6 ms·

Timnit Gebru: Google and big tech are 'institutionally racist'

24 points by hintymad 6y ago

hintymad 6y ago
What can we do to battle such grotesque systemic racism in the valley? Mandatory class on critical race theory? Fine of $10B+ per company for racial equity fund? Mandatory firing of over-represented groups? There’s so much we can do yet we chose not to. Such a disgraceful racist country.
- dave_4_bagels 6y ago
  Being a white colonialist in any form should be illegal!
- epistasis 6y ago
  Funny, the only people I hear talking about "critical race theory" are people who denigrate those who try to understand it. And with suggestions like "mandatory firing of over-represented groups," a ridiculous and awful suggestion that nobody wants and would achieve no good, I'm guess that you also wish to denigrate those who work to understand racial disparities in the US. But usually such sort of odd sarcasm isn't found on HN.
  - hintymad 6y ago
    Funny. Have you read CRT? At least you must have read numerous criticisms on that the representations of employees, leadership, or students in colleges do not reflect our population? Given that Google is not going to grow its headcount any time soon, how could you possibly achieve racial equity? Please, to battle racisms, we also need to use logic and reasoning.
    - epistasis 6y ago
      > Given that Google is not going to grow its headcount any time soon, how could you possibly achieve racial equity? Most of your comment doesn't make sense to me, but for this one at least, I can point out your mistake. Even if Google is maintaining a mostly constant head count, people change jobs all the time, and to account for this Google is continuously hiring. This is part of the process, where tech companies have already focused on fixing problems. The other part of the problem is that tech companies can be quite hostile to underrepresented minorities, and the comments on this post are a perfect example, especially all the trolling dead comments. In real life, URM experience those comments and they don't get deleted from their memories. So making the work environment less hostile is essential to, in addition to the hiring practices.
      - hintymad 6y ago
        You got me. It makes sense.
    - MikeUt 6y ago
      You're right, colleges don't reflect our population. Compare for example Harvard to the overall US (degree of overrepresentation in parenthesis): Jewish: 14.0% vs 2.15% (6.51x) Asian American: 25.3% vs 5.3% (4.77x) Native Hawaiian: 0.6% vs 0.2% (3.00x) Native American: 1.8% vs 0.7% (2.57x) African American: 14.3% vs 12.7% (1.13x) Latino: 12.2% vs 17.6% (0.69x) White: 33.0% vs 58.9% (0.56x) Or Princeton: Asian: 20.9% vs 5.3% (3.94x) Jewish: 8.0% vs 2.15% (3.72x) Black: 7.7% vs 12.7% (0.61x) White: 34.7% vs 59.4% (0.58x) Latino: 9.5% vs 17.6% (0.54x) Sources: https://ejewishphilanthropy.com/how-many-jewish-undergraduates/ https://ejewishphilanthropy.com/how-many-jewish-undergraduat... https://college.harvard.edu/admissions/admissions-statistics https://college.harvard.edu/admissions/admissions-statistics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Jews https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Jews https://features.thecrimson.com/2016/freshman-survey/lifestyle/ https://features.thecrimson.com/2016/freshman-survey/lifesty... https://hillel.org/college-guide/list/record/princeton-university https://hillel.org/college-guide/list/record/princeton-unive... https://www.collegefactual.com/colleges/princeton-university/student-life/diversity/#secEthnic https://www.collegefactual.com/colleges/princeton-university...
  - HexagonalKitten 6y ago
    Do you go out of your way to listen to the internal communication and writing of all the groups? Because otherwise what you've heard only indicates who you pay attention to. For a quick intro, google Rachel Dolezal and skip the news articles and look for forums. You'll find everything you need, and you can then follow those people to see what else they discuss through the lens of CRT. > "mandatory firing of over-represented groups," a ridiculous and awful suggestion that nobody wants Poe's law strikes again then because if you follow Gebru's crowd on Twitter you'll see a lot of talk of cleaning up and making room for new hires. That's a coded racist dogwhistle for exactly what Hintymad was joking about. This is the problem with platforming extremists.
    - geofft 6y ago
      There's a distinction between "It stands to reason that, if a company has had racially-biased hiring and promotion processes, there are unqualified people who benefited from the bias just as much as there are qualified people who lost out because of it, and we should re-evaluate people in a race-neutral manner, which will necessarily cause unqualified people who have benefited from racial biases to leave" (which is a claim I have heard "Gebru's crowd on Twitter" make) and "We should re-evaluate people in a non-race-neutral manner and cause people to leave because of their race, regardless of qualification" (which is not). But making that distinction requires some critical reasoning skills. In particular, I imagine there's a large crowd of people who are in the group that would be negatively affected by the first proposal trying to paint it as the second - possibly people who have convinced themselves that they have their job due to their genuine qualification, and if they lose it, it is because they were evaluated in a non-race-neutral manner. "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
      - HexagonalKitten 6y ago
