18 ms·

It is unfortunate that way too many commenters on a prior threads dismissed her as a some twitter personality and trivialized her body of work in spite of the f

by tmotwu 6y ago

It is unfortunate that way too many commenters on a prior threads dismissed her as a some twitter personality and trivialized her body of work in spite of the fact that she is well regarded and reputable in the ML community. It's becoming clear a rising number of her colleagues are in support of what she was seeking to publish. A reviewer on reddit mentioned the authors have plenty of time to make revisions if there were issues with the content. Not to mention, supposedly the internal reviewing processes are usually limited to the extent of sensitive disclosure and rarely the contents of the literature. Yet, emails from Google leadership seems to imply retraction was needed, providing very little reason. The opaqueness of the internal feedback and expectations are highly suspicious and I was suprised to see no one bothered to question it. People have been bringing up the 2 weeks, yet internal Brain researchers have refuted that have never seen a policy like this excercised. It does appear as an attempt to suppress an important paper that was critical of another colleagues work (BERT) and the employer's intended research goals. It's similar to the kind of pushback Greenwald most recently received - yet the reactions here have been distinctly flipsidded - in support towards Google executives no less and unsympathetic to the researcher.

epinephrinios 6y ago
She is just another toxic personality that is using her race (minority) as a free pass to bully colleagues.
elefanten 6y ago
Body of work aside, she absolutely is an aggressive-ranging-into-toxic Twitter personality and a very strident proponent of a divisive and dogmatic strain of diversity advocacy.
- minikites 6y ago
  When was the last time a marginalized group gained rights by asking politely?
  - dvtrn 6y ago
    Even when we do the response is quite often some form of "not like that" or the goalposts get moved back another 40 yards from the back of the endzone.
    - Cyph0n 6y ago
      Heck, even kneeling during the national anthem is “too much”...
      - dvtrn 6y ago
        Because it "disrespects the veterans" in some people's eyes. Astonishing, isn't it, that the same people who found issue with Kaepernick's protest probably have never heard the name "Nate Boyer"[1] before-who is both a veteran of the armed forces, and a veteran of the NFL. It's never good enough. [1] https://ftw.usatoday.com/2018/05/nfl-49ers-colin-kaepernick-national-anthem-protest-nate-boyer https://ftw.usatoday.com/2018/05/nfl-49ers-colin-kaepernick-...
        edgyquant 6y ago
        I’m pretty sure “disrespects the flag” is little more than a strawman to attack instead of them having to discuss the actual point trying to be made.
        dvtrn 6y ago
        Of course it is.
        darkarmani 6y ago
        And painting a blue line down the middle of it is the best way to respect the flag. /s
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - 6y ago
- tmotwu 6y ago
  If she was truly removed for her abrasiveness, we would have a completely separate discussion entirely. What transpired, from both her disclosures and Google's leaderships response, has justifiably reigned in a lot of concern and skeptism from the broader research community.
  - teen 6y ago
    She was, they said her email was not befitting of a manager. Which is clearly true
    - whatshisface 6y ago
      The case being made in this thread is that that was how they got her, not why they fired her. I know none of the facts and am perfectly ignorant about this situation, but I have seen people get kicked out for semi-justifiable surface reasons that were totally unrelated to why their superiors didn't like them. So a-priori, the theory that the difference between someone's not-so-significant faults being tolerated or not being tolerated, is their willingness to comply with the goals that for whatever reason the leadership doesn't feel they can make explicit, is a reasonable suggestion.
      - srean 6y ago
        > The case being made in this thread is that that was how they got her, not why they fired her Conjecturing what could be the real reason, person A conjecturing why a person B does what he does (hates our freedom, for example) and why one should not take B's own explanation of his own actions -- these to me are an avoidable form of discourse. Nothing good comes of it other than an obligate outrage.
        whatshisface 6y ago
        Well, refusing to consider the idea that someone might do something with more than zero layers of subtlety... would lead to falling for every trick anybody ever tries to play. ;) A more appropriate response would be to admit that it's not easy to tell the difference, and maybe, if the interlocutor cares enough, to do some research to determine whether or not it's still suspicious once the facts are known. One example of some facts that could resolve or strengthen the suspicion would be: How many other emails of equal or greater verbal strength were sent at Google, but then not followed up by dismissal?
- coffeemaniac 6y ago
  Would anyone mind citing an instance of this toxic Twitter behavior? I don't dispute that individual tweets can be enough to wreck your career in certain circumstances but it's a high bar and haven't noticed any links to twitter.com supporting these accusations.
