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She didn’t sneak the paper, and the committee was trying to block it for BS reasons like the committee member wanted his work cited. Jeff Dean is a billion-dol

She didn’t sneak the paper, and the committee was trying to block it for BS reasons like the committee member wanted his work cited. Jeff Dean is a billion-dollar employee who has evidently extremely weak people skills. He was in way over his head in this one and he made the exceptionally bad choice of continuing the argument. Moreover he knew Gebru was consulting a lawyer, so his actions are de facto retaliation for that. If you can’t muster skepticism for Google’s astroturf here, you’re falling straight into the issues of bias and prejudice that we do dearly need to expunge from the workplace.

doublekill 6y ago
She tried to bypass internal review. She knew that internal review was part of the process. She auhored a paper under the Google banner, not making note of her colleagues' work which combat the bias she was decrying. Then she submitted it for internal review the day of the submission deadline. After internal review was done and suggestions to improve were made (valuable time from your peers!) the paper was already accepted by external reviewers. She was then miffed having to update or retract the paper. Jeff Dean is an absolute saint and ally for the cause. For sure he has better people skills than Gebru. Jeff was over his head with the Twitter mob, which would mess with anyone, no matter how famous. Google fired Gebru not for retaliation, or for critical science, or for being Black, or for advocating diversity, or for Dean having bad people skills. She was fired for being insufferable. Only astroturfing Ive seen is from activists claiming racism or Jeff Dean autism / white privilege.