        > "we should re-evaluate people in a race-neutral manner" Cough, no. This is where I know that's not even a rough paraphrasing because racially-neutral or sex-neutral hiring practices are not okay these days. They lead to a meritocracy and that's also not okay. That's how we got where we are. In fact, in hiring now resumes more often have pictures and HR tells us that people are intersectional and to try to hire them. They try to be subtle but they fail. (They don't tell us what intersections.) All interviewers are given the racial statistics and we're told that it's a very serious company priority. > if a company has had racially-biased hiring and promotion processes, there are unqualified people who benefited from the bias just as much as there are qualified people who lost out because of it This only stands to reason if the company had racially-biased hiring policies. Instead big SV companies seem to reflect the later years of tech fields in school. And if we look at sex, not race, we can see that the gender-equality paradox from scandinavian schools suggests that not all groups may be equally interested in all things. Perhaps this is society telling those groups not to be, or natural consequences of their upbringing in different areas and circumstances. We should definitely try to stamp out any racism we find, but let's not cry wolf and label everything racist. Let's actually try to make sure first.
- leoh 6y ago
  Mere curiosity from those who are reading and commenting about this situation, as opposed to outright skepticism or anger would, and I mean this sincerely, be a good start.
koreanguy 6y ago
Pichai Sundararajan, is head of Google a Indian running a American Company. look at IBM, it has been sold, every job has been shifted to India how many White people are working for IBM since it has been sold ? 80% less. because they replaced with the local indian workforce. i think the tiny minority, should really stop this nonsense, you can not simply put every minority everywhere just because of your skin. how many whites are working for TATA ? or are head of office in a minority company ????? zero . you are a minority, you can't be in all positions its a honest fact.
- CBLT 6y ago
  I get the feeling I'd disagree with what you're trying to say, but I legitimately can't understand your prose.
  - HexagonalKitten 6y ago
    I think this is it (OP feel free to comment): IBM has made white people into a minority by moving the main work to countries where white people are a minority. This is okay. Minorities are, by definition, less frequently encountered in a population sample and by the simple nature of this, aren't going to be in every position. This is okay.
Proven 6y ago
Bunch of nonsense. She reminds me of that Swedish climatist teen - we have no choice but to read or listen to her nonsense from time to time. After a while they fade away and some other fake celebrity-victim gets their five minutes of fame...
draw_down 6y ago
Interesting that the issue fluctuates between a) Google is incurably racist, and b) the paper said something counter to Google's business interests, depending on who is telling it/what's more expedient
jonathathan 6y ago
Maybe not my place, but I'm just going to link to the HN comment guidelines [1] and quote a few relevant sections: - "Don't be snarky." - "Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community." - "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive." [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
MikeUt 6y ago
In all six major companies profiled by https://recruitinginnovation.com/blog/diversity-in-tech/ https://recruitinginnovation.com/blog/diversity-in-tech/ (Uber, Facebook, Apple, Google, Twitter, Microsoft), whites are underrepresented. So if big tech is institutionally racist, who is it racist in favor of? Should we demand from these companies a major initiative to improve the representation of whites? How come the BBC didn't see fit to mention these statistics - isn't that highly relevant to the story?
leoh 6y ago
I empathize deeply with Gebru and I have no doubts that she has experienced institutional racism at Google and in tech generally. I do think that, despite me being white, however, there is a good chance that I would be fired, were I to make an ultimatum about quitting unless the company did X. Based on conversations with managers who have worked at big companies like Google (full disclosure, I work there now), it sounded like this was nearly an explicit policy HR holds at some companies — i.e. that ultimatums would never be tolerated and could result in termination. That said, supposing such a policy were in place, given the understandable frustration she felt about the situation and given the potential institutional racism that led to the event in the first place, an exception likely should have been made. Moreover, one would hope that a company would trust an established ethicist about whether it were appropriate to issue an ultimatum and would take it very seriously if they did, opting to take time to consider it, as opposed to issuing a quick termination.
- SheinhardtWigCo 6y ago
  Why does being an ethicist qualify someone to make ultimatums? Is Google supposed to let researchers dictate the terms of their employment?
  - leoh 6y ago
    An ideal HR department would not yield to ultimatums unless they felt that not yielding is a sound, ethical orientation. Thus, a trained ethicist's position ought to be at least tentatively considered without rushing to a decision.
  - geofft 6y ago
    The question isn't really about whether she was qualified to make ultimatums. She's not an idiot - she knew that there was little chance of it going well for her, career-wise, when she did so. Everyone who's saying "She should have expected to lose her job" is missing that she did. The question is why she felt she needed to make one anyway. In particular, she was hired into effectively an adversarial role: to note when Google was engaging in unethical practices. This is not particularly uncommon in business: internal audit teams do this in their own way, for instance. Or security teams, or legal teams, or whoever. All of them have the job of occasionally telling the company "Don't do this." If an internal auditor (or security engineer, or counsel) says, I feel like I am unable to do my job under the terms you've set and if you don't change those terms I see no choice but to leave, it's worth asking why. It's possible that the auditor has an unreasonable view of how to do their job. But it's also entirely possible that the company is intentionally preventing the auditor from being able to do their job because they have something they don't want seen, that upper management wants to do something that they know their audit team won't agree with. An ethicist is much the same. It would be one thing if she was fired by her boss. She was not, and her boss was blindsided. She was fired by her skip-boss on the orders of her skip-skip-boss, neither of whom are on the ethics team, but who are in the larger Google AI organizational unit.
