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This person forced Yann LeCun (one of the top 3 AI/ML researchers today, head of Facebook AI, and an ML researcher since the 80s) to give up on Twitter after sh

This person forced Yann LeCun (one of the top 3 AI/ML researchers today, head of Facebook AI, and an ML researcher since the 80s) to give up on Twitter after she took exception to this tweet of his: https://twitter.com/ylecun/status/1274782757907030016 https://twitter.com/ylecun/status/1274782757907030016 She lives her life attacking people who she disagrees with, and brings in race/gender into any conflict where she's involved. I am surprised Google had hired her, because it was only a matter of time they'd become collateral damage in this roving tornado of hate and aggression. From what I have seen today, she gave them an ultimatum: do this, this and that or else I will leave. They decided to not do those things she demanded, and then proceeded to fire her before she could do any more internal damage.

elevenoh 6y ago
Thanks for sharing. Curious: How did she 'force him to give up on twitter'? There's a lotta companies who've hired ticking time bombs like this. They don't get why they were truly hired.
- 1024core 6y ago
  It was discussed on HN a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23696427 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23696427
- hintymad 6y ago
  Easy. Just call that person a racist, a bigot, or an oppressor without a shred of evidence. > A person: I think bias in machine learning is caused by bias in training data. > Me: Why are you ignoring all I've been saying? You're a racist. You're a white man who oppresses. I'm not going to talk to a bigot like you. Repeat this a few times, the attacked will be punished both online and offline. Justice served.
  - tfehring 6y ago
    I don't think that's a fair characterization of Gebru's argument there at all. A better summary might be "You're the Chief AI Scientist at a massively influential and profitable company with billions of users and exabytes of data, you can't just throw up your hands and say 'welp, that's what the model spits out so that's what we're stuck with.'"
    - njanirudh 6y ago
      Its more like " There are difficulties on collecting data and historical reasons that leads to bias in the trained model" Other side " no you are a racist and responsible for bias due for being a white male"
      - tfehring 6y ago
        It's pretty clear that Gebru criticized LeCun for being apathetic about an obviously biased model, not because he's a white male. And again, "There are difficulties on collecting data and historical reasons that leads to bias in the trained model" is accurate, but it's still a total cop-out! There's no way Facebook would let results like [0] slide if there were money at stake - they'd get more training data, or even throw out training images of white faces, if they had to - so why is LeCun defending someone else's failure to do so? More importantly, how should that make us feel about the very real possibility of LeCun serving as an expert advisor on, say, police or other military applications of AI? Would he again just throw up his hands and say, "Well the training data consists disproportionately of black faces, so the model disproportionately implicates black people, nothing we can do about it"? [0] https://twitter.com/Chicken3gg/status/1274314622447820801 https://twitter.com/Chicken3gg/status/1274314622447820801
        deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
        PrefixKitten 6y ago
        All real world data is inherently biased... Don't they teach this fact in introductory statistics? I can't imagine otherwise.
  - BlueTemplar 6y ago
    "SJW"'s are racist and sexist. (AmIdoingitright?)
deanCommie 6y ago
> forced ... to give up on Twitter after she took exception to this tweet Can you provide a source for this. What did she say? There are legitimate criticisms of Yann's tweet. Just because he is technically correct about how ML works doesn't mean that what he is saying isn't ALSO a classical dismissal of the concerns people have with AI. The issue isn't that ML is evil or racist. The issue is that if it is used too objectively detached from the reality of the world it operates in, the outcomes could be used for evil or with racist intents. AI scientists like LeCun handwaves away concerns about diversity in data sources, just as his employer handwaves away concerns about engagement algorithms surfacing misinformation on the platform. But the societal consequences remain for others to deal with.
- 1024core 6y ago
  It was discussed on HN a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23696427 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23696427 Basically (to summarize a lot), his point was: an ML model is only as good as the data you feed it. If, say, the photos for your face recognition model are only of white men, then obviously the model will do well on white men, while (possibly) not doing as well on other races or genders. This is a statement of fact, and nothing controversial about it. But she took offense to it, and started insulting him on Twitter. He got tired of defending himself, and just quit twitter.
  - hintymad 6y ago
    That LeCunn needed to defend his own character out of such simple discussion shows everything that's wrong with the US' progressive culture.
    - rbanffy 6y ago
      She was never uncivil and she pointed out a series of issues, from what she believed was imprecise in his argument, to the societal issues that caused her to be viciously attacked by other people for engaging in the discussion. Other people questioned whether data only can be accountable for the biases and were not subjected to the kind of vitriol she was. The fact I am a white cishet male shields me from a lot of misdirected anger.
hpoe 6y ago