- whimsicalism 6y ago
  > divisive and dogmatic strain of diversity advocacy. Reading the HN comments section sometimes feels akin to doing archival research on letters to the editor during the peak of the civil rights movement. It's astonishing how consistent the tropes are.
  - claydavisss 6y ago
    Reading the HN comments section sometimes feels akin to doing archival research on letters to the editor for the Guardian in 2018. The moral preening, the harumph-worthy circle jerks of pithy middlebrow dismissals and vacuous brigading. It's astonishing how consistent the tropes are.
  - tmpz22 6y ago
    Relating GP to a '60s era segregation apologist for offering a dissenting opinion is proving their point.
    - whimsicalism 6y ago
      They're free to offer a dissenting opinion, my comment was on the rhetorical flourishes around diversity advocates being "divisive", "dogmatic", uncivil are very reminiscent of that period. I think it is very illuminating to read letters from that period, because they aren't just vitriolic racists like schools often teach. These are people trying to come off as "very reasonable", offering a civil, moderate path forward for the South, etc., etc. It's fascinating to see that rhetoric being deployed to defend what is an obvious evil and compare to who is using that rhetoric now.
      - tmpz22 6y ago
        I agree historical context on rhetoric can be absolutely eye opening, but your example was not a 1:1 comparison (neither the victims or actions being of equal consequence). It also reminds me of Goodwin's Law [1] where disagreements on the internet so often devolve into calling someone a Nazi (to me a '60s segregationist apologist is one or two steps removed from a Nazi). [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law
- devy 6y ago
  This above is very intolerable in Corporate America. First and foremost, she works for the corporation and get paid, no matter how great she is, she has to follow the corporate culture and norms or she won't be surviving in Corporate America. Stanford Business School professor Jeffrey Pfeffer wrote a book about this[1] in particular. [1]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/24331490-leadership-bs https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/24331490-leadership-bs
  - whimsicalism 6y ago
    > Stanford Business School professor Jeffrey Pfeffer wrote a book about this[1] in particular. A book about how toxic this is and how it needs to change, right? This small detail seems sort of missing from your comment.
    - devy 6y ago
      Yes. I am just stating a fact. And do you see a change?
  - minikites 6y ago
    >she has to follow the corporate culture and norms or she won't be surviving in Corporate America "Corporate culture" isn't fixed, the whole point is that it needs changing.
    - JamesBarney 6y ago
      "Corporate culture" is a culture of bland, and empty niceties, with a veneer of politeness and it's 100% needed so that a large corporation can focus on getting things done without every interaction turning into twitter. Hacker news also requires a certain amount of politeness in the way you speak and it's one of the many reasons the discourse is better than twitter.
      - PascLeRasc 6y ago
        What makes you think our discourse is better? We have plenty of low-quality comments (see this one for an example) and nearly every thread goes off-topic (like what we're discussing now).
- actuator 6y ago
  Her spat against Yann LeCun felt very wrong to me. That is not how fellow academics/researchers should treat each other. Maybe Yann LeCun was wrong, the way she conveyed the message disregarding any knowledge he might have on this was definitely not civil. She could have chosen a different way to address the complaints here, not by getting overtly confrontational. Maybe the review group got it wrong, maybe they were right. But that is not how you handle disputes.
  - whimsicalism 6y ago
    > definitely not civil. I agree that people should try to be kind and charitable to each other, and this conversation didn't show that. That said, I think we also have to be cognizant of the way "civility" is not objective/neutral, often relies on codifying the norms of a dominant majority, and also preserves the status quo. It might not have been very "civil" for instance when Google employees walked out of the office, but I also don't think it was "civil" when Google paid $90 million to someone fired for sexual harassment. Sometimes big problems can't be met just with civil discourse, it's why many of us still voted for Biden (for instance) even after he told Trump to "shut up."
    - ivalm 6y ago
      What about paying $90 million to the key person in creation of android? Honestly, he is a scumbag, but that doesn’t nullify his contribution to google (?) it’s not that he was paid for sexual harassment, it’s that he got paid for being creator of one of the most important products in the world.
      - whimsicalism 6y ago
        Was he laboring for free before that?
        ivalm 6y ago
        He was laboring with contracts that stipulated severance, which got paid out.
- marricks 6y ago
