21 ms·

Maybe different teams are different, but on my previous team within Google AI, we thought the goal of google's pubapproval process was to ensure that internal c

by gcr 6y ago

Maybe different teams are different, but on my previous team within Google AI, we thought the goal of google's pubapproval process was to ensure that internal company IP (eg. details about datasets, details about google compute infra) does not leak to the public, and maybe to shield Google from liability. Nothing more. In all of my time at Google AI, I never heard of pubapproval being used for peer review or to critique the scientific rigor of the work. It was never used as a journal, it was an afterthought that folks on my team would usually clear only hours before important deadlines. We like to leave peer review to the conferences/journals' existing process to weed out bad papers; why duplicate that work internally? I'm disappointed that Jeff has chosen to imply that pubapproval is used to enforce rigour. That is a new use case and not how it has been traditionally used. Pubapproval hasn't been used to silence uncomfortable minority viewpoints until now. If this has changed, it's a very, very new change.

logicslave 6y ago
Do you want to know whats interesting? I read alot of computer science research, particularly what comes out of Google. Its clear to me that details are left out of specific papers, especially how things are done in sub systems. But, like a jig saw puzzle, I discovered that many papers are actually descriptions of computing systems and algorithms that interact. If you read between the lines and squint your eyes, you can get a much bigger picture of internal google AI systems than you guys think you can.
- SirYandi 6y ago
  Would love to read a blog post of your observations about that
- cbsmith 6y ago
  Oh yeah, absolutely. It's not at all hard to see the systems view of this.
vikramkr 6y ago
They might have enough of a PR budget to make the Google version of the story stick. But, its concerning that, if what you say is true, they are hoping to make that work by leveraging the public's ignorance of how the Google specific process works. Its also not the smartest move, since Google is important enough and public goodwill towards tech is low enough that journalists will have a field day looking for evidence of double standards/a cover up. And they're not making it too difficult for the journalists if that evidence is found in the top comment on a hacker news post.
- hackcasual 6y ago
  This really seems like whistling past the graveyard on google's part here. There's too much meat to the story for them to really do much more than obfuscate. The intersection of race and gender, ethical implications of big tech, the capitalistic pursuit of innovation at the expense of individual freedom. All of these look bad for google
theobeers 6y ago
And the examples of issues flagged in review that Jeff keeps highlighting—like Timnit’s alleged failure to mention recent work to reduce the environmental impact of large models—are themselves a bit worrisome. Jeff gives the impression that they demanded retraction (!) because they wanted Timnit and her coauthors to soften their critique. The more I read about this, the worse it looks.
- omgwtfbyobbq 6y ago
  That was my impression as well. Having said that, if Jeff were to make public the paper, criticisms of the paper, and improvements made to address the problems described in the paper, that could go a long way towards clearing the air.
  - gcr 6y ago
    oh yes absolutely, i would love for timmit or jeff to release this paper as-is so we can see what happened. could be a good read.
    - UncleMeat 6y ago
      The draft is rolling around the web already.
      - treis 6y ago
        link?
        ninjin 6y ago
        A second hand account from a VentureBeat journalist is the best I could find [1]. As a researcher with more than a decade of experience in Natural Language Processing, what is described by the journalist in regards to the paper content seems to be non-controversial and nothing out of the ordinary from this kind of work. If anyone could find an actual leak I would be more than excited to have a look at it using my own eyes rather than filtered through someone else’s. [1]: https://venturebeat.com/2020/12/03/ai-ethics-pioneers-exit-from-google-involved-research-into-risks-and-inequality-in-large-language-models https://venturebeat.com/2020/12/03/ai-ethics-pioneers-exit-f...
kwillets 6y ago
That confused me as well -- where I work we have a legal dept. approval for IP issues, and that's it. Academic review doesn't make sense in that context or time frame.
petulla 6y ago
This response really seems like gaslighting. He doesn't address her concerns and glosses over whether she was held to a different standard than others at GR.
- bmitc 6y ago
  He was also extremely vague, perhaps intentionally, about what the issue actually was. His sentence about when the paper was submitted and approved and all that is impossible to parse and make sense of who did what and when.
  - sbarre 6y ago
    Of course he was vague. This just happened, tensions are high, and no doubt Timnit is talking to an employment lawyer to find out what both parties' right and obligations are, and I'm sure Google's lawyers are also getting all their ducks in a row. This is spin at best, gaslighting at worst. We'll never get the full story (and should we? it is an internal company matter made public, after all)..
    - Barrin92 6y ago
