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I feel the title is a little misleading. "withering email" == "anger-fueled message sent by a manager to a large group that asks readers to ignore company poli
by room500 6y ago
I feel the title is a little misleading.
"withering email" == "anger-fueled message sent by a manager to a large group that asks readers to ignore company policy and start arguments with other leaders"
I don't see where "ethical AI researcher" comes into play here. Instead, I see a leader at a company unprofessionally sending messages to a large listserv and is later fired.
What am I missing?
- idlewords 6y agoYou're missing that she wasn't fired.
- cool_dude85 6y agoWhat's misleading about the title? You have your own way of characterizing the email, and so does the publication. Them not agreeing with you isn't the same as misleading you.
- robertlagrant 6y agoDisagreement about characterisation matters if one characterisation is just not true.
- cool_dude85 6y agoSure, only that doesn't seem like the case here. Are you really gonna argue that the email is in a factual, true-or-false sense, not "withering"?
- room500 6y agoI agree that there is a fine line here. In general, if I hear "withering e-mail" without context, I imagine an e-mail sent between two parties (or at most, a handful) where one party is cutting down the other directly. When I hear that an employee was fired for a "withering e-mail", I immediately think of retaliation. In this case, "e-mail" is almost inconsequential. This "e-mail" was a broadcast to hundreds of people who were not in any way involved with the subject matter. It was "withering" in the sense that it cut someone down, but the person/company it cut down wasn't even in the TO field. Words matter. I now notice that the post title is changed to the much more neutral "AI researcher Timnit Gebru resigns from Google".
- lowercase1 6y agoThe anger is a distraction. The allegations are most important. "Google silences minorities/women/AI researchers" is way more interesting/important than "Google/AI researcher did/didn't misbehave."
- oh_sigh 6y agoCan we be more careful with our language? Saying "X silenced a minority/woman" or whatever is not saying that "X silenced a minority/woman because they are a minority/woman". It isn't really clear with your first quote if one thinks that silencing people generally is okay, but not minorities/women, or if silencing anyone is never okay, or if the minority/woman was silenced merely for their demographic status.
- lowercase1 6y agoIt's an abbreviation for any/all/some of those things being more important/interesting than what most of discussion here is about (whether letter/firing is appropriate)
- fortran77 6y ago> What am I missing? She wasn't fired. She said she'd resign if they didn't meet her conditions, so the accepted her resignation. She's being disingenuous.