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Anyone else see the narrative on Twitter to be so much different than Reddit and hacker news? On reddit and hacker news I have never seen any unconditional sup

Anyone else see the narrative on Twitter to be so much different than Reddit and hacker news? On reddit and hacker news I have never seen any unconditional support for Timmit. Even amongst those anti Google and broadly in support of her, there's no whole agreement with all of what Timmit says; the assertion of her story, the reasons why and the conclusions. that a. She was fired b. That she was fired because of sexism and racism and c. That all research at Google is pointless and should stop until reform. On Twitter there is more vocal support, but here and Reddit even on those most critical of Google and behind Timmit, there's no entire agreement with her. There are comments supporting some parts but none supporting all, none agreeing with the Google Walkout document. Comments pointing out holes with official explanations but not supporting the conclusions. Why is this? I find it odd, I would expect more unequivocal solidarity seen with less public visibility.

geofft 6y ago
Er, who is claiming "all research at Google is pointless and should stop until reform"? Presumably not the person who was trying to do and publish research at Google? (Are you confusing this with her email that said that participating in Google's feel-good diversity and inclusion work, specifically, was pointless and should stop, so that people could focus on their real jobs - such as research - instead of wasting time placating unknown managers?) Anyway, my theory re your question is that Reddit and HN are usually pseudonymous, and so you have no idea whether the person saying something actually knows anything about Google or actually participates in the industry. The norm on Twitter is to use your real identity, and so comments from Googlers and ex-Googlers are boosted there. On Reddit and HN, good-sounding first-principles arguments are boosted. The two models are better at different kinds of discussions.
- thinkingemote 6y ago
  A bit of a mixup I think. Good to clarify it. The Google walkout blog demands all research needs reform (but no stop) but the email did specify that specific field to stop.
  - geofft 6y ago
    Yeah, the email was clearly written amidst frustration and isn't the world's most polished piece of prose, but I think it's pretty clear that the thing it's saying you should do is stop writing DEI docs that meet OKRs and are aimed at an internal audience, not stop doing research: > What I want to say is stop writing your documents because it doesn’t make a difference. The DEI OKRs that we don’t know where they come from (and are never met anyways), the random discussions, the “we need more mentorship” rather than “we need to stop the toxic environments that hinder us from progressing” the constant fighting and education at your cost, they don’t matter. [...] > So if you would like to change things, I suggest focusing on leadership accountability and thinking through what types of pressures can also be applied from the outside. For instance, I believe that the Congressional Black Caucus is the entity that started forcing tech companies to report their diversity numbers. Writing more documents and saying things over and over again will tire you out but no one will listen. (It seems to consistently use the word "paper" instead of "document" for research.) And Jeff Dean's reply identifies that she was asking to stop the DEI work, not to stop research: > I also feel badly that hundreds of you received an email just this week from Timnit telling you to stop work on critical DEI programs. Please don’t.
fxtentacle 6y ago
sarcasm I heard buying Twitter bots is cheap.
thu2111 6y ago
Remember that outside the valley AI bubble Gebru is primarily famous for having publicly whipped up a mob against Yann LeCun and chasing him off Twitter by constantly claiming he was a racist sexist white man with no clue. Given that, it's maybe not a huge surprise that the tweets you're finding are more pro-Timnit than actually exists. Another obvious problem: she keeps being described as a highly respected AI researcher, a leader of the field etc. Er, no. I read a lot of AI papers. I don't respect Gebru or the sub-field of AI ethnics much at all. What's happening here is simple: criticising a black woman in tech is impossible to do under your own name in corporate America, as radical leftists will immediately set out as a group to destroy you. The only acceptable position is to praise her and claim she's a genius. On HN and Reddit you can see what people really think and it's very far from that.
- TotallyHaram 6y ago
  I am not vested in AI research at all. But I am horrified by the possibility that 'data' and 'science' need to be ignored by AI so that false equality among the races could be realized. Timnit was refining this unethical approach IMO by using extortion against her own employer. Just the thought that someone who is basically an unethical emotional terrorist would be programming AI to ignore actual data and science in favor of their own race is chilling.
linspace 6y ago
Maybe deeper knowledge of the issues at hand than in Twitter. Or maybe different interests. Why would they agree? There is a reason why I don't use Twitter and I read HN.
asdfrmrf 6y ago
Hackernews tends to be male.
christophilus 6y ago
I find that the average HN thread demonstrates a broader diversity of thought, and generally deeper, more critical, more scientific thought than the average Twitter feed. So it’s not surprising that Twitter would be near unanimous and HN would be more nuanced. This is one of the reasons I prefer HN to just about any other online forum.
- claudeganon 6y ago
  I agree that there is a broader diversity of a thought, but there’s also a dominant, conservative streak when it comes to deferring to corporate authority. This is unsurprising since many people on this site get paid a lot of money by the same people being critiqued, but does represent a kind of self-selection toward servility.
- newsclues 6y ago
  HN is the new /.
  - Breza 6y ago
    Oh I haven't thought about that site in a long time. I used to be obsessed with it back in the day.
- guantanamo_bob 6y ago