So I don't know enough to make a well informed opinion; however it seems part of the aggreivement on her part is that she was not given the names of those who peer reviewed her paper. If internally she has a history of bringing race or sex into every discussion I could see why they'd rather be anonymous. Even being accused of being racist can ruin someone's career in this current climate.
- GVIrish 6y ago
  They wouldn't even share with her the feedback on her paper to give her the opportunity to fix it. They didn't have to say who the feedback was from, but they could've at least told her the substance of the feedback.
  - hpoe 6y ago
    To quote from Dean's email "Timnit responded with an email requiring that a number of conditions be met in order for her to continue working at Google, including revealing the identities of every person who Megan and I had spoken to and consulted as part of the review of the paper and the exact feedback." I can imagine wanting to know the feedback, but she didn't ask for that she asked for the identity of everyone person who they consulted. It could also be that disclosing the feedback would've identified the individual.
    - GVIrish 6y ago
      A few things don't add up then. Timnit claims that she was told at a meeting called on short notice that her paper was being retracted because of anonymous feedback. She said she asked about the substance of the feedback and they refused to tell her. After that meeting, she is told she can be read a private document with some, but not all of the anonymous feedback. That led to Gebru sending a frustrated email to her colleagues and a separate email with conditions that she was willing to resign over. In that email it seems like she asked to knows the identities of the people who gave the feedback that let to the demand for retraction. Jeff Dean says that Timnit wanted the identity of the people who gave the feedback as a condition for staying. Then he describes what that feedback was. He doesn't acknowledge that Timnit was not given the substance of the feedback in the first meeting when she asked for it. And it sounds like the full feedback wasn't given later during that private reading. The feedback Dean cites that led to the retraction doesn't at all sound like something that required the protection of identities, and certainly nothing that required keeping that feedback secret. If the reviewers felt like the paper left out some relevant research, why wasn't that communicated fully and clearly in the first meeting? Jeff Dean's email seems to leave out a lot of context about everything leading up to Timnit threatening to resign. At the very least it doesn't seem like the reasons the surprise retraction order came down weren't revealed at all until some time after that first meeting.
swiley 6y ago
Seeing this kind of thing is why I keep putting "Be Nice!" into the MOTDs on all my machines. I know I flip out at people on the internet sometimes but I hope I never become someone like that.
sorenjan 6y ago
Reminds me of the drama with Coraline Ada Ehmke and the Contributor Covenant a few years back that forced Linus Torvalds to take a break. These people are drama seeking instigators that demand that people do as they say, and companies keep giving in to them. It's a kind of rent seeking and power grabbing.
- anothermoron 6y ago
  Github got rid of her pretty quickly. And guess what ? She accused them of being sexist for doing so.
kenjackson 6y ago
He's still posting on Twitter. Did so today, and yesterday. Her response to that tweet is a bit harsh, but not completely unreasonable. I'm not a Twitter expert, so I can't really stitch together their conversation on Twitter to see where/when it goes off the rails.
- pas 6y ago
  What/where is her response? Could you link it please?
  - cranium 6y ago
    https://twitter.com/timnitGebru/status/1274808654227619840 https://twitter.com/timnitGebru/status/1274808654227619840
stevecalifornia 6y ago
"You are probably going to be a very successful computer person. But you're going to go through life thinking that girls don't like you because you're a nerd. And I want you to know, from the bottom of my heart, that that won't be true. It'll be because you're an asshole." ~ The Social Network A good number of social activists are rude and abrasive and then blame how people react as racism/sexism. No one wants to be around or work with anyone who is a jerk. The quote above sorta reminds me of how this person is going about their life.
- basicneo 6y ago
  Experiencing marginalisation is frustrating, and frustrated people sometimes have outbursts. I don't think we can infer much from a few highly publicised events.
  - chrissnell 6y ago
    Was she marginalized? She ran a team at Google. How many of us can claim that?
  - mstg 6y ago
    How was she marginalized? Marginalized means keeping someone in a powerless or unimportant position in society, which she was not as she had one of the most important roles in AI and was a manager.
  - dheera 6y ago
    Even if you are marginalized, threatening to resign with ultimatums will never work in your favor unless you have an entire union behind you.
    - basicneo 6y ago
      I wasn't commenting on expected outcomes of their behaviour, just that I think it's a bit of a jump say to they are "rude and abrasive " in general.
- hardwaregeek 6y ago
deleted 6y ago
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hardwaregeek 6y ago
I do not know the details of this case and I can't speak to the subject's character. However I can't help but note that people who study the effects of race and gender tend to bring race/gender into anything and everything, because well, that's their job. If your response is that race and gender should be brought into only the areas where race and gender are relevant, I'd respond that the prevailing opinion among gender and race scholars is that gender/race is relevant everywhere.
- sandpigeondrone 6y ago
  "Google fired a black researcher". Does the word "black" belong there or is it used just as an attempt to tarnish Google?
