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It disturbs me how much of a news story this is. This should be handled internally and not aired in public across several media sites. Why should I care about

• bioinformatics 6y ago
  How do you think she will get attention to her cause(s)?
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
• krooj 6y ago
  It reeks of an ulterior motive / agenda, but to what end?
• gerash 6y ago
  Obviously the individual who was let go loves the fame but I see most news website are pretty much looking for some sensational story to run mainly because doing more thorough analysis doesn't pay for itself. That's the problem.
  • prodtorok 6y ago
    I don't think it's as innocent as "loves the fame" ... there is a greater theme in our society regarding the influence of public opinion; and how influencers are abusing that in politics/positions of power. The media of course enables it, which I think is a sign of a growing, large scale, rational fragility across society (demand controls their publication, there is a large demand for this type of information)
    • actuator 6y ago
      FB gets criticized a lot in HN but Twitter isn't. IMO Twitter is absolutely the worst platform for things like these because of the prevalent mob culture. It is very easy to organise people using your influence and they can easily hound out any dissenting opinion. I will have to search for them now but I saw people doxxing some of the current Googler's identities if they agreed with the resignation. This is extremely toxic. Even the old media seems to love Twitter and it escapes FB level of scrutiny.
      • prodtorok 6y ago
        Completely agree. I'd say, historically speaking, that Facebook became a constrained negative environment while twitter was more of an open, entertaining, and free environment (and less tied to actual life/society). This isn't the case any longer. Facebook is now far less egregious & more of a soft environment to socialize with people you personally know. Bubbles/pockets of societal function and some large-influence which is lesser enabled than the prior. Twitter is a platform that justifies large societal movement through "influential information". (I don't have the best english to articulate here)
      • Reedx 6y ago
        That's because Twitter is the platform of journalists.
        • bigbubba 6y ago
          Facebook radicalized weird uncles, but twitter radicalized journalists.
      • raxxorrax 6y ago
        Mob culture didn't start with Twitter though. It was just not as effective before social media when people were anonymous. At least in most cases. Now social media sites encourage people being public figures, which is an insanely bad advice for the vast majority of individuals.
    • jasonwatkinspdx 6y ago
      Maybe instead of labeling it "rational fragility" you should take some effort to understand what people are actually saying.
  • tb303 6y ago
    Just a nudge from a stranger: Please take a moment to consider the extremely difficult position "the individual" may be in, the frustrations leading up to this, and the possible negative impact this has on their career that they had to weigh before naively thinking that they "love the fame." that's gamergate mentality in action and will work against you.
    • lawnchair_larry 6y ago
      So you’re saying it’s actually about ethics in AI? ;)
    • throwaway19937 6y ago
      Timnit's position is a direct result of her actions and internal reputation at Google. No one forced her to do any of the following things: 1. Griping about the racist reviewers of her paper on Twitter. 2. Sending an email to a internal list criticizing Google's behavior and telling people to stop working on diversity. 3. Demanding the names of reviewers and threatening to resign if they weren't provided. #2 or #3 would get you fired or cause your resignation to be accepted any place that I've worked. #1 wouldn't get you fired but it's not going to help your career.
      • tb303 6y ago
        even if i agreed with you about some of those points (and i worked at google 2013-2015, internally criticized many of their processes, and was lectured about "my place" at google), everything you said is independent of reading into someone's motives. you're arguing with a point i am not making at all and trivializing the abuse timnit subjects herself to in going public with this.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• morelisp 6y ago
  > Why should I care about the dirty laundry of FAANG FAANG employs a tremendous number of technology workers, are key drivers the industry-wide technical agenda formally (standards bodies) and informally (open source project management, areas of active research), are often the first line of serious education for new workers, and the fallback for workers when riskier undertakings fail. If anything far more of their internal management (project and people) processes should be scrutinized.
  • kd913 6y ago
    If we were talking about Linus Torvalds, Jim Keller or Raja Koduri someone who is actually an industry driver then sure. These are individuals who have had considerable impact on a piece of technology whose names I can recognize for the tech they built. I have no idea what or how this individual matters at all or the tech that she is relevant in. Not everyone at FAANG are industry leaders, and there are several cogs just like at IBM. I fail to see why I should care for every individual starling who can't stand out other than the company they work for. This random individual along with James Damore and that random FB grad are not on the same level. Your arguments tell me more that FAANG should be broken apart. Public attention and scrutiny would achieve nothing in affecting Google's decision making here.
    • morelisp 6y ago
      My entire reply is about Google (not even specifically Google!), but you're still focusing on Gebru. > I have no idea Why are you commenting then?
      • kd913 6y ago
        Because my original point still stands? In articles discussing Raja, Jim, Linus and their various moves. The first paragraph introduces into great detail about their impacts relating to their contributions to x86, GPUs or the kernel. This individual's highlight appears to be her employment at Google. She is an AI ethics researcher? So what makes her important or an 'industry leader'? Why should I care and why is Google's dirty laundry here in the open?
• motoboi 6y ago
  Because she is was an ethicist in google, an AI company. People are very afraid that google fired her because they don't care about bias and unethical use in AI. So, for us that care about google's use of AI and ethical use of it, it's important to understand what happened.