      >We'll never get the full story (and should we? it is an internal company matter made public, after all)) Not really sure what the point of an 'ethical AI' department is when there's no transparency or accountability facing the public because if it can be cancelled internally at any point if it threatens the company you've basically recreated some kind of Soviet ministry for truth
      - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
        The point is to do foundational research, and to help Google ensure that its AI development complies with its own ethics. Google did try to set up an AI ethics board for accountability to the public, but it fell apart, because many segments of the public have ethical views which were seen as unacceptable. (https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/04/google-cancels-controversial-ai-ethics-panel.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/04/google-cancels-controversial...)
pengstrom 6y ago
Increased scrutiny on minorites speaking up is a common historical occurance.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
eachro 6y ago
But in this scenario, shielding Google from liability is actually a primary concern given that Timnit is discussing ethics/bias. A paper on say novel transformer architecture, the lottery ticket hypothesis in a new setting, a new RL benchmark suite, etc is not going to expose Google to legal risk the way ethical AI research often can.
- aabhay 6y ago
  This. I have been arguing the unpopular opinion that most AI ethics work in corporate settings is not designed to empower real research. It was a matter of time before an actual researcher with an ethical compass was removed unceremoniously. Anyone in an AI ethics team at a large company — you need to know exactly what your job means to the company, because it isn’t safe.
- oh_sigh 6y ago
  How would publishing a paper open a 3rd party up to legal risk? Research papers aren't laws, and it is chronologically impossible for a research paper to influence already on the book laws.
  - eachro 6y ago
    I can imagine a scenario where a politician who wants to pick a fight with Google uses some of the unflattering findings in the published work as supporting material for why Google needs to be regulated/fined/etc: "Google does {bad thing}. Look at this research report from Google researchers! They admit to doing {bad thing}!"
    - oh_sigh 6y ago
      That would be a future act, not making previous acts illegal ex post facto.
  - btilly 6y ago
    A paper from Google saying that Google knows that its systems discriminate against minority groups can open Google up to liability for a class action lawsuit from said minority groups against Google. And the fact that Google knows increases the damages that they can look for. The same paper from outside of Google also creates liability, but now the argument for increased damages becomes about whether Google knew.
lokar 6y ago
In technical infra I saw papers rejected that were deemed to be not interesting enough (not a big enough novel contribution).
cavisne 6y ago
We know large language models are super important to google, and there are lots of competitors. If they approved the paper the message would be "google thinks language models are a waste of resources and racist". There would be no academic debate on this topic as its been framed as woke and published by a militant activist, so any disagreement would be racist (see prior interactions between this researcher and other researchers [1]). Thats why the standard process of publishing, peer reviewing, academic critique etc would not work. Why would their researchers working on language models stay? when they can go to Facebook, OpenAI etc. Why would new researchers join? [1] https://syncedreview.com/2020/06/30/yann-lecun-quits-twitter-amid-acrimonious-exchanges-on-ai-bias/ https://syncedreview.com/2020/06/30/yann-lecun-quits-twitter...
- freeone3000 6y ago
  Academic debate is, in fact, done through conferences and journals. You saying there can be no debate is a strawman position with no basis in reality. The idea that standard rigor cannot be applied to ethics research is absurd, and seems to insinuate that the entire field is absent discipline. The proper response to her position would be to publish a response or critique. Attacking her entire field does nothing to further the conversation.
  - diffserv 6y ago
    The statement that "Academic debate is, in fact, done through conferences and journals" is not strictly true. Specially given that a lot of reviews in more popular conference are very hit and miss. You can submit the same paper to the same conference multiple times and get wildly different opinions on the same paper. The variation in reviewers' response is often due their lack of knowledge and unfamiliarity with the problem. Take a look at the recent reviews on some of the more popular conferences on OpenReview.net. Most of the reviews don't have any substance and are often vague/generic. I'd take the reviews from peers that I trust and are aware of my work more seriously than reviewers of conferences.
- yodelshady 6y ago
  She's got solid STEM credentials. If google managed to hire a "woke militant activist" instead of what they wanted... is that really much better? Demand the best from your multi-billion dollar corporations.
lallysingh 6y ago
Also, when has feedback on a paper in this process been relayed via HR? You only bring in HR protections to protect the company from a legal standpoint.
calf 6y ago
The key sentence is the bullshit about a paper not offering mitigation as not helping. Since when is a scientific paper required to do that.
- BeetleB 6y ago