- hpoe 6y ago
  I've thought about that filter through which we view the world a lot recently, and I think you may have identified part of where the conflict comes from. People viewing the world through fundamentally different filters. The problem is that if you focus on race, gender and/or sexual orientation as an important factor underlying interactions, if you're not careful you can soon come to see race and gender as the primary driving force that dictates the outcomes of all interactions, and soon all issues get reduced down to a matter or racial, sexual, or class struggle. The problem is the real world doesn't work that way, it is a complicated interacting network of events that are often only 2nd or 3rd order events from other completely different decisions made long ago. To try and reduce all interactions and societal problems to a matter of a 1 or 2 factors is like trying to make money on the stock market solely by looking at the Fed's monetary policy. Sure the Fed's monetary policy is an important overall factor, and in some cases the most important factor in certain changes in the stock market, but that doesn't mean that there aren't a thousand other moving parts to focus on. The problem is when we interpret every event through a single filter, or give one filter primacy in all interpretations of events that filter now colors everything we see. So for example if my primary filter for understanding the world is race relations and/or critical race theory, any time someone disagrees with me I really do feel as though it is a racially motivated attack. Why? Because I have chosen to interpret everything in my world through the filter of race, and every event that occurs will in my mind be race related. Note this applies just as well to any filter, christian extremists will interpret all events that happen as a sign of the times and the devil coming to power. If my filter is the class struggle than I will see every issue be between the haves and the have-nots. My point is not to discredit people that want to bring gender and race in to everything I think there are many discussions where examining the role these factors played is important. My point is to caution and warn against getting into a single filter mindset, that is the cause of much of the divisiveness we see, we have people that really are living in totally different worlds because the way they choose to view the world is totally different and they refuse to ever consider there might be other filters to view the world through.
suifbwish 6y ago
It is a big problem that in our current political climate people with those types of built in personal issues float to the top. Gender and race should only be brought up if there is evidence that someone is being discriminated against or harassed based on those traits. I see all kinds of articles immediately pulling race and gender into the equation and it’s dangerous and dishonest because it robs credibility from situations where there is truly discrimination/harassment based on this occurring.
- rbanffy 6y ago
  It's incredibly hard to prove discrimination or harassment was based on ethnicity, sexual orientation, religion, or political views, even when it is. You say "people with those types of built in personal issues float to the top" aren't you implying their positions are not earned based on merit and, therefore, that they are less competent than their peers?
  - suifbwish 6y ago
    I am implying that they often scare away their competition by attacking the character of the individuals who they work with, rather than focusing on true accomplishments that would give them legitimate merit for the positions they aspire to. Their supervisors can even be intimidated into promoting them if they have a history of filing complaints of discrimination when things don’t go their way. It’s also possible that some promotions/hires are based on desired political appearance of the company. Promoting someone based on certain race and gender types ironically makes your company seem less racist and sexist to the casual outside observer.
    - gnusty_gnurc 6y ago
      I think there’s definitely a dynamic in any dogmatic arena (social justice is dogma heaven) where the most pathological people thrive. In the high-dogma arena there’s incredibly easy and visible signals that give you the ability to appear like “one of the good ones.” I think coincidentally this is highly attractive to elite circles too. Follow all the social justice rituals and shibboleth and you suddenly get the camouflage of an empathetic, good person.
suifbwish 6y ago
If given the right opportunity and enough time, every once victimized group will become the oppressor. Note this is true for groups not individuals.
kmonsen 6y ago
Not disputing what you are saying, but there seems to be more to the story. If this is all that happened why not let her resign on her own (perhaps take action if this did not happen after n months). Surely that would create less publicity.
- njanirudh 6y ago
  She sounds like a deranged person.
TheMagicHorsey 6y ago
I'm always hearing tales of how insane Google's social justice warrior culture has become ... but I'm always hearing these stories from White, Asian, or Indian males. I wonder how bad it actually is in reality. The picture insiders paint is that of organizations infested with technically mediocre people who form cliques that provide air cover for each others mediocrity ... with sex and race providing a disincentive for management to take action. I wonder how accurate that is ... one explanation for the stories could just be that a lot of disgruntled males are unhappy with competition. On the other hand, if it was true and I was a high performance underrepresented minority, there's no way I'd go to Google. Wouldn't people just assume I'm there because of quota filling, instead of my actual performance?
- BlueTemplar 6y ago
  Indeed, this is why positive discrimination is still discrimination, and therefore racist.
