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We read the paper that forced Timnit Gebru out of Google

technologyreview.com

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

#521

Post by textgel »

mustuhfa wrote: post #412
textgel wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A word you seem to have no reservations about using against your opponents just from a quick search of your comment history. Why such outrage when it's turned back on your own sacred cows?

Why are you assuming anything about me? You realise I e used the word toxic in my whole comment history only related to this topic right? I, like many others, dont like the way she deals with people. It is toxic. You call a toxic person, a toxic person. Ample evidence for it. Its not outrage, its just facts.

I think you replied to the wrong person?/friendly fire?

My message wan in reponse was to.

> Toxic is an inflammatory and unnecessary word to use when no-one is privy to the actual facts.

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

#522

Post by tinyhouse »

kenjackson wrote: post #510
tinyhouse wrote: post #503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, nothing in this story suggest they do. They might have an inconsistent review process, like pretty much most processes in these companies - from interviews to promotions. Let's see how many people follow her and leave Google Research due to their practices. My prediction is zero.

That’s the beauty of modern discrimination. You never come out and say you’re discriminating. Rather you just apply the rules selectively. An inconsistent process is the best best way to discriminate. My prediction is you will see some people leave Google due to this. Likely those who worked closest to her. Apple is already extending interest.

There is no evidence they applied rules selectively. What I meant by inconsistent process is that it's subjective. These process usually say something like "Two L6+ need to approve...". Then it's assigned to someone and that person can spend 2 minutes or 2 hours on it. Paper reviews are esp prone to that. How likely your paper being accepted is often more of a factor of who reviews it than how good the paper is. The main thing for me is that it was clear the paper would have been published eventually. I've seen it many times - reviewers ask for some changes. Authors make the changes, Reviews are happy. Paper is published. The reviewers didn't ask for anything that would make the paper weaker, nor did they ask to remove any content.

I'm guessing she was so mad because they were external people on the paper and pulling the paper out would make her look bad.

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

#523

Post by zepto »

albntomat0 wrote: post #485
zepto wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think we agree on the difficulty here. I believe the reverse is also true: if the person is fired for a legitimate, non-watchdog reason, they have an incentive to say the firing was due to them bring up privacy/ethics concerns.

This is true, but it’s not symmetrical. If they actually have privacy/ethics concerns, those can be presented publicly. In many cases of employee performance etc, it boils down to subjective issues or he said/she said.

In this case, it seems like the technology review article supports the idea that there are real concerns being raised, and elsewhere it has been suggested that the reasoning for the firing is not credible.

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

#524

Post by bronson »

tinyhouse wrote: post #447
tclancy wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? People should check their principles at the door? They literally hired an ethics researcher and then it appears they fired her unethically.

Did I say people should check their principles at the door? It's a large research org within a large company. Obv it's not all perfect. I'm sure it has some inefficiencies, politics, etc. It's a company after all and people who accept their offer should know they are going to lose some freedom. But it's still one of the best environments for researchers outside of academia. Google should get some credit for that. Not…

This is top notch flattery. You’re sure to get the job now.

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

#525

Post by free_rms »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #455
karmasimida wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because, as far as I can tell, the entire AI community is now on her side Oh because how dare people judge. You would be instantly taken to court of public opinion for talking down a black female, AI, ethics, researcher. If people have opposite opinion, they would keep it to themselves. But saying the entire AI community had rallied behind her is wrong.

I've been hoping to address that point, actually. Because, I get where you're coming from, and I've felt those frustrations myself. Let's just say I'm probably the last person to hop on the "do what I say or else" bandwagon. ... but like everything else, that turns out not to be an issue here. I would feel fine saying what you said. It's nothing to do with the color of her skin, or the fact that she was working on et…

> The answer to this mystery was obvious, but only in hindsight. There are far fewer black people in FFHQ than whites or asians. I found a classifier, got it to identify an order of magnitude more black faces than I had before, retrained my model, and the result was instantly so much better: https://twitter.com/theshawwn/status/1209749009092493312

Ironically, that exact observation about that exact dataset was what got Dr. Gebru so mad at Yann Le Cun in the twitter thread that people brought up. So maybe you're just lucky with who saw your tweets.