  When I was in academia, it was not unusual for the referees to reject a paper for this reason. Of course, you are informed of that and always have the option to rewrite the paper to include that information. In some cases, though, it's not simply a matter of listing it as other work in the Intro - you may need to incorporate it into your models, etc.
  - calf 6y ago
    That's no justification for the rationale that critique or negative results in general are not paper worth or do not advance science in less short-sighted ways.
    - BeetleB 6y ago
      I wasn't discussing the appropriateness - I was pointing out that this behavior is normal in science. Your original comment was: > Since when is a scientific paper required to do that. Unfortunately, for a long time (since well before my time, at least).
- justicezyx 6y ago
  If you are actually an academic researchers in an academia institution, and are exposed to a large scope of the dealings of the community, then you might find that professional academia is as political as corporations, if not more so...
- dekhn 6y ago
  beyond reviewers or editors asking you to make changes like this (for example, "so-and-so just published <blah> which means that your sentence about <blah> is obsolete"), we're talking about research coming from a corporation. If one part of the company is trashing another part of the company, and it's based on stale results, asking to have the paper updated to include the latest results is reasonable.
contemporary343 6y ago
Ditto in my past experience at Microsoft Research. Never an actual review of paper's merits, just IP and maintaining trade secrets if applicable.
dzdt 6y ago
Yes it is disingenuous for Dean to pretend that this was a normal process applied to a normal situation. Clearly whatever happened on that team, this latest round was not the beginning or even most important part. Gebru's letter mentions her threatening to sue Google previously, for instance. [1] The discussion about rigour in a conference paper or internal review is obviously a pretense. [1] https://www.platformer.news/p/the-withering-email-that-got-an-ethical https://www.platformer.news/p/the-withering-email-that-got-a...
jariel 6y ago
"Pubapproval hasn't been used to silence uncomfortable minority viewpoints until now." This is sad gaslighting of a reasonable concern the team had. Having to endure some external review for what could otherwise be sensitive material. The inability for the SJW crowd to work reasonably within very reasonable terms, to then resort to aggressive tactics such as 'demand the names and opinions of everyone on the board' and then publicly misrepresenting the situation is going to lose you a lot of favour. Every time I read one of these stories I immediately feel sympathetic to the individual, but then upon learning more, I feel duped and maligned for having been effectively lied to. The doors are wide open for progress, those who take it to micro-totalitarian lengths are not doing anyone any favours.
- mostafab 6y ago
  Black female scientist Timnit Gebru fired - the end of Google as a top AI research institution? https://melwy.com/blog/black-female-scientist-timnit-gebru-fired-the-end-of-google-as-a-top-ai-research-institution https://melwy.com/blog/black-female-scientist-timnit-gebru-f...
kazamaloo 6y ago
Every paper we submitted went through a technical review as well as legal and IP reviews. They were along the lines of cite this, cite that, run these experiments etc. What's different in her case is that you don't see the names of the people reviewing. Being the devil's advocate, she MIGHT have a pattern of aggressively attacking people who reviewed their work before. So they might have made the reviewers anonymous this time.
contemporary343 6y ago
Similar experience to another current Google Brain researcher: https://twitter.com/le_roux_nicolas/status/1334601960972906496 https://twitter.com/le_roux_nicolas/status/13346019609729064... Submitting conference papers last minute is... normal.
- sjg007 6y ago
  This tweet is on point.
cyrus20 6y ago
At least when I was there, my papers were getting thoroughly reviewed and often had to make some adjustments before getting approval. Never occurred to me to make any demands from the reviewers or threaten to resign if my paper doesn't get immediately and unconditionally approved. Seems like she's asking for preferential treatment.
- contemporary343 6y ago
  She's the one asking for an option to revise and discuss it. Management is the one demanding an unconditional retraction, with no recourse.
stjohnswarts 6y ago
Why wouldn't you want to weed out bad papers as close to the source as possible to save company embarrassment and external people's time? If you see something wrong during a review why not push it back to the author before it does rounds outside the company? That would seem like a very bad practice to me.
creato 6y ago
I don't think the approval process is being used to enforce rigor in general, the (claimed) problem is the paper lacks rigor specifically in regards to claims about google's behavior. Publishing a paper with a lack of rigor about some obscure mathematical technique isn't a problem for google (beyond some possible but unlikely mild reputation damage). Publishing a paper with a lack of rigor that says google is doing unethical things, when those things are questionably accurate, that is something google would (and should) have a problem with. Whether the paper actually lacks rigor in a relevant way is not something I can comment on.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