  Deeper and more critical sure (likely due to the platform, not necessarily the users). On Twitter I can choose to follow POC, women, experts inside/outside this field and hear their opinion—-which I’d argue provides a more diverse representation than anonymous posts by a largely white male message board. I also trust the opinion of someone willing to share their identity, it forces you to think more carefully about the stand you’re taking when your reputation is on the line.
  - blub 6y ago
    What makes someone's opinion particularly valuable when that someone's a woman or not white? They might have different life experiences and perspectives on day to day life compared to a white male, but sex or race has zero relevance to knowledge-based fields. The opinion of someone anonymous is probably very close to their true opinion. The opinion of non-anonymous users on Twitter is almost certainly censored.
dzdt 6y ago
Hacker News is about pseudonymous discussion. Only a small percent of HN posters are building a brand name. Twitter is much more real-name based and personal brand-building focussed. Jumping in on a bandwagon to signal group membership in an in group can help brand-building. Going against the in group is potentially fatal to your brand. The risk/reward balance does not favor genuine discussion of a controversial topic. On HN most comments are up/down voted based on their content. The post authorship usually matters little. There is little benefit for the author to announce support of a popular position and little risk for the author to express an unpopular one. So discussion here can be more about substance and less about signaling.
- z3ncyberpunk 6y ago
  you are writing like HN is much fairer and upstanding than other forms of social media. there is nothing different here, if you step outside of the blind faith of corporate fawning and startup hustle or bring any challenging opinion you get shadowbanned
- machinelabo 6y ago
  This is one of the most illuminating assessments of Twitter. It’s virtue signaling , as cliche as it sounds to use that term - that’s what Twitter has become. No fault of Twitter, we’ve created a culture in our society where persons with their open identity cannot easily voice dissenting opinions and going against the grain without getting cancelled. What a fucked up world we live in.
  - 495636483 6y ago
    I am not on twitter. What's with this canceling? Who got cancelled? What does that mean for them? Could you illustrate some examples?
    - TotallyHaram 6y ago
      Cancel culture is when the Twitter Strangler deletes your current account for the 23rd time because you point out the irony of someone working in 'AI ethics' is 100% unethical for trying to extort the company they work for with their own political agenda, regardless of the companies interests or needs. Thankfully this 'ethical AI researcher' will no longer be employed teaching or guiding ethics in AI.
mlthoughts2018 6y ago
This is not surprising. On Twitter there is a strong cancel culture to irrationally oppose anything that fails to unquestioningly accept “wokeness” narratives. Critical thinking and evaluation of evidence is not really permitted. Twitter is more about trying to look (publicly) like you affiliate with this or that celebrity, so the regular person can feel some sense of patronage to their chosen circle of intellectuals or artists. It has no connection to objective appraisal of evidence. It’s more tribal. It’s “Team Timnit” (all the details supporting wokeness narratives are believed, all details supporting Google taking an appropriate action are heresy) or “Team Google” and you feel the opposite. The James Damore episode is another example. It is essentially 100% equivalent to what Timnit has done in this chain of events, but in that case the “wokeness” bloc on Twitter called for Damore’s firing and railed against his perspective - virtually a complete double standard compared to how they view Timnit’s behavior. By the mostly anonymous nature of Hacker News, and the removal of any type of social credit for patronage of different ideologues, the commentary here is able to be much more nuanced and try to really account for a much greater variety of facts or perspectives.
- rbanffy 6y ago
  The basic difference is that she implied I&D work at Google was ineffective while he implied half his co-workers were unworthy of their jobs. She made her managers mad while he made half the company mad.
  - mlthoughts2018 6y ago
    I would say she did much more than imply - she wrote a workplace email imploring her coworkers to stop doing their jobs - something that would get you fired anywhere, any time. I also think you’re overstating Damore’s claims and you’re taking the interpretation or reaction to his claims to be equivalent to the claims themselves. The claims themselves, that innate biological differences between men and women can partly account for their different representation in hiring in certain professions, is pretty much beyond dispute and has so much academic research supporting it that it’s pure gaslighting to treat someone like they are sexist or discriminating or biased for saying so. Note this has to do with factors that lead to representation in certain fields, and is not a statement about whether people of a given gender actually perform jobs in that field in any better or worse way. Both Gebru and Damore are pushing agenda-based interpretations of existing facts, and both are doing so in ways that are not appropriate for a professional workplace. I am glad at least to see that Google handled both situations relatively consistently, given how extremely similar in scope and impact Gebru’s comments are to Damore’s.
paganel 6y ago
> Why is this? Because there are lots of FAANG engineers in here (i.e. working at Google, or with friends working at Google, or working at companies who do the same nasty AI stuff as Google) so them unconditionally supporting Gebru on this would be against their direct financial interests. It's as simple as that.
- christophilus 6y ago
  HN strikes me as being pretty consistently anti-Google almost every time Google comes up, so I don’t think this is the reason.
  - blub 6y ago
    It's split quite evenly in pro and against camps, at least on privacy.
- ioctrl 6y ago
  FAANG employees tend to consistently be among the most vocal and outspoken critics of FAANG. Also see the 1,200+ employees who signed a petition unconditionally supporting Gebru while turning a blind eye to her problematic behavior. There's significant overlap between FAANG employees (and SV tech employees in general) and Woke Twitter.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

