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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

#601

Post by matthewdgreen »

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…

Google didn't hire Gebru for her "wokeness" or for whatever petty internal political issues drive discussions here on HN. They hired her because they are a massive AI company operating on a multi-billion user scale that will very likely produce massic impacts on our society, impacts that we can't even imagine today. They understand at an intuitive level that what they're doing is risky and (perhaps at minimum) they understand there's a risk that it will provoke a backlash. To insulate themselves, they wanted a credible AI ethics researcher even at the cost of her being potentially a bit difficult to manage.

Now, I don't fully understand what happened in this incident, but I think there's a chance that it's far more impactful than some internal workplace spat. To put this succinctly: businesses like Google are playing cards for thousand dollar bills, and HN is interested in debating their favorite game of nickle poker.

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

#602

Post by mlthoughts2018 »

kenjackson wrote: post #534
mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #526

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I can’t find where she said to stop doing your job. Can you quote it here?

It’s directly in the email Timnit wrote, among just the first few lines. If you were unable to find it, then either you did not try whatsoever, or you are disingenuously pretending like there is some other potential way to interpret Timnit’s email that miraculously causes it to not refer to the explicit labor tasks of the Google employees she sent it to.

The direct quote (which can be read in the link [0]) is:

> “What I want to say is stop writing your documents because it doesn’t make a difference.”

This is a direct, explicit, unequivocal reference to researchers and ethicists employed by Google to write research and policy documents on fairness, DE&I, and bias, within machine learning, staffing and hiring, and other areas.

The phrase, “stop writing your documents because it doesn’t make a difference,” cannot be falsely made to apply to any context other than actively encouraging coworkers to specifically stop performing their direct job responsibilities.

My suspicion is that you would try to falsely misrepresent Timnit’s imploring to stop work as instead being about some type of non-work related activities or optional / extra-curricular activities that Google wouldn’t have a formal labor productivity stake in - and if that is in fact what your response would be, it is completely and wholly false and wrong.

[0]: https://www.platformer.news/p/the-withering-email-that-got-a...

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

#603

Post by stjohnswarts »

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…

The problem is she made some higher up angry and they said to fire her post haste. I think this is all being blown out of proportion. If she had been professional she wouldn't have put in an ultimatum, if google would have been professional google would have said "hol' up, no firing, let's communicate on this". So as usual both sides were wrong and unwilling to be adults.

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

#604

Post by stjohnswarts »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #441
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…

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…

This is probably like hiring the EFF (by Apple) to help with privacy ethics, it is 100% guaranteed that they'd be fired in time :) . EFF are idealists, Apple is a pragmatist, so eventually they would part ways, it's inevitable. Hopefully google and she both learned something from it.

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

#605

Post by UncleMeat »

JamesBarney wrote: post #598
UncleMeat wrote: post #545

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. The most interesting part of the story is the part that happened before this.

Where google requested she retract her paper to include information that was flattering to google and Google thought was relevant?

They just demanded that she retract it. No opportunity to adjust it to include the additional information (there would be ample time to do this between review and the camera-ready).

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

#606

Post by Jugurtha »

mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #602
kenjackson wrote: post #534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can’t find where she said to stop doing your job. Can you quote it here?

It’s directly in the email Timnit wrote, among just the first few lines. If you were unable to find it, then either you did not try whatsoever, or you are disingenuously pretending like there is some other potential way to interpret Timnit’s email that miraculously causes it to not refer to the explicit labor tasks of the Google employees she sent it to. The direct quote (which can be read in the link [0]) is: > “Wha…

What was communicated on social media was that the company had fired her, but it appears that the researcher tied the continuation of her work to the company accepting her conditions. The company did not accept.

In poker terms: one party bluffed and the other party called the bluff.

Now whether the clauses were abusive and the company was compelled to satisfy these conditions is left to lawyers, I suppose. I'm not privy to more details to have an opinion one way or the other.

