What’s in a name? The need to nip NIPS
NIPS NeurIPS nips 2018 neurips 2018 nips name change machine learning deep learning community sexism diversity inclusion bias gender women tech women in tech women in stem majority vote minorities statistics computer science harassment
http://tensorlab.cms.caltech.edu/users/anima/pubs/NIPS_Name_Debate.pdf

Abstract:
There has been substantial recent controversy surrounding the use of the acronym "NIPS" for the Neural Information Processing Systems conference, stemming from the fact that the word "nips" is common slang for nipples, and has historically been used as a racial slur targeting people of Japanese origin. Here, we outline the ways in which this acronym has contributed to a hostile environment towards women in machine learning. We argue that an October 2018 decision by the Neural Information Processing Systems board not to change the name of the conference was based on a misunderstanding of the issues that women face in STEM fields, a poorly-designed survey, and a faulty statistical analysis. We applaud the board for a more recent announcement of the new abbreviation "NeurIPS", and emphasize that this name change is an important first step towards the creation of a more inclusive environment in machine learning.

Authors:
Daniela M. Witten, Elana J. Fertig, Animashree Anandkumar, Jeff Dean

References:
https://medium.com/@kristianlum/statistics-we-have-a-problem-304638dc5de5
https://nips.cc/Conferences/2018/News
https://twitter.com/AnimaAnandkumar/status/1055278000588021762
https://www.change.org/p/members-of-nips-board-protestnips-nips-acronym-encourages-sexism-and-is-a-slur-change-the-name
https://twitter.com/AnimaAnandkumar/status/1056971852248018944
 Hello and welcome. Today we're going to look at what's in a name, the need to nip NIPS by Daniela Witten, Alina Oferdig, Anima Shri Anand Kumar and Jeff Dean. This is a bit of a special paper as it's not an academic topic. The paper in fact is about the change of name or rather change in acronym for the conference Neural Information Processing Systems, previously abbreviated NIPS, but now for the first year this conference has been hosted under the acronym NURIPS. The people here on the paper are not the organizers of the conference, they are advocates for the name change and the paper basically outlines their arguments and a bit of description of what happened. So they're also pretty big names in the community so it should be interesting to see what they have to say. The paper is pretty short, it's three parts, three pages and we're going to go through it and yeah let's jump into it. So I have it over here. Alright so the first part of the paper basically describes, it's called What's all the Fuzz About? It basically describes why a name change was necessary in their perspective. So they say in machine learning like the rest of them suffers from severe gender imbalance, low retention rates for women and so on. They also describe the MeToo movement, increased awareness of sexual harassment faced by many female researchers, pervasiveness of sexual harassment at computational conferences and they reference an article here. I want to kind of show you this article. It's this article here. So if you haven't seen this yet I encourage you to read it. It's pretty horrifying to read but it gives you an idea of what people talk about when they say sexual harassment is a problem, is pervasive at conferences and so on. So yeah just I don't want to go into this specifically. Just go ahead read it and you know see what people are talking about. I think it's important context to understand where people are coming from. So they go on to say however more subtle acts of gender harassment defined in this report. This includes like sexist hostility, crude behavior and so on have gotten less public attention. Nonetheless gender harassment is extremely pervasive, is direct contributor to the challenges faced by women in the STEM field. In this article we argue that NIPS, the former acronym of the Neuro-Information Processing Systems Conference, constituted gender harassment towards women. So that's what their arguments basically about. So the acronym led to basically had its part in gender harassment towards women. Basically led to an environment where women could not feel comfortable at this conference. So here's their description. In popular slang the word NIPS is an abbreviation for nipples. Furthermore it has historically been used as a racial slur targeting people of Japanese origin but we'll not go into this deeper because that's kind of a historic use of the word. The current use of the word in fact is the slang for nipples and so we'll focus on that. They say at first glance the fact that a major machine learning conference shared its name with this slang is an unfortunate but unimportant coincidence. And it really is a coincidence. I think the the conference name has been around for longer than the slang has been kind of popular. The slang word has been popular so it really is a coincidence. Many other conferences have same coincidences like Colt for example. Maybe actually that's even less a coincidence than here. They say in fact one might hope that members of the machine learning community are sufficiently mature that the conference's name is unimportant. That's basically what everyone would hope. Maybe people don't even notice and if they notice maybe they'll have like a two-second oh that's you know that's the other word haha but then we basically just go on with our lives and no one cares too much. So that that's kind of the ideal scenario and they acknowledge that here. It's really important that they say unfortunately this appears not to be the case. They detail a few examples here at the 2017 conference Elon Musk made inappropriate jokes about the acronym participants wore loot t-shirts. I think one said my nips are NP hard which is kind of a double computer science joke I guess. There was a pre-conference event named word I can't probably say out loud without getting some sort of strike. You can clearly see that even though the kind of original name is coincidental and you know one would hope that people are like you know just putting it off be adult about it. There have been jokes, there have been you know t-shirts made and you know you can say the name collision is not like is unintended but I think this word here is very intended. So I think the main argument here or one of the main arguments is this really first of all creates an environment where certain people don't feel comfortable. It creates kind of a sexualized environment. Second of all and the more broader sense it's just unprofessional as a community especially since the kind of community is booming. We want to represent machine learning to the wider world. One can say okay it's you know it's just in professional that we kind of bring intertwine these things. It doesn't make a good impression. They say furthermore reminders of the unfortunate acronym are everywhere. Online searches for the acronym led to not safer work content. The hashtag NIPS is devoted to pornography. If you misspell the conference website you get to an adult site and I think this yeah this further goes into the argument that it's just an unprofessional appearance towards the outside. It's unfortunate the conference has been here longer but you know still there's a need to do something about it and I largely agree with these arguments that these are good arguments to make for a change of name. This paragraph down here it's a bit of a we'll go into that later. It's not very connected to the arguments made here so well it's more like connected to what's been happening so we'll go into that later. People have been circulating these arguments and calling for a name change for a while and then the the board of the conference the NIPS board made a survey surveying the attendance of the last five years conferences whether or not the conference should change its name. The next section is dedicated to how the survey turned out and what the response of the board was. So actually let's first go to the decision by the board. So here is the press release. This is a press release after the survey results had been collected. So they said our survey was returned by about 2200 people here and as I said have attended NIPS in the last five years. Of the male respondents about 28% are in favor of the conference name change of the female respondents about 44% are in favor of a name change. 40% prefer the existing name 16% expressed no preferences. In fact let's go look at the detailed results which they have down here. So you can see overall there is a big a big slant towards not agree. So negative 2 is strongly disagree with the name change while positive 2 is strongly agree. So you can see there's a big slant towards the not agree. If you split this by gender of respondents then you can see the basically the male distribution is that slant while the female distribution is a bit different as you can see here. The first thing it's mostly towards the extremes. So there are more people strongly saying something than non-strongly saying something to either side. And the second of all it seems very divided and very evenly divided. So in fact if you look at the numbers if you count the disagrees and agrees you'll find there's a slight majority in the agrees. There is a slight majority in the disagrees if you only consider the strongs. But ultimately these numbers are pretty close so that there's people on either side feeling strongly and there's about in this survey about as many on either side. So that's basically the outcome of this. Here I find very interesting some quotes from respondents. So you had the opportunity to put quotes to put like a comment and these are quoted from these comments. So they say for example this thanks for considering a name change. I'm not personally bothered by the current name but I think the gesture will send a much-needed inclusive vibe in the right direction. One person says if you were up to me I'd call off this nice but symbolic gesture. Use whatever time money and energy to make actual changes. Then someone says please please please change the name it is sexist and racist slur. I'm embarrassed every time I have to say the name of the conference. This feeds into the unprofessionalism argument. The next one I find very interesting. It says as a woman I find it offensive that the board is seriously considering changing the name of the meeting because of an adolescent reference to a woman's body. From my point of view it shows that the board does not see me as an equal member of the community but as a woman first and a scientist second. This is extremely interesting. So this is one of the people who was a female respondent and said strongly disagree with the name change or disagree with the name change. I mean I can guess. So we've only heard so far that the name or the acronym is offensive to women but here we have a woman saying that the consideration to change the acronym is actually offensive to her. That's very special and understandable. I can understand why that happens. I can understand the argument made here. This woman feels like okay it shows me that basically my gender is important and not really my being scientist. It's an argument. The next one goes into the same direction. It says I'm a