by gcr 6y ago

logicslave 6y ago

Do you want to know whats interesting? I read alot of computer science research, particularly what comes out of Google. Its clear to me that details are left out of specific papers, especially how things are done in sub systems. But, like a jig saw puzzle, I discovered that many papers are actually descriptions of computing systems and algorithms that interact. If you read between the lines and squint your eyes, you can get a much bigger picture of internal google AI systems than you guys think you can.

SirYandi 6y ago
Would love to read a blog post of your observations about that
cbsmith 6y ago
Oh yeah, absolutely. It's not at all hard to see the systems view of this.

vikramkr 6y ago

They might have enough of a PR budget to make the Google version of the story stick. But, its concerning that, if what you say is true, they are hoping to make that work by leveraging the public's ignorance of how the Google specific process works. Its also not the smartest move, since Google is important enough and public goodwill towards tech is low enough that journalists will have a field day looking for evidence of double standards/a cover up. And they're not making it too difficult for the journalists if that evidence is found in the top comment on a hacker news post.

hackcasual 6y ago
This really seems like whistling past the graveyard on google's part here. There's too much meat to the story for them to really do much more than obfuscate. The intersection of race and gender, ethical implications of big tech, the capitalistic pursuit of innovation at the expense of individual freedom. All of these look bad for google

theobeers 6y ago

And the examples of issues flagged in review that Jeff keeps highlighting—like Timnit’s alleged failure to mention recent work to reduce the environmental impact of large models—are themselves a bit worrisome. Jeff gives the impression that they demanded retraction (!) because they wanted Timnit and her coauthors to soften their critique. The more I read about this, the worse it looks.

omgwtfbyobbq 6y ago
That was my impression as well. Having said that, if Jeff were to make public the paper, criticisms of the paper, and improvements made to address the problems described in the paper, that could go a long way towards clearing the air.
- gcr 6y ago
  oh yes absolutely, i would love for timmit or jeff to release this paper as-is so we can see what happened. could be a good read.
  - UncleMeat 6y ago
    The draft is rolling around the web already.
    - treis 6y ago
      link?
      - ninjin 6y ago
        A second hand account from a VentureBeat journalist is the best I could find [1]. As a researcher with more than a decade of experience in Natural Language Processing, what is described by the journalist in regards to the paper content seems to be non-controversial and nothing out of the ordinary from this kind of work. If anyone could find an actual leak I would be more than excited to have a look at it using my own eyes rather than filtered through someone else’s. [1]: https://venturebeat.com/2020/12/03/ai-ethics-pioneers-exit-from-google-involved-research-into-risks-and-inequality-in-large-language-models https://venturebeat.com/2020/12/03/ai-ethics-pioneers-exit-f...

kwillets 6y ago

That confused me as well -- where I work we have a legal dept. approval for IP issues, and that's it. Academic review doesn't make sense in that context or time frame.

petulla 6y ago

This response really seems like gaslighting. He doesn't address her concerns and glosses over whether she was held to a different standard than others at GR.

bmitc 6y ago
He was also extremely vague, perhaps intentionally, about what the issue actually was. His sentence about when the paper was submitted and approved and all that is impossible to parse and make sense of who did what and when.
- sbarre 6y ago
  Of course he was vague. This just happened, tensions are high, and no doubt Timnit is talking to an employment lawyer to find out what both parties' right and obligations are, and I'm sure Google's lawyers are also getting all their ducks in a row. This is spin at best, gaslighting at worst. We'll never get the full story (and should we? it is an internal company matter made public, after all)..
  - Barrin92 6y ago
    >We'll never get the full story (and should we? it is an internal company matter made public, after all)) Not really sure what the point of an 'ethical AI' department is when there's no transparency or accountability facing the public because if it can be cancelled internally at any point if it threatens the company you've basically recreated some kind of Soviet ministry for truth
    - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
      The point is to do foundational research, and to help Google ensure that its AI development complies with its own ethics. Google did try to set up an AI ethics board for accountability to the public, but it fell apart, because many segments of the public have ethical views which were seen as unacceptable. (https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/04/google-cancels-controversial-ai-ethics-panel.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/04/google-cancels-controversial...)

