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AI researcher Timnit Gebru resigns from Google

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Re: AI researcher Timnit Gebru resigns from Google

#661

Post by acituan »

wonnage wrote: post #632
1024core wrote: post #625

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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!

> a leading Ethical AI researcher a douche!

Ex-ethical AI researcher, we don't know what her next job will be, and she certainly lost an opportunity to lead by losing her place at Google. We are yet to see if this maneuver will cost her social capital or add to her reputation. Also, do you seriously believe being an ethics researcher automatically excludes one from misconduct?

From what we know so far, she seems to have overplayed her hand, assumed she should be treated above rules and when failed at it wanted to take names and encouraged mutiny, in a company where she is a junior manager. Not only there are actual legal complications for a manager to do that, it also sounds like narcissistic and toxic.

Her goals might be laudable, but she have executed poorly and emotionally, and lost an immediate chance to deliver ongoing impact for the ethics causes she cared about. I hope aspiring activist-ethicist-researcher-techies take note of this. Tantrums don't deliver long term impact. Narcissism clouds your judgement. Impassioned supporters mislead you. You have great power, if you wield it responsibly and pay attention not to overestimate it.

Re: AI researcher Timnit Gebru resigns from Google

#662

Post by room500 »

cool_dude85 wrote: post #42
room500 wrote: post #23

I feel the title is a little misleading. "withering email" == "anger-fueled message sent by a manager to a large group that asks readers to ignore company policy and start arguments with other leaders" I don't see where "ethical AI researcher" comes into play here. Instead, I see a leader at a company unprofessionally sending messages to a large listserv and is later fired. What am I missing?

What's misleading about the title? You have your own way of characterizing the email, and so does the publication. Them not agreeing with you isn't the same as misleading you.

I agree that there is a fine line here.

In general, if I hear "withering e-mail" without context, I imagine an e-mail sent between two parties (or at most, a handful) where one party is cutting down the other directly. When I hear that an employee was fired for a "withering e-mail", I immediately think of retaliation.

In this case, "e-mail" is almost inconsequential. This "e-mail" was a broadcast to hundreds of people who were not in any way involved with the subject matter. It was "withering" in the sense that it cut someone down, but the person/company it cut down wasn't even in the TO field.

Words matter. I now notice that the post title is changed to the much more neutral "AI researcher Timnit Gebru resigns from Google".

Re: AI researcher Timnit Gebru resigns from Google

#663

Post by lawnchair_larry »

krapp wrote: post #656
lawnchair_larry wrote: post #654

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Worst of all, it pushes non-racists to become actual racists. If you start attacking people who previously had no problem with you, grouping them as evil on the basis of their physical characteristics, you’re going to get various forms of backlash. One of those is going to be those people seeking support among others belonging to the evil group identity that you carved out for them, and they’re going to push back in…

> One of those is going to be those people seeking support among others belonging to the evil group identity that you carved out for them, and they’re going to push back in kind. I don't think that happens very often outside of the villain origin stories in comic books. A normal non-racist person doesn't react to being called a racist by becoming the biggest racist they can just to spite people.

Oh, I don’t think it happens in the common case, no. But it absolutely happens at the margins, particularly among folks who are more predisposed to radicalization. I know that happens.

And racism isn’t binary. You don’t have to be pushed all the way to wearing KKK garb to have some level of contempt or prejudice towards other races. So a great way to avoid this outcome and minimize exacerbating existing tensions is to not engage in more divisive hostility on the basis of their identity. Like the guy she is berating likely didn’t even consciously realize he was white until she made a point of reminding him in the worst way possible. A dumb, counterproductive strategy.

But her behavior is going to make it harder for all other black people to get hired. People who are otherwise not concerned with race or sex at all will see this and then need to convince themselves that she is not representative of most black people. Some will undoubtedly just go with the option that seems like it carries the lowest risk to them personally and professionally.

Personally I would not hire anybody who has a history of trying to weaponize twitter. And being smeared as a racist, like she is doing to Jeff Dean, can be extremely damaging and severely career limiting. He’ll probably be ok, but it’s something that many people can never move past, especially if Vice or Vox or Salon or whatever culture war libel vehicle decides that they can twist your story into a hot hit piece.

Re: AI researcher Timnit Gebru resigns from Google

#664

Post by DoreenMichele »

philipkglass wrote: post #657
DoreenMichele wrote: post #641

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know the answers to that. I've been on Hacker News over 11 years. I would like to think I've been building bridges, but it seems like nothing I do is ever enough to reassure people I'm not some SJW Feminazi here to just piss on the guys and let them know what misogynistic assholes they are and it gets hard to keep trying when most of the community has watched me starve for years and openly told me "Not my pro…

I vouched for your comment. It had been auto-marked [dead] due to containing some blocked keyword -- perhaps the very word that you talked about trying to avoid. I have noticed that a few words cause posts to initially show [dead] even when they are from high karma members such as yourself.