woman. I've experienced being harassed by male academics and I would like this problem to be discussed and addressed but not in this frankly almost offensive way. Another person saying basically that's changing the name is almost offensive and it's not the right way to go to achieve these results. There's another one saying I'm in favor of the name change but this is cosmetic. So you have basically people coming from all angles giving their opinions and you can clearly see why there is especially in the female respondent group why there is a divide. So the board overall said the following. The board overall said the following. After extensive discussions the NIPS board has decided not to change the name of the conference for now. The poll itself did not yield a clear consensus on a name change or a well-regarded alternative name. Further they state instead we ask the community support in implementing concrete steps to improve the inclusiveness of the conference. So these are described down here. They have a number of changes to make the conference basically more inclusive. So they basically said okay so the name change survey was inconclusive and they clearly say whatever we do here regardless of which decision we take we're failing to accommodate the opinions about half the women in the community. Which is true this is clearly what you can see from the results from the quotes. So basically what they say is we'll not change the conference name for now. We'll implement these steps because what they I can guess what they felt was okay even the people against the name change were in support of making the conference more inclusive. So they basically say okay we do these things we strengthen their code of conduct. We have two inclusion diversity chairs. We have an inclusion town hall. We have childcare support. Gender-inclusive restrooms and so on and so on. Mentoring breakfasts for women and other minorities. So they take these steps concretely. They say this is what we do and even further if you look at their page on diversity and inclusion which I have here. They say here on the top in addition to hosting diversity related event the conference also making consider structural changes include a new code of conduct we've already seen and in-depth discussion of the potential of changing the name of the conference. So in total what they're saying is we've done this poll. It came back inconclusive which you've I think has been clearly demonstrated. We'll not change the name of the conference for now and we'll do all of these other things right down there and at the conference we'll hold a meeting and discuss the name change so we could maybe potentially change it in upcoming years. I think this is a really sensible decision by the board. I mean given this data given all of that this is probably the most sensible decision. Let's take concrete steps. The name change seems to be you know debatable so let's actually debate it at the conference with the actual community. That was the basically result of the poll. Let's now go back to what the paper has to say about this. Here's the paper again and they say in order to collect data about the machine learning community's feelings about the conference name the conference board sent out a survey to people who have attended the conference during the past five years. However serving conference attendees results in a very biased sample of a much larger community of potential machine learning researchers. Bias arises due to the fact that some people who are made uncomfortable by the name or by other aspects of the machine learning culture may have decided not to enter or to remain in the or not to remain in the field have chosen not to attend the conference. So basically you're saying well if you only ask this one group of people right then this other group of people you know doesn't have a chance to make their voice heard and there is basically bias because in this other group of people the people who have not attended the conference they would would have a severely different opinion from the people who have attended the conference. So first of all I think this can be a valid point here of course all the ways if you ask one group of people and exclude another one you there's there's if the if the group you ask and the target group which here it's really unclear what it is I guess it's the machine learning community considering going to the conference if those don't overlap then you you will introduce some sort of bias and they say okay bias could come from the fact you know some people who actually are affected by these problems of which this name is one they may have you know not attended the conference because they may have left the field because the the gender harassment is so pervasive and they just didn't didn't stay and so on. So I think this can be a good point but the problem I have with it here is that it's simply stated without anything it's simply said okay there is bias, bias arises and my question would be how much is that bias of any data like any data on this you can't just criticize these that the survey for being biased and and then not provide actual data like how many people are there who are made uncomfortable by the name or have left the field in who have left the field because of these things and is it really viable to to count them in I guess okay we can argue it is but how would they have responded to this we've clearly seen that a lot of affected people that even have experienced harassment are not in favor of the name change so in this case I would really like to see some data on how much this bias is right and I cannot also say it's not it's not that bad of a decision to what the board did to send the survey to the last five years attendees I think is a very sensible choice if you want to gather the community's feelings towards these kind of things I mean you you can't just ask the entire world because the entire world is not the machine learning community so I think the this is a very sensible decision to ask last five years attendees and if you have real evidence that this causes a notifiable like a significant bias then we could potentially correct for that bias but without any data on that I think the the asking last five years participants was completely reasonable and one of I don't really see how you can do a much better job without much much more manual work and I want to make this point a bit clearer on how hard it actually is to do that by pointing to the response to this so here is a tweet thread by one of the authors of this paper after the conference decision came out she basically tweeted out this protest nips I am starting this new hashtag please retweet if you're in support of the next conference changing its name so basically kind of launching a a Twitter campaign a Twitter hashtag under this to come you know get into a conversation with people about this people could express their support she also that was a misclick she also here made a change dot org petition to change the name so a petition basically petition is here the text of the petition basically says something similar to the to the what we've already seen including there is a the criticism of the survey and as you can see here about 2,000 people have signed it so I mean a Twitter hashtag is all good you know you can do that a petition is all good you can do that but it's a bit ironic because a change that org petition literally anyone can sign this and in addition to that there's only one option you can only say yes you can't even say no right so and even more who's gonna see the change that org petition it's gonna be the social media followers of these people right so basically you have now a you have it now what's basically a survey of the social media network of people in favor of changing the name where there's only one option to respond I I find it and so I've gone through here the people who actually publicly associate their name give a reason for signing a lot of these they you know they give some argument why they've signed the petition but I've tried searching these people for any sort of academic track record and in my sample I've come up with between 10 and 20 percent of people who somehow have an academic track record so this is I mean certainly a valid thing to make your voice heard and to show your numbers and but I mean look at this there's a bot signing twice hello Jack Nelson and Richard Chi very nice but so basically I'm not here to criticize petitions but what I want to say is you can't like criticize this this poll so hard for being biased and then launching basically an own poll that's even more biased and even more non-representative of the community to me that's that's kind of ironic and just goes to show how hard this is and my argument would be it's actually not that unsensible of a decision of the board the way they did it and if you have again if you have data to actually quantify the bias here then it's viable to go and correct for that all right so to they go on to analyze the survey results conference board simply noted that of the 294 women surveyed the number who strongly support or support the name change is comparable to the number of women who are strongly opposed or opposed however this analysis implicitly assumes that one person's feeling of discomfort or marginalization as a result of the name should be given the same weight as another person's preference for the status quo this amounts to giving the same way to false positives and false negatives of course we learn in an introductory statistics course that false positives and false negatives should be assigned weights dependent on context in this context we feel that a much greater weight should be given to the views of a person who feels marginalized as a result of the name so up here I find this a bit strange they say this amounts to giving the same way to false positives and false negatives to me the false is here a bit confusing because it seems to me it's it's simply giving the same weight to negatives and positives there's I don't think there's a need to dress this up in statistical lingo here it simply we give the same weight to people who responded positively and to people who responded negatively I think that's that's it there's no false of course we learn in a truck see this is class that false positives and false negatives should be assigned weights dependent on context in this context we feel that a much greater weight should be given to the views of person who feels marginalized as a result of the name I would I would say to this it's the problem for me it's these are this is one of the things that where you at you read it first and you say like oh yeah this makes sense but first of all it's framed extremely one-sided it's framed as all the people who are for the name change like they they feel discomforted they feel marginalized and the people who are against the name change they simply and here specifically they they they talk about the women group so in argument they're all affected the people against it simply prefer the status quo but we've clearly seen in the in the in the press release and we'll go over to that now these quotes here we've clearly seen that the the offense and the marginalization happens on both sides so here this as a woman I find it offensive that the board is considering changing the