pengstrom 6y ago

Increased scrutiny on minorites speaking up is a common historical occurance.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

eachro 6y ago

But in this scenario, shielding Google from liability is actually a primary concern given that Timnit is discussing ethics/bias. A paper on say novel transformer architecture, the lottery ticket hypothesis in a new setting, a new RL benchmark suite, etc is not going to expose Google to legal risk the way ethical AI research often can.

aabhay 6y ago
This. I have been arguing the unpopular opinion that most AI ethics work in corporate settings is not designed to empower real research. It was a matter of time before an actual researcher with an ethical compass was removed unceremoniously. Anyone in an AI ethics team at a large company — you need to know exactly what your job means to the company, because it isn’t safe.
oh_sigh 6y ago
How would publishing a paper open a 3rd party up to legal risk? Research papers aren't laws, and it is chronologically impossible for a research paper to influence already on the book laws.
- eachro 6y ago
  I can imagine a scenario where a politician who wants to pick a fight with Google uses some of the unflattering findings in the published work as supporting material for why Google needs to be regulated/fined/etc: "Google does {bad thing}. Look at this research report from Google researchers! They admit to doing {bad thing}!"
  - oh_sigh 6y ago
    That would be a future act, not making previous acts illegal ex post facto.
- btilly 6y ago
  A paper from Google saying that Google knows that its systems discriminate against minority groups can open Google up to liability for a class action lawsuit from said minority groups against Google. And the fact that Google knows increases the damages that they can look for. The same paper from outside of Google also creates liability, but now the argument for increased damages becomes about whether Google knew.

lokar 6y ago

In technical infra I saw papers rejected that were deemed to be not interesting enough (not a big enough novel contribution).

cavisne 6y ago

We know large language models are super important to google, and there are lots of competitors. If they approved the paper the message would be "google thinks language models are a waste of resources and racist". There would be no academic debate on this topic as its been framed as woke and published by a militant activist, so any disagreement would be racist (see prior interactions between this researcher and other researchers [1]). Thats why the standard process of publishing, peer reviewing, academic critique etc would not work. Why would their researchers working on language models stay? when they can go to Facebook, OpenAI etc. Why would new researchers join? [1] https://syncedreview.com/2020/06/30/yann-lecun-quits-twitter-amid-acrimonious-exchanges-on-ai-bias/ https://syncedreview.com/2020/06/30/yann-lecun-quits-twitter...

freeone3000 6y ago
Academic debate is, in fact, done through conferences and journals. You saying there can be no debate is a strawman position with no basis in reality. The idea that standard rigor cannot be applied to ethics research is absurd, and seems to insinuate that the entire field is absent discipline. The proper response to her position would be to publish a response or critique. Attacking her entire field does nothing to further the conversation.
- diffserv 6y ago
  The statement that "Academic debate is, in fact, done through conferences and journals" is not strictly true. Specially given that a lot of reviews in more popular conference are very hit and miss. You can submit the same paper to the same conference multiple times and get wildly different opinions on the same paper. The variation in reviewers' response is often due their lack of knowledge and unfamiliarity with the problem. Take a look at the recent reviews on some of the more popular conferences on OpenReview.net. Most of the reviews don't have any substance and are often vague/generic. I'd take the reviews from peers that I trust and are aware of my work more seriously than reviewers of conferences.
yodelshady 6y ago
She's got solid STEM credentials. If google managed to hire a "woke militant activist" instead of what they wanted... is that really much better? Demand the best from your multi-billion dollar corporations.

lallysingh 6y ago

Also, when has feedback on a paper in this process been relayed via HR? You only bring in HR protections to protect the company from a legal standpoint.

calf 6y ago

The key sentence is the bullshit about a paper not offering mitigation as not helping. Since when is a scientific paper required to do that.

