My point is that neither "insects are unpleasant" nor "plants are pleasant" nor "doctors are 66% male" are immutable features of the universe. They are merely snapshots of the human view of world conditions, as the world is now. "True now", but not "true forever and always".
The paper seems to advocate for designing ML systems that learn that what is "true now" may not be "true forever and always". It seems to be quite the opposite of "there are certain truths that ML systems should not learn."
If your standard for truth is "immutable feature of the universe" then you might as well give up now because we don't know about any of those, or indeed if any exist at all.
Setting such a standard for a machine is ridiculous if all you want is a new tool to get some work done.
Quite possibly. Words relating to insects will occur in news articles about malaria, zika, crop destruction, etc. Words relating to plants might occur in articles about arbor day, spring time, environmentalism, etc.
An exercise: Words relating to insects will occur in news articles about environmentalism, crop production, rituals of rebirth, etc. Words relating to plants might occur in articles about crop destruction, the international drug trade, people getting poisoned, etc.
rmxt questioned the universality of sentiment analysis. Responding by noting specific contexts, free from a clear coherent general structure, is an assertion against the discovered sentiments' universal truth.
But it is a universal truth that humans generally find plants pleasant and insects unpleasant. And the word "pleasant" is entirely based on human preferences after all.
What I'm probably missing indeed is that scoping of universality to humans. Lately I've been trying to be more explicit in my written communications in an attempt to understand both the limits of my knowledge and perceptions and the limits of the sources of information that I digest.
Is suggesting that pleasantness is a sentiment that's not unique to humans really that controversial?
super late edit: it's specifically flowers, not plants, that people are biased towards finding pleasant