rvz 6y ago
At this point in their view, Everything is 'institutionally racist'™ Being a victim is now cool again I suppose. The new 'blames the government for everything' rhetoric is now applied to tech companies.
- nowledge 6y ago
  what victims are cool? history is filled with aggressors we idolize, i don't know a victim. asking honestly.
  - pas 6y ago
    Wasn't Jesus a victim?
    - threatofrain 6y ago
      More importantly, Jesus is considered by many to be the son of God, as well as God himself. Otherwise Jesus would just be a victim.
      - corty 6y ago
        It is a reinterpretation of victimhood to be noble and glorious to appeal to the masses, who are or see themselves as predominantly victims.
        loopz 6y ago
        Jesus only said to love one another, have compassion, care for even thieves and hookers, meet people as they are not how you want them to be.
- leoh 6y ago
  Roman, remember by your strength to rule Earth’s peoples—for your arts are to be these: To pacify, to impose the rule of law, To spare the conquered, battle down the proud. (VI.1151–1154) [Virgil's Aeneid] --- We need more compassion in this world, not less; especially for the defeated. For Gebru, even for those at Google that have, in my view, erred; to do otherwise is to drown ourselves in misery; to race one another towards the bottom; to view the world merely as zero sum.
freditup 6y ago
> Interviewer: I suppose if you think that, the next obvious question is do you think Google itself is institutionally racist? > Dr. Gebru: Yes, Google itself is institutionally racist. > Interviewer: That's quite a thing to say - you were a Google employee until a short while ago. > Dr. Gebru: I feel like most if not all tech companies are institutionally racist. I mean, how can I not say that they are not institutionally racist? The Congressional Black Caucus is the one who's forcing them to publish their diversity numbers. It's not by accident that black women have one of the lowest retention rates[, in the technology industry]. So for sure Google and all of the other tech companies are institutionally racist. There's not really much to discuss or unpack here. There's no defining of 'institutionally racist' in the conversation, so it's impossible to say what standards are being using to determine if something is institutionally racist. Dr. Gebru also provides essentially no facts or evidence for her claims. Asking if organizations are racist is a fair question, but the conversation will basically only be productive if terms are clearly defined and accusations are based on concrete evidence. This seems like it was a very casual interview, so I'm not faulting Dr. Gebru for not providing more evidence here, just saying that this interview is not super helpful in the larger conversation around racism. Because an accusation of racism is a serious accusation to make, I wish in these situations that there was more substantiated evidence provided.
- leoh 6y ago
  It is arguably disappointing. Yet she is deeply upset and doubtlessly experiencing a severe degree of stress at the moment. Thus, I would cut her some slack here. Although an explicit, concrete, pedagogical discussion would be helpful, I don't think it's fair to expect it from her at the moment.
  - FiberBundle 6y ago
    Cut her some slack? She's making extremely harsh accusations without any kind of evidence. Why is it that these people have seemingly unlimited leeway in their statements whereas any just slightly politically incorrect statement can cost other people their careers?
leoh 6y ago
dang / @dang — this post was flagged; yet it is from a reputable source, and is arguably a tenable position; i.e. the very skepticism and anger (as opposed to mere curiosity) that people hold towards her could be collectively be viewed as an example of institutional racism itself. Could you look at removing the flag?
- geofft 6y ago
  FWIW, I flagged this post because the submitter ('hintymad) also started out discussion with a sarcastic comment satirizing the tenable position in an untenable and uncharitable way. I think this article sets out an entirely tenable position and the source is entirely reputable. I just also do not think that it was submitted in good faith and I don't expect the comments to "gratify one's intellectual curiosity," just promote culture-war flaming.
blastonico 6y ago
The problem with calling everybody and everything racist all the time, is that the word will start to lose meaning.
loopz 6y ago
If this is racism, do we have evidence of other people doing the same, and being treated differently? It could be discrimination, which may happen regardless of gender and color. Or just lack of internal credibility and authority, managers panicking, cutting losses short, internal politics, or whatever disagreement was not resolved. Making it all about ethnicity, seems the wrong way to go about it, if one wants to avoid racism. Then it seems inevitable, any roadblock can be suggested as racism as anchor. Which ends up the entirely wrong attitude to be smart about it. Now, it's impossible to prescribe how to be smart at anything.. I would separate between the actions in that workplace, and the research itself. The latter is highly interesting as it's widely known data and parameters from data, may be highly biased and difficult to neutralize. Even to detect all kinds of biases and separate them from knowledge of the world. Actions from such data can have deeply unfair and repressing consequences, so it's important.