  How is that relevant to this discussion of her getting dismissed? It's okay to unceremoniously let her go because she is outspoken on Twitter? That's the only way your comment would seem relevant to this discussion.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
laretluval 6y ago
She demanded to know the identities of anonymous internal reviewers of her paper, or else she would resign. Google accepted her resignation. What is the evidence that this has to do with the content of the paper?
- whimsicalism 6y ago
  You don't "accept someone's resignation" and then add terms to it and actually "resign" them a little sooner than they were going to resign. That's called firing.
  - harrisonjackson 6y ago
    That's exactly what a lot of companies do when someone gives 2 weeks notice. Send them home right away and pay them for the 2 weeks so you can keep them from filing unemployment and have them on the hook for any exit interview / handoff questions etc. They always want you to sign "something" as part of the process, too.
    - whimsicalism 6y ago
      Yes, I'm aware of how FB&Google work. > when someone gives 2 weeks notice. But she didn't give 2 weeks notice. This seems to be the key detail.
      - harrisonjackson 6y ago
        Definitely! The terms of her resignation are unclear. If you give an employer an ultimatum and they don't want to give in to your demands then is that giving notice or quitting on the spot or something else? Should her managers/google legal have waited for her to tell them when exactly she was going to leave?
        whimsicalism 6y ago
        > Should her managers/google legal have waited for her to tell them when exactly she was going to leave? Yes, if they wanted her to resign they should have waited for her to resign rather than fire her. If they fired her, seems odd to call it a resignation.
mellosouls 6y ago
It is unfortunate that way too many commenters on a prior threads dismissed her as a some twitter personality and trivialized her body of work in spite of the fact that she is well regarded and reputable in the ML community. Both the positive aspects of her contributions and the clear negatives of her approach were rightly pointed out by various people (as well as problems with process and politics at Google); perhaps your reading of a long and complicated morass of comments was unintentionally selective.
- whimsicalism 6y ago
  I think the tone on HN was markedly more critical than elsewhere and I certainly notice that the divergence in tone seems greatest when discussing black people and women.
  - mellosouls 6y ago
    It depends where "elsewhere" is. I personally find HN to be generally liberal-leaning but not excessively so, and have noticed a welcome openness to centrist opinions that might once have been dismissed here out of hand as right-wing (and are still being dismissed elsewhere) that I take as a good sign of an increasingly aware local commentariat with respect to the excesses of the more ideological elements of the left and right.
  - contemporary343 6y ago
    Yep, I've noticed this too.
  - JamesBarney 6y ago
    Where is elsewhere? The big online communities I'm a part of are twitter, reddit, hacker news, and facebook. It's true that hacker news seems to be different from those when discussing culture war topics. With hacker news being father to the right than twitter and reddit, and more center right than my facebook feed. One conclusion is hacker news exists in a right wing bubble. The other is that twitter and reddit exist in a left wing bubble. Given that the median voter in the last election voted for Biden, but just barely, and maybe voted for a republican senator. And even the people arguing her being let go was justified are probably pretty center or center left. I would guess your "elsewhere" exists in a ideological bubble that is much stronger than the one hacker news exists in.
Certhas 6y ago
Absolutely. The supposedly objectionable tone in the EMails she posted was after leadership censored her paper in an apparently unprecedented and intransparent internal review. She has a track record of publishing peer reviewed and well received papers, and the paper in question was going through a normal peer review process when it was halted internally. To any academic the explanations of leadership are transparently absurd. No academic of integrity could accept that as a work environment, doubly so if you were hired as Ethical AI Lead. It simply indicates to me that Google as an organisation is no longer capable of having a serious Ethical AI Lab.
anonvenger 6y ago
It is regrettable that Timnit Gebru chose the public route, first writing to the 'Brain Women and Allies' mailing list, where she implied that the rejection of her paper is part of a pattern of 'constant dehumanization' (a person holding one of the highest status technical jobs in tech, TL of an AI research group at Google Brain), and then going straight to Twitter and telling half truths under the cover of potential legal action. Not sure what is customary in AI research these days, back in my day it was common to polish and resubmit to the next conference. ICML deadline is Tue 29 Dec 2020, less than a month ahead. There is also ACL, the top NLP conference, Mon 01 Feb 2021, two months ahead.
pontus 6y ago
