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We read the paper that forced Timnit Gebru out of Google

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

#471

Post by dash2 »

mschuster91 wrote: post #456
tomp wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

algorithm is biased => we should fix it is reasonable, but also a misrepresentation of the argument that this whole thread is about, which is more along the lines of algorithm is biased => researchers are racist => the company that employs them is racist => the whole country is racist which definitely is driven more by ideology than reason. I’m happy about people viewing the world differently and having an honest, go…

> researchers are racist I never argued for that. My point is that researchers (as well as everyone!) have biases , which may manifest in the end as racism or other forms of discriminations. To prevent these biases from manifesting, (AI) ethics experts are needed as oversight. > the company that employs them is racist To take the example of the "racist soap dispenser" again: while the individual people who have devel…

> Just short of half of the country recently elected a President who openly spouted white-supremacist conspiracy theories. For half the people in the US racism is not a dealbreaker for the highest office it has to offer!

... which is a bit different from saying that half the country is racist. Perhaps they thought the alternative was worse.

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

#472

Post by Veedrac »

hezag wrote: post #49

I did not read the paper (just like most people here), but by the title — “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?” — it does not look like the CO2 emissions thing is the main topic of this research. BTW, "Stochastic Parrots" is a very descriptive name for the problem > Moreover, because the training datasets are so large, it’s hard to audit them to check for these embedded biases. “A me…

The first page was leaked. The environmental angle was a significant part of it, particularly the claim that environmental and financial costs ‘doubly punishes marginalized communities’.

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

#473

Post by z3ncyberpunk »

dzdt wrote: post #423
thinkingemote wrote: post #365

Anyone else see the narrative on Twitter to be so much different than Reddit and hacker news? On reddit and hacker news I have never seen any unconditional support for Timmit. Even amongst those anti Google and broadly in support of her, there's no whole agreement with all of what Timmit says; the assertion of her story, the reasons why and the conclusions. that a. She was fired b. That she was fired because of sexis…

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 topi…

you are writing like HN is much fairer and upstanding than other forms of social media. there is nothing different here, if you step outside of the blind faith of corporate fawning and startup hustle or bring any challenging opinion you get shadowbanned

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

#474

Post by sokoloff »

CydeWeys wrote: post #405
onedognight wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If she was cut off without “gardening leave”, then she was fired. It can then be true that she both quit (two weeks notice) and she was fired (no two weeks for you). I’d be surprised if the latter was true as it would be petty on Google’s part. More likely would be gardening without access which would still be gardening.

It's really just academic and not germane to the larger overall discussion whether or not she got that one pay period's worth of money.

IMO, it’s germane. “I quit. My last day will be sometime in late Dec.” “We’ll pay you and recognize your employment through that date, but you are relieved of all duties effective immediately” is quite different from “Nope; your job ends today.”

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

#475

Post by kenjackson »

nathanlied wrote: post #444
jpm_sd wrote: post #391

Here's why I have absolutely no sympathy for Google in this situation. They hired Gebru as a professional thorn in their side. "Come up in here and be a pain in the ass! Tell us what we're doing wrong!", they said. "We're Enlightened Corporate America, after all!" She is a chess piece in the game of Wokeness Street Cred. She then proceeded to do the job she was hired for, and now they're all "Hey lady, Here At Google…

Agreed; but this isn't just a Google problem. Seems to me like a lot of SF (and SF-inspired) "big tech" wants to be known for their "wokeness"[1], which leads to hires like Timnit and other "politically-outspoken" people, which in turn leads to situations like this, James Damore, and other individuals/situations that amount to workplace political activism. I am wholly uncomfortable with any discussion of politics in…

The problem here is that AI and race now intersect in non trivial ways. It’s like having privacy as political discourse when you are scanning emails for marketing purposes. There’s a line at which not having the discussion is equivalent to taking a political stance.

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

#477

Post by zepto »

albntomat0 wrote: post #453
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm less cynical about this as a concept. Would you feel differently if, say, Apple hired a "Privacy Watchdog", with a long history of activism on the topic? Someone you could trust to speak out if something was amiss. If the person is later fired, that's a sign that something is wrong at the company. But if they stay , and have generally good things to say, that's a sign the company can be trusted. I do think this i…

I think that works if there's a clear way to distinguish the hypothetical privacy watchdog leaving/getting fired due to issues with the privacy program, versus leaving/getting fired for other reasons. Making that distinction, imo, seems to be the core disagreement with the current Google issue, at least among all of us commenting on the outside.

It seems like that is always going to be a problem, since if the person is getting fired critiquing the thing they are there to critique, the company will always have a huge incentive to present another explanation.

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

#478

Post by fastball »

viktorcode wrote: post #295
fastball wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kinda the point though isn't it? We're only reading a summary of the paper because apparently the authors aren't confident enough in its quality to release it publicly. You can't claim that Google dismissed this paper out-of-hand while simultaneously saying "oh, but it's too much of a draft to release publicly". Uh, if it was too much of a draft for the public why shouldn't it be too drafty for Google? Are we really…

That, or Google is censoring the paper because of the conclusion it comes to, which doesn't align with their business interests.

I’m taking the article at face value, which states the authors think it’s too much of a draft.

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

#479

Post by qsort »

free_rms wrote: post #468
qsort wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Playing the devil's advocate here, I'm with you that half of AI ethics is obvious and the other half is wrong, but is't it the goal of the field to try and give meaning to things that aren't obviously well defined? To make an example that's en vogue right now, AI explainability. Nobody even has a definition of what it means for a model to be explainable (is a linear regression "more explainable" than ML? isn't Google…

Yes, a linear regression is explainable. You know what your features represent, and the regression puts a straight-up co-efficient on each of them. You can look at the weights you trained, see how strongly your input features contribute to the output prediction, and say things like "if all else is equal, 25-49 males are 0.08 likely to click on this ad". Deep nets aren't explainable in that way, even if you devoted a…

> Yes, a linear regression is explainable.

I don't agree that this is, in general, the case.

Dense linear models trained on a lot of parameters aren't exactly simple to trace, and even the weights aren't as intuitive as they might seem.What about regularization? What about pre-processing? What about feature selection?

There are a lot of examples of linear regressions where, for example, you can reverse the sign of the correlation by picking some features rather than others.

Assigning meanings to features of your model is something that requires extreme care and deep understanding of both the model and your dataset.

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

#480

Post by dragonwriter »

mschuster91 wrote: post #456
tomp wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

algorithm is biased => we should fix it is reasonable, but also a misrepresentation of the argument that this whole thread is about, which is more along the lines of algorithm is biased => researchers are racist => the company that employs them is racist => the whole country is racist which definitely is driven more by ideology than reason. I’m happy about people viewing the world differently and having an honest, go…

> researchers are racist I never argued for that. My point is that researchers (as well as everyone!) have biases , which may manifest in the end as racism or other forms of discriminations. To prevent these biases from manifesting, (AI) ethics experts are needed as oversight. > the company that employs them is racist To take the example of the "racist soap dispenser" again: while the individual people who have devel…

> Just short of half of the country recently elected a President who openly spouted white-supremacist conspiracy theories.

He was elected by the votes of ~27% of eligible voters, and about ~20% of the population, not “just short of half the country”.

You could say it was a little less than half the people who felt it is worthwhile to vote in a system where votes matter so little that getting the most of them doesn't mean you win, but then the story is about alienation from the electoral system more than support or even indifference to racism.

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