name it shows that the board does not see me as an equal member of the community but as a woman first and the scientists second I mean this is almost a textbook definition of marginalization and this is clearly happening on the other side as well so I think the framing here is extremely dishonest and one-sided and there is given basically the the side that we just seen in this quote is given absolutely no not even a mention that it exists it's simply framed as this side is marginalized and oppressed and discomforted and the other side simply prefers the status quo but we've clearly seen that yeah it's almost a this fits exactly this definition it's just one person's feeling or discomfort or marginalization as a result of the name it's just as a result of the name change second of all I think the the bigger problem and this goes into the statement down here to state this last point more explicitly an issue adversely affecting the minority of participants should not be decided by a majority vote again something at first you say oh yeah that makes sense but if you think about it this is a really really outrageous statement and the reason is it's it's it's outrageous is if the mud if it's not majority vote if it's not one person one vote then someone has to decide who gets to vote and who doesn't and more so specifically here someone basically needs to decide who should be given what weight in the vote right you need someone to decide this and here you can say well it's easy it's just the the women right because they're affected I this but they go further they say well it's the women who feel discomforted and marginalized who should be given more weight than the ones who simply prefer the status quo but then you have to have someone assessing whether someone is really marginalized and discomforted or simply prefers the status quo and it's not like an environment where there is kind of a sexist undertone isn't also discomforting or can't also be discomforting to men to men of any sort or people of of any sort of gender it's just not clear that the fact that people should be given different weight in in crafting an opinion I mean this this can be true if you have like some clear area of expertise but in this case it's really unclear and the fact is if it's not majority vote you need someone deciding the weight and the someone deciding the weights automatically decides on the outcome of the vote and then why do you need a vote in the first place basically up here they say yeah we feel the great weights should be aligned like this and down here there is no more we feel it's be an issue at worst affecting the minority of participants should not be decided by majority vote they're basically calling for a dictatorship in this case and I'm gonna guess like everyone has the opinion the dictatorship would be an awesome idea if the dictator were me right that's that's what everyone thinks of course and that's basically the argument made here but it's not it's not true and there's some really really disturbing implicit things in here and maybe I want to quickly go over how I think a democratic decision works so imagine you have a person and the person has decision to make for or against in this case the name change right and the person must decide on one of these two things on a let's say on a continuous scale but it doesn't matter what what this what this stuff up here basically implicitly assumes is that the person looks at themselves and they think well am I personally discomforted or marginalized by the name or the climate it creates no then I'm obviously against the name change because it doesn't help me or another person go am I personally affected yes well I feel discomforted or marginalized well then I'm obviously for a name change so the basic assumption here is that people simply vote purely their own egotistical interests and that's that's it so basically if you're in one of these minorities then you'll vote for the name change because it affects you which we've already seen is not it's not a given that people vote that way and if you're not in this then you know you you'd vote against but you're not affected so your vote shouldn't count it's completely untrue what people do especially smart people and I believe the machine learning community consists largely of these what they do is they'll make a list of arguments argument one argument two argument three argument for everyone has the same arguments everyone's hurt the same arguments if not then maybe there's some work to do in actually getting arguments to people but that's not the same as weighing the people differently you get the arguments to the people and then you weigh each of them equally why because what every person does is they say okay argument one is maybe it's unprofessional right name is unprofessional alright how important is that to me give it a weight weight one cool that's really important to me I'll give it a big weight argument two some people feel really discomfort like discomforted if you're marginalized by the name creates a bad environment for them how much weight am I gonna give to that right so people can actually consider other people's feelings and other people's problems and decide on what's the best also for them in their own mind so they give it a weight two and then there's maybe two arguments against some given these weight three weight four at the end what you have is you have argument I you will sum it up by the weights W I J you will sum it up over all people so basically now and this will give you like a final number a which is either positive or negative if it's positive you do the name change if it's negative you don't do the name change if you do this over all people what you've basically done is you have just determined these weightings here by a democratic process you've crowd sourced the weighting this is exactly what these people say up here right we feel we feel that you're not false false positives false we feel that positives and negatives should be assigned weights dependent on context so the positive and negative arguments in this case are assigned weights dependent on context but the weights are crowd sourced to the community right and each person this who participates in that each person who participates is one more brain power in a complicated decision that no one basically no one has the authority just to just decide for themselves so these people are calling for different weighting this is the way to do it the democratic majority vote is the exact way to determine these weights what these people basically are no no no no no we should determine the weights we who know I'm a bit corny here but this is basically it's still it's two alternatives either you do democratic process one person one brain one vote and that will give you a crowd sourced crowd sourced true weighting of the arguments what the community feels or someone needs to decide some one needs to side by force basically and that's a dictatorship so these are the choices you have and clearly now you can maybe understand why I say this is an outrageous statement because to me the dictatorship option is not an option note that I'm not saying that democracy can never be wrong or the majority can never be wrong but in fact it's the best system there is can be wrong but anything else will undoubtedly go more wrong so that's my point here alright so that was a maybe a bit ranty but let's go on a false choice and a minimization of a real issue so they go on to say what they think of the decision that the board made in response to this so up was how they analyzed the poll and now it's the decision in announcing their decision not to change the conference name conference board expressed commitment to implement concrete steps to improve the inclusiveness of the conference and they list them here and they say we sincerely applaud the conference board for these efforts okay I yeah I think the community feels like that as well however the wording of the decision implied the need to choose between changing the name of the conference and taking concrete steps to improve its inclusiveness I don't see that at all say this was a false choice there's no reason that the board could not do both yes there's no reason that they couldn't do both and I believe we've read this together before I don't think the board ever said that there was a choice between one or the other I think they've said very much the opposite let's go back I think what they mean here is the word instead so here they say we won't change the name and then here's they say instead we ask for the community support and implementing creed steps I think this this must be it because I don't really see any other way you would ever think that and the reason is this here they say will not change the name of the conference for now on another page they say it will discuss the name change at the conference and then here the instead I think what is meant is instead what we will do right now is these things we'll discuss about the name change but what we will do right now which was basically not the the real problem in the first place the real issue raised was the name so instead of that issue we'll do these other things which we feel the community wants I think that's the I think there's no I think everyone reading this comes to the same conclusion after after reading that but so I really don't see how you you can say that this is kind of presented as an either or by the board I don't think that at all and but you decide for yourself I believe the real real real crocs here is the for now and the promise to discuss at the conference which if you can see here in the paper is never ever ever touched right this they make it basically seem that the board has decided to not change the name and that's it which is completely wrong they've clearly stated their openness to a name change they want to discuss it it was just inconclusive so they want to basically not do anything rash and then half the community is against it anyway so they want to discuss it I to say that this is the basically that that the wording implied the need to choose I don't see that um but you know you decide for yourselves the board suggested a name change would only be symbolic and so on would have no real consequences so that this this these are some of the arguments basically made in the quotes as well but you know the fact that the name change would only be symbolic and so on these are all things you could actually discuss at the con at this conference meeting you could even correct for your for your poll right you could invite people who have left the community to represent those you could invite new potential researchers you could give everyone their voice and then actually listen to all of them I think that's a very sensible decision by the board and I think this is misrepresented here lastly let's say another argument though not explicitly mentioned a number of machine learning researchers told us that changing the name of the conference lead to too much confusion in the community while we understand we respectfully do not share it I mean this is it's basically an argument against the name change I think it's also a point worthy of discussion right that they say they say we respectfully do not share this point yeah okay they don't share it other people do it's a point of