I think that even if her work was spot on, Google has every right to have her retract her research. You can say that this is hypocritical of Google, which I actually don't really agree with. Even if we take it as fact that she was somehow going to be releasing something very damaging and that Google was weary of that (which I already think is quite generous to her), I would imagine that her role as a researcher is not to be an in-house whistleblower but rather to be someone who helps Google mitigate the biases etc that they may be perpetuating. If that's the case, her first job is to serve Google and help them address these shortcomings and her second role (if there even is one) would be to publish this for the community at large. Most companies will not let people publish their findings at all, and I think this is something that sets Google and a few other companies apart from the pack. The fact that there even is a mechanism to share results outside of your employer is really rare. So, even if Google said "wow, this is spot on and will make us look terrible", they should be 100% able to tell her "don't publish this, instead let's work to fix this and then possibly publish a post mortem". Google is ultimately a company, not a democracy.
aspaceman 6y ago
The comments are so implicitly skeptical I find it hard to take this site seriously.
6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago
She seems like a fantastic researcher and brilliant person, but also an new subvariety of the old tech trope of a brilliant asshole. Or the trope of a 10x’er whose toxic behavior should be overlooked because she’s right with regards to her research. Saying a brilliant asshole is a net negative isn’t trivializing their work. It’s saying the work isn’t the most important factor.
justicezyx 6y ago
LMAO Timinit has been showing her aggressive side without much self awareness for a long time. Instead of relying on her research work and data, she routinely try to shut down the opposite side's "matter of fact" statements. In contrast, the proclaimed "bad" guy, Jeff Dean, never do that. I know a co-worker who is level 4 engineer, reviewing Jeff's code changes, with Jeff never show a slight hint of his status. At the moment Jeff is level 11 engineer. If Timinit could be that patient, then given enough time, she will make impact equal or beyond Jeff as in pure engineering. Instead, she tried to let loose her emotions. Her continue staying at Google and the ethical AI research community would become a long term risk and overall negative factor, given the trajectory. That's my pessimistic prediction.
ethical-ai 6y ago
I'm not sure why everyone refer to the process as "retracting" rather than "withdrawing", given the paper was not accepted yet. It sounds for me pretty reasonable to withdraw the paper which has flaws to fix and resubmit it, rather than rush into fixes before conference deadline (given that those fixes should probably be reviewed too). I didn't see any claims that the requirement was to never publish this paper. It also seems to be reasonable that the papers published by company are internally reviewed, like the papers by lab members are reviewed by PI before submission. I see different claims from Google researchers, but it seems that at least for some internal review is used to access quality of the work [1,2]. It might potentially harm the freedom of the researcher, but once again, unless I missed something, there is no evidence that Google asked her to withdraw the paper and never resubmit. As I already wrote in different comment, I can not think of a single reason to ask for reviewers identities unless she wanted to confront them personally. [1] https://twitter.com/julianibarz/status/1334623651719643141 https://twitter.com/julianibarz/status/1334623651719643141 [2] https://twitter.com/vivnat/status/1334710506045669376 https://twitter.com/vivnat/status/1334710506045669376
courtf 6y ago
It doesn't matter if she is aggressive or demure, brilliant or stupid. It doesn't really matter if her work changes the world, or benefits mankind. All that matters for her employment status currently is whether Google sees value in paying her salary. There is an endless river of souls being callously, unfairly fired every day. The only reason we are even talking about this one is because it is controversial, and has been blasted out on social media. Gebru seems like a smart cookie to me, but being smart, hardworking, just, kind, or any other number of other adjectives simply doesn't matter. Google, just like every other profit driven company on the planet, only cares about the value you provide. They are only different in degree from companies running sweatshops in SE Asia, and if the law allowed it, there would be _zero_ hesitation to bring that reality back here in the US. People in tech would get whiplash from how fast the industry would pull that u-turn. We want to believe there is a social contract, that Google, or the tech industry, or America, or some group of people, somewhere, is above the competitive fray, and would not stoop so low as to abuse us for profit. Even at the very heights of privilege in the richest country in the world, working at one of the richest, most enlightened companies in the world, you are still getting exploited, and nothing will change that as it stands today. Google will probably keep investing in AI ethics, as long as people keep believing that actually makes them committed to some kind of standard.

