> He can’t see why worry, and wonders what sins he committed to deserve this asshole Chinese (given the Engrish) reviewer...
That's entirely uncalled for.
Yes, there are a lot of Chinese researchers in the field, but instead of mocking them, imagine how hard it is to conduct almost all your professional work in a language almost entirely different to your native one. Learning, say, AI to a level high enough to review papers is hard enough, but now you have to also learn a whole language just on top and in your own time. And when you trip over it, you get a mouth full of abuse.
I know I couldn't submit a paper to a Chinese language journal, let alone review one. I couldn't even do it in German, and that's basically the same family as English and I was taught some at school.
Be nice to ESL people, they work incredibly hard and people don't give them enough credit.
This is HN, so perhaps you're not familiar with how fiction writing works, but the things that a character says or thinks are not necessarily the opinions of the author.
All true, but I think you might be misinterpreting this scene. While it's possible Gwern is accidentally exposing his underlying racist beliefs, my guess is there is another level here. I presumed that a "pull request" that leads to world takeover was a social engineering attack by another system, and that the awkward English was an AI's imperfect attempt at pretending to be a human. I heard echo of "How do you do, fellow kids?" Contrast with the later description of Clippy faking video calls, using the excuse of low quality webcams.
On the other hand, I presumed we'd get back to that later in the story; and as far as I can tell, we never did. So maybe a simpler explanation is in order: Gwern intended it as morality play where the lazy racist researcher gets what's coming to him. But while it's a legitimate question whether it's socially beneficial to portray flawed characters in this way without disclaimer, I'm pretty sure that Gwern appreciates that in real life Chinese researchers have remarkable communication ability even if their English is occasionally nonstandard.
> On the other hand, I presumed we'd get back to that later in the story.
Right, if it's a Chekhov's Gun (or even a Brick Joke), then that's different. I was wondering if it would turn out to be another AI that was trained on other PRs too or something, but it didn't seem to actually pan out. It just seems unnecessary to make "Chinese reviewer has bad English" as the third sentence in the whole thing. There's hardly any character development for the researcher (basically this comment, going drinking, calling the the regulations alarmism and having a husband are the only times he's really mentioned outside of his actual research), so it doesn't seem particularly salient.
Certainly, I'm not calling Gwern racist, just that if you're going to make "racist asshole" (or anything, indeed) an important part of a character, it needs more than a throwaway, otherwise you risk that instead of making that a feature of the character, it just feels like part of the cultural background.
The laziness and drinking, for example, is clearly defined with a return to it to delineate the extent of it, and it's important to the plot.
On the other hand, him having a husband is a throwaway, which simply indicates that being gay is so unremarkable that no further comment is needed (quite rightly).
A real effect of this fiction is that the cosine distance between "asshole" and "Chinese" gets a bit closer in some future word embedding models that include this fiction as part of its corpus.
Maybe this is an example of how "bias" was introduced into machine learning models from training data.
I'm ESL and I wouldn't care if someone made fun of me like this. Let people have some fun, not everything has to be responded with with twitter level outrage.
On the other hand, I have an ESL spouse and people are regularly horrible to them regarding their English (which is actually extremely good), and there have been a lot of tears and a stress disorder because of it. Maybe I'm just over sensitive because of that, but it's far too common that people write other people off as stupid or less able because they don't speak English to a fully native idiomatic standard.
In Germany I was GSL and I didn't mind being teased for mispronounciation - hilarity ensues!
But I experienced inbound contempt like this once, and I remember it clearly. But it was the contempt, not the tease, that was the problem. I could tell this person, a total stranger BTW, really hated me because I wasn't a native speaker. It didn't matter to them I was trying. (That is about as right-wing as I get, BTW: I believe it's incumbent on immigrants to keep putting effort into learning the language until they sound basically native. To give up early is...rude.)
At the end of this short video[0], a (half-thai) young woman says "Would you kindry?" while wearing a stereotypical asian farmer hat. It's funny, and highlights the supreme importance of context in general, and intent in particular.
The character insulting the reviewer caused the extinction of humanity. I don't think they're meant to be a paragon of all that is right and good in the world. (they're also a memecoin speculator, among other things)
While you’re not wrong, it’s a very American conceit to make second languages into this mountain to climb. Plenty of countries teach ESL or some other world language and then expect most students to invest about as much energy into a third language as the typical American invests in a second.
In Japan you might go to college with two years of German and five years of English. From my limited sample the third language was often a “where would I like to vacation” question.
I'm speaking from the perspective of someone who watched my spouse struggle with it for over a decade while copping a completely unacceptable amount of flak from both native speakers and other ESL speakers of other primary languages who want to show them up for what is, to me, a very impressive amount of effort. A common topic of conversation between them and their friends is how soul-draining it is to keep up in English, and most of them are PhDs or high-middle management levels, they're not 18 year olds straight out of highschool English.
I'm not just projecting my own struggles with learning Chinese.
That's entirely uncalled for.
Yes, there are a lot of Chinese researchers in the field, but instead of mocking them, imagine how hard it is to conduct almost all your professional work in a language almost entirely different to your native one. Learning, say, AI to a level high enough to review papers is hard enough, but now you have to also learn a whole language just on top and in your own time. And when you trip over it, you get a mouth full of abuse.
I know I couldn't submit a paper to a Chinese language journal, let alone review one. I couldn't even do it in German, and that's basically the same family as English and I was taught some at school.
Be nice to ESL people, they work incredibly hard and people don't give them enough credit.