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AI researcher Timnit Gebru resigns from Google

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Re: AI researcher Timnit Gebru resigns from Google

#631

Post by nwallin »

IfOnlyYouKnew wrote: post #81
prionassembly wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The tone of her replies is regrettable: Yann: “ML systems are biased when data is biased" Timnit: “I’m sick of this framing. Tired of it. Many people have tried to explain, many scholars. Listen to us. You can’t just reduce harms caused by ML to dataset bias. Even amidst of world wide protests people don’t hear our voices and try to learn from us, they assume they’re experts in everything. Let us lead her and you fol…

I find it strange to take issue with the "I'm so tired" line. It would seem to be entirely appropriate for circumstances where you see an argument that you have replied to many times but that completely ignores your reply. It also just doesn't strike me as particularly hostile or profane. Quitting twitter and making a show of it strikes me as a far more emotional reaction, but nobody here seems to take any issue with…

It's not the message, it's the tone. There's a big difference between offering constructive criticism and being a condescending prick.

> You can disagree with that reasoning (although you'd be wrong). What you can't do, as a leader in AI, is to pretend to have never heard of it, or that it is so obviously wrong that it warrants no reply whatsoever.

There's a third option. You can just decide to not engage with the condescending prick at all.

We have one of those at work. His area of responsibility is a very cross functional one, and while it is important, he have a great deal of difficulty getting people to participate. Because participation usually means getting told you're an idiot. Loudly, forcefully, and with more words.

That seems to be the case here, only substituting "idiot" out for "racist".

Re: AI researcher Timnit Gebru resigns from Google

#632

Post by wonnage »

1024core wrote: post #625
wonnage wrote: post #608

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're commenting on an article where a person was fired due to being a racial/gender justice advocate, and you're worried about "Even being accused of being racist can ruin someone's career in this current climate" ???

> a person was fired due to being a racial/gender justice advocate Nope, they were fired for being a douche.

And this is what HN has devolved to, calling a leading Ethical AI researcher a douche!

Re: AI researcher Timnit Gebru resigns from Google

#633

Post by gonehome »

1024core wrote: post #449

This person forced Yann LeCun (one of the top 3 AI/ML researchers today, head of Facebook AI, and an ML researcher since the 80s) to give up on Twitter after she took exception to this tweet of his: https://twitter.com/ylecun/status/1274782757907030016 She lives her life attacking people who she disagrees with, and brings in race/gender into any conflict where she's involved. I am surprised Google had hired her, beca…

This is the thread (it was a retweet with comment, naturally).

https://twitter.com/ylecun/status/1275162528511860737

Whatever your position, Yann engages on substance, and Timnit is obnoxious:

https://twitter.com/timnitGebru/status/1275191341455048704?s...

https://twitter.com/timnitGebru/status/1275191515380215808?s...

Basically the worst of online discourse, but in this case one-sided. Yann is discussing in good faith and Timnit is not.

If this is the normal way she interacts with people she disagrees with it's no surprise they didn't want her to stay. The public tweeting about it doesn't inspire much confidence either.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/02/23/in-favor-of-niceness-c...

Re: AI researcher Timnit Gebru resigns from Google

#634

Post by [deleted] »

rbanffy wrote: post #590
Andraia wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We don't know the full list of demands Timnit is far from silent. She could share them if she wanted to. She appears to think that that would hurt rather than help her.

Considering she says she made a list of issues she'd like fixed and that she'd discuss it when she came back from PTO without ever mentioning resignation and that was answered with a "we accept your resignation" passed on to her reports, I believe she has legal representation. The financial implications of her resigning vs her being fired are probably significant. In Google's place I'd probably negotiate an agreement…

[deleted]

Re: AI researcher Timnit Gebru resigns from Google

#635

Post by joshuamorton »

oh_sigh wrote: post #613
joshuamorton wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The posted email specifically says something about behavior not expected of her position. Yes, and its unclear what this behavior was. > Is there an example you have, even self-reported, of a person who was merely critical of Google and was not given a rampdown? No, which is my point. This is unusual behavior on the part of Google, because it's not explained (and certainly not obvious) what the failure was.

> Yes, and its unclear what this behavior was. The email clearly states: "certain aspects of the email you sent last night to non-management employees in the brain group reflect behavior that is inconsistent with the expectations of a Google manager" > No, which is my point. No, that is the opposite of your point. You said that people critical of Google have been given a rampdown, so it is unusual for her to not be g…

Yes, and having read the email, I will reiterate my assertion that it is "certainly not obvious" what behavior is being characterized as "inconsistent with the expectations of a Google manager". Repeating the vague justification message is not a response to criticism of the vague justification message. The email she was fired for (it's quoted in this thread) does not contain any content that I find to be fireable.