- thu2111 6y ago
  I definitely saw a bit of that when I was there, but only a bit. I think it mostly started after I left. Before about 2012 or so, every female engineer I encountered was just as competent as the men. I never thought about diversity culture because everyone was of pretty consistent skill, at least in the parts of the org I was in. After 2012 we got a diversity hire on our team who was useless in every way, was a pathological liar and manipulator, yet who was consistently rewarded because the bosses boss was a female feminist. Her boss knew she was trouble but could do nothing. I did encounter a few more cases where female employees would just inexplicably have skills gaps that shouldn't have happened at Google, like not knowing what hexadecimal was. I never encountered grumbling about competition. Google was not a hugely competitive place at that time because there was more than enough for everyone. Promos were generally not quotad, for instance, at least not for most of the rank and file. I was a high performance underrepresented minority, there's no way I'd go to Google. Wouldn't people just assume I'm there because of quota filling, instead of my actual performance? If you were genuinely high performance then no, of course people wouldn't assume that. And sure you'd go to Google, because they pay very well. The real issue and it's not at all Google specific are the minority low performers or outright troublemakers, like Gebru. Then people absolutely assume they are quota filling. They go anyway because they aren't self aware enough to realise that's happening and blame any lack of respect they get to racism/sexism. And the money is still great so why wouldn't they go?
wonnage 6y ago
I don't think you understand the word "forced"... did Twitter delete his account? Congratulations on blaming the victim. This is what POC in tech deal with every day.
- lawnchair_larry 6y ago
  > POC in tech deal with every day. Why even repeat such an absurd lie? Surely you don’t actually believe it yourself.
  - wonnage 6y ago
    What makes you think it's a lie?
    - lawnchair_larry 6y ago
      What would make you think it isn’t? Where do these ideas even come from?
canniballectern 6y ago
I see the tweet, but I don't see her in the replies at all. Where did she take exception to the tweet?
fossuser 6y ago
This is the thread (it was a retweet with comment, naturally). https://twitter.com/ylecun/status/1275162528511860737 https://twitter.com/ylecun/status/1275162528511860737 Whatever your position, Yann engages on substance, and Timnit is obnoxious: https://twitter.com/timnitGebru/status/1275191341455048704?s=20 https://twitter.com/timnitGebru/status/1275191341455048704?s... https://twitter.com/timnitGebru/status/1275191515380215808?s=20 https://twitter.com/timnitGebru/status/1275191515380215808?s... Basically the worst of online discourse, but in this case one-sided. Yann is discussing in good faith and Timnit is not. If this is the normal way she interacts with people she disagrees with it's no surprise they didn't want her to stay. The public tweeting about it doesn't inspire much confidence either. https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/02/23/in-favor-of-niceness-community-and-civilization/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/02/23/in-favor-of-niceness-c...
- joshuamorton 6y ago
  > Whatever your position, Yann engages on substance, and Timnit is obnoxious: For what it's worth, I and many others disagree with this characterization. I find Yann comes across as incredibly condescending and holier than thou in their interactions. Nor does Yann engage on substance. He refuses to take the time engage with, or even acknowledge that he has read, the relevant academic literature (which Timnit repeatedly cites).
  - fossuser 6y ago
    People can read the thread for themselves and decide. I see a quote tweet from Timnit with "I'm sick of this framing...listen to us", then misquoting what he said. Ignoring his replies and then following up with "I'm disengaging for my sanity...not worth my time...Maybe your colleagues will try to educate you..." etc. She attacks him (so he replies) and then she ignores him and talks down to him. I don't have a dog in this fight, I'm just an outside person reading this - I suspect most people reading that thread would think Timnit's tweets are obnoxious. Imagine if the people were switched. I wouldn't want to work with someone who argues that way when they disagree.
    - 6y ago
geofft 6y ago
Are you saying that someone that Google hired as an AI ethics researcher should not be allowed to disagree with an AI practitioner on matters of AI ethics, and should be canceled for expressing an opinion? What happened to diversity of thought, academic freedom, free speech as a civic virtue and not simply a restriction on government action, and all those other things this community normally stands for? Just yesterday we saw the NLRB rule that Google had illegally fired workers, and we were talking about how the big tech companies use their power to suppress internal dissent and it's bad. How did we forget that so quickly?
dheera 6y ago
In general, theatening to resign is never a good strategy and will never be in your favor unless you are a highly valued executive. If you're anyone else in the company and think a problem could possibly work out, try to amicably work it out. If you believe it to be impossible to work out, it is much better to just resign than to threaten to resign, which will almost always result in firing. If you resign, you have the upper hand, can still get 2 more weeks of pay, possibly a couple of good recommendations for your next job, and then go write your blog posts after that.
haram_masala 6y ago
She reminds me of an intelligent Adria Richards.
apta 6y ago
Seems like typical SJW behavior. Hopefully more companies will stand up to these far leftists and kick them out.