24 points by hintymad 6y ago

What can we do to battle such grotesque systemic racism in the valley? Mandatory class on critical race theory? Fine of $10B+ per company for racial equity fund? Mandatory firing of over-represented groups? There’s so much we can do yet we chose not to. Such a disgraceful racist country.

dave_4_bagels 6y ago
Being a white colonialist in any form should be illegal!
epistasis 6y ago
Funny, the only people I hear talking about "critical race theory" are people who denigrate those who try to understand it. And with suggestions like "mandatory firing of over-represented groups," a ridiculous and awful suggestion that nobody wants and would achieve no good, I'm guess that you also wish to denigrate those who work to understand racial disparities in the US. But usually such sort of odd sarcasm isn't found on HN.
- hintymad 6y ago
  Funny. Have you read CRT? At least you must have read numerous criticisms on that the representations of employees, leadership, or students in colleges do not reflect our population? Given that Google is not going to grow its headcount any time soon, how could you possibly achieve racial equity? Please, to battle racisms, we also need to use logic and reasoning.
  - epistasis 6y ago
    > Given that Google is not going to grow its headcount any time soon, how could you possibly achieve racial equity? Most of your comment doesn't make sense to me, but for this one at least, I can point out your mistake. Even if Google is maintaining a mostly constant head count, people change jobs all the time, and to account for this Google is continuously hiring. This is part of the process, where tech companies have already focused on fixing problems. The other part of the problem is that tech companies can be quite hostile to underrepresented minorities, and the comments on this post are a perfect example, especially all the trolling dead comments. In real life, URM experience those comments and they don't get deleted from their memories. So making the work environment less hostile is essential to, in addition to the hiring practices.
    - hintymad 6y ago
      You got me. It makes sense.
  - MikeUt 6y ago
    You're right, colleges don't reflect our population. Compare for example Harvard to the overall US (degree of overrepresentation in parenthesis): Jewish: 14.0% vs 2.15% (6.51x) Asian American: 25.3% vs 5.3% (4.77x) Native Hawaiian: 0.6% vs 0.2% (3.00x) Native American: 1.8% vs 0.7% (2.57x) African American: 14.3% vs 12.7% (1.13x) Latino: 12.2% vs 17.6% (0.69x) White: 33.0% vs 58.9% (0.56x) Or Princeton: Asian: 20.9% vs 5.3% (3.94x) Jewish: 8.0% vs 2.15% (3.72x) Black: 7.7% vs 12.7% (0.61x) White: 34.7% vs 59.4% (0.58x) Latino: 9.5% vs 17.6% (0.54x) Sources: https://ejewishphilanthropy.com/how-many-jewish-undergraduates/ https://ejewishphilanthropy.com/how-many-jewish-undergraduat... https://college.harvard.edu/admissions/admissions-statistics https://college.harvard.edu/admissions/admissions-statistics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Jews https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Jews https://features.thecrimson.com/2016/freshman-survey/lifestyle/ https://features.thecrimson.com/2016/freshman-survey/lifesty... https://hillel.org/college-guide/list/record/princeton-university https://hillel.org/college-guide/list/record/princeton-unive... https://www.collegefactual.com/colleges/princeton-university/student-life/diversity/#secEthnic https://www.collegefactual.com/colleges/princeton-university...
- HexagonalKitten 6y ago
