  Researchers in NLP often frame and discuss research results in ways that
serve to deemphasize the field's successes, often in response to the field's
widespread hype. Though well-meaning, this has yielded many misleading or false
claims about the limits of our best technology. This is a problem, and it may
be more serious than it looks: It harms our credibility in ways that can make
it harder to mitigate present-day harms, like those involving biased systems
for content moderation or resume screening. It also limits our ability to
prepare for the potentially enormous impacts of more distant future advances.
This paper urges researchers to be careful about these claims and suggests some
research directions and communication strategies that will make it easier to
avoid or rebut them.