elevenoh 6y ago

Thanks for sharing. Curious: How did she 'force him to give up on twitter'? There's a lotta companies who've hired ticking time bombs like this. They don't get why they were truly hired.

1024core 6y ago
It was discussed on HN a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23696427 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23696427
hintymad 6y ago
Easy. Just call that person a racist, a bigot, or an oppressor without a shred of evidence. > A person: I think bias in machine learning is caused by bias in training data. > Me: Why are you ignoring all I've been saying? You're a racist. You're a white man who oppresses. I'm not going to talk to a bigot like you. Repeat this a few times, the attacked will be punished both online and offline. Justice served.
- tfehring 6y ago
  I don't think that's a fair characterization of Gebru's argument there at all. A better summary might be "You're the Chief AI Scientist at a massively influential and profitable company with billions of users and exabytes of data, you can't just throw up your hands and say 'welp, that's what the model spits out so that's what we're stuck with.'"
  - njanirudh 6y ago
    Its more like " There are difficulties on collecting data and historical reasons that leads to bias in the trained model" Other side " no you are a racist and responsible for bias due for being a white male"
    - tfehring 6y ago
      It's pretty clear that Gebru criticized LeCun for being apathetic about an obviously biased model, not because he's a white male. And again, "There are difficulties on collecting data and historical reasons that leads to bias in the trained model" is accurate, but it's still a total cop-out! There's no way Facebook would let results like [0] slide if there were money at stake - they'd get more training data, or even throw out training images of white faces, if they had to - so why is LeCun defending someone else's failure to do so? More importantly, how should that make us feel about the very real possibility of LeCun serving as an expert advisor on, say, police or other military applications of AI? Would he again just throw up his hands and say, "Well the training data consists disproportionately of black faces, so the model disproportionately implicates black people, nothing we can do about it"? [0] https://twitter.com/Chicken3gg/status/1274314622447820801 https://twitter.com/Chicken3gg/status/1274314622447820801
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      - PrefixKitten 6y ago
        All real world data is inherently biased... Don't they teach this fact in introductory statistics? I can't imagine otherwise.
- BlueTemplar 6y ago
  "SJW"'s are racist and sexist. (AmIdoingitright?)

deanCommie 6y ago

> forced ... to give up on Twitter after she took exception to this tweet Can you provide a source for this. What did she say? There are legitimate criticisms of Yann's tweet. Just because he is technically correct about how ML works doesn't mean that what he is saying isn't ALSO a classical dismissal of the concerns people have with AI. The issue isn't that ML is evil or racist. The issue is that if it is used too objectively detached from the reality of the world it operates in, the outcomes could be used for evil or with racist intents. AI scientists like LeCun handwaves away concerns about diversity in data sources, just as his employer handwaves away concerns about engagement algorithms surfacing misinformation on the platform. But the societal consequences remain for others to deal with.

1024core 6y ago
It was discussed on HN a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23696427 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23696427 Basically (to summarize a lot), his point was: an ML model is only as good as the data you feed it. If, say, the photos for your face recognition model are only of white men, then obviously the model will do well on white men, while (possibly) not doing as well on other races or genders. This is a statement of fact, and nothing controversial about it. But she took offense to it, and started insulting him on Twitter. He got tired of defending himself, and just quit twitter.
- hintymad 6y ago
  That LeCunn needed to defend his own character out of such simple discussion shows everything that's wrong with the US' progressive culture.
  - rbanffy 6y ago
    She was never uncivil and she pointed out a series of issues, from what she believed was imprecise in his argument, to the societal issues that caused her to be viciously attacked by other people for engaging in the discussion. Other people questioned whether data only can be accountable for the biases and were not subjected to the kind of vitriol she was. The fact I am a white cishet male shields me from a lot of misdirected anger.

hpoe 6y ago

So I don't know enough to make a well informed opinion; however it seems part of the aggreivement on her part is that she was not given the names of those who peer reviewed her paper. If internally she has a history of bringing race or sex into every discussion I could see why they'd rather be anonymous. Even being accused of being racist can ruin someone's career in this current climate.

