301–310 of 683 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The effective date of a resignation is when the employee is officially no longer employed. Not when they're put on gardening leave. Google doesn't pay people past the effective date normally.
Thank you. That's helpful to know and clearly illustrates the difference in practice across different countries (they wouldn't be able to do that in the UK unless it was a firing).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If her behavior is "toxic", who has it harmed?
Based on previous discussions, she bullied facebook's AI chief, Yann LeCun, who is apparently a respected expert in the field, off of twitter in an attempted cancellation.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
She didn’t “refuse to fix it when asked”. She agreed with the proviso that she could have a meeting to figure out what she was and was not permitted to publish. The response was to decline to meet and fire her. It’s entirely plausible that the paper is bunk; however, when someone is willing to come down that hard to prevent an idea being published, I tend to err on the side of “worth finding out what”.
She wasn't fired, she offered her resignation.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Was I pointing out what Lecun said or her specific way of handling that interaction? Its the latter thats toxic. If people were attacking Timnit for that interaction why is that? Clearly she did not handle that very well.
I think if she is to be judged on whether she was being toxic to Lecun or not, Lecun's opinion is relevant. Why do you feel it's not? And if his opinion isn't relevant, why should we care about yours? I also find your question about why people attacked her, as if people in the internet always have good reasons to attack others, is an incredibly silly attempt to appeal to the Bandwagon fallacy.
Now go and look at how she has handled it and how she argued with Lecun. Then she also thratens people if she does not get her way. There is ample evidence for her behavior. Does she behave like this all the time? Of course probably not. But the fact that she is openly behaving like this is a clear data point. If you can not see this behavior as not suitable in a work environment, then lets hope we never work together.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you dispute her ultimatum and/or offer to resign?
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you feel we have not heard enough of her side of the story yet?
It's clear all off the facts are not available, and likely never will be, experiences are subjective. It's also clear that before learning of this event, we had 0% knowledge of the situation. Between 0 and where we are now with both sides expressing their point of view to some degree, people on HN began making up their mind in the absence of complete information. There is no requirement or urgency that we come to som…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Based on previous discussions, she bullied facebook's AI chief, Yann LeCun, who is apparently a respected expert in the field, off of twitter in an attempted cancellation.
Lecun's last post on twitter was telling people not to attack her, so I'm not sure that characterization holds.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If a megafarm hires you to write papers for the Ethical Milk Production team, any modicum of social awareness will tell you that they don’t actually want you to write a paper about the ethics of animal products.
If you, a large corproation working in AI, hire a prominent and vocal AI ethicist, any modicum of awareness should tell you that they may actually have a sense of ethics.
Good grief - this terrible clickbaity headline writing: "We read the paper that forced Timnit Gebru out of Google. Here’s what it says" The paper DID NOT force her out of Google. Her subsequent behaviour - submitting without approval, rant, ultimatum, and resignation - did. And she wasn't "forced out": she resigned of her own volition. She could have chosen to make improvements to the paper based on the feedback she…
You might be interested to know that I’ve changed my mind. The reasons are documented here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25308233
Basically, every one of those arguments evaporates when you dig into the details. She was doing her job. The paper was anodyne and perhaps even boring. She was rightfully pissed off that some middle manager was telling her and her four coauthors that they must retract their paper (the reviewers later posted on Reddit that they would have been happy to accept edits). Jeff was micromanaging her citation list, which is almost unheard of, apparently. Multiple google employees came out of the woodwork to say “there is no such review process, other than a quick scan to see if you’re leaking company secrets by accident.”
All of this is fascinating. Because, as far as I can tell, the entire AI community is now on her side. The only people who keep bringing up her character flaws are people who don’t do AI / ML. Or at least, they seem to be pretty quiet now that Jeff revealed Google supposedly has some weird academic review process no one’s heard of till now.
Your feelings about the journalists are completely warranted, to underscore that point. But it’s odd how much momentum is building. Try to ignore the circus; you’ll be surprised to find there is substance behind the claims. I was as surprised as anyone.
And to reiterate, pick any one of the arguments you mention, and really dig into it deeply for details. Try to verify the claims. The most you’ll get is that she was curt. And I remind you that it’s usually known who the reviewers are at any given venue. Even if it’s blinded, you at least know the general group of people involved. In this case it was highly unusual to do some kind of anonymous, selective, ad-hoc enforcement of rules that really don’t seem to benefit the scientific process in any way.
The problem I find with this has much to do with character. I will not comment on the research (because I do not know the field) but rather comment on why character matters and why motivation is important. Having read her email and tweets; it is quite clear that she is as much a political activist for a far-left “woke” interpretation of the world that I view as of immediate threat to our way of living, democracy and…