discussion we could you know you could actually discuss it at the conference but I actually agree with the authors here I think changing the name will not have a big impact on the kind of recognizability of the conference especially now down here we'll actually get into what actually happened in November the in response to extensive public backlash the conference board announced a change to the official conference acronym to NRIPS they say we are pleased provides this provides a reasonable compromise so in in my opinion this is it as far as solutions go this is a good solution right the NRIPS acronym I think it's it's it's cool you don't have to change the name of the conference itself you simply change the acronym which you know was the the reported problem in the first place I think the all the new papers will like people will still recognize the old NIPS acronym or the new conference it will be clear that it's the same thing and I think this is a very good a very good new name and I think people will get used to it pretty quickly it also you know to say NRIPS it it's also rolls off the tongue easily so it's as far as solutions go I like it further they say however the work for the conference board is far from done oops we encourage the board to continue its efforts blah blah blah so they say okay you have to do more than just change the name and so on they say together these steps will help ensure that the NRIPS conference retains its place in the forefront of machine learning research while also creating a welcoming environment for women and members of other representative groups on other underrepresented groups we all hope that to me the problem is a bit how this how this went down and if we go back and look at the actual press release of the name change they say here dear members of the neural information processing systems community something remarkable has happened in our community the name NRIPS has sprung up organically as an alternative acronym we're delighted to see it being adopted indeed one forward-thinking member of the community purchased NRIPS comm described as purpose as hosting conference content under different acronym until the board catches up we've caught up we're considering alternative acronyms when the community support for NRIPS became apparent we ask all attendees to respect the solution from the community use the new acronym so basically they've rebranded the entire conference about a month before the actual meeting asked all sponsors all invited companies asked all invited papers to rebrand the acronym to me this the wording here is fit is a bit funny like something remarkable has happened in our community has sprung up organically and now we'll just adopt it it seems like it seems like much less of the fairy tale to describe here but the actual like there's a there's a mob with pitchforks around your house and this is like the first kind of straw that you can grab to to make them calm down and also know that some companies have begun pulling out funding for the conference so I think this is really this was really you know much more backed by force and and back yeah what they say in the paper extensive public backlash so loud screaming basically then this this kind of the name has sprung up organically and has been adopted and seems much more bit forceful to me it would have still been a viable path the most valuable path to actually wait for the conference and then have that discussion and then if indeed this name in the rips would be would be presented as a good alternative and you know people would be fine with that then you could still make the name change for last for next year I think this this would have been a good alternative my fear now is this has been extremely rash extremely forceful as as I've said also accompanied by with like by withdrawal of funding that I believe these things usually provoke a backlash and that's really something that I wouldn't look forward to so I hope that this con that this paragraph down here is true that actually we will see a more welcoming environment for everyone but I believe things like this tend in society to have the sometimes very opposite effects of what's intended and so I hope this does not produce a backlash I think having had the actual discussion doing things non rashly would have done much more in the direction of preventing such a backlash so this is the end of the paper so to recap they basically say the acronym was was inappropriate which I agree with they say the survey was bad which I could believe if there was data they say that an issue adversely affecting the minority of participants should not be cited by majority vote which I absolutely disagree with and then they say the board has basically stated this as an either or decision which is I believe not true and misrepresenting or maybe I've missed something it's always possible lastly I want to get to this paragraph in recent months a number of women including some of the authors of this article who publicly expressed support for a change of the conference name have been relentlessly trolled harassed verbally abused and even physically threatened on Twitter reddit other online forums much of this harassment they say has been anonymous and typically has had an extremely gendered tone furthermore some students have reached out to us the authors lamenting the fact that they felt unable to openly express their support for renaming the conference due to fear of bullying or retaliation by faculty advisors or others in position of power this I believe is really bad the fact that people can't speak out about something like this without being bullied or harassed or having to fear for their careers basically is is bad and I would really discourage everyone from engaging in such behavior verbal abuse physically threaten I mean that's I mean to one point you can say all right if you've been on the internet for longer than a week then this probably has happened to you if you have had any sort of serious discussion on the internet but you can also say that doesn't make it right so I believe it's it's really important to separate what is you know harassment basically from actual disagreement and criticism and please engage in the latter do not engage in the former my problem with this paragraph it's again it's very one-sided it's basically stated here some students have reached out to us lamenting the fact that they felt unable to openly express their support for renaming the conference due to fear of bullying retaliation by faculty or advisors of other and others of position power to me I'm you know I'm gonna say this probably happens on both sides what you know one could argue where it happens more but this very much happens on both sides of this issue and it's real shame for both sides basically I think anyone should be able to express your opinion to to demonstrate that here I'm gonna show another Twitter thread by one of the authors of this paper where basically this is a thread where she posts screenshots of conversations basically people reaching out to her saying exactly that like I can't share my I have trouble sharing my opinion I get mocked for my opinion I can't do so publicly because I fear you know from my from my faculty and so on but then there's also this one here where a person wrote an email to the author basically saying they disagree with her and I I've read this email I don't you know I don't agree with the arguments here made but I can say that the this is not verbal abuse it's not personal attack it's not physically threatening it's actually quite respectful disagreement that the person actually goes through length to say how respectful they are how much you know how much this is meant as a as a disagreement on factual terms and further what they say is that they want to be anonymous maybe you see it on the very bottom for example I haven't done too much to anonymize myself but I ask you to respect my wishes of remaining anonymous don't try to figure out who I am further up they state basically they want to remain anonymous because they fear for their ladder for their later career right they fear of a backlash up here wish to remain anonymous as I'm an early in my career someday we may work together so basically they say here I disagree here's why I disagree and they wish to remain anonymous because they fear for their career right so this is almost like this is this is very much here feeling unable and will will go feeling unable to openly express their in the case support against renaming the conference to to fear of bullying or retaliation by faculty advisor others in position of power so this author here is obviously a real person in position of power and in very famous senior researcher and this person basically says I'm afraid and I can't you know that that's why I'm anonymous and the way the author responded here as you can read is what an anonymous coward of course I will do everything to guess you and it's it's difficult to to kind of put this off as I mean even if it's I don't know how it's meant right I will do everything to guess you and the least it means she will try to figure out who that is right and she doesn't go as far as saying that she will then basically either you know remember that name in case of any future thing or share it or whatnot but it's certainly you can't argue that this is a real deterrent for other people to even anonymously voice their opinion to if if this person announces I will do everything to guess you to me that that shows that this fear that we discuss here is very much present on both sides and it's absolutely not okay if if either side reacts by basically by basically retaliation or even even the the possibility of retaliation and I believe everyone should be able to say their opinion I respect really everyone even like these these authors here clearly took a lot of effort and a lot of a lot of beating basically they say they've been relentlessly trolled harassed verbally abused even physically threatened this is just really bad and have lots of respect for them saying their opinions stating their opinions anyway I think everyone should be able to do that without these things happening so to everyone watching I encourage you to not engage in these things and that alone will probably make the environment much much more inclusive and nice for everybody irregardless of of affiliation so that was it for me for this paper it's a bit longer it's a bit ranty if you agree disagree let me know in the comments I guess and other than that have a nice week weekend whatever you do bye
 Hello and welcome. Today we're going to look at what's in a name, the need to nip
 NIPS by Daniela Witten, Alina Oferdig, Anima Shri Anand Kumar and Jeff Dean.
 This is a bit of a special paper as it's not an academic topic. The paper in fact
 is about the change of name or rather change in acronym for the conference
 Neural Information Processing Systems, previously abbreviated NIPS, but now for
 the first year this conference has been hosted under the acronym NURIPS. The
 people here on the paper are not the organizers of the conference, they are
 advocates for the name change and the paper basically outlines their arguments
 and a bit of description of what happened. So they're also pretty big names
 in the community so it should be interesting to see what they have to say.