Thank you. I didn't know it showed up dead. It didn't look dead to me.

Re: AI researcher Timnit Gebru resigns from Google

#665

Post by room500 »

fantod wrote: post #648
1024core wrote: post #626

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you share the identities of the reviewers, if the author has a history of attacking anyone who disagrees with them??

Sorry, I was referring to the assertion that "they wouldn't share the feedback on her paper".

According to her, she was allowed to see the feedback confidentially, but was not given the names of the authors of the feedback.

Re: AI researcher Timnit Gebru resigns from Google

#666

Post by tomp »

UncleOxidant wrote: post #528
tomp wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

She is accused of being an abuser. I think we've seen enough fake accusations of various kinds of abuse (i.e. crimes without proof, one person's word vs another's) in the past few years to know better.

There's no evidence that she was accused of abuse. How do you abuse people in an academic paper, anyway? Seems much more likely that someone higher up didn't like what she might have implied in the paper in that it might have clashed with company policy somehow. EDIT: a bit more info from the NYTimes: "In an interview with The Times, Dr. Gebru said her exasperation stemmed from the company’s treatment of a research p…

tbh I didn't look in details, I guess I mistakenly believed the HN comments...

my original comment was only targeted at the treatment of the (accused) abusers by the corporate HR, nothing with any specific person

Re: AI researcher Timnit Gebru resigns from Google

#667

Post by basicneo »

dheera wrote: post #649
basicneo wrote: post #545

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Experiencing marginalisation is frustrating, and frustrated people sometimes have outbursts. I don't think we can infer much from a few highly publicised events.

Even if you are marginalized, threatening to resign with ultimatums will never work in your favor unless you have an entire union behind you.

I wasn't commenting on expected outcomes of their behaviour, just that I think it's a bit of a jump say to they are "rude and abrasive " in general.

Re: AI researcher Timnit Gebru resigns from Google

#668

Post by lawnchair_larry »

hardwaregeek wrote: post #550
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…

I do not know the details of this case and I can't speak to the subject's character. However I can't help but note that people who study the effects of race and gender tend to bring race/gender into anything and everything, because well, that's their job. If your response is that race and gender should be brought into only the areas where race and gender are relevant, I'd respond that the prevailing opinion among gen…

You’d probably find this fascinating:

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/360/6396/1465

Re: AI researcher Timnit Gebru resigns from Google

#669

Post by andbberger »

sorenjan wrote: post #510
Upvoter33 wrote: post #482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"but it still bothers me that people like this get highly paid positions to point out problems seemingly without any technical knowledge" You are making a lot of (wrong) assumptions here. Not too many Stanford PhDs are graduating without technical knowledge

Ok, I read her Wikipedia entry and apparently she has Bachelor's and Master's degrees in electrical engineering from Stanford. Those are probably fairly standardized, so I'll concede that she does have some technical knowledge. I have however seen way to many doctorates that seem technical while they're not. There's a common theme in her career, and it's not necessarily technical knowledge. She worked at Microsoft re…

She doesn't deserve to have her work discredited with an ad hominem attack. Humans are complex multi-faceted creatures.

I have determined from your condescending tone in this thread that you do not have technical skills. See? Doesn't feel good or make much sense!

Re: AI researcher Timnit Gebru resigns from Google

#670

Post by ianbicking »

m00x wrote: post #599
ianbicking wrote: post #566

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, reading the article ( https://syncedreview.com/2020/06/30/yann-lecun-quits-twitter... ) and the thread I also don't see how one puts this on Timnit. Coming back to the original tweet: if you changed the training data have more black people instead of white, would it perform the same but with inverted racial biases? Maybe? You really can't know without doing it. It might generate faces with a dark complexion…

> Ultimately the engineers and other humans behind the scenes are the ultimate arbiters of success, loss functions are chosen by humans, and swapping training data on the same model won't change those early decisions How would changing loss functions alter this? This makes no sense. Hyperparameter tuning is done iteratively, and used get the best score on the test dataset. Do you really believe the engineers hand pic…

The goal is to get pleasing face reconstruction, everything follows from that. There's no objectively correct loss function, it's something that is selected because it has a good effect.

A simple example could be sensitivity to color differences: with lighter skin tones there is a fairly large difference between eyebrows and eye features and the person's forehead or cheek. Someone with a pretty dark complexion might have features that are distinguished in a very compressed set of colors. Depending on the loss function a dark complexion face could be essentially flat and featureless.

This could be fixed of course... but it requires changing the loss function.

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