GVIrish 6y ago
They wouldn't even share with her the feedback on her paper to give her the opportunity to fix it. They didn't have to say who the feedback was from, but they could've at least told her the substance of the feedback.
- hpoe 6y ago
  To quote from Dean's email "Timnit responded with an email requiring that a number of conditions be met in order for her to continue working at Google, including revealing the identities of every person who Megan and I had spoken to and consulted as part of the review of the paper and the exact feedback." I can imagine wanting to know the feedback, but she didn't ask for that she asked for the identity of everyone person who they consulted. It could also be that disclosing the feedback would've identified the individual.
  - GVIrish 6y ago
    A few things don't add up then. Timnit claims that she was told at a meeting called on short notice that her paper was being retracted because of anonymous feedback. She said she asked about the substance of the feedback and they refused to tell her. After that meeting, she is told she can be read a private document with some, but not all of the anonymous feedback. That led to Gebru sending a frustrated email to her colleagues and a separate email with conditions that she was willing to resign over. In that email it seems like she asked to knows the identities of the people who gave the feedback that let to the demand for retraction. Jeff Dean says that Timnit wanted the identity of the people who gave the feedback as a condition for staying. Then he describes what that feedback was. He doesn't acknowledge that Timnit was not given the substance of the feedback in the first meeting when she asked for it. And it sounds like the full feedback wasn't given later during that private reading. The feedback Dean cites that led to the retraction doesn't at all sound like something that required the protection of identities, and certainly nothing that required keeping that feedback secret. If the reviewers felt like the paper left out some relevant research, why wasn't that communicated fully and clearly in the first meeting? Jeff Dean's email seems to leave out a lot of context about everything leading up to Timnit threatening to resign. At the very least it doesn't seem like the reasons the surprise retraction order came down weren't revealed at all until some time after that first meeting.

swiley 6y ago

Seeing this kind of thing is why I keep putting "Be Nice!" into the MOTDs on all my machines. I know I flip out at people on the internet sometimes but I hope I never become someone like that.

sorenjan 6y ago

Reminds me of the drama with Coraline Ada Ehmke and the Contributor Covenant a few years back that forced Linus Torvalds to take a break. These people are drama seeking instigators that demand that people do as they say, and companies keep giving in to them. It's a kind of rent seeking and power grabbing.

anothermoron 6y ago
Github got rid of her pretty quickly. And guess what ? She accused them of being sexist for doing so.

kenjackson 6y ago

He's still posting on Twitter. Did so today, and yesterday. Her response to that tweet is a bit harsh, but not completely unreasonable. I'm not a Twitter expert, so I can't really stitch together their conversation on Twitter to see where/when it goes off the rails.

pas 6y ago
What/where is her response? Could you link it please?
- cranium 6y ago
  https://twitter.com/timnitGebru/status/1274808654227619840 https://twitter.com/timnitGebru/status/1274808654227619840

stevecalifornia 6y ago

"You are probably going to be a very successful computer person. But you're going to go through life thinking that girls don't like you because you're a nerd. And I want you to know, from the bottom of my heart, that that won't be true. It'll be because you're an asshole." ~ The Social Network A good number of social activists are rude and abrasive and then blame how people react as racism/sexism. No one wants to be around or work with anyone who is a jerk. The quote above sorta reminds me of how this person is going about their life.

basicneo 6y ago
Experiencing marginalisation is frustrating, and frustrated people sometimes have outbursts. I don't think we can infer much from a few highly publicised events.
- chrissnell 6y ago
  Was she marginalized? She ran a team at Google. How many of us can claim that?
- mstg 6y ago
  How was she marginalized? Marginalized means keeping someone in a powerless or unimportant position in society, which she was not as she had one of the most important roles in AI and was a manager.
- dheera 6y ago
  Even if you are marginalized, threatening to resign with ultimatums will never work in your favor unless you have an entire union behind you.
  - basicneo 6y ago
    I wasn't commenting on expected outcomes of their behaviour, just that I think it's a bit of a jump say to they are "rude and abrasive " in general.
hardwaregeek 6y ago

deleted 6y ago

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hardwaregeek 6y ago

I do not know the details of this case and I can't speak to the subject's character. However I can't help but note that people who study the effects of race and gender tend to bring race/gender into anything and everything, because well, that's their job. If your response is that race and gender should be brought into only the areas where race and gender are relevant, I'd respond that the prevailing opinion among gender and race scholars is that gender/race is relevant everywhere.

