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The political activist collective is slowly falling apart. If you get blamed for racism when firing an employee for telling colleagues not to pursue KPIs, there

• joshuamorton 6y ago
  > They are now resorting to calling Google gaslighting for replacing Gebru with a Black person. The complaint isn't what they did, it's what they didn't do. There were no substantive policy changes that could address the underlying issues. Tokenism without change isn't improvement.
  • mupuff1234 6y ago
    What are the underlying issues?
    • joshuamorton 6y ago
      Broadly there were two complaints: 1. Concerns about censorship of research critical of Google. 2. Concerns about diversity efforts within the Research organization. Replacing someone with a proven track record of being above-average on diversity work, even to his own detriment, and who was willing to fight for his reports when they were censored by higher ups (Samy) with someone who is at best an unknown quantity (Marian) does not instill confidence. Further, the claimed changes don't really do much. Supposedly, failures of DEI will be more impactful on perf for executives. Does that mean that the executives involved in this sequence of events will be dinged for mishandling this? My impression is no, or if anyone is, it'll be Samy. As a sidebar, there's also the more nefarious thought that if you're being judged on the diversity of your org, firing a black woman and then bringing in a black woman executive means you won't get dinged for DE&I failures. Hence: tokenism without addressing the underlying issues, which might be summed up as many of the employees have no confidence in management.
• true_religion 6y ago
  Who was Gebru replaced with? I couldn't find anything when I looked it up (ironically on Google).
  • joshuamorton 6y ago
    She wasn't, really. For context, you had a reporting chain of Jeff Dean -> Megan Kacholia -> Samy Bengio -> Timnit Gebru/Meg Mitchell. Timnit and Meg have been fired. Samy appears to have been sidelined, despite everyone involved in the ethical work liking Samy and finding him willing to protect them. My best Guess is that Marian Croak (a Black woman who is currently an Engineering VP in an unrelated area) will approximately replace Megan Kacholia with Megan focusing on other areas, except that "ethical AI" was only a part of Samy's purview, much less Megan's, and its unclear if Marian is stepping down from her former position, or if she's going to split her time between ethical AI and completely unrelated work. So there are no direct leads of the ethics team currently. There's a VP in charge who has other significant responsibilities and relatively junior researchers (some of whom are very recent hires with limited experience), and no one in the middle. So any chance of mentorship is gone, and the system is quite clearly adversarial. Those researchers have lost their direct and skip level manager, with no clear replacement. Lovely.
  • Dma54rhs 6y ago
    Doubt she was needed there first place, just good PR to hire someone related with ethics who is also POC and woman.
• kleer001 6y ago
  > The political activist collective is slowly falling apart. In my heart and heart and dream of dreams, yes I wish that to be true. However my intuition tells me another generation with the same persona will pick up the banner again in a few years.
  • undoware 6y ago
    Dearest ones, we have only just begun. See you next summer.
    • kleer001 6y ago
      Thankfully not. For several reasons. Mainly... "Reality has a way of asserting itself" - Obama IMHO Philosophy is great and all for motivations and decoration, but for structural items like farming, biology, and architecture it's blind and mute. And the movement in question is a philosophical one, namely a bastard child of post-structuralism and select bone and gristle from Marxism. Sure, it'll rise again, like a bad penny zombie. But for now its lost half its population that just wanted Trump out the door.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]