 The paper is pretty short, it's three parts, three pages and we're going to go
 through it and yeah let's jump into it. So I have it over here. Alright so the
 first part of the paper basically describes, it's called What's all the Fuzz
 About? It basically describes why a name change was necessary in their
 perspective. So they say in machine learning like the rest of them
 suffers from severe gender imbalance, low retention rates for women and so on.
 They also describe the MeToo movement, increased awareness of sexual harassment
 faced by many female researchers, pervasiveness of sexual harassment at
 computational conferences and they reference an article here. I want to kind
 of show you this article. It's this article here. So if you haven't seen this
 yet I encourage you to read it. It's pretty horrifying to read but it gives
 you an idea of what people talk about when they say sexual harassment is a
 problem, is pervasive at conferences and so on. So yeah just I don't want to go
 into this specifically. Just go ahead read it and you know see what people are
 talking about. I think it's important context to understand where people are
 coming from. So they go on to say however more subtle acts of gender
 harassment defined in this report. This includes like sexist hostility, crude
 behavior and so on have gotten less public attention. Nonetheless gender
 harassment is extremely pervasive, is direct contributor to the challenges
 faced by women in the STEM field. In this article we argue that NIPS, the former
 acronym of the Neuro-Information Processing Systems Conference, constituted
 gender harassment towards women. So that's what their arguments basically
 about. So the acronym led to basically had its part in gender harassment
 towards women. Basically led to an environment where women could not feel
 comfortable at this conference. So here's their description. In popular
 slang the word NIPS is an abbreviation for nipples. Furthermore it has
 historically been used as a racial slur targeting people of Japanese origin but
 we'll not go into this deeper because that's kind of a historic use of the
 word. The current use of the word in fact is the slang for nipples and so
 we'll focus on that. They say at first glance the fact that a major
 machine learning conference shared its name with this slang is an unfortunate
 but unimportant coincidence. And it really is a coincidence. I think the
 the conference name has been around for longer than the slang has been kind of
 popular. The slang word has been popular so it really is a coincidence. Many other
 conferences have same coincidences like Colt for example. Maybe actually that's
 even less a coincidence than here. They say in fact one might hope that
 members of the machine learning community are sufficiently mature that
 the conference's name is unimportant. That's basically what everyone
 would hope. Maybe people don't even notice and if they notice maybe
 they'll have like a two-second oh that's you know that's the other word haha but
 then we basically just go on with our lives and no one cares too much. So that
 that's kind of the ideal scenario and they acknowledge that here. It's
 really important that they say unfortunately this appears
 not to be the case. They detail a few examples here at the 2017 conference
 Elon Musk made inappropriate jokes about the acronym participants wore loot
 t-shirts. I think one said my nips are NP hard which is kind of a double
 computer science joke I guess. There was a pre-conference event named
 word I can't probably say out loud without getting some sort of strike.
 You can clearly see that even though the kind of original name is coincidental
 and you know one would hope that people are like you know just putting it off be
 adult about it. There have been jokes, there have been you know t-shirts
 made and you know you can say the name collision is not like is
 unintended but I think this word here is very intended. So I think the
 main argument here or one of the main arguments is this really first of all
 creates an environment where certain people don't feel comfortable. It creates
 kind of a sexualized environment. Second of all and the more broader sense it's
 just unprofessional as a community especially since the kind of community
 is booming. We want to represent machine learning to the wider world. One can
 say okay it's you know it's just in professional that we kind of bring
 intertwine these things. It doesn't make a good impression. They say furthermore
 reminders of the unfortunate acronym are everywhere. Online searches for the
 acronym led to not safer work content. The hashtag NIPS is devoted to
 pornography. If you misspell the conference website you get to an adult
 site and I think this yeah this further goes into the argument that it's just an
 unprofessional appearance towards the outside. It's unfortunate the conference
 has been here longer but you know still there's a need to do something about it
 and I largely agree with these arguments that these are good arguments to make
 for a change of name. This paragraph down here it's a bit of a
 we'll go into that later. It's not very connected to the arguments made here so
 well it's more like connected to what's been happening so we'll go into that
 later. People have been circulating these arguments and calling for a name
 change for a while and then the the board of the conference the NIPS board
 made a survey surveying the attendance of the last five years conferences
 whether or not the conference should change its name. The next section
 is dedicated to how the survey turned out and what the response of the board
 was. So actually let's first go to the decision by the board.
 So here is the press release. This is a press release after the survey results
 had been collected. So they said our survey was returned by about 2200
 people here and as I said have attended NIPS in the last five years. Of the male
 respondents about 28% are in favor of the conference name change of the female
 respondents about 44% are in favor of a name change. 40% prefer the existing
 name 16% expressed no preferences. In fact let's go look at the detailed
 results which they have down here. So you can see overall there is a big a big
 slant towards not agree. So negative 2 is strongly disagree with the name change
 while positive 2 is strongly agree. So you can see there's a big slant towards
 the not agree. If you split this by gender of respondents then you can see
 the basically the male distribution is that slant while the female
 distribution is a bit different as you can see here. The first thing it's
 mostly towards the extremes. So there are more people strongly saying
 something than non-strongly saying something to either side. And the
 second of all it seems very divided and very evenly divided. So in fact if you
 look at the numbers if you count the disagrees and agrees you'll find there's
 a slight majority in the agrees. There is a slight majority in the disagrees if
 you only consider the strongs. But ultimately these numbers are pretty
 close so that there's people on either side feeling strongly and
 there's about in this survey about as many on either side. So that's basically
 the outcome of this. Here I find very interesting some quotes from
 respondents. So you had the opportunity to put quotes to put like a
 comment and these are quoted from these comments. So they say for example this
 thanks for considering a name change. I'm not personally bothered by the current
 name but I think the gesture will send a much-needed inclusive vibe in the right
 direction. One person says if you were up to me I'd call off this nice
 but symbolic gesture. Use whatever time money and energy to make actual changes.
 Then someone says please please please change the name it is sexist and racist
 slur. I'm embarrassed every time I have to say the name of the conference.
 This feeds into the unprofessionalism argument. The next one I find very
 interesting. It says as a woman I find it offensive that the board is seriously
 considering changing the name of the meeting because of an adolescent
 reference to a woman's body. From my point of view it shows that the board
 does not see me as an equal member of the community but as a woman first and
 a scientist second. This is extremely interesting. So this is one of the
 people who was a female respondent and said strongly disagree with the name
 change or disagree with the name change. I mean I can guess. So we've only
 heard so far that the name or the acronym is offensive to women but here
 we have a woman saying that the consideration to change the acronym is
 actually offensive to her. That's very special and
 understandable. I can understand why that happens. I can
 understand the argument made here. This woman feels like okay it shows
 me that basically my gender is important and not really my being scientist.
 It's an argument. The next one goes into the same direction. It says I'm
 a woman. I've experienced being harassed by male academics and I would like this
 problem to be discussed and addressed but not in this frankly almost offensive
 way. Another person saying basically that's changing the name is
 almost offensive and it's not the right way to go to achieve
 these results. There's another one saying I'm in favor of the name change but this
 is cosmetic. So you have basically people coming from all angles
 giving their opinions and you can clearly see why there is especially in
 the female respondent group why there is a divide. So the board
 overall said the following. The board overall said the following.
 After extensive discussions the NIPS board has decided not to change the
 name of the conference for now. The poll itself did not yield a clear consensus
 on a name change or a well-regarded alternative name. Further they state
 instead we ask the community support in implementing concrete steps to improve
 the inclusiveness of the conference. So these are described down here. They have
 a number of changes to make the conference basically more inclusive. So
 they basically said okay so the name change survey was
 inconclusive and they clearly say whatever we do here regardless of which
 decision we take we're failing to accommodate the opinions about half the
 women in the community. Which is true this is clearly what you can see from
 the results from the quotes. So basically what they say is we'll not
 change the conference name for now. We'll implement these steps because what they
 I can guess what they felt was okay even the people against the name change were
 in support of making the conference more inclusive. So they basically say okay we
 do these things we strengthen their code of conduct. We have two inclusion
 diversity chairs. We have an inclusion town hall. We have childcare support.
