Pedro Domingos

First, I'm happy to see you move to a long form rather than tweets. I think it greatly increases the possibility for meaningful discussion. 1/9

Second, I'm hoping that you and the other drafters see that the ambiguity in the proposed letter, and applying the term "cancel culture" to a very wide range of issues, is not helping your cause. 2/9

You bring up at least these topics in your rebuttal, and so I assume you feel the letter was intended to address them: 3/9

(1) social pressure in CS to express particular political opinions in professional and social media contexts, and what constitutes appropriate ways to engage in political discussions with other professionals, 4/9

(2) potential exclusion of CS researchers or their publications from professional contexts based on those authors' political views, 5/9

(3) political selectivity in the degree to which the technical merits of CS publications are interrogtated, based on the perceived social implications of those publications, and 6/9

(4) evaluation of the ethical impacts of submitted work in CS (particularly AI), evaluation of how well the authors have examined those impacts, and the danger of a political thumb on the scale in such evaluations. 7/9

These are all important issues to discuss, and you might get me on board with a thoughtful letter on any one of them. But none of that is clear in the proposed CACM letter. @karger ended up covering half the landscape trying to figure out what he wasn't signing on to. 8/9

What *I* am not signing on to is ambiguous waving at a pile of important issues that each need careful treatment in our institutional mechanisms. What I am not signing on to is reducing the complexities of our field to just another polarized front in our society. 9/9

Good.