geofft 6y ago

Er, who is claiming "all research at Google is pointless and should stop until reform"? Presumably not the person who was trying to do and publish research at Google? (Are you confusing this with her email that said that participating in Google's feel-good diversity and inclusion work, specifically, was pointless and should stop, so that people could focus on their real jobs - such as research - instead of wasting time placating unknown managers?) Anyway, my theory re your question is that Reddit and HN are usually pseudonymous, and so you have no idea whether the person saying something actually knows anything about Google or actually participates in the industry. The norm on Twitter is to use your real identity, and so comments from Googlers and ex-Googlers are boosted there. On Reddit and HN, good-sounding first-principles arguments are boosted. The two models are better at different kinds of discussions.

thinkingemote 6y ago
A bit of a mixup I think. Good to clarify it. The Google walkout blog demands all research needs reform (but no stop) but the email did specify that specific field to stop.
- geofft 6y ago
  Yeah, the email was clearly written amidst frustration and isn't the world's most polished piece of prose, but I think it's pretty clear that the thing it's saying you should do is stop writing DEI docs that meet OKRs and are aimed at an internal audience, not stop doing research: > What I want to say is stop writing your documents because it doesn’t make a difference. The DEI OKRs that we don’t know where they come from (and are never met anyways), the random discussions, the “we need more mentorship” rather than “we need to stop the toxic environments that hinder us from progressing” the constant fighting and education at your cost, they don’t matter. [...] > So if you would like to change things, I suggest focusing on leadership accountability and thinking through what types of pressures can also be applied from the outside. For instance, I believe that the Congressional Black Caucus is the entity that started forcing tech companies to report their diversity numbers. Writing more documents and saying things over and over again will tire you out but no one will listen. (It seems to consistently use the word "paper" instead of "document" for research.) And Jeff Dean's reply identifies that she was asking to stop the DEI work, not to stop research: > I also feel badly that hundreds of you received an email just this week from Timnit telling you to stop work on critical DEI programs. Please don’t.

