Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

We read the paper that forced Timnit Gebru out of Google

technologyreview.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 683 posts

Re: We read the paper that forced Timnit Gebru out of Google

#231

Post by curiousgal »

lsiebert wrote: post #224

Ultimately this reads as straight censorship by Google. Or if not by Google, by Google employees, with the tacit approval of their higher ups. They didn't like the viewpoint she expressed, didn't like the criticisms she raised, so they blocked her (well her and 7 co-author's) paper. When she said that was unacceptable and stood her ground, they badmouthed her and fired her. You don't have to agree with the paper's cr…

> Censorship

Man, people really do want to have their cake and eat it too. If you want to publish research freely join an academic research lab, if you value money join an industry lab. You can't have both of those things.

Re: We read the paper that forced Timnit Gebru out of Google

#232

Post by tsjq »

adrian_mrd wrote: post #126
adrian_mrd wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi dang, I’ve recently noticed that this commonly occurs ie multiple relevant threads that make up the top 50 of HN over say a 72 hour period, all related or rifts on a similar discussion. Wondering if there is a way to group them as part of the same topic/submission? (thus saving you the manual work of posts like this). I appreciate this would (i) require a code change and (ii) would shift the HN model from individu…

One potential implementation: at the top of each thread, after the metadata for the thread itself and before the comment box, are a list of ‘Related discussions’ with a bulletpoint list of related HN threads.

That will be really good

Re: We read the paper that forced Timnit Gebru out of Google

#233

Post by totony »

threeseed wrote: post #217
bartread wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Timnit also shared a number of tweets, which you can easily access via the one you referenced, where she quotes from the email that Google sent her in response to her ultimatum. They accepted her resignation and brought her finish date forward. They cited her message to the brain group as reason for doing so (without the resignation I suspect she may have faced some disciplinary action, though whether it would have g…

No-one knows fully without seeing her employment contract. But having worked at many companies similar to Google in similar roles it is not normal for (a) contracts to not have notice periods and (b) for companies to not honour them. And IP-flight risk is a concern for many roles but it's typically handled through legal channels as we've seen with Uber.

>contracts to not have notice periods

All the employments contracts I've seen were along the lines of "you may give notice of x day which we may refuse" and "in case of termination we give notice according to laws (2 weeks)" or something iirc. If she resigned it's pretty usual for the employer to be able to waive the notice period.

Re: We read the paper that forced Timnit Gebru out of Google

#234

Post by lsiebert »

mustuhfa wrote: post #226
saagarjha wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am honestly disappointed to see this kind of response at the top of comments here. Every time we have some sort of social issue come up people here come in to pick apart the person involved, and I think it’s one of the bigger reasons why some maintain a generally negative view of Hacker News. Can you imagine being Timnit and stopping by this thread, where the top comment, in colorful language, reduces you to a soci…

Have you seen or read her toxic behavior online?

If her behavior is "toxic", who has it harmed?

Re: We read the paper that forced Timnit Gebru out of Google

#236

Post by elihu »

ardit33 wrote: post #125

Ok, so basically she is a bullshit social engineer, masquerading as an 'AI ethics researcher' "Gebru’s draft paper points out that the sheer resources required to build and sustain such large AI models means they tend to benefit wealthy organizations, while climate change hits marginalized communities hardest. “It is past time for researchers to prioritize energy efficiency and cost to reduce negative environmental i…

Sometimes researchers investigate boring questions like "what is the carbon emissions impact of doing this thing?" Just because you don't think the question is interesting doesn't mean the answers aren't relevant to somebody, or that finding some answers isn't increasing our understanding of the field in some way.

There are all kinds of research papers; they aren't always describing some new clever trick no one thought of before. Sometimes it's just "hey, we had this question we wanted to know the answer to and so we did some investigation and some math and figured it out." As long as they're questions that some other people somewhere are asking, there's no reason why a respectable conference or journal wouldn't accept such a paper. It's up to them and the reviewers to decide whether the content is a good fit for that venue. If it isn't, it'll get rejected; no reason for Google to involve themselves in the decision.

How rigorously the authors treated these questions in the paper is something we don't know without being able to see the paper itself.

Re: We read the paper that forced Timnit Gebru out of Google

#237

Post by bzb6 »

saagarjha wrote: post #204
ardit33 wrote: post #125

Ok, so basically she is a bullshit social engineer, masquerading as an 'AI ethics researcher' "Gebru’s draft paper points out that the sheer resources required to build and sustain such large AI models means they tend to benefit wealthy organizations, while climate change hits marginalized communities hardest. “It is past time for researchers to prioritize energy efficiency and cost to reduce negative environmental i…

I am honestly disappointed to see this kind of response at the top of comments here. Every time we have some sort of social issue come up people here come in to pick apart the person involved, and I think it’s one of the bigger reasons why some maintain a generally negative view of Hacker News. Can you imagine being Timnit and stopping by this thread, where the top comment, in colorful language, reduces you to a soci…

> I think it’s one of the bigger reasons why some maintain a generally negative view of Hacker News.

Twitter already exists, we don’t need another place online to spend all day spreading false positivity.

Re: We read the paper that forced Timnit Gebru out of Google

#238

Post by mustuhfa »

lsiebert wrote: post #224

Ultimately this reads as straight censorship by Google. Or if not by Google, by Google employees, with the tacit approval of their higher ups. They didn't like the viewpoint she expressed, didn't like the criticisms she raised, so they blocked her (well her and 7 co-author's) paper. When she said that was unacceptable and stood her ground, they badmouthed her and fired her. You don't have to agree with the paper's cr…

This is utter nonsense. If you looked outside her twitter feed and at evidence, its clear she was fired because she was toxic. Her threat to leave was her own fault which allows google to move forward. Look at her interactions with respected people like lecun. She has issues with disagreeing with people. She may be qualified, she can have opinions, you can also be the best engineer. If you are an asshole when it comes to disagreeing, then no one will want to work with you. Everyone is replaceable.

Re: We read the paper that forced Timnit Gebru out of Google

#239

Post by gnomewascool »

rualca wrote: post #193
einarfd wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think this sort of veiled personal attack resorting to baseless extrapolation is not a productive line of public discourse. I thought that my comment was fitting to the tone of the text I replied too, but fair enough, maybe I shouldn't have included that paragraph. > You should take a step back and think about a) the field of study, b) how the main argument completely ignores the basis of said technical field and…

> I thought that my comment was fitting to the tone of the text (...) Yes, that was one of the problems. > It is unclear to me what this means, is it arguing that studying bias in AI and specifically deep learning is not germane? Let me make it clear for you so that a) we are able to talk about things objectively, b) your options to continue using veiled personal attacks is curtailed. Either your goal is to model rea…

I'm not OP, but what is "real life"? In cases where some communities/countries have (to quote from the article) a "smaller linguistic footprint online", is trying to control for this a form of manipulation of society or a way to fix a bias? Can you actually choose a sampling measure without making some sort of value judgement?

Re: We read the paper that forced Timnit Gebru out of Google

#240

Post by threeseed »

mustuhfa wrote: post #223
saagarjha wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do I dispute that she provided an ultimatum of which one side was a resignation offer? No. But can I say that this ultimatum wasn’t the result of Google pulling the rug out from under her and putting her in an unfortunate position from which she felt her only way to exercise her leverage was to make such a proposition, then pretend like they’re blameless by “choosing a provided option” of terminating her without look…

What about her toxic behavior? Do you dispute that?

Toxic is an inflammatory and unnecessary word to use when no-one is privy to the actual facts.
Post reply on HN