by tmotwu 6y ago

epinephrinios 6y ago

She is just another toxic personality that is using her race (minority) as a free pass to bully colleagues.

elefanten 6y ago

Body of work aside, she absolutely is an aggressive-ranging-into-toxic Twitter personality and a very strident proponent of a divisive and dogmatic strain of diversity advocacy.

minikites 6y ago
When was the last time a marginalized group gained rights by asking politely?
- dvtrn 6y ago
  Even when we do the response is quite often some form of "not like that" or the goalposts get moved back another 40 yards from the back of the endzone.
  - Cyph0n 6y ago
    Heck, even kneeling during the national anthem is “too much”...
    - dvtrn 6y ago
      Because it "disrespects the veterans" in some people's eyes. Astonishing, isn't it, that the same people who found issue with Kaepernick's protest probably have never heard the name "Nate Boyer"[1] before-who is both a veteran of the armed forces, and a veteran of the NFL. It's never good enough. [1] https://ftw.usatoday.com/2018/05/nfl-49ers-colin-kaepernick-national-anthem-protest-nate-boyer https://ftw.usatoday.com/2018/05/nfl-49ers-colin-kaepernick-...
      - edgyquant 6y ago
        I’m pretty sure “disrespects the flag” is little more than a strawman to attack instead of them having to discuss the actual point trying to be made.
        dvtrn 6y ago
        Of course it is.
        darkarmani 6y ago
        And painting a blue line down the middle of it is the best way to respect the flag. /s
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- 6y ago
tmotwu 6y ago
If she was truly removed for her abrasiveness, we would have a completely separate discussion entirely. What transpired, from both her disclosures and Google's leaderships response, has justifiably reigned in a lot of concern and skeptism from the broader research community.
- teen 6y ago
  She was, they said her email was not befitting of a manager. Which is clearly true
  - whatshisface 6y ago
    The case being made in this thread is that that was how they got her, not why they fired her. I know none of the facts and am perfectly ignorant about this situation, but I have seen people get kicked out for semi-justifiable surface reasons that were totally unrelated to why their superiors didn't like them. So a-priori, the theory that the difference between someone's not-so-significant faults being tolerated or not being tolerated, is their willingness to comply with the goals that for whatever reason the leadership doesn't feel they can make explicit, is a reasonable suggestion.
    - srean 6y ago
      > The case being made in this thread is that that was how they got her, not why they fired her Conjecturing what could be the real reason, person A conjecturing why a person B does what he does (hates our freedom, for example) and why one should not take B's own explanation of his own actions -- these to me are an avoidable form of discourse. Nothing good comes of it other than an obligate outrage.
      - whatshisface 6y ago
        Well, refusing to consider the idea that someone might do something with more than zero layers of subtlety... would lead to falling for every trick anybody ever tries to play. ;) A more appropriate response would be to admit that it's not easy to tell the difference, and maybe, if the interlocutor cares enough, to do some research to determine whether or not it's still suspicious once the facts are known. One example of some facts that could resolve or strengthen the suspicion would be: How many other emails of equal or greater verbal strength were sent at Google, but then not followed up by dismissal?
coffeemaniac 6y ago
Would anyone mind citing an instance of this toxic Twitter behavior? I don't dispute that individual tweets can be enough to wreck your career in certain circumstances but it's a high bar and haven't noticed any links to twitter.com supporting these accusations.
whimsicalism 6y ago
> divisive and dogmatic strain of diversity advocacy. Reading the HN comments section sometimes feels akin to doing archival research on letters to the editor during the peak of the civil rights movement. It's astonishing how consistent the tropes are.
- claydavisss 6y ago
  Reading the HN comments section sometimes feels akin to doing archival research on letters to the editor for the Guardian in 2018. The moral preening, the harumph-worthy circle jerks of pithy middlebrow dismissals and vacuous brigading. It's astonishing how consistent the tropes are.
- tmpz22 6y ago
  Relating GP to a '60s era segregation apologist for offering a dissenting opinion is proving their point.
  - whimsicalism 6y ago
