We read the paper that forced Timnit Gebru out of Google

The summarized sections of the paper seem very, very weak to me.

1. Environmental footprint of technology must always be considered as a trade-off for what you get in return. Why do we spend energy on a giant render farm for Pixar? Because the cinematic artwork is worth that environmental cost for many people. Obviously we should pursue improvements in environmental outcomes, but that is not a goal unto itself in a vacuum apart from all other side effects of a technology. Is it worth ~5 car-lifetimes to train GPT? I would say overwhelmingly yes. It reminds me of an anecdote from The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch, where some ethicists argued about whether it was a useful human endeavor to invent color TV monitors back when they first hit the market. Why would you need to spend resources creating something besides black and white TV? Yet today and for decades, color monitors are used as critical tools to diagnose diseases and save lives.

2. Nobody is required to accept “wokeness” vocabulary, and indeed one of the signs of a crank or a quack is making up a fiefdom of new vocabulary and collecting rent in the form of social authority for the validity and requirement of that new vocab. Nobody is required to be on the cutting edge of how activist language changes, and it seems like a disingenuous way to try to make a cottage industry out of one’s own expertise in rapid changes to activist language. As long researchers are stating what corpus is used, and making tools available that allow peer reviewers to audit that corpus, they are meeting their obligations to their professional field and to society. We should be happy that language researchers would produce lots of papers and lots of models on many sets of corpora, and as the cost of training these models gets cheaper, and the cost of curating the corpora gets cheaper, we can expect to see better variety of curated large corpora, domain-specific corpora and other things.

3. Researcher opportunity cost is perhaps the most ridiculous objection. Researchers are free agents to decide what they want to study. In most PhD programs, especially in machine learning, the project selection is entirely up to the student. If Timnit wants there to be different research priorities, well, news flash, but she is only one of eight billion. Unless she wants to raise money to give as research grants that tie the researchers to her pre-decided methods of inquiry, she really has nothing to say here.

4. Inscrutable models - this is the only one where there is any point. If the models can produce harmful outcomes and they are inscrutable, then debugging or safeguarding them is a real problem. But this has been true for almost all types of computer science algorithms. Of course we should work on methods that synthesize clarity from the prediction mechanism of large neural nets, but that is also not a criticism of neural nets. That’s just a need for more technology.

Overall the main points of this paper seem full of themselves, arrogant and overly self-important, especially with wildly ridiculous connections to “wokeness” vocabulary.

Given the immediate nuclear option of the ultimatum and email that Timnit sent, I suspect the full text of the paper would be even more unacceptable.

Google has plenty of bullshit issues with the way it treats employees and transparency of decision making. Rejecting this publication approval was not one of them.

Hacker News is about pseudonymous discussion. Only a small percent of HN posters are building a brand name. Twitter is much more real-name based and personal brand-building focussed.

Jumping in on a bandwagon to signal group membership in an in group can help brand-building. Going against the in group is potentially fatal to your brand. The risk/reward balance does not favor genuine discussion of a controversial topic.

On HN most comments are up/down voted based on their content. The post authorship usually matters little. There is little benefit for the author to announce support of a popular position and little risk for the author to express an unpopular one. So discussion here can be more about substance and less about signaling.

The existence of other problems does not make a particular problem go away and humanity can in fact focus on more than one thing at a time.

Suppose your girlfriend announced she was working on an end date, how would you feel?

This is not surprising. On Twitter there is a strong cancel culture to irrationally oppose anything that fails to unquestioningly accept “wokeness” narratives. Critical thinking and evaluation of evidence is not really permitted. Twitter is more about trying to look (publicly) like you affiliate with this or that celebrity, so the regular person can feel some sense of patronage to their chosen circle of intellectuals or artists. It has no connection to objective appraisal of evidence. It’s more tribal. It’s “Team Timnit” (all the details supporting wokeness narratives are believed, all details supporting Google taking an appropriate action are heresy) or “Team Google” and you feel the opposite.

The James Damore episode is another example. It is essentially 100% equivalent to what Timnit has done in this chain of events, but in that case the “wokeness” bloc on Twitter called for Damore’s firing and railed against his perspective - virtually a complete double standard compared to how they view Timnit’s behavior.

By the mostly anonymous nature of Hacker News, and the removal of any type of social credit for patronage of different ideologues, the commentary here is able to be much more nuanced and try to really account for a much greater variety of facts or perspectives.