that I am a reverse snob?

I am just asking a question. Do you have an answer?

sorry, I default to assuming sarcasm when you post....

No pass for anyone who's authority/self-confidence has surpassed their competence. If that is what you are asking.

So it’s not a fancy degree or a fancy school?

I have a hard time determining whether you are engaging in good faith. So I will assume you are.

It is my experience that someone who checks the fancy degree or (and especially) the fancy school box has a harder time managing the balance I reference in my previous post.

Interesting. Hasn’t been my experience. We started a training program 5 years ago and have brought in about 100 kids. No correlation between fancy school and poor performance. Could be your selection. Maybe it’s adverse?

Also, you don’t have to be from a fancy school to do well. Baruch College in NYC punches above its weight. City College guys have done well….doesn’t mean “Fancy School” kids suck.

Yeah, look at George Santos...

Well….Baruch had a recruiting scandal just like the fancy schools.

[Farfromgeneva]

Timnit Gebru Is Calling Attention to the Pitfalls of AI

The Silicon Valley veteran says big tech can’t be trusted to regulate artificial intelligence by itself.

Emily BobrowFeb. 24, 2023 12:27 pm ET
Ms. Gebru, 39, is the founder and executive director of the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (DAIR), a nonprofit she launched in 2021 with backing from the MacArthur Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation and others. Much of her work involves highlighting the ways AI programs can reinforce existing prejudices. “We talk about algorithms, but we don’t talk about who’s constructing the data set or who’s in the data set,” she says. Because machine-learning systems adopt patterns of language and images scraped from the internet, they are often riddled with the internet’s all-too-human flaws: “If the input data is biased, then the output can amplify such biases.”

For years, Ms. Gebru earned notoriety as an in-house AI skeptic at big tech companies. In 2018, while she was working at Microsoft, she co-authored a study that found that commercial facial-analysis programs were far more accurate in identifying the gender of white men than Black women, which the researchers warned could lead to damaging cases of false identification. Later, while working at Google, Ms. Gebru called on companies to be more transparent about the errors baked into their AI models.

Her work as an AI ethicist at Google came to an abrupt halt in late 2020 over research she planned to publish about the shortcomings of language-based AI programs. She says Google fired her; Google said she resigned, and a representative for the company declined to comment further. She now argues that tech companies can’t be trusted to regulate themselves.

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Growing up, Gebru says, the drive to be the best ‘wasn’t a pressure in my family. It was the expectation.’

As a child in the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa, Ms. Gebru “was quite a nerd,” she recalls. Given her fascination with physics and math, she assumed she would become an electrical engineer, like her two older sisters and her father, who died when she was five. Whatever she decided to do, she felt driven to be the best. “It wasn’t a pressure in my family,” she says. “It was the expectation.”

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When war broke out between Ethiopia and neighboring Eritrea in 1998, Ms. Gebru’s Eritrean-born family sought refuge overseas. After a detour in Ireland, she joined her mother, an economist, in Somerville, Mass. Ms. Gebru was already fluent in English and a strong student, so she was surprised when some of her new public school teachers tried to dissuade her from taking advanced courses. Although she recalls earning a top grade in her honors physics class, she says that her teacher suggested the AP class might be “too hard.”

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Ms. Gebru went on to study electrical engineering at Stanford, where her experiments with an electronic piano helped secure an internship at Apple as an audio engineer. She cofounded a software startup—“I felt like I had to in Silicon Valley to get some respect”—before returning to Apple, where she helped develop signal processing algorithms for various products, including the first iPad. When she sensed she was more interested in algorithms than hardware, she returned to Stanford, where she earned her Ph.D. from the AI Laboratory in 2017.

As a grad student, Ms. Gebru was fascinated by the potential of AI. She worked in a lab that used a database of tens of millions of images to teach machines how to deduce a neighborhood’s demographics from its cars: Pickup trucks were popular in more Republican areas, vans correlated with more crime. By the end of her studies, however, Ms. Gebru worried about how these algorithms might be used.

In 2016 she was alarmed by a ProPublica article about how U.S. judges were increasingly relying in sentencing on an algorithm that predicted a criminal’s risk of reoffending. This software typically rated Black defendants who did not reoffend as “high risk” and white defendants who reoffended as “low risk.” “I got into this because I like building stuff,” she says. “But the more I started to do this work, the more I realized I needed to understand those kinds of harms.”