    They're free to offer a dissenting opinion, my comment was on the rhetorical flourishes around diversity advocates being "divisive", "dogmatic", uncivil are very reminiscent of that period. I think it is very illuminating to read letters from that period, because they aren't just vitriolic racists like schools often teach. These are people trying to come off as "very reasonable", offering a civil, moderate path forward for the South, etc., etc. It's fascinating to see that rhetoric being deployed to defend what is an obvious evil and compare to who is using that rhetoric now.
    - tmpz22 6y ago
      I agree historical context on rhetoric can be absolutely eye opening, but your example was not a 1:1 comparison (neither the victims or actions being of equal consequence). It also reminds me of Goodwin's Law [1] where disagreements on the internet so often devolve into calling someone a Nazi (to me a '60s segregationist apologist is one or two steps removed from a Nazi). [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law
devy 6y ago
This above is very intolerable in Corporate America. First and foremost, she works for the corporation and get paid, no matter how great she is, she has to follow the corporate culture and norms or she won't be surviving in Corporate America. Stanford Business School professor Jeffrey Pfeffer wrote a book about this[1] in particular. [1]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/24331490-leadership-bs https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/24331490-leadership-bs
- whimsicalism 6y ago
  > Stanford Business School professor Jeffrey Pfeffer wrote a book about this[1] in particular. A book about how toxic this is and how it needs to change, right? This small detail seems sort of missing from your comment.
  - devy 6y ago
    Yes. I am just stating a fact. And do you see a change?
- minikites 6y ago
  >she has to follow the corporate culture and norms or she won't be surviving in Corporate America "Corporate culture" isn't fixed, the whole point is that it needs changing.
  - JamesBarney 6y ago
    "Corporate culture" is a culture of bland, and empty niceties, with a veneer of politeness and it's 100% needed so that a large corporation can focus on getting things done without every interaction turning into twitter. Hacker news also requires a certain amount of politeness in the way you speak and it's one of the many reasons the discourse is better than twitter.
    - PascLeRasc 6y ago
      What makes you think our discourse is better? We have plenty of low-quality comments (see this one for an example) and nearly every thread goes off-topic (like what we're discussing now).
actuator 6y ago
Her spat against Yann LeCun felt very wrong to me. That is not how fellow academics/researchers should treat each other. Maybe Yann LeCun was wrong, the way she conveyed the message disregarding any knowledge he might have on this was definitely not civil. She could have chosen a different way to address the complaints here, not by getting overtly confrontational. Maybe the review group got it wrong, maybe they were right. But that is not how you handle disputes.
- whimsicalism 6y ago
  > definitely not civil. I agree that people should try to be kind and charitable to each other, and this conversation didn't show that. That said, I think we also have to be cognizant of the way "civility" is not objective/neutral, often relies on codifying the norms of a dominant majority, and also preserves the status quo. It might not have been very "civil" for instance when Google employees walked out of the office, but I also don't think it was "civil" when Google paid $90 million to someone fired for sexual harassment. Sometimes big problems can't be met just with civil discourse, it's why many of us still voted for Biden (for instance) even after he told Trump to "shut up."
  - ivalm 6y ago
    What about paying $90 million to the key person in creation of android? Honestly, he is a scumbag, but that doesn’t nullify his contribution to google (?) it’s not that he was paid for sexual harassment, it’s that he got paid for being creator of one of the most important products in the world.
    - whimsicalism 6y ago
      Was he laboring for free before that?
      - ivalm 6y ago
        He was laboring with contracts that stipulated severance, which got paid out.
marricks 6y ago
How is that relevant to this discussion of her getting dismissed? It's okay to unceremoniously let her go because she is outspoken on Twitter? That's the only way your comment would seem relevant to this discussion.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

laretluval 6y ago

She demanded to know the identities of anonymous internal reviewers of her paper, or else she would resign. Google accepted her resignation. What is the evidence that this has to do with the content of the paper?