 Gender-inclusive restrooms and so on and so on. Mentoring breakfasts for women and
 other minorities. So they take these steps concretely. They say this is what
 we do and even further if you look at their page on diversity and inclusion
 which I have here. They say here on the top in addition to hosting diversity
 related event the conference also making consider structural changes include a
 new code of conduct we've already seen and in-depth discussion of the potential
 of changing the name of the conference. So in total what they're saying is we've
 done this poll. It came back inconclusive which you've I think
 has been clearly demonstrated. We'll not change the name of the
 conference for now and we'll do all of these other things
 right down there and at the conference we'll hold a meeting and discuss the
 name change so we could maybe potentially change it in upcoming years.
 I think this is a really sensible decision by the board. I mean given
 this data given all of that this is probably the most sensible decision.
 Let's take concrete steps. The name change seems to be you know debatable so
 let's actually debate it at the conference with the actual community.
 That was the basically result of the poll. Let's now go back to what the paper
 has to say about this. Here's the paper again and they say in order to collect
 data about the machine learning community's feelings about the
 conference name the conference board sent out a survey to people who have
 attended the conference during the past five years. However serving
 conference attendees results in a very biased sample of a much larger community
 of potential machine learning researchers. Bias arises due to the fact
 that some people who are made uncomfortable by the name or by other
 aspects of the machine learning culture may have decided not to enter or to
 remain in the or not to remain in the field have chosen not to attend the
 conference. So basically you're saying well if you only ask this one group of
 people right then this other group of people you know doesn't have a chance
 to make their voice heard and there is basically bias because in this other
 group of people the people who have not attended the conference they would would
 have a severely different opinion from the people who have attended the
 conference. So first of all I think this can be a valid point here of course all
 the ways if you ask one group of people and exclude another one you there's
 there's if the if the group you ask and the target group which here it's really
 unclear what it is I guess it's the machine learning community considering
 going to the conference if those don't overlap then you you will introduce some
 sort of bias and they say okay bias could come from the fact you know some
 people who actually are affected by these problems of which this name is one
 they may have you know not attended the conference because they may have left
 the field because the the gender harassment is so pervasive and they just
 didn't didn't stay and so on. So I think this can be a good point but the problem
 I have with it here is that it's simply stated without anything it's simply said
 okay there is bias, bias arises and my question would be how much is that bias
 of any data like any data on this you can't just criticize these that the
 survey for being biased and and then not provide actual data like how many people
 are there who are made uncomfortable by the name or have left the field in who
 have left the field because of these things and is it really viable to to
 count them in I guess okay we can argue it is but how would they have responded
 to this we've clearly seen that a lot of affected people that even have
 experienced harassment are not in favor of the name change so in this case I
 would really like to see some data on how much this bias is right and I cannot
 also say it's not it's not that bad of a decision to what the board did to send
 the survey to the last five years attendees I think is a very sensible
 choice if you want to gather the community's feelings towards these kind
 of things I mean you you can't just ask the entire world because the entire
 world is not the machine learning community so I think the this is a very
 sensible decision to ask last five years attendees and if you have real evidence
 that this causes a notifiable like a significant bias then we could
 potentially correct for that bias but without any data on that I think the the
 asking last five years participants was completely reasonable and one of I don't
 really see how you can do a much better job without much much more manual work
 and I want to make this point a bit clearer on how hard it actually is to do
 that by pointing to the response to this so here is a tweet thread by one of the
 authors of this paper after the conference decision came out she
 basically tweeted out this protest nips I am starting this new hashtag please
 retweet if you're in support of the next conference changing its name so
 basically kind of launching a a Twitter campaign a Twitter hashtag under this to
 come you know get into a conversation with people about this people could
 express their support she also that was a misclick she also here made a change
 dot org petition to change the name so a petition basically petition is here the
 text of the petition basically says something similar to the to the what
 we've already seen including there is a the criticism of the survey and as you
 can see here about 2,000 people have signed it so I mean a Twitter hashtag is
 all good you know you can do that a petition is all good you can do that but
 it's a bit ironic because a change that org petition literally anyone can
 sign this and in addition to that there's only one option you can only say
 yes you can't even say no right so and even more who's gonna see the change
 that org petition it's gonna be the social media followers of these people
 right so basically you have now a you have it now what's basically a survey of
 the social media network of people in favor of changing the name where there's
 only one option to respond I I find it and so I've gone through here the people
 who actually publicly associate their name give a reason for signing a lot of
 these they you know they give some argument why they've signed the petition
 but I've tried searching these people for any sort of academic track record and
 in my sample I've come up with between 10 and 20 percent of people who somehow
 have an academic track record so this is I mean certainly a valid thing to make
 your voice heard and to show your numbers and but I mean look at this there's a
 bot signing twice hello Jack Nelson and Richard Chi very nice but so basically
 I'm not here to criticize petitions but what I want to say is you can't like
 criticize this this poll so hard for being biased and then launching basically
 an own poll that's even more biased and even more non-representative of the
 community to me that's that's kind of ironic and just goes to show how hard
 this is and my argument would be it's actually not that unsensible of a
 decision of the board the way they did it and if you have again if you have
 data to actually quantify the bias here then it's viable to go and correct for
 that all right so to they go on to analyze the survey results conference
 board simply noted that of the 294 women surveyed the number who strongly
 support or support the name change is comparable to the number of women who
 are strongly opposed or opposed however this analysis implicitly assumes that
 one person's feeling of discomfort or marginalization as a result of the name
 should be given the same weight as another person's preference for the
 status quo this amounts to giving the same way to false positives and false
 negatives of course we learn in an introductory statistics course that
 false positives and false negatives should be assigned weights dependent on
 context in this context we feel that a much greater weight should be given to
 the views of a person who feels marginalized as a result of the name so
 up here I find this a bit strange they say this amounts to giving the same way
 to false positives and false negatives to me the false is here a bit confusing
 because it seems to me it's it's simply giving the same weight to negatives and
 positives there's I don't think there's a need to dress this up in statistical
 lingo here it simply we give the same weight to people who responded
 positively and to people who responded negatively I think that's that's it
 there's no false of course we learn in a truck see this is class that false
 positives and false negatives should be assigned weights dependent on context in
 this context we feel that a much greater weight should be given to the views of
 person who feels marginalized as a result of the name I would I would say
 to this it's the problem for me it's these are this is one of the things that
 where you at you read it first and you say like oh yeah this makes sense but
 first of all it's framed extremely one-sided it's framed as all the people
 who are for the name change like they they feel discomforted they feel
 marginalized and the people who are against the name change they simply and
 here specifically they they they talk about the women group so in argument
 they're all affected the people against it simply prefer the status quo but
 we've clearly seen in the in the in the press release and we'll go over to that
 now these quotes here we've clearly seen that the the offense and the
 marginalization happens on both sides so here this as a woman I find it
 offensive that the board is considering changing the name it shows that the
 board does not see me as an equal member of the community but as a woman first
 and the scientists second I mean this is almost a textbook definition of
 marginalization and this is clearly happening on the other side as well so I
 think the framing here is extremely dishonest and one-sided and there is
 given basically the the side that we just seen in this quote is given
 absolutely no not even a mention that it exists it's simply framed as this side
 is marginalized and oppressed and discomforted and the other side simply
 prefers the status quo but we've clearly seen that yeah it's almost a this fits
 exactly this definition it's just one person's feeling or discomfort or
 marginalization as a result of the name it's just as a result of the name change
 second of all I think the the bigger problem and this goes into the statement
 down here to state this last point more explicitly an issue adversely affecting
