[khazhoux]

That’s not a fair assessment. Just because this study is not useful in the technical advancement of the field, does not mean that studying social issues is worthless (“woke is bad”). Just that that research should happen somewhere else.

[version_five]

It's my perception of this social justice stuff that it infects everything, because it's somehow become a magic wand that give people power over others. The whole point in this example is that resources from what is ostensibly an computer science research institute is working on fringe left political issues. It wouldn't be ok if they studied "intelligent design" or whatever the current far right is up to either, but politics has managed to infiltrate research so we're all forced to deal with cuture war stuff instead of working on computer science.

[khazhoux]

I look at it like this: it’s exceedingly hard to hire strong technical people. It’s extremely hard to create cutting edge research. It’s as true here as in any research institution, especially (sorry to say it) when it’s not a top tier research institution. And so in those cases, yeah, you will find a lot of not-great research.

And someone else mentioned, here they are paying one or two orders of magnitude less than Google and other top companies for AI/ML researchers. Should we be surprised that they don’t have technical heavy hitters on their staff, or leadership?