BeetleB 6y ago
When I was in academia, it was not unusual for the referees to reject a paper for this reason. Of course, you are informed of that and always have the option to rewrite the paper to include that information. In some cases, though, it's not simply a matter of listing it as other work in the Intro - you may need to incorporate it into your models, etc.
- calf 6y ago
  That's no justification for the rationale that critique or negative results in general are not paper worth or do not advance science in less short-sighted ways.
  - BeetleB 6y ago
    I wasn't discussing the appropriateness - I was pointing out that this behavior is normal in science. Your original comment was: > Since when is a scientific paper required to do that. Unfortunately, for a long time (since well before my time, at least).
justicezyx 6y ago
If you are actually an academic researchers in an academia institution, and are exposed to a large scope of the dealings of the community, then you might find that professional academia is as political as corporations, if not more so...
dekhn 6y ago
beyond reviewers or editors asking you to make changes like this (for example, "so-and-so just published <blah> which means that your sentence about <blah> is obsolete"), we're talking about research coming from a corporation. If one part of the company is trashing another part of the company, and it's based on stale results, asking to have the paper updated to include the latest results is reasonable.

contemporary343 6y ago

Ditto in my past experience at Microsoft Research. Never an actual review of paper's merits, just IP and maintaining trade secrets if applicable.

dzdt 6y ago

Yes it is disingenuous for Dean to pretend that this was a normal process applied to a normal situation. Clearly whatever happened on that team, this latest round was not the beginning or even most important part. Gebru's letter mentions her threatening to sue Google previously, for instance. [1] The discussion about rigour in a conference paper or internal review is obviously a pretense. [1] https://www.platformer.news/p/the-withering-email-that-got-an-ethical https://www.platformer.news/p/the-withering-email-that-got-a...

jariel 6y ago

"Pubapproval hasn't been used to silence uncomfortable minority viewpoints until now." This is sad gaslighting of a reasonable concern the team had. Having to endure some external review for what could otherwise be sensitive material. The inability for the SJW crowd to work reasonably within very reasonable terms, to then resort to aggressive tactics such as 'demand the names and opinions of everyone on the board' and then publicly misrepresenting the situation is going to lose you a lot of favour. Every time I read one of these stories I immediately feel sympathetic to the individual, but then upon learning more, I feel duped and maligned for having been effectively lied to. The doors are wide open for progress, those who take it to micro-totalitarian lengths are not doing anyone any favours.

mostafab 6y ago
Black female scientist Timnit Gebru fired - the end of Google as a top AI research institution? https://melwy.com/blog/black-female-scientist-timnit-gebru-fired-the-end-of-google-as-a-top-ai-research-institution https://melwy.com/blog/black-female-scientist-timnit-gebru-f...

kazamaloo 6y ago

Every paper we submitted went through a technical review as well as legal and IP reviews. They were along the lines of cite this, cite that, run these experiments etc. What's different in her case is that you don't see the names of the people reviewing. Being the devil's advocate, she MIGHT have a pattern of aggressively attacking people who reviewed their work before. So they might have made the reviewers anonymous this time.

contemporary343 6y ago

Similar experience to another current Google Brain researcher: https://twitter.com/le_roux_nicolas/status/1334601960972906496 https://twitter.com/le_roux_nicolas/status/13346019609729064... Submitting conference papers last minute is... normal.

sjg007 6y ago
This tweet is on point.

cyrus20 6y ago

At least when I was there, my papers were getting thoroughly reviewed and often had to make some adjustments before getting approval. Never occurred to me to make any demands from the reviewers or threaten to resign if my paper doesn't get immediately and unconditionally approved. Seems like she's asking for preferential treatment.

contemporary343 6y ago
She's the one asking for an option to revise and discuss it. Management is the one demanding an unconditional retraction, with no recourse.

stjohnswarts 6y ago

Why wouldn't you want to weed out bad papers as close to the source as possible to save company embarrassment and external people's time? If you see something wrong during a review why not push it back to the author before it does rounds outside the company? That would seem like a very bad practice to me.

creato 6y ago

I don't think the approval process is being used to enforce rigor in general, the (claimed) problem is the paper lacks rigor specifically in regards to claims about google's behavior. Publishing a paper with a lack of rigor about some obscure mathematical technique isn't a problem for google (beyond some possible but unlikely mild reputation damage). Publishing a paper with a lack of rigor that says google is doing unethical things, when those things are questionably accurate, that is something google would (and should) have a problem with. Whether the paper actually lacks rigor in a relevant way is not something I can comment on.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]