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Ryan Orban

Ryan Orban

Subject
5 entries

Ethics

Bookmarks

  1. Machine Learning's First Cheating Scandal

    A post-mortem on a Kaggle-era incident where participants gamed the public leaderboard through repeated test-set probing — effectively overfitting to held-out data via the submission API. Raised serious questions about how ML benchmarks and competitions should be designed.

  2. New DNA Construct Can Set Off a "Mutagenic Chain Reaction"

    Ars Technica on the first demonstration of a CRISPR-based gene drive — a genetic construct that can spread a modification through an entire wild population. One of the most consequential biotechnology developments of 2015, with ecological and ethical implications that are still being worked out.

  3. Lance Armstrong Stripped of Tour de France Titles

    The UCI's 2012 decision to strip Lance Armstrong of all seven Tour de France titles after USADA published its doping case — the end of a long fraud and a reckoning for professional cycling's permissive relationship with performance-enhancing drugs.

  4. DNA Blueprint for Fetus Built Using Samples From Parents

    NYT coverage of a 2012 breakthrough: reconstructing a fetal genome from samples of parents' blood and the father's saliva, without invasive amniocentesis. A preview of prenatal genomics that raised immediate ethical questions about what to do with the information.

  5. "Fail Fast" Is Not an Excuse for Being a Moron, a Flake, or a Scumbag

    Michael O. Church's rebuttal of 'fail fast' as a cultural cover for irresponsible behavior in startups — it means iterate quickly on product, not burn bridges, mistreat employees, or make reckless promises. A pushback against the valley's weaponization of failure mythology.

All bookmarks