 the minority of participants should not be decided by a majority vote again
 something at first you say oh yeah that makes sense but if you think about it
 this is a really really outrageous statement and the reason is it's it's
 it's outrageous is if the mud if it's not majority vote if it's not one person
 one vote then someone has to decide who gets to vote and who doesn't and more so
 specifically here someone basically needs to decide who should be given what
 weight in the vote right you need someone to decide this and here you can
 say well it's easy it's just the the women right because they're affected I
 this but they go further they say well it's the women who feel discomforted
 and marginalized who should be given more weight than the ones who simply
 prefer the status quo but then you have to have someone assessing whether someone
 is really marginalized and discomforted or simply prefers the status quo and
 it's not like an environment where there is kind of a sexist undertone isn't
 also discomforting or can't also be discomforting to men to men of any sort
 or people of of any sort of gender it's just not clear that the fact that people
 should be given different weight in in crafting an opinion I mean this this can
 be true if you have like some clear area of expertise but in this case it's
 really unclear and the fact is if it's not majority vote you need someone
 deciding the weight and the someone deciding the weights automatically
 decides on the outcome of the vote and then why do you need a vote in the first
 place basically up here they say yeah we feel the great weights should be aligned
 like this and down here there is no more we feel it's be an issue at worst
 affecting the minority of participants should not be decided by majority vote
 they're basically calling for a dictatorship in this case and I'm gonna
 guess like everyone has the opinion the dictatorship would be an awesome idea if
 the dictator were me right that's that's what everyone thinks of course and that's
 basically the argument made here but it's not it's not true and there's some
 really really disturbing implicit things in here and maybe I want to quickly go
 over how I think a democratic decision works so imagine you have a person and
 the person has decision to make for or against in this case the name change
 right and the person must decide on one of these two things on a let's say on a
 continuous scale but it doesn't matter what what this what this stuff up here
 basically implicitly assumes is that the person looks at themselves and they
 think well am I personally discomforted or marginalized by the name or the
 climate it creates no then I'm obviously against the name change because it
 doesn't help me or another person go am I personally affected yes well I feel
 discomforted or marginalized well then I'm obviously for a name change so the
 basic assumption here is that people simply vote purely their own egotistical
 interests and that's that's it so basically if you're in one of these
 minorities then you'll vote for the name change because it affects you which
 we've already seen is not it's not a given that people vote that way and if
 you're not in this then you know you you'd vote against but you're not
 affected so your vote shouldn't count it's completely untrue what people do
 especially smart people and I believe the machine learning community consists
 largely of these what they do is they'll make a list of arguments argument one
 argument two argument three argument for everyone has the same arguments
 everyone's hurt the same arguments if not then maybe there's some work to do
 in actually getting arguments to people but that's not the same as weighing the
 people differently you get the arguments to the people and then you weigh each of
 them equally why because what every person does is they say okay argument
 one is maybe it's unprofessional right name is unprofessional alright how
 important is that to me give it a weight weight one cool that's really important
 to me I'll give it a big weight argument two some people feel really
 discomfort like discomforted if you're marginalized by the name creates a bad
 environment for them how much weight am I gonna give to that right so people can
 actually consider other people's feelings and other people's problems and
 decide on what's the best also for them in their own mind so they give it a weight
 two and then there's maybe two arguments against some given these weight three
 weight four at the end what you have is you have argument I you will sum it up
 by the weights W I J you will sum it up over all people so basically now and this
 will give you like a final number a which is either positive or negative if
 it's positive you do the name change if it's negative you don't do the name
 change if you do this over all people what you've basically done is you have
 just determined these weightings here by a democratic process you've crowd sourced
 the weighting this is exactly what these people say up here right we feel we feel
 that you're not false false positives false we feel that positives and
 negatives should be assigned weights dependent on context so the positive and
 negative arguments in this case are assigned weights dependent on context
 but the weights are crowd sourced to the community right and each person this who
 participates in that each person who participates is one more brain power in
 a complicated decision that no one basically no one has the authority just
 to just decide for themselves so these people are calling for different
 weighting this is the way to do it the democratic majority vote is the exact
 way to determine these weights what these people basically are no no no no
 no we should determine the weights we who know I'm a bit corny here but this is
 basically it's still it's two alternatives either you do democratic
 process one person one brain one vote and that will give you a crowd sourced
 crowd sourced true weighting of the arguments what the community feels or
 someone needs to decide some one needs to side by force basically and that's a
 dictatorship so these are the choices you have and clearly now you can maybe
 understand why I say this is an outrageous statement because to me the
 dictatorship option is not an option note that I'm not saying that democracy
 can never be wrong or the majority can never be wrong but in fact it's the best
 system there is can be wrong but anything else will undoubtedly go more
 wrong so that's my point here alright so that was a maybe a bit ranty but let's
 go on a false choice and a minimization of a real issue so they go on to say
 what they think of the decision that the board made in response to this so up was
 how they analyzed the poll and now it's the decision in announcing their
 decision not to change the conference name conference board expressed
 commitment to implement concrete steps to improve the inclusiveness of the
 conference and they list them here and they say we sincerely applaud the
 conference board for these efforts okay I yeah I think the community feels like
 that as well however the wording of the decision implied the need to choose
 between changing the name of the conference and taking concrete steps to
 improve its inclusiveness I don't see that at all say this was a false choice
 there's no reason that the board could not do both yes there's no reason that
 they couldn't do both and I believe we've read this together before I don't
 think the board ever said that there was a choice between one or the other I
 think they've said very much the opposite let's go back I think what they
 mean here is the word instead so here they say we won't change the name and
 then here's they say instead we ask for the community support and implementing
 creed steps I think this this must be it because I don't really see any other way
 you would ever think that and the reason is this here they say will not change
 the name of the conference for now on another page they say it will discuss
 the name change at the conference and then here the instead I think what is
 meant is instead what we will do right now is these things we'll discuss about
 the name change but what we will do right now which was basically not the
 the real problem in the first place the real issue raised was the name so
 instead of that issue we'll do these other things which we feel the community
 wants I think that's the I think there's no I think everyone reading this comes
 to the same conclusion after after reading that but so I really don't see
 how you you can say that this is kind of presented as an either or by the board I
 don't think that at all and but you decide for yourself I believe the real
 real real crocs here is the for now and the promise to discuss at the
 conference which if you can see here in the paper is never ever ever touched
 right this they make it basically seem that the board has decided to not
 change the name and that's it which is completely wrong they've clearly stated
 their openness to a name change they want to discuss it it was just
 inconclusive so they want to basically not do anything rash and then half the
 community is against it anyway so they want to discuss it I to say that this is
 the basically that that the wording implied the need to choose I don't see
 that um but you know you decide for yourselves the board suggested a name
 change would only be symbolic and so on would have no real consequences so that
 this this these are some of the arguments basically made in the quotes
 as well but you know the fact that the name change would only be symbolic and
 so on these are all things you could actually discuss at the con at this
 conference meeting you could even correct for your for your poll right you
 could invite people who have left the community to represent those you could
 invite new potential researchers you could give everyone their voice and then
 actually listen to all of them I think that's a very sensible decision by the
 board and I think this is misrepresented here lastly let's say another argument
 though not explicitly mentioned a number of machine learning researchers told us
 that changing the name of the conference lead to too much confusion in the
 community while we understand we respectfully do not share it I mean this
 is it's basically an argument against the name change I think it's also a
 point worthy of discussion right that they say they say we respectfully do not
 share this point yeah okay they don't share it other people do it's a point
 of discussion we could you know you could actually discuss it at the