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

#607

Post by joshuamorton »

saeranv wrote: post #599
joshuamorton wrote: post #596

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> whereas she repeatedly encouraged her supporters to attack LeCun, and avoided his points. This is historical revisionism, colored by your misremembering of the events. If you go back and look, you'll be unable to find Gebru encouraging anyone to attack LeCun. Nor will you find LeCun making an effort to engage with Gebrus research. He never so much as acknowledges the existence of her publications when asked to read…

So as I recall, you're right that she didn't encourage people explicitly, but she kept retweeting other supporters attacking LeCun, whereas LeCun kept telling his supporters to not attack her, and talked very positively of her. I agree my phrasing is muddying the waters, I should have been more precise. On another note, it's interesting to me that I keep seeing the LeCun debate come up here again and again as an exam…

I think twitter is a better representation of the actual ML community than HN. Yes, her reputation suffered amongst a group predisposed to consider her area of research to be something between not real and propaganda (both sentiments I've seen expressed and upvoted!).

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

#608

Post by mam2 »

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…

I mean she did not HAVE to make an ultimatum.

Real change takes hard work and time, and patience, and also playing politics with powerful people you dont like.

Sounds like she basically made a one sided hit piece which was against the work some teams of brain, and took the "my way or the highway" approach. That wasn't so smart from her either...

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

#609

Post by nefitty »

matthewdgreen wrote: post #601
nathanlied wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Google didn't hire Gebru for her "wokeness" or for whatever petty internal political issues drive discussions here on HN. They hired her because they are a massive AI company operating on a multi-billion user scale that will very likely produce massic impacts on our society, impacts that we can't even imagine today. They understand at an intuitive level that what they're doing is risky and (perhaps at minimum) they u…

I really like this train of thought. I want to push on the idea of an AI-focused corporation “insulating” itself from backlash. I think what’s happening here is an example of the human agents inside of a corporation acting human, counter to the interest of the organization within which they find themselves. This particular spat might not necessarily be the tipping point, but it looks like history is starting to overtly dance with the impacts AI will have, as you stated.

The current imperatives of a profit-focused corporation are not aligned with human interests. This has been clear since the time of 1940’s fascist Germany. There are examples of corporations aligning themselves with that government, solely because of the stability that a strong government structure provided. In hindsight, it is clear that corporations provided Hitler et al with the economic powerhouses that moved him and other sympathetic leaders to construct frameworks which were not in accordance with modern ideas of human rights. Especially under the imperative of shareholder primacy in the US, that motivation is stronger than ever. In China, the imperative is strengthening government power.

A development I’m personally watching is how AI will fit into that tension between human-interests and corporate interests. Alphabet’s leaders seem to be attempting to steer that corporation closer in alignment with human interests, although the profit motive is an unshakeable goal. Should the US government take a more active role in the development and control of AI, or should we mainly allow the market to pursue AI within the framework of profit motive?

Offhandedly, I am wary of allowing unrestrained pursuit of AI development, and so departments like which Gebru was leading take a historically vital role. I also feel a tension between my awe of progress (as a layman) and the possibilities that AI might unlock for humanity. That leaves me with the question of, who should be in charge of artificial intelligence? From our perspective in 2020, I know Bostrom’s and Musk’s concerns about the future of AI seem far-fetched, but even if those negative outcomes have a non-zero possibility of coming true, then we should spend time considering them.

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

#610

Post by rbanffy »

Jugurtha wrote: post #606
mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #602

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s directly in the email Timnit wrote, among just the first few lines. If you were unable to find it, then either you did not try whatsoever, or you are disingenuously pretending like there is some other potential way to interpret Timnit’s email that miraculously causes it to not refer to the explicit labor tasks of the Google employees she sent it to. The direct quote (which can be read in the link [0]) is: > “Wha…

What was communicated on social media was that the company had fired her, but it appears that the researcher tied the continuation of her work to the company accepting her conditions. The company did not accept. In poker terms: one party bluffed and the other party called the bluff. Now whether the clauses were abusive and the company was compelled to satisfy these conditions is left to lawyers, I suppose. I'm not pr…

This isn't poker. She made demands and stated she'd discuss it further after her PTO. Google accepted a resignation never made as a punishment (it has financial implications).
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