> No, that is the opposite of your point.

No, it's exactly my point. The vague justification is not borne out by any evidence.

Re: AI researcher Timnit Gebru resigns from Google

#636

Post by caddemon »

fhrow4484 wrote: post #402
jerome-jh wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> behavior that is inconsistent with the expectations of a Google manager. Maybe my remark is down to earth but, she literally told her group to stop working. I do not know of any company where this is an acceptable behavior for a manager. Besides the disagreements, it sounds to me that was the action that caused Google to pull the trigger. Also from Dean's email it is pretty clear there are a number of new products…

> she literally told her group to stop working. Where did you read that? in the email shown,she told a listserv called "Women and Allies" to stop writing docs that are an attempt to better the situation in terms of diversity, equity, inclusion as writing those docs are like pissing in the wind in her opinion

Well there is precedence for firing people who criticize Google's diversity policies on mailing lists...

Re: AI researcher Timnit Gebru resigns from Google

#637

Post by smt1 »

sudosysgen wrote: post #200
wil421 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TBH it doesn’t matter if she is right or wrong. Her tone and angry writing is pretty harsh. The Twitter replies read a lot like her Google message thing. She’s got a lot of good things to say but needs to work on the delivery. I think she’s playing the victim and race card a lot more than she should. She’s got all the ammo she needs to make her arguments without the angry victim tone.

I agree that her tone is not good, indeed. It's true that this is a big problem on Twitter especially. I still think it is an interesting and under-discussed point, though.

It's why natural language is so hard. People like ethnographers and other people who spend their continuous feeling time understanding this are owed a lot of gratitude (like us, who benefit from unicode). Tone is just another way to encode a basic unit within a language (how a basic unitary 'meme' is converted to a 'lexeme', 'morpheme', etc is very interesting, but has been part of an ancient ontology/metaontology war for all communications systems), and language is just a tool for two human beings to communicate and share ideas. just look at the variance of toneless between English, the gamut of into-european Langs, and tonal languages like Chinese. Heck, in the Universe in a Single Atom, the Dali Llama talks about how Buddhism and other Indic culture spread across the himilayas (it took a lot of sheer luck and kinematics). Sanskrit unlike Tibetan had a lot of prosody (aka distributed word-meaning state), but the English equivalent to things like "affect" and "effect" were culture shocks. Tibetan had little words to encode affect-like words outside of mental states. So little "counting" was ever done.

Re: AI researcher Timnit Gebru resigns from Google

#638

Post by thex10 »

thex10 wrote: post #280

I think this link does a nice job of contextualizing at least part of the situation. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-03/google-s-... I’ve been at companies where I’m faced with an approval process before publishing research to the outside world. It can be quite stressful, especially in the face of holidays and impending deadlines. However I guarantee that if anyone had a problem with the work, they wo…

Another source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/03/technology/google-researc...

Re: AI researcher Timnit Gebru resigns from Google

#639

Post by itsoktocry »

je42 wrote: post #383
rubatuga wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What Yann said about data bias is a fact. He wasn’t dismissing your concerns nor distracting from it. A lot of people tried to extrapolate what Yann meant, but from the way I see it, if more people learn about the cause of this racial bias, the more people will be inclined to use fairer and diverse datasets in their future ML research.

The point is that she has an expectation of Yann to go further than just stating a fact. I assume she thinks that Yann has enough intellectual capacity to improve situation of biased ML but doesnt execute. Further, my guess is that the reason why he doesnt execute is not transparent to her, hence frustrating.

>I assume she thinks that Yann has enough intellectual capacity to improve situation of biased ML but doesnt execute.

Yann has no obligation to do so on Twitter, and shouldn't be called out by coworkers publicly regarding that decision, in my opinion.

Re: AI researcher Timnit Gebru resigns from Google

#640

Post by throwaway2245 »

that_guy_iain wrote: post #560
stevecalifornia wrote: post #519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"You are probably going to be a very successful computer person. But you're going to go through life thinking that girls don't like you because you're a nerd. And I want you to know, from the bottom of my heart, that that won't be true. It'll be because you're an asshole." ~ The Social Network A good number of social activists are rude and abrasive and then blame how people react as racism/sexism. No one wants to be…

I read her email and all I could read was her privilege and her entitlement. I think she knows there is racism and sexism in play but thinks everything is about that. The feedback going to HR was probably because they didn’t feel comfortable telling her it direct for fear of reprisals from her.

One unusual privilege that she has is the ability to describe her experience of racism and sexism and expect to be listened to - her e-mail here speaks mostly on this point.

Her e-mail identifies that you can speak on racism and sexism as much as you want, but all of your speech will be routed to /dev/null.

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