sandpigeondrone 6y ago
"Google fired a black researcher". Does the word "black" belong there or is it used just as an attempt to tarnish Google?
hpoe 6y ago
I've thought about that filter through which we view the world a lot recently, and I think you may have identified part of where the conflict comes from. People viewing the world through fundamentally different filters. The problem is that if you focus on race, gender and/or sexual orientation as an important factor underlying interactions, if you're not careful you can soon come to see race and gender as the primary driving force that dictates the outcomes of all interactions, and soon all issues get reduced down to a matter or racial, sexual, or class struggle. The problem is the real world doesn't work that way, it is a complicated interacting network of events that are often only 2nd or 3rd order events from other completely different decisions made long ago. To try and reduce all interactions and societal problems to a matter of a 1 or 2 factors is like trying to make money on the stock market solely by looking at the Fed's monetary policy. Sure the Fed's monetary policy is an important overall factor, and in some cases the most important factor in certain changes in the stock market, but that doesn't mean that there aren't a thousand other moving parts to focus on. The problem is when we interpret every event through a single filter, or give one filter primacy in all interpretations of events that filter now colors everything we see. So for example if my primary filter for understanding the world is race relations and/or critical race theory, any time someone disagrees with me I really do feel as though it is a racially motivated attack. Why? Because I have chosen to interpret everything in my world through the filter of race, and every event that occurs will in my mind be race related. Note this applies just as well to any filter, christian extremists will interpret all events that happen as a sign of the times and the devil coming to power. If my filter is the class struggle than I will see every issue be between the haves and the have-nots. My point is not to discredit people that want to bring gender and race in to everything I think there are many discussions where examining the role these factors played is important. My point is to caution and warn against getting into a single filter mindset, that is the cause of much of the divisiveness we see, we have people that really are living in totally different worlds because the way they choose to view the world is totally different and they refuse to ever consider there might be other filters to view the world through.

suifbwish 6y ago

It is a big problem that in our current political climate people with those types of built in personal issues float to the top. Gender and race should only be brought up if there is evidence that someone is being discriminated against or harassed based on those traits. I see all kinds of articles immediately pulling race and gender into the equation and it’s dangerous and dishonest because it robs credibility from situations where there is truly discrimination/harassment based on this occurring.

rbanffy 6y ago
It's incredibly hard to prove discrimination or harassment was based on ethnicity, sexual orientation, religion, or political views, even when it is. You say "people with those types of built in personal issues float to the top" aren't you implying their positions are not earned based on merit and, therefore, that they are less competent than their peers?
- suifbwish 6y ago
  I am implying that they often scare away their competition by attacking the character of the individuals who they work with, rather than focusing on true accomplishments that would give them legitimate merit for the positions they aspire to. Their supervisors can even be intimidated into promoting them if they have a history of filing complaints of discrimination when things don’t go their way. It’s also possible that some promotions/hires are based on desired political appearance of the company. Promoting someone based on certain race and gender types ironically makes your company seem less racist and sexist to the casual outside observer.
  - gnusty_gnurc 6y ago
    I think there’s definitely a dynamic in any dogmatic arena (social justice is dogma heaven) where the most pathological people thrive. In the high-dogma arena there’s incredibly easy and visible signals that give you the ability to appear like “one of the good ones.” I think coincidentally this is highly attractive to elite circles too. Follow all the social justice rituals and shibboleth and you suddenly get the camouflage of an empathetic, good person.

suifbwish 6y ago

If given the right opportunity and enough time, every once victimized group will become the oppressor. Note this is true for groups not individuals.

kmonsen 6y ago

Not disputing what you are saying, but there seems to be more to the story. If this is all that happened why not let her resign on her own (perhaps take action if this did not happen after n months). Surely that would create less publicity.

njanirudh 6y ago
She sounds like a deranged person.

TheMagicHorsey 6y ago

I'm always hearing tales of how insane Google's social justice warrior culture has become ... but I'm always hearing these stories from White, Asian, or Indian males. I wonder how bad it actually is in reality. The picture insiders paint is that of organizations infested with technically mediocre people who form cliques that provide air cover for each others mediocrity ... with sex and race providing a disincentive for management to take action. I wonder how accurate that is ... one explanation for the stories could just be that a lot of disgruntled males are unhappy with competition. On the other hand, if it was true and I was a high performance underrepresented minority, there's no way I'd go to Google. Wouldn't people just assume I'm there because of quota filling, instead of my actual performance?