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image
Gebru notes that in the rush to develop AI, tech companies aren’t heeding calls to slow down.Photo: NO CROP Nicholas Albrecht for The Wall Street Journal
Although Ms. Gebru admits that her falling out with Google was stressful—“I lost 20 pounds in two weeks”—she says it clarified big tech’s approach to the ethics of AI. “There aren’t incentives for better behavior,” she says. By launching DAIR, Ms. Gebru says she hopes to offer a voice of restraint at a time when in-house critics may feel silenced: “I think it’s really difficult for people on the inside to push back.”

Ms. Gebru notes that in the rush to create a product that rivals OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which will soon power Microsoft’s Bing search engine, tech companies aren’t heeding calls to slow down. “Our recommendations basically say that before you put anything out, you have to understand what’s in your data set and document it thoroughly,” she says. “But at the end of the day this means taking more time, spending more resources and making less money. Who’s going to do that without legislation?” She hopes for laws that push tech companies to prove their products are safe, just as they do for car manufacturers and drug companies.

‘In tech we’re very good at pretending that everything is in the cloud, but these models require a lot of people, energy and water.’

At DAIR, Ms. Gebru is working to call attention to some of the hidden costs of AI, from the computational power it requires to the low wages paid to laborers who filter training data. “In tech we’re very good at pretending that everything is in the cloud, but these models require a lot of people, energy and water,” she says. “The environmental costs can be huge.”

Yet Ms. Gebru wants to make sure that DAIR isn’t merely a naysaying organization. “I didn’t get into this because I wanted to fight people or big corporations,” she says. She points to how DAIR researchers are using thousands of high resolution satellite images to better understand the legacy of apartheid in South Africa, correlating township boundaries with disparities in public services.

“It’s demoralizing to just analyze harms and try to mitigate them,” she says. “We’re also trying to imaginatively think about how technology should be built.”

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[Seacoaster(1)]

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/24/us/e ... suits.html

"In the three weeks since a freight train derailed in East Palestine and released more than 100,000 gallons of toxic chemicals, lawyers have poured into the little town, signing up clients, gathering evidence and already filing more than a dozen lawsuits in federal court on behalf of local residents.

They have held information sessions nearly everywhere a crowd can gather, including at a nearby Best Western, at the American Legion hall and in the packed cafeteria at East Palestine High School. Their message overall has been one of warning: It may be months, years or possibly even decades before the derailment’s ultimate effect on people’s health, property values or the soil and water becomes clear.

Further, the lawyers say, early moves by Norfolk Southern, the operator of the train, suggest that getting comprehensive answers from the company will not be easy.

Among a public that is deeply skeptical of official test results — Gov. Mike DeWine, a Republican, and other state and federal officials say they have not shown anything alarming so far — or camera-friendly efforts at reassurance, these warnings have resonated.

The distrust has been deepened by a sense that politicians are not being diligent enough in their response to the disaster; on Friday, President Biden said he had no plans to visit, though he pointed out that federal officials had arrived there within hours of the crash and was “keeping very close tabs on” the situation.

“They get what’s happening,” said Rene Rocha, a lawyer with the supersize personal injury firm Morgan & Morgan, during a state hearing about the derailment on Thursday in Beaver County, Pa., just across the border from East Palestine.

Referring to residents there who had spoken at the hearing about headaches, coughs and other classic symptoms of chemical exposure, he added: “They see they’re not getting the truth from the politicians and the company. That leaves the lawyers.”

Norfolk Southern declined to comment on Friday on matters involving litigation.

The huge scale of the chemical burn-off and the harrowing images of the fire, as well as the intense politicization of it all, have made the derailment in East Palestine among the most high-profile environmental disasters in the country in years.

Television cameras are still routine fixtures on the sidewalks of the town’s central street. On Friday night, Erin Brockovich, the famed environmental activist who years ago exposed corporate wrongdoing that polluted drinking water, spoke to a packed town hall at the East Palestine High School auditorium.

The event, billed as an “educational seminar” and organized by a law firm based out of Akron, Ohio, consisted mostly of a detailed presentation by Mikal Watts, a prominent Texas lawyer, about the potential health effects of the derailment and the legal landscape that plaintiffs would be facing.

But it began with a short speech from Ms. Brockovich to the hundreds sitting in the auditorium and watching an overflow screen in the gym. “You’re going to be told it’s safe, you’re going to be told not to worry: Well that’s just rubbish,” she said. Of the derailment in East Palestine, she said, “I’ve never seen anything in 30 years like this.”

To some local attorneys, the army that has descended on the town is exasperating. “Did they even know where East Palestine was prior to this accident?” fumed David Betras, a lawyer who has spent his career just up the road in Youngstown, and is himself planning to file a suit on behalf of hundreds of local residents. “They come in with this star power. Like, ‘Oh, Erin’s gonna solve it.’”