whimsicalism 6y ago
You don't "accept someone's resignation" and then add terms to it and actually "resign" them a little sooner than they were going to resign. That's called firing.
- harrisonjackson 6y ago
  That's exactly what a lot of companies do when someone gives 2 weeks notice. Send them home right away and pay them for the 2 weeks so you can keep them from filing unemployment and have them on the hook for any exit interview / handoff questions etc. They always want you to sign "something" as part of the process, too.
  - whimsicalism 6y ago
    Yes, I'm aware of how FB&Google work. > when someone gives 2 weeks notice. But she didn't give 2 weeks notice. This seems to be the key detail.
    - harrisonjackson 6y ago
      Definitely! The terms of her resignation are unclear. If you give an employer an ultimatum and they don't want to give in to your demands then is that giving notice or quitting on the spot or something else? Should her managers/google legal have waited for her to tell them when exactly she was going to leave?
      - whimsicalism 6y ago
        > Should her managers/google legal have waited for her to tell them when exactly she was going to leave? Yes, if they wanted her to resign they should have waited for her to resign rather than fire her. If they fired her, seems odd to call it a resignation.

mellosouls 6y ago

It is unfortunate that way too many commenters on a prior threads dismissed her as a some twitter personality and trivialized her body of work in spite of the fact that she is well regarded and reputable in the ML community. Both the positive aspects of her contributions and the clear negatives of her approach were rightly pointed out by various people (as well as problems with process and politics at Google); perhaps your reading of a long and complicated morass of comments was unintentionally selective.

whimsicalism 6y ago
I think the tone on HN was markedly more critical than elsewhere and I certainly notice that the divergence in tone seems greatest when discussing black people and women.
- mellosouls 6y ago
  It depends where "elsewhere" is. I personally find HN to be generally liberal-leaning but not excessively so, and have noticed a welcome openness to centrist opinions that might once have been dismissed here out of hand as right-wing (and are still being dismissed elsewhere) that I take as a good sign of an increasingly aware local commentariat with respect to the excesses of the more ideological elements of the left and right.
- contemporary343 6y ago
  Yep, I've noticed this too.
- JamesBarney 6y ago
  Where is elsewhere? The big online communities I'm a part of are twitter, reddit, hacker news, and facebook. It's true that hacker news seems to be different from those when discussing culture war topics. With hacker news being father to the right than twitter and reddit, and more center right than my facebook feed. One conclusion is hacker news exists in a right wing bubble. The other is that twitter and reddit exist in a left wing bubble. Given that the median voter in the last election voted for Biden, but just barely, and maybe voted for a republican senator. And even the people arguing her being let go was justified are probably pretty center or center left. I would guess your "elsewhere" exists in a ideological bubble that is much stronger than the one hacker news exists in.

Certhas 6y ago

Absolutely. The supposedly objectionable tone in the EMails she posted was after leadership censored her paper in an apparently unprecedented and intransparent internal review. She has a track record of publishing peer reviewed and well received papers, and the paper in question was going through a normal peer review process when it was halted internally. To any academic the explanations of leadership are transparently absurd. No academic of integrity could accept that as a work environment, doubly so if you were hired as Ethical AI Lead. It simply indicates to me that Google as an organisation is no longer capable of having a serious Ethical AI Lab.

anonvenger 6y ago

It is regrettable that Timnit Gebru chose the public route, first writing to the 'Brain Women and Allies' mailing list, where she implied that the rejection of her paper is part of a pattern of 'constant dehumanization' (a person holding one of the highest status technical jobs in tech, TL of an AI research group at Google Brain), and then going straight to Twitter and telling half truths under the cover of potential legal action. Not sure what is customary in AI research these days, back in my day it was common to polish and resubmit to the next conference. ICML deadline is Tue 29 Dec 2020, less than a month ahead. There is also ACL, the top NLP conference, Mon 01 Feb 2021, two months ahead.