  Do you go out of your way to listen to the internal communication and writing of all the groups? Because otherwise what you've heard only indicates who you pay attention to. For a quick intro, google Rachel Dolezal and skip the news articles and look for forums. You'll find everything you need, and you can then follow those people to see what else they discuss through the lens of CRT. > "mandatory firing of over-represented groups," a ridiculous and awful suggestion that nobody wants Poe's law strikes again then because if you follow Gebru's crowd on Twitter you'll see a lot of talk of cleaning up and making room for new hires. That's a coded racist dogwhistle for exactly what Hintymad was joking about. This is the problem with platforming extremists.
  - geofft 6y ago
    There's a distinction between "It stands to reason that, if a company has had racially-biased hiring and promotion processes, there are unqualified people who benefited from the bias just as much as there are qualified people who lost out because of it, and we should re-evaluate people in a race-neutral manner, which will necessarily cause unqualified people who have benefited from racial biases to leave" (which is a claim I have heard "Gebru's crowd on Twitter" make) and "We should re-evaluate people in a non-race-neutral manner and cause people to leave because of their race, regardless of qualification" (which is not). But making that distinction requires some critical reasoning skills. In particular, I imagine there's a large crowd of people who are in the group that would be negatively affected by the first proposal trying to paint it as the second - possibly people who have convinced themselves that they have their job due to their genuine qualification, and if they lose it, it is because they were evaluated in a non-race-neutral manner. "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
    - HexagonalKitten 6y ago
      > "we should re-evaluate people in a race-neutral manner" Cough, no. This is where I know that's not even a rough paraphrasing because racially-neutral or sex-neutral hiring practices are not okay these days. They lead to a meritocracy and that's also not okay. That's how we got where we are. In fact, in hiring now resumes more often have pictures and HR tells us that people are intersectional and to try to hire them. They try to be subtle but they fail. (They don't tell us what intersections.) All interviewers are given the racial statistics and we're told that it's a very serious company priority. > if a company has had racially-biased hiring and promotion processes, there are unqualified people who benefited from the bias just as much as there are qualified people who lost out because of it This only stands to reason if the company had racially-biased hiring policies. Instead big SV companies seem to reflect the later years of tech fields in school. And if we look at sex, not race, we can see that the gender-equality paradox from scandinavian schools suggests that not all groups may be equally interested in all things. Perhaps this is society telling those groups not to be, or natural consequences of their upbringing in different areas and circumstances. We should definitely try to stamp out any racism we find, but let's not cry wolf and label everything racist. Let's actually try to make sure first.
leoh 6y ago
Mere curiosity from those who are reading and commenting about this situation, as opposed to outright skepticism or anger would, and I mean this sincerely, be a good start.

koreanguy 6y ago

Pichai Sundararajan, is head of Google a Indian running a American Company. look at IBM, it has been sold, every job has been shifted to India how many White people are working for IBM since it has been sold ? 80% less. because they replaced with the local indian workforce. i think the tiny minority, should really stop this nonsense, you can not simply put every minority everywhere just because of your skin. how many whites are working for TATA ? or are head of office in a minority company ????? zero . you are a minority, you can't be in all positions its a honest fact.