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

#526

Post by mlthoughts2018 »

kenjackson wrote: post #500
mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say she did much more than imply - she wrote a workplace email imploring her coworkers to stop doing their jobs - something that would get you fired anywhere, any time. I also think you’re overstating Damore’s claims and you’re taking the interpretation or reaction to his claims to be equivalent to the claims themselves. The claims themselves, that innate biological differences between men and women can partl…

Did she say to stop doing your job? Or to stop writing about achieving diversity? Damore said more than just that there might be reasons for the lack of women in tech. He also said that we should stop trying to increase their representation. Among a bunch of other things.

She said to stop doing your job.

Re: Damore, I agree. He was pushing a bad agenda that tried to draw more than is reasonable from some academic research on gender disparity.

Very, very similar to what Gebru did as well. First by pushing agendas in a publication leading to its disapproval, then in her follow up email.

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

#527

Post by JamesBarney »

UncleMeat wrote: post #462
derangedHorse wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always found it funny how we treat companies like Google as imaginary people with no single individual bearing responsibility. To be fair, some people are aware of the people involved like Jeff Dean, but I look forward to a shift in the future where individuals within companies are as popular and held to the same standards as individuals within politics. Some of these corporate individuals already seem to have j…

> With respect to this particular case of Timnit Gebru, it sounds like she was already on her way to being let go. This is just wild speculation and part of a frustrating pattern where all sorts of questionable behaviors by authorities are justified by other unrelated properties of the victims.

She's not a victim. She was an employee who sent in her resignation/ultimatum letter and then blasted an unprofessional message to a bunch of her colleagues.

She is obviously doing good research, but I could also see why she wouldn't be a good fit for Google (or really any other large tech company).

I really don't see why this isn't a win for everyone. She said she didn't want to work there under current conditions, now she's not. I'm sure she'll get a job in academia or at a think tank where she'll be able to be much more critical of Google and big tech. The world will better off because her voice and research won't be toned down by a Google internal review. And Google gets to get rid of a problematic employee. It's a win-win-win.

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

#528

Post by skinkestek »

rbanffy wrote: post #463
mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The basic difference is that she implied I&D work at Google was ineffective while he implied half his co-workers were unworthy of their jobs. She made her managers mad while he made half the company mad.

> while he implied half his co-workers were unworthy of their jobs.

Why do you and other keep propagating this myth?

If anything I think you are making it harder for women in IT:

You are building a narrative that many respected people doesn't respect girls in IT which probably makes it even harder for them to choose IT.

Also I think you are building up under the idea that men and women are enemies in the workplace.

At this point I think it is well established for anyone that cared to read what he actually wrote that he was trying to help bring more women into Google, not saying that those who were there were somehow unworthy.

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

#529

Post by qsort »

Tyr42 wrote: post #511
qsort wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI explainability is a concept that's being thrown around frequently these days; it revolves around the idea that machine learning models should be "explainable", that is, their predictions should be traceable not just to the mathematical operations that define it, but also to some properties of the input which should be understandable by a human. While I won't deny that the concept is interesting, it's terribly diff…

I think it's a little better than that. An example from class. Suppose you are building a ML decider which can stop a production line if it sees defective products. If you are choosing between a decision tree and a neural net, one of the things to consider is that with a DT you can look at the tree the model comes up with a d say, okay if the mass of the widget is low, we reject. With a NN, you can't see why things a…

> But I don't think it's just a buzzword

I don't think it's just a buzzword either, in the same sense that 'AI' is not just a buzzword. But both "AI" and "explainable" are also buzzwords, or at least often used as such.

I have no objections to the example you made, some models are "obviously" more explainable than others. I'm simply refuting the claim that some models are inherently more explainable, because the entire concept starts falling apart when you take it out of its mathematical context. For example, it's easy to see what a DT does when it's small, but larger DTs are as "unexplainable" as a NN.

> trying to enforce political control

I'm not against political control per se, some political control is well-justified; but I find it pretty suspicious that everyone is jumping on this train when there are more glaring issues, (for example, if and when a branch of the government or a government-controlled agency decides to use a ML model, they should be required to declare that they are using it and make the source code public, so that it can be cross-examined) and my guess is that it's because "explainability" provides a nice narrative, unlike other concerns.

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