pontus 6y ago

I think that even if her work was spot on, Google has every right to have her retract her research. You can say that this is hypocritical of Google, which I actually don't really agree with. Even if we take it as fact that she was somehow going to be releasing something very damaging and that Google was weary of that (which I already think is quite generous to her), I would imagine that her role as a researcher is not to be an in-house whistleblower but rather to be someone who helps Google mitigate the biases etc that they may be perpetuating. If that's the case, her first job is to serve Google and help them address these shortcomings and her second role (if there even is one) would be to publish this for the community at large. Most companies will not let people publish their findings at all, and I think this is something that sets Google and a few other companies apart from the pack. The fact that there even is a mechanism to share results outside of your employer is really rare. So, even if Google said "wow, this is spot on and will make us look terrible", they should be 100% able to tell her "don't publish this, instead let's work to fix this and then possibly publish a post mortem". Google is ultimately a company, not a democracy.

aspaceman 6y ago

The comments are so implicitly skeptical I find it hard to take this site seriously.

6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago

She seems like a fantastic researcher and brilliant person, but also an new subvariety of the old tech trope of a brilliant asshole. Or the trope of a 10x’er whose toxic behavior should be overlooked because she’s right with regards to her research. Saying a brilliant asshole is a net negative isn’t trivializing their work. It’s saying the work isn’t the most important factor.

justicezyx 6y ago

LMAO Timinit has been showing her aggressive side without much self awareness for a long time. Instead of relying on her research work and data, she routinely try to shut down the opposite side's "matter of fact" statements. In contrast, the proclaimed "bad" guy, Jeff Dean, never do that. I know a co-worker who is level 4 engineer, reviewing Jeff's code changes, with Jeff never show a slight hint of his status. At the moment Jeff is level 11 engineer. If Timinit could be that patient, then given enough time, she will make impact equal or beyond Jeff as in pure engineering. Instead, she tried to let loose her emotions. Her continue staying at Google and the ethical AI research community would become a long term risk and overall negative factor, given the trajectory. That's my pessimistic prediction.

ethical-ai 6y ago

I'm not sure why everyone refer to the process as "retracting" rather than "withdrawing", given the paper was not accepted yet. It sounds for me pretty reasonable to withdraw the paper which has flaws to fix and resubmit it, rather than rush into fixes before conference deadline (given that those fixes should probably be reviewed too). I didn't see any claims that the requirement was to never publish this paper. It also seems to be reasonable that the papers published by company are internally reviewed, like the papers by lab members are reviewed by PI before submission. I see different claims from Google researchers, but it seems that at least for some internal review is used to access quality of the work [1,2]. It might potentially harm the freedom of the researcher, but once again, unless I missed something, there is no evidence that Google asked her to withdraw the paper and never resubmit. As I already wrote in different comment, I can not think of a single reason to ask for reviewers identities unless she wanted to confront them personally. [1] https://twitter.com/julianibarz/status/1334623651719643141 https://twitter.com/julianibarz/status/1334623651719643141 [2] https://twitter.com/vivnat/status/1334710506045669376 https://twitter.com/vivnat/status/1334710506045669376

courtf 6y ago

It doesn't matter if she is aggressive or demure, brilliant or stupid. It doesn't really matter if her work changes the world, or benefits mankind. All that matters for her employment status currently is whether Google sees value in paying her salary. There is an endless river of souls being callously, unfairly fired every day. The only reason we are even talking about this one is because it is controversial, and has been blasted out on social media. Gebru seems like a smart cookie to me, but being smart, hardworking, just, kind, or any other number of other adjectives simply doesn't matter. Google, just like every other profit driven company on the planet, only cares about the value you provide. They are only different in degree from companies running sweatshops in SE Asia, and if the law allowed it, there would be _zero_ hesitation to bring that reality back here in the US. People in tech would get whiplash from how fast the industry would pull that u-turn. We want to believe there is a social contract, that Google, or the tech industry, or America, or some group of people, somewhere, is above the competitive fray, and would not stoop so low as to abuse us for profit. Even at the very heights of privilege in the richest country in the world, working at one of the richest, most enlightened companies in the world, you are still getting exploited, and nothing will change that as it stands today. Google will probably keep investing in AI ethics, as long as people keep believing that actually makes them committed to some kind of standard.