On Thursday night, Steve and Kelly Davis sat down in a yet-to-be-opened wine bar a short walk from where the train cars left the tracks nearly three weeks earlier. Thousands of their bees had been found dead after the burn-off, thousands of dollars’ worth of boxes that had housed the bees were now in questionable condition, and the reputation of the family honey business was in jeopardy.

Their son, on the verge of buying a house downtown, was suddenly getting a cold shoulder from the bank. No one had come to test their well water. And to top it all off, Mr. Davis had developed a cough.

They had come to meet with Robert Till, a Texas-based investigator for the law firm of Cory Watson who for weeks has been meeting people at a table set up in the empty bar. Mr. Till has met with hundreds so far, he said, talking with people about their health conditions, learning how their businesses have been affected and asking whether they have cleaned their homes — and if they have held onto the cleaning materials, which he said would contain critical data about contamination.

“I’m putting you guys on for priority testing,” he told the Davises.

“For the water?” Mr. Davis asked.

“For everything,” Mr. Till said.

The legal machinations are in their early stages. Cases might ultimately be consolidated as a class action or multi-district litigation; most of the suits will almost surely end up bundled before one or several federal judges in an Ohio courtroom.

Norfolk Southern may offer some sort of resolution voluntarily, whether by setting up a compensation fund with an independent administrator, as BP did after the 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, or establishing a court-supervised medical monitoring program, where people could come for free testing related to possible health effects.

The company has already been paying $1,000 in “inconvenience compensation” to people who had to evacuate. Though Norfolk Southern insists that the payments do not curtail anyone’s right to sue, many are skeptical.

Lawyers point to certain moves made by the company — including a letter sent on Thursday notifying plaintiffs’ attorneys that they had two days to inspect the rail cars before the cars were removed or destroyed — as signs that it would be combative.

There is no shortage of experience among the members of the plaintiff’s bar arriving in town: train derailments are not unusual in the United States, nor are oil spills, chemical leaks or industrial accidents.

“It looks like these dadgum railroads would get it right after that many years and stop falling off the tracks but they just can’t do it,” said Calvin Fayard Jr., a Louisiana lawyer who took the lead in a suit after a train carrying vinyl chloride — one of the substances that spilled and burned in East Palestine — derailed in a small Louisiana town in 1982.

As part of a $39 million settlement arising from the 1982 derailment, a commission was set up to monitor long-term health effects and oversee the decontamination of soil and water. That commission continued its work for more than 30 years, dissolving less than a decade ago, said Mr. Fayard, whose law partner has been in East Palestine talking with potential clients.

But a program of that magnitude is never a sure thing. After a train carrying vinyl chloride derailed in Paulsboro, N.J., in 2012, a federal judge ruled against any medical monitoring program and dismissed the suit; settlements were ultimately reached in state court.

No sooner had Mr. Till signed up the Davises as clients on Thursday evening than another couple walked in, keeping him at work. The Davises stepped outside to talk with Michael McKim, the owner of the wine bar, which so far remains on track to open next month.

Mr. McKim had met Mr. Till in a hotel lobby during the town’s initial evacuation, and had been letting him use his place as an office ever since. This was all new to both couples.

“I feel like a baby seal in the middle of the ocean surrounded by great white sharks,” Mr. McKim said. But with as big a shark as Norfolk Southern as the defendant, he said, joining up with a law firm was his best chance. “It’s kind of nice to at least hang out with a shark that maybe understands.”

[PizzaSnake]

Timnit Gebru Is Calling Attention to the Pitfalls of AI

The Silicon Valley veteran says big tech can’t be trusted to regulate artificial intelligence by itself.

Emily BobrowFeb. 24, 2023 12:27 pm ET
Ms. Gebru, 39, is the founder and executive director of the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (DAIR), a nonprofit she launched in 2021 with backing from the MacArthur Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation and others. Much of her work involves highlighting the ways AI programs can reinforce existing prejudices. “We talk about algorithms, but we don’t talk about who’s constructing the data set or who’s in the data set,” she says. Because machine-learning systems adopt patterns of language and images scraped from the internet, they are often riddled with the internet’s all-too-human flaws: “If the input data is biased, then the output can amplify such biases.”

For years, Ms. Gebru earned notoriety as an in-house AI skeptic at big tech companies. In 2018, while she was working at Microsoft, she co-authored a study that found that commercial facial-analysis programs were far more accurate in identifying the gender of white men than Black women, which the researchers warned could lead to damaging cases of false identification. Later, while working at Google, Ms. Gebru called on companies to be more transparent about the errors baked into their AI models.

