241–250 of 926 posts
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I really want to read that paper. Can't wait til it's published. Presuming it'll be at FAccT*...
Underrated post. Would be interesting indeed.
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I did not get that impression. But I do recognize the dense style common on the humanities academic field. It can throw some people off at first.
One paragraph has four parentheticals. I wonder which humanities background, other than Law, finds that acceptable.
These things seem to play out like clockwork. Progressive companies hire social justice warriors into vague ethics or policy roles, let them hire their activist friends, shower them with fast track careers and promotions. It's good optics, the progressives like it because it makes them feel better about working at big techs. Said hires have thus far, as far as I can tell, not produced anything of substantial value to…
It seems that one of the reasons they have not produced anything of value is because, at least in this case, the work is actively suppressed. The heart of the issue here is that Timnit tried to publish a paper and was told by upper management to retract it with no further feedback. Maybe if you’re going to hire ethics researchers, you should listen to them?
Doing work that needs to be actively suppressed is not producing value - at least not to the company. So apparently there's a fundamental misalignment between the work Dr. Gebru wants to do and the work that Google wants her to do; this was made clear with the suppression of the paper, and escalated as Dr. Gebru apparently (and understandably) did not want to work in a very different direction, (quoting her tweet) "asked for simple conditions first" which were totally unacceptable to the employer ("We cannot agree to #1 and #2 as you are requesting."), so that's it, if neither is willing to compromise on their primary goals, they can't work together.
This does indicate that apparently listening to ethics researchers they hired is unacceptable to Google. Sad, but not surprising.
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But isn't it commonly accepted that ML systems reflect the bias in the data, and that it's hard to predict and control the bias in advance?
Her point is more than that. I think that she was trying to say that ML systems have an inherent bias that is independent of their data. This is a consequence of the fact that it's not possible to do generalization, and thus learning, without bias to begin with. What an AI researcher does when deciding which architecture is essentially tuning the bias in the generalization system in order to produce better results, w…
In general I take these types of tropes to be cloaked (politically correct) way of saying "fuck x group".
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Having conditions is often part of a negotiation. Maybe they offered to resign in that email, but Timnit Gebru does not say she did in the linked twitter as far as I can tell. Unless she formally offer to resign it seems like her management jumped the gun.
From this tweet: https://twitter.com/timnitGebru/status/1334343577044979712 > I said here are the conditions. If you can meet them great I’ll take my name off this paper, if not then I can work on a last date. To employers, that qualifies as a conditional resignation.
If an employee tells their boss they have a plan to offer a resignation on x day or do not get y or are considering it they can fire the employee before then, but I assume they can not push around the day they offer a resignation.
An employer not wanting to keep an employee who might soon resign is understandable of course.
I am sure it can get fiddly on what counts as a formal offer to resign and that courts make calls one way or another based on ambiguous language.
Without the email though it's not clear to me. For better or worse it comes across as Timnit Gebru bosses were eager to shoo her out the door though.
I think this is actually the better link to be discussing, rather than the twitter threads shared before. The most relevant parts (in terms of back story) should be this: > A week before you go out on vacation, you see a meeting pop up at 4:30pm PST on your calendar (this popped up at around 2pm). No one would tell you what the meeting was about in advance. Then in that meeting your manager’s manager tells you “it ha…
I really want to read that paper. Can't wait til it's published. Presuming it'll be at FAccT*...
Maybe someone could post it here when it's published?
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Which doesn't seem to be what was happening here though, or at least there's no indication to that effect. At the same time, the narrative that someone above her in the management hierarchy decided to pull her research seems more plausible. In that case, I would tend to "Privacy for the Weak, Transparency for the Powerful." What you describe is the former, but this would seem to be a case of the latter.
It's really hard to tell from this message what really happened. Why isn't it plausible that the paper in question was somehow upsetting to one of the dozens of people to whom the author circulated it? It reads to me like this person rejects the very idea that any criticism of their paper could possibly be legitimate.
Based on that I assume that the author was soliciting guidance from PR & Policy but didn't receive any. Someone higher up isn't doing their job effectively.
I wonder why these privileged people (I don't have her huge salary, I don't live in the us or work for a FAANG) keeps forgetting that after all they are just _employees_.
That's one of the worse takes possible about this situation. Her role is specifically created to hold her employer to account when they are using bad practices. Her opposition to particular policies enacted in the company is literally part of her job description.
Only highlighting issues without power to enforce anything is not enough to have any tangible results? That's for sure.
But she was not the CEO.
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Underrated post. Would be interesting indeed.
Pure speculation, but it's gotta be criticizing Google, right? What else could they _possibly_ have been so concerned about that they were willing to fire the researcher over it?
Gonna have to wait and see I guess.