 conference but I actually agree with the authors here I think changing the name
 will not have a big impact on the kind of recognizability of the conference
 especially now down here we'll actually get into what actually happened in
 November the in response to extensive public backlash the conference board
 announced a change to the official conference acronym to NRIPS they say we
 are pleased provides this provides a reasonable compromise so in in my opinion
 this is it as far as solutions go this is a good solution right the NRIPS
 acronym I think it's it's it's cool you don't have to change the name of the
 conference itself you simply change the acronym which you know was the the
 reported problem in the first place I think the all the new papers will like
 people will still recognize the old NIPS acronym or the new conference it will be
 clear that it's the same thing and I think this is a very good a very good
 new name and I think people will get used to it pretty quickly it also you
 know to say NRIPS it it's also rolls off the tongue easily so it's as far as
 solutions go I like it further they say however the work for the conference
 board is far from done oops we encourage the board to continue its efforts blah
 blah blah so they say okay you have to do more than just change the name and so
 on they say together these steps will help ensure that the NRIPS conference
 retains its place in the forefront of machine learning research while also
 creating a welcoming environment for women and members of other representative
 groups on other underrepresented groups we all hope that to me the problem is a
 bit how this how this went down and if we go back and look at the actual press
 release of the name change they say here dear members of the neural information
 processing systems community something remarkable has happened in our
 community the name NRIPS has sprung up organically as an alternative acronym
 we're delighted to see it being adopted indeed one forward-thinking member of
 the community purchased NRIPS comm described as purpose as hosting
 conference content under different acronym until the board catches up we've
 caught up we're considering alternative acronyms when the community support for
 NRIPS became apparent we ask all attendees to respect the solution from
 the community use the new acronym so basically they've rebranded the entire
 conference about a month before the actual meeting asked all sponsors all
 invited companies asked all invited papers to rebrand the acronym to me
 this the wording here is fit is a bit funny like something remarkable has
 happened in our community has sprung up organically and now we'll just adopt it
 it seems like it seems like much less of the fairy tale to describe here but the
 actual like there's a there's a mob with pitchforks around your house and this is
 like the first kind of straw that you can grab to to make them calm down and
 also know that some companies have begun pulling out funding for the conference
 so I think this is really this was really you know much more backed by
 force and and back yeah what they say in the paper extensive public backlash so
 loud screaming basically then this this kind of the name has sprung up
 organically and has been adopted and seems much more bit forceful to me it
 would have still been a viable path the most valuable path to actually wait for
 the conference and then have that discussion and then if indeed this name
 in the rips would be would be presented as a good alternative and you know
 people would be fine with that then you could still make the name change for
 last for next year I think this this would have been a good alternative my
 fear now is this has been extremely rash extremely forceful as as I've said also
 accompanied by with like by withdrawal of funding that I believe these things
 usually provoke a backlash and that's really something that I wouldn't look
 forward to so I hope that this con that this paragraph down here is true that
 actually we will see a more welcoming environment for everyone but I believe
 things like this tend in society to have the sometimes very opposite effects of
 what's intended and so I hope this does not produce a backlash I think having
 had the actual discussion doing things non rashly would have done much more in
 the direction of preventing such a backlash so this is the end of the paper
 so to recap they basically say the acronym was was inappropriate which I
 agree with they say the survey was bad which I could believe if there was data
 they say that an issue adversely affecting the minority of participants
 should not be cited by majority vote which I absolutely disagree with and
 then they say the board has basically stated this as an either or decision
 which is I believe not true and misrepresenting or maybe I've missed
 something it's always possible lastly I want to get to this paragraph in recent
 months a number of women including some of the authors of this article who
 publicly expressed support for a change of the conference name have been
 relentlessly trolled harassed verbally abused and even physically threatened on
 Twitter reddit other online forums much of this harassment they say has been
 anonymous and typically has had an extremely gendered tone furthermore some
 students have reached out to us the authors lamenting the fact that they
 felt unable to openly express their support for renaming the conference due
 to fear of bullying or retaliation by faculty advisors or others in position
 of power this I believe is really bad the fact that people can't speak out
 about something like this without being bullied or harassed or having to fear
 for their careers basically is is bad and I would really discourage everyone
 from engaging in such behavior verbal abuse physically threaten I mean that's
 I mean to one point you can say all right if you've been on the internet for
 longer than a week then this probably has happened to you if you have had any
 sort of serious discussion on the internet but you can also say that
 doesn't make it right so I believe it's it's really important to separate what
 is you know harassment basically from actual disagreement and criticism and
 please engage in the latter do not engage in the former my problem with
 this paragraph it's again it's very one-sided it's basically stated here
 some students have reached out to us lamenting the fact that they felt unable
 to openly express their support for renaming the conference due to fear of
 bullying retaliation by faculty or advisors of other and others of position
 power to me I'm you know I'm gonna say this probably happens on both sides what
 you know one could argue where it happens more but this very much happens
 on both sides of this issue and it's real shame for both sides basically I
 think anyone should be able to express your opinion to to demonstrate that here
 I'm gonna show another Twitter thread by one of the authors of this paper where
 basically this is a thread where she posts screenshots of conversations
 basically people reaching out to her saying exactly that like I can't share
 my I have trouble sharing my opinion I get mocked for my opinion I can't do so
 publicly because I fear you know from my from my faculty and so on but then
 there's also this one here where a person wrote an email to the author
 basically saying they disagree with her and I I've read this email I don't you
 know I don't agree with the arguments here made but I can say that the this is
 not verbal abuse it's not personal attack it's not physically threatening
 it's actually quite respectful disagreement that the person actually
 goes through length to say how respectful they are how much you know how
 much this is meant as a as a disagreement on factual terms and further
 what they say is that they want to be anonymous maybe you see it on the very
 bottom for example I haven't done too much to anonymize myself but I ask you
 to respect my wishes of remaining anonymous don't try to figure out who I
 am further up they state basically they want to remain anonymous because they
 fear for their ladder for their later career right they fear of a backlash up
 here wish to remain anonymous as I'm an early in my career someday we may work
 together so basically they say here I disagree here's why I disagree and they
 wish to remain anonymous because they fear for their career right so this is
 almost like this is this is very much here feeling unable and will will go
 feeling unable to openly express their in the case support against renaming
 the conference to to fear of bullying or retaliation by faculty advisor others
 in position of power so this author here is obviously a real person in position
 of power and in very famous senior researcher and this person basically
 says I'm afraid and I can't you know that that's why I'm anonymous and the
 way the author responded here as you can read is what an anonymous coward of
 course I will do everything to guess you and it's it's difficult to to kind of
 put this off as I mean even if it's I don't know how it's meant right I will
 do everything to guess you and the least it means she will try to figure out who
 that is right and she doesn't go as far as saying that she will then basically
 either you know remember that name in case of any future thing or share it or
 whatnot but it's certainly you can't argue that this is a real deterrent for
 other people to even anonymously voice their opinion to if if this person
 announces I will do everything to guess you to me that that shows that this
 fear that we discuss here is very much present on both sides and it's
 absolutely not okay if if either side reacts by basically by basically
 retaliation or even even the the possibility of retaliation and I believe
 everyone should be able to say their opinion I respect really everyone even
 like these these authors here clearly took a lot of effort and a lot of a lot
 of beating basically they say they've been relentlessly trolled harassed
 verbally abused even physically threatened this is just really bad and
 have lots of respect for them saying their opinions stating their opinions
 anyway I think everyone should be able to do that without these things happening
 so to everyone watching I encourage you to not engage in these things and that
 alone will probably make the environment much much more inclusive and nice for
 everybody irregardless of of affiliation so that was it for me for this paper
 it's a bit longer it's a bit ranty if you agree disagree let me know in the
 comments I guess and other than that have a nice week weekend whatever you do
 bye