CBLT 6y ago
I get the feeling I'd disagree with what you're trying to say, but I legitimately can't understand your prose.
- HexagonalKitten 6y ago
  I think this is it (OP feel free to comment): IBM has made white people into a minority by moving the main work to countries where white people are a minority. This is okay. Minorities are, by definition, less frequently encountered in a population sample and by the simple nature of this, aren't going to be in every position. This is okay.

Proven 6y ago

Bunch of nonsense. She reminds me of that Swedish climatist teen - we have no choice but to read or listen to her nonsense from time to time. After a while they fade away and some other fake celebrity-victim gets their five minutes of fame...

draw_down 6y ago

Interesting that the issue fluctuates between a) Google is incurably racist, and b) the paper said something counter to Google's business interests, depending on who is telling it/what's more expedient

jonathathan 6y ago

Maybe not my place, but I'm just going to link to the HN comment guidelines [1] and quote a few relevant sections: - "Don't be snarky." - "Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community." - "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive." [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

MikeUt 6y ago

In all six major companies profiled by https://recruitinginnovation.com/blog/diversity-in-tech/ https://recruitinginnovation.com/blog/diversity-in-tech/ (Uber, Facebook, Apple, Google, Twitter, Microsoft), whites are underrepresented. So if big tech is institutionally racist, who is it racist in favor of? Should we demand from these companies a major initiative to improve the representation of whites? How come the BBC didn't see fit to mention these statistics - isn't that highly relevant to the story?

leoh 6y ago

I empathize deeply with Gebru and I have no doubts that she has experienced institutional racism at Google and in tech generally. I do think that, despite me being white, however, there is a good chance that I would be fired, were I to make an ultimatum about quitting unless the company did X. Based on conversations with managers who have worked at big companies like Google (full disclosure, I work there now), it sounded like this was nearly an explicit policy HR holds at some companies — i.e. that ultimatums would never be tolerated and could result in termination. That said, supposing such a policy were in place, given the understandable frustration she felt about the situation and given the potential institutional racism that led to the event in the first place, an exception likely should have been made. Moreover, one would hope that a company would trust an established ethicist about whether it were appropriate to issue an ultimatum and would take it very seriously if they did, opting to take time to consider it, as opposed to issuing a quick termination.

SheinhardtWigCo 6y ago
Why does being an ethicist qualify someone to make ultimatums? Is Google supposed to let researchers dictate the terms of their employment?
- leoh 6y ago
  An ideal HR department would not yield to ultimatums unless they felt that not yielding is a sound, ethical orientation. Thus, a trained ethicist's position ought to be at least tentatively considered without rushing to a decision.
- geofft 6y ago
  The question isn't really about whether she was qualified to make ultimatums. She's not an idiot - she knew that there was little chance of it going well for her, career-wise, when she did so. Everyone who's saying "She should have expected to lose her job" is missing that she did. The question is why she felt she needed to make one anyway. In particular, she was hired into effectively an adversarial role: to note when Google was engaging in unethical practices. This is not particularly uncommon in business: internal audit teams do this in their own way, for instance. Or security teams, or legal teams, or whoever. All of them have the job of occasionally telling the company "Don't do this." If an internal auditor (or security engineer, or counsel) says, I feel like I am unable to do my job under the terms you've set and if you don't change those terms I see no choice but to leave, it's worth asking why. It's possible that the auditor has an unreasonable view of how to do their job. But it's also entirely possible that the company is intentionally preventing the auditor from being able to do their job because they have something they don't want seen, that upper management wants to do something that they know their audit team won't agree with. An ethicist is much the same. It would be one thing if she was fired by her boss. She was not, and her boss was blindsided. She was fired by her skip-boss on the orders of her skip-skip-boss, neither of whom are on the ethics team, but who are in the larger Google AI organizational unit.

rvz 6y ago

At this point in their view, Everything is 'institutionally racist'™ Being a victim is now cool again I suppose. The new 'blames the government for everything' rhetoric is now applied to tech companies.

