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I think that works if there's a clear way to distinguish the hypothetical privacy watchdog leaving/getting fired due to issues with the privacy program, versus
by albntomat0 6y ago
I think that works if there's a clear way to distinguish the hypothetical privacy watchdog leaving/getting fired due to issues with the privacy program, versus leaving/getting fired for other reasons. Making that distinction, imo, seems to be the core disagreement with the current Google issue, at least among all of us commenting on the outside.
- zepto 6y agoIt seems like that is always going to be a problem, since if the person is getting fired critiquing the thing they are there to critique, the company will always have a huge incentive to present another explanation.
- albntomat0 6y agoI think we agree on the difficulty here. I believe the reverse is also true: if the person is fired for a legitimate, non-watchdog reason, they have an incentive to say the firing was due to them bring up privacy/ethics concerns.
- chishaku 6y agobelieve Google vs believe a solitary worker (female, black, known political agenda)
- alisonkisk 6y agoWhat's your point? Jeff Dean is a solitary worker (male, white, known political agenda).
- pinewurst 6y agoWhat is his political agenda then, if you know it? (Possession/absence of Y chromosome/melanin does not constitute such.)
- zepto 6y agoProtect Google.
- pinewurst 6y agoWhile that may be a self-interested professional agenda (they pay him an obscene salary), that's hardly politics.
- zepto 6y agoAI ethics is politics. Google is one of the largest players in AI, not to mention one of the largest companies in the world, and the focus politics surrounding Tech in general. Defending Google’s AI ethics is politics.
- dragonwriter 6y ago> believe Google vs believe a solitary worker But it's not a solitary worker, many Google AI workers have spoken up and said that even if the management narrative is true as to what happened in the specific case, it would represent a radically different review process — both as to what the review looked at and the request to retract rather than correct when there was a plenty of time for corrections for the conference — than is applied in Google AI research to other workers. This strongly suggests that even if Google's incident-specific behavioral narrative is true as far as it goes that the entire incident was constructed as personally-targeted harassment, and that the narrative about qualitative motivations and regular process are false.
- chishaku 6y agoGood point, I agree. My implication was that in the absence of all the facts, many are making a deliberate choice to believe one side or the other. As far as this specific community, I'm not surprised that many (not all) take Google at their word.
- zepto 6y agoWhat facts do you think are missing, and what do you mean by ‘a deliberate choice to believe one side or the other’?
- chishaku 6y agoMost of the circumstances around the firing are hearsay. My weakly-held assessment agrees with your comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25316014 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25316014 The following comment and thread demonstrate how many in the HN community reflexively defend Google. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25320745 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25320745
- zepto 6y agoInteresting. It seems like we share an overall impression of what is going on. It seems to me that ‘reflexive’ and ‘deliberate’ are contradictory adjectives when assessing people’s responses.
- zepto 6y agoThis is true, but it’s not symmetrical. If they actually have privacy/ethics concerns, those can be presented publicly. In many cases of employee performance etc, it boils down to subjective issues or he said/she said. In this case, it seems like the technology review article supports the idea that there are real concerns being raised, and elsewhere it has been suggested that the reasoning for the firing is not credible.
- Wowfunhappy 6y agoWell, if the ombudsman leaves the company amicably, they can say so. But it should be understood going in that there's no way to "fire" a person like this (at least without raising a storm), regardless of the reason. I don't think that should be such a problem—it's like giving tenure to a professor, except unlike at some universities, an organization will only have a small number of this kind of employee.
- albntomat0 6y agoI agree it depends on the number of folks in such a role. One person at a large company should be manageable. In this case, Google seems to have a moderate number of AI ethicists, which presents a more difficult hiring problem.