fxtentacle 6y ago

sarcasm I heard buying Twitter bots is cheap.

thu2111 6y ago

Remember that outside the valley AI bubble Gebru is primarily famous for having publicly whipped up a mob against Yann LeCun and chasing him off Twitter by constantly claiming he was a racist sexist white man with no clue. Given that, it's maybe not a huge surprise that the tweets you're finding are more pro-Timnit than actually exists. Another obvious problem: she keeps being described as a highly respected AI researcher, a leader of the field etc. Er, no. I read a lot of AI papers. I don't respect Gebru or the sub-field of AI ethnics much at all. What's happening here is simple: criticising a black woman in tech is impossible to do under your own name in corporate America, as radical leftists will immediately set out as a group to destroy you. The only acceptable position is to praise her and claim she's a genius. On HN and Reddit you can see what people really think and it's very far from that.

TotallyHaram 6y ago
I am not vested in AI research at all. But I am horrified by the possibility that 'data' and 'science' need to be ignored by AI so that false equality among the races could be realized. Timnit was refining this unethical approach IMO by using extortion against her own employer. Just the thought that someone who is basically an unethical emotional terrorist would be programming AI to ignore actual data and science in favor of their own race is chilling.

linspace 6y ago

Maybe deeper knowledge of the issues at hand than in Twitter. Or maybe different interests. Why would they agree? There is a reason why I don't use Twitter and I read HN.

asdfrmrf 6y ago

Hackernews tends to be male.

christophilus 6y ago

I find that the average HN thread demonstrates a broader diversity of thought, and generally deeper, more critical, more scientific thought than the average Twitter feed. So it’s not surprising that Twitter would be near unanimous and HN would be more nuanced. This is one of the reasons I prefer HN to just about any other online forum.

claudeganon 6y ago
I agree that there is a broader diversity of a thought, but there’s also a dominant, conservative streak when it comes to deferring to corporate authority. This is unsurprising since many people on this site get paid a lot of money by the same people being critiqued, but does represent a kind of self-selection toward servility.
newsclues 6y ago
HN is the new /.
- Breza 6y ago
  Oh I haven't thought about that site in a long time. I used to be obsessed with it back in the day.
guantanamo_bob 6y ago
Deeper and more critical sure (likely due to the platform, not necessarily the users). On Twitter I can choose to follow POC, women, experts inside/outside this field and hear their opinion—-which I’d argue provides a more diverse representation than anonymous posts by a largely white male message board. I also trust the opinion of someone willing to share their identity, it forces you to think more carefully about the stand you’re taking when your reputation is on the line.
- blub 6y ago
  What makes someone's opinion particularly valuable when that someone's a woman or not white? They might have different life experiences and perspectives on day to day life compared to a white male, but sex or race has zero relevance to knowledge-based fields. The opinion of someone anonymous is probably very close to their true opinion. The opinion of non-anonymous users on Twitter is almost certainly censored.

dzdt 6y ago

Hacker News is about pseudonymous discussion. Only a small percent of HN posters are building a brand name. Twitter is much more real-name based and personal brand-building focussed. Jumping in on a bandwagon to signal group membership in an in group can help brand-building. Going against the in group is potentially fatal to your brand. The risk/reward balance does not favor genuine discussion of a controversial topic. On HN most comments are up/down voted based on their content. The post authorship usually matters little. There is little benefit for the author to announce support of a popular position and little risk for the author to express an unpopular one. So discussion here can be more about substance and less about signaling.