nowledge 6y ago
what victims are cool? history is filled with aggressors we idolize, i don't know a victim. asking honestly.
- pas 6y ago
  Wasn't Jesus a victim?
  - threatofrain 6y ago
    More importantly, Jesus is considered by many to be the son of God, as well as God himself. Otherwise Jesus would just be a victim.
    - corty 6y ago
      It is a reinterpretation of victimhood to be noble and glorious to appeal to the masses, who are or see themselves as predominantly victims.
      - loopz 6y ago
        Jesus only said to love one another, have compassion, care for even thieves and hookers, meet people as they are not how you want them to be.
leoh 6y ago
Roman, remember by your strength to rule Earth’s peoples—for your arts are to be these: To pacify, to impose the rule of law, To spare the conquered, battle down the proud. (VI.1151–1154) [Virgil's Aeneid] --- We need more compassion in this world, not less; especially for the defeated. For Gebru, even for those at Google that have, in my view, erred; to do otherwise is to drown ourselves in misery; to race one another towards the bottom; to view the world merely as zero sum.

freditup 6y ago

> Interviewer: I suppose if you think that, the next obvious question is do you think Google itself is institutionally racist? > Dr. Gebru: Yes, Google itself is institutionally racist. > Interviewer: That's quite a thing to say - you were a Google employee until a short while ago. > Dr. Gebru: I feel like most if not all tech companies are institutionally racist. I mean, how can I not say that they are not institutionally racist? The Congressional Black Caucus is the one who's forcing them to publish their diversity numbers. It's not by accident that black women have one of the lowest retention rates[, in the technology industry]. So for sure Google and all of the other tech companies are institutionally racist. There's not really much to discuss or unpack here. There's no defining of 'institutionally racist' in the conversation, so it's impossible to say what standards are being using to determine if something is institutionally racist. Dr. Gebru also provides essentially no facts or evidence for her claims. Asking if organizations are racist is a fair question, but the conversation will basically only be productive if terms are clearly defined and accusations are based on concrete evidence. This seems like it was a very casual interview, so I'm not faulting Dr. Gebru for not providing more evidence here, just saying that this interview is not super helpful in the larger conversation around racism. Because an accusation of racism is a serious accusation to make, I wish in these situations that there was more substantiated evidence provided.

leoh 6y ago
It is arguably disappointing. Yet she is deeply upset and doubtlessly experiencing a severe degree of stress at the moment. Thus, I would cut her some slack here. Although an explicit, concrete, pedagogical discussion would be helpful, I don't think it's fair to expect it from her at the moment.
- FiberBundle 6y ago
  Cut her some slack? She's making extremely harsh accusations without any kind of evidence. Why is it that these people have seemingly unlimited leeway in their statements whereas any just slightly politically incorrect statement can cost other people their careers?

leoh 6y ago

dang / @dang — this post was flagged; yet it is from a reputable source, and is arguably a tenable position; i.e. the very skepticism and anger (as opposed to mere curiosity) that people hold towards her could be collectively be viewed as an example of institutional racism itself. Could you look at removing the flag?

geofft 6y ago
FWIW, I flagged this post because the submitter ('hintymad) also started out discussion with a sarcastic comment satirizing the tenable position in an untenable and uncharitable way. I think this article sets out an entirely tenable position and the source is entirely reputable. I just also do not think that it was submitted in good faith and I don't expect the comments to "gratify one's intellectual curiosity," just promote culture-war flaming.

blastonico 6y ago

The problem with calling everybody and everything racist all the time, is that the word will start to lose meaning.

loopz 6y ago

If this is racism, do we have evidence of other people doing the same, and being treated differently? It could be discrimination, which may happen regardless of gender and color. Or just lack of internal credibility and authority, managers panicking, cutting losses short, internal politics, or whatever disagreement was not resolved. Making it all about ethnicity, seems the wrong way to go about it, if one wants to avoid racism. Then it seems inevitable, any roadblock can be suggested as racism as anchor. Which ends up the entirely wrong attitude to be smart about it. Now, it's impossible to prescribe how to be smart at anything.. I would separate between the actions in that workplace, and the research itself. The latter is highly interesting as it's widely known data and parameters from data, may be highly biased and difficult to neutralize. Even to detect all kinds of biases and separate them from knowledge of the world. Actions from such data can have deeply unfair and repressing consequences, so it's important.