Her work as an AI ethicist at Google came to an abrupt halt in late 2020 over research she planned to publish about the shortcomings of language-based AI programs. She says Google fired her; Google said she resigned, and a representative for the company declined to comment further. She now argues that tech companies can’t be trusted to regulate themselves.

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Growing up, Gebru says, the drive to be the best ‘wasn’t a pressure in my family. It was the expectation.’

As a child in the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa, Ms. Gebru “was quite a nerd,” she recalls. Given her fascination with physics and math, she assumed she would become an electrical engineer, like her two older sisters and her father, who died when she was five. Whatever she decided to do, she felt driven to be the best. “It wasn’t a pressure in my family,” she says. “It was the expectation.”

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When war broke out between Ethiopia and neighboring Eritrea in 1998, Ms. Gebru’s Eritrean-born family sought refuge overseas. After a detour in Ireland, she joined her mother, an economist, in Somerville, Mass. Ms. Gebru was already fluent in English and a strong student, so she was surprised when some of her new public school teachers tried to dissuade her from taking advanced courses. Although she recalls earning a top grade in her honors physics class, she says that her teacher suggested the AP class might be “too hard.”

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Ms. Gebru went on to study electrical engineering at Stanford, where her experiments with an electronic piano helped secure an internship at Apple as an audio engineer. She cofounded a software startup—“I felt like I had to in Silicon Valley to get some respect”—before returning to Apple, where she helped develop signal processing algorithms for various products, including the first iPad. When she sensed she was more interested in algorithms than hardware, she returned to Stanford, where she earned her Ph.D. from the AI Laboratory in 2017.

As a grad student, Ms. Gebru was fascinated by the potential of AI. She worked in a lab that used a database of tens of millions of images to teach machines how to deduce a neighborhood’s demographics from its cars: Pickup trucks were popular in more Republican areas, vans correlated with more crime. By the end of her studies, however, Ms. Gebru worried about how these algorithms might be used.

In 2016 she was alarmed by a ProPublica article about how U.S. judges were increasingly relying in sentencing on an algorithm that predicted a criminal’s risk of reoffending. This software typically rated Black defendants who did not reoffend as “high risk” and white defendants who reoffended as “low risk.” “I got into this because I like building stuff,” she says. “But the more I started to do this work, the more I realized I needed to understand those kinds of harms.”

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Gebru notes that in the rush to develop AI, tech companies aren’t heeding calls to slow down.Photo: NO CROP Nicholas Albrecht for The Wall Street Journal
Although Ms. Gebru admits that her falling out with Google was stressful—“I lost 20 pounds in two weeks”—she says it clarified big tech’s approach to the ethics of AI. “There aren’t incentives for better behavior,” she says. By launching DAIR, Ms. Gebru says she hopes to offer a voice of restraint at a time when in-house critics may feel silenced: “I think it’s really difficult for people on the inside to push back.”

Ms. Gebru notes that in the rush to create a product that rivals OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which will soon power Microsoft’s Bing search engine, tech companies aren’t heeding calls to slow down. “Our recommendations basically say that before you put anything out, you have to understand what’s in your data set and document it thoroughly,” she says. “But at the end of the day this means taking more time, spending more resources and making less money. Who’s going to do that without legislation?” She hopes for laws that push tech companies to prove their products are safe, just as they do for car manufacturers and drug companies.

‘In tech we’re very good at pretending that everything is in the cloud, but these models require a lot of people, energy and water.’

At DAIR, Ms. Gebru is working to call attention to some of the hidden costs of AI, from the computational power it requires to the low wages paid to laborers who filter training data. “In tech we’re very good at pretending that everything is in the cloud, but these models require a lot of people, energy and water,” she says. “The environmental costs can be huge.”

Yet Ms. Gebru wants to make sure that DAIR isn’t merely a naysaying organization. “I didn’t get into this because I wanted to fight people or big corporations,” she says. She points to how DAIR researchers are using thousands of high resolution satellite images to better understand the legacy of apartheid in South Africa, correlating township boundaries with disparities in public services.

“It’s demoralizing to just analyze harms and try to mitigate them,” she says. “We’re also trying to imaginatively think about how technology should be built.”

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“Our recommendations basically say that before you put anything out, you have to understand what’s in your data set and document it thoroughly,”

Or, simply put, shite in, shite out.

Bing’s “Sydney” ingested the Internet. Anyone surprised by the results?