z3ncyberpunk 6y ago
you are writing like HN is much fairer and upstanding than other forms of social media. there is nothing different here, if you step outside of the blind faith of corporate fawning and startup hustle or bring any challenging opinion you get shadowbanned
machinelabo 6y ago
This is one of the most illuminating assessments of Twitter. It’s virtue signaling , as cliche as it sounds to use that term - that’s what Twitter has become. No fault of Twitter, we’ve created a culture in our society where persons with their open identity cannot easily voice dissenting opinions and going against the grain without getting cancelled. What a fucked up world we live in.
- 495636483 6y ago
  I am not on twitter. What's with this canceling? Who got cancelled? What does that mean for them? Could you illustrate some examples?
  - TotallyHaram 6y ago
    Cancel culture is when the Twitter Strangler deletes your current account for the 23rd time because you point out the irony of someone working in 'AI ethics' is 100% unethical for trying to extort the company they work for with their own political agenda, regardless of the companies interests or needs. Thankfully this 'ethical AI researcher' will no longer be employed teaching or guiding ethics in AI.

mlthoughts2018 6y ago

This is not surprising. On Twitter there is a strong cancel culture to irrationally oppose anything that fails to unquestioningly accept “wokeness” narratives. Critical thinking and evaluation of evidence is not really permitted. Twitter is more about trying to look (publicly) like you affiliate with this or that celebrity, so the regular person can feel some sense of patronage to their chosen circle of intellectuals or artists. It has no connection to objective appraisal of evidence. It’s more tribal. It’s “Team Timnit” (all the details supporting wokeness narratives are believed, all details supporting Google taking an appropriate action are heresy) or “Team Google” and you feel the opposite. The James Damore episode is another example. It is essentially 100% equivalent to what Timnit has done in this chain of events, but in that case the “wokeness” bloc on Twitter called for Damore’s firing and railed against his perspective - virtually a complete double standard compared to how they view Timnit’s behavior. By the mostly anonymous nature of Hacker News, and the removal of any type of social credit for patronage of different ideologues, the commentary here is able to be much more nuanced and try to really account for a much greater variety of facts or perspectives.

rbanffy 6y ago
The basic difference is that she implied I&D work at Google was ineffective while he implied half his co-workers were unworthy of their jobs. She made her managers mad while he made half the company mad.
- mlthoughts2018 6y ago
  I would say she did much more than imply - she wrote a workplace email imploring her coworkers to stop doing their jobs - something that would get you fired anywhere, any time. I also think you’re overstating Damore’s claims and you’re taking the interpretation or reaction to his claims to be equivalent to the claims themselves. The claims themselves, that innate biological differences between men and women can partly account for their different representation in hiring in certain professions, is pretty much beyond dispute and has so much academic research supporting it that it’s pure gaslighting to treat someone like they are sexist or discriminating or biased for saying so. Note this has to do with factors that lead to representation in certain fields, and is not a statement about whether people of a given gender actually perform jobs in that field in any better or worse way. Both Gebru and Damore are pushing agenda-based interpretations of existing facts, and both are doing so in ways that are not appropriate for a professional workplace. I am glad at least to see that Google handled both situations relatively consistently, given how extremely similar in scope and impact Gebru’s comments are to Damore’s.

paganel 6y ago

> Why is this? Because there are lots of FAANG engineers in here (i.e. working at Google, or with friends working at Google, or working at companies who do the same nasty AI stuff as Google) so them unconditionally supporting Gebru on this would be against their direct financial interests. It's as simple as that.

christophilus 6y ago
HN strikes me as being pretty consistently anti-Google almost every time Google comes up, so I don’t think this is the reason.
- blub 6y ago
  It's split quite evenly in pro and against camps, at least on privacy.
ioctrl 6y ago
FAANG employees tend to consistently be among the most vocal and outspoken critics of FAANG. Also see the 1,200+ employees who signed a petition unconditionally supporting Gebru while turning a blind eye to her problematic behavior. There's significant overlap between FAANG employees (and SV tech employees in general) and Woke Twitter.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]