BlueTemplar 6y ago
Indeed, this is why positive discrimination is still discrimination, and therefore racist.
thu2111 6y ago
I definitely saw a bit of that when I was there, but only a bit. I think it mostly started after I left. Before about 2012 or so, every female engineer I encountered was just as competent as the men. I never thought about diversity culture because everyone was of pretty consistent skill, at least in the parts of the org I was in. After 2012 we got a diversity hire on our team who was useless in every way, was a pathological liar and manipulator, yet who was consistently rewarded because the bosses boss was a female feminist. Her boss knew she was trouble but could do nothing. I did encounter a few more cases where female employees would just inexplicably have skills gaps that shouldn't have happened at Google, like not knowing what hexadecimal was. I never encountered grumbling about competition. Google was not a hugely competitive place at that time because there was more than enough for everyone. Promos were generally not quotad, for instance, at least not for most of the rank and file. I was a high performance underrepresented minority, there's no way I'd go to Google. Wouldn't people just assume I'm there because of quota filling, instead of my actual performance? If you were genuinely high performance then no, of course people wouldn't assume that. And sure you'd go to Google, because they pay very well. The real issue and it's not at all Google specific are the minority low performers or outright troublemakers, like Gebru. Then people absolutely assume they are quota filling. They go anyway because they aren't self aware enough to realise that's happening and blame any lack of respect they get to racism/sexism. And the money is still great so why wouldn't they go?

wonnage 6y ago

I don't think you understand the word "forced"... did Twitter delete his account? Congratulations on blaming the victim. This is what POC in tech deal with every day.

lawnchair_larry 6y ago
> POC in tech deal with every day. Why even repeat such an absurd lie? Surely you don’t actually believe it yourself.
- wonnage 6y ago
  What makes you think it's a lie?
  - lawnchair_larry 6y ago
    What would make you think it isn’t? Where do these ideas even come from?

canniballectern 6y ago

I see the tweet, but I don't see her in the replies at all. Where did she take exception to the tweet?

fossuser 6y ago

This is the thread (it was a retweet with comment, naturally). https://twitter.com/ylecun/status/1275162528511860737 https://twitter.com/ylecun/status/1275162528511860737 Whatever your position, Yann engages on substance, and Timnit is obnoxious: https://twitter.com/timnitGebru/status/1275191341455048704?s=20 https://twitter.com/timnitGebru/status/1275191341455048704?s... https://twitter.com/timnitGebru/status/1275191515380215808?s=20 https://twitter.com/timnitGebru/status/1275191515380215808?s... Basically the worst of online discourse, but in this case one-sided. Yann is discussing in good faith and Timnit is not. If this is the normal way she interacts with people she disagrees with it's no surprise they didn't want her to stay. The public tweeting about it doesn't inspire much confidence either. https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/02/23/in-favor-of-niceness-community-and-civilization/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/02/23/in-favor-of-niceness-c...

joshuamorton 6y ago
> Whatever your position, Yann engages on substance, and Timnit is obnoxious: For what it's worth, I and many others disagree with this characterization. I find Yann comes across as incredibly condescending and holier than thou in their interactions. Nor does Yann engage on substance. He refuses to take the time engage with, or even acknowledge that he has read, the relevant academic literature (which Timnit repeatedly cites).
- fossuser 6y ago
  People can read the thread for themselves and decide. I see a quote tweet from Timnit with "I'm sick of this framing...listen to us", then misquoting what he said. Ignoring his replies and then following up with "I'm disengaging for my sanity...not worth my time...Maybe your colleagues will try to educate you..." etc. She attacks him (so he replies) and then she ignores him and talks down to him. I don't have a dog in this fight, I'm just an outside person reading this - I suspect most people reading that thread would think Timnit's tweets are obnoxious. Imagine if the people were switched. I wouldn't want to work with someone who argues that way when they disagree.
  - 6y ago

geofft 6y ago

Are you saying that someone that Google hired as an AI ethics researcher should not be allowed to disagree with an AI practitioner on matters of AI ethics, and should be canceled for expressing an opinion? What happened to diversity of thought, academic freedom, free speech as a civic virtue and not simply a restriction on government action, and all those other things this community normally stands for? Just yesterday we saw the NLRB rule that Google had illegally fired workers, and we were talking about how the big tech companies use their power to suppress internal dissent and it's bad. How did we forget that so quickly?

dheera 6y ago

In general, theatening to resign is never a good strategy and will never be in your favor unless you are a highly valued executive. If you're anyone else in the company and think a problem could possibly work out, try to amicably work it out. If you believe it to be impossible to work out, it is much better to just resign than to threaten to resign, which will almost always result in firing. If you resign, you have the upper hand, can still get 2 more weeks of pay, possibly a couple of good recommendations for your next job, and then go write your blog posts after that.

haram_masala 6y ago

She reminds me of an intelligent Adria Richards.

apta 6y ago

Seems like typical SJW behavior. Hopefully more companies will stand up to these far leftists and kick them out.