  • kd913 6y ago
    Then surely the article focus should be described and focused on precisely the issues raised in the controversial paper no? > She tweeted Wednesday that Google had abruptly fired her after a disagreement about a research paper that scrutinized possible bias in large-language AI models, which the company asked her to retract. The article should be focusing on the disagreement here. Instead the article focuses on employment which I don't care about.
  • mlthoughts2018 6y ago
    > “ People are very afraid that google fired her because they don't care about bias and unethical use in AI.” I have not heard anyone express this fear, certainly not in the AI community. I have not seen any part of the Timnit Gebru incident that paints Google in a bad light or corroborates any type of inconsistency or unfair judgment. Google has done plenty of that stuff in other situations, just not in any part of the handling of Timnit Gebru’s very inappropriate behavior.
  • lawnchair_larry 6y ago
    This is not logical at all and seems either completely hysterical or deliberately malicious. If Google fires a janitor, does that mean they don’t care about a clean work environment? If they fire a VP of engineering, does that mean they don’t care about engineering? No, it means that person didn’t work out. And considering how she is handling it by going nuclear with the press and the twitter mobbing, I for one am not the least bit surprised.
  • raxxorrax 6y ago
    The main ethical problem of AI is it quantifying every possible metric that can be attached to individuals and resulting reduction of said subject. Talk about bias, which is mostly inevitable, is a cheap distraction at best, even though AIs will mostly be stereotype generators in the beginning. It still isn't even good or foundational criticism about ethical AI programs. That said, I don't believe that decisions about application of AI can be made internally at Google. These are basically PR jobs that come with the product.
• ekms 6y ago
  Yeah... there've been something like 5 top posts on hn in the past week about this incident. It's ridiculous
• apta 6y ago
  Hopefully it's a lesson for other companies to be very careful for hiring "woke" SJW's after seeing the chaos they're causing.
  • amanaplanacanal 6y ago
    It sounds like the problem wasn’t the hiring, but rather the questions around the firing.
    • apta 6y ago
      It definitely was the hiring when HR was targeting SJW's to show how "progressive" the company is. What those employees end up doing is causing tantrums and playing victim then suing their employers. Now that the employers are finding out how expensive and destructive those people are, they'll actively avoid hiring them.
  • xadhominemx 6y ago
    Much of what was regarded as “woke SJW nonsense” 15 years ago is now completely mainstream. I’m sure even you — who clearly has some preoccupation with progressive social thought as you post on about “SJWs” multiple times per day on average — have some beliefs that would have been considered insufferably woke and obnoxious by people like you in 2003.
    • apta 6y ago
      > 15 years ago is now completely mainstream Such as? Furthermore, I don't care about mainstream, a lot of mainstream stuff today is trash honestly. > have some beliefs that would have been considered insufferably woke and obnoxious by people like you in 2003 My basis has been consistent for over 1400 years now.
    • hnuser123456 6y ago
      The things that I believe are real social justice have no hint of becoming mainstream anytime in the next 20 years. SJW, in the connotation, is a term reserved for extremists, and there's no shortage of them, and they deserve the same scrutiny as any other political extremist.
• lsiebert 6y ago
  Do you not care about Google censoring and firing one of the people who are supposed to keep it ethical?
  • kd913 6y ago
    No not really. Just as I probably wouldn't care if Boeing fired one of their plane testers or Rolls Royce for one of their engine testers. It's 1 employee out of 120k. There are probably other ethicists in AI at Google. Also the story seems to have devolved more specifically to employment rather than talking about the specific ethical issues relating to Google's language models.
    • lsiebert 6y ago
      https://gizmodo.com/more-than-1-500-google-employees-sign-petition-condemni-1845816400 https://gizmodo.com/more-than-1-500-google-employees-sign-pe... I mean google employees including most of her coworkers seem to think it's problematic.
      • kd913 6y ago
        Yes because the individual internally can see a better picture as to why the disagreement has occurred and why it's important. More importantly, the individuals within the company can influence the decision much better. None of that is useful here which from an external perspective looks like a employment dispute. She isn't exactly doing a Snowden here. Even if the individuals internally view it as problematic, I am not gonna stop using Android, Google or Youtube. What are these individuals expecting to achieve from airing the dirty laundry in public? Are they expecting people's opinions to have changed at all about Google?
        • lsiebert 6y ago
          We talk about the tech community right? What do you do when there's a problem in your community you want to address... not talk about it?
• dragonwriter 6y ago
  > This should be handled internally and not aired in public across several media sites. When the triggering event involved a collaboration involving non-Google parties, that became pretty much impossible. > Why should I care about the dirty laundry of FAANG and some random individual? Maybe you shouldn't, but not everyone outside of Google is you. Other people in the field of AI ethics might want to know, because Google’s practices when it comes to employee research have a significant impact on how publications from Google authors are approached. And people who might consider working at Google, especially in the same field, have an interest in information about the working environment, positive or negative.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
• systemBuilder 6y ago
  You have no idea how legal battles are won! They are one in the court of public opinion!