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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

#611

Post by 4bpp »

nashalo wrote: post #457

Not totally on topic, but on threads about researchers, I see this trend that when we're talking about a male researcher we only mention the family name but when talking about a female researcher we're using mostly the first name. Case in point, at time of writing there are 26 mentions of "Timnit" vs 16 mentions of "Gebru" on this thread. I don't think there are bad intentions behind this, but it really comes off as…

Ethiopian names seem to generally not follow the western first name/surname pattern, instead using the Semitic system where you list the male lineage (cf. https://ethnomed.org/culture/ethiopian/). I remember this information receiving some unusually mainstream exposure thanks to the moments in the limelight that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tedros_Adhanom enjoyed this year.

(Now, I don't actually have enough of a sense of Ethiopian ethnicities to be confident as to whether this holds true for all of them and whether Timnit Gebru belongs to one for which it does, but the case of @DrTedros certainly left me with a general heuristic saying that referring to her as Gebru may be an ignorant foreigner move whereas using the "first" name (as US academics generally refer to each other anyway) is almost certainly safe.)

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

#612

Post by pseudalopex »

sokoloff wrote: post #595
pseudalopex wrote: post #592

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Should she have been fired for her email to the group? It's hard to discuss if people don't agree she was fired. Should we believe her or her managers? Her managers pretending they just accepted her resignation is dishonest.

What makes it dishonest? Do you not believe that she stipulated that she'd resign under certain conditions? Do you not believe those conditions then came to exist? Do you not believe that her managers accepted her resignation? I don't have a strong opinion in the matter (and have no connection to Google), but if she in fact unambiguously offered her resignation conditioned on her paper not being approved to publish a…

She didn't offer to resign immediately. Her manager explicitly rejected her actual offer and imposed new terms as punishment for her email to the group.

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

#613

Post by Jugurtha »

rbanffy wrote: post #610
Jugurtha wrote: post #606

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Sure it's not poker. I believe the researcher was looking for an employment lawyer, and the pressure is increasing. The email was discussed in public and subsequently "published" by the company's people. Again, not privy to more details.

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

#614

Post by saagarjha »

mustuhfa wrote: post #226
saagarjha wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am honestly disappointed to see this kind of response at the top of comments here. Every time we have some sort of social issue come up people here come in to pick apart the person involved, and I think it’s one of the bigger reasons why some maintain a generally negative view of Hacker News. Can you imagine being Timnit and stopping by this thread, where the top comment, in colorful language, reduces you to a soci…

Have you seen or read her toxic behavior online?

If you’re referring to her spat on Twitter with Yann LeCun, I am aware of it although not particularly well versed in its details. Certainly not well enough that I could claim it was “toxic”, although maybe that would be an accurate classification of her behavior. Regardless, her toxic behavior elsewhere is not an excuse for toxic behavior here.

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

#615

Post by tptacek »

machinelabo wrote: post #61
pvg wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Downvote goading, things like 'the entire world playing the race card on you' are basically trolling, they don't sound like asking a question in good faith. This particular case is also not about someone being fired for 'not performing' - nobody has claimed that. So if trolling is not your intent, you should edit it down to whatever it is you are actually asking.

That's why I removed it. I am asking the questions in good faith. I want to know how the society will avoid having chilling effect of not being able to fire underperformers and making difficult choices when they need to be made. If we cannot sit down and have a peaceful conversation, calling trolls and other non-sense, please don't divulge in this thread.

No, I'm sorry, the high horse you're trying to ride here just isn't going to hold the weight of the ideological argument you tried to make. Timnit Gebru was severed from Google because of a conflict between her and the research practices at Google. Moreover, the story begins with her offering an ultimatum and Google preemptively accepting her resignation. No part of this story reasonably involves the "gender differences" and "difficult truths" you're invoking.

Dropping boilerplate ideological provocations onto unrelated threads isn't good-faith conversation. Whether you mean it to be or not, it has the effect of trolling, and on HN, trolling is a strict-liability offense; your mens rea matters less than the outcome.

Please don't do things like this on HN.

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

#616

Post by saagarjha »

rualca wrote: post #247
saagarjha wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Do I dispute that she provided an ultimatum of which one side was a resignation offer? Ok so it's established that she threatened her managers and employer to either comply with her personal wishes or she would "exercise her leverage" to cause the company harm. And in the end, as their managers didn't caved into her threats, she decided to pull the trigger. > But can I say that this ultimatum wasn’t the result of G…

It seems to me that people misunderstand how ultimatums work. I guarantee you that you maintain a number of unsaid ultimatums with your employer; for example, one of them may be “pay me or I will quit”. Once an ultimatum reaches the point where it is nonverbal it is difficult to classify as a straightforward resignation or firing, because at that point it is clear that communication has broken down and pressure is being applied from at least one side. Without knowing who the “victim” is here the argument could go either way: “you made me issue an ultimatum”/“you put us in a position where we had to accept your resignation”.

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

#617

Post by kenjackson »

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…

She directly said stop writing these documents. They are not effective for doing the job. The data shows this. She doesn’t say stop doing your job. In one example she gives job is to increase diversity in gender and lamenting that all of this talking has had no impact yet Samy seems to have done it with no incentive (I’d like more of the backstory on Samy).

The job is to increase diversity and inclusion, not to write documents. Programmers get this in other domains (the job isn’t to write lines of code, but to provide value to customers), but suddenly become naive when it comes to things like this.

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

#618

Post by sokoloff »

pseudalopex wrote: post #612
sokoloff wrote: post #595

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes it dishonest? Do you not believe that she stipulated that she'd resign under certain conditions? Do you not believe those conditions then came to exist? Do you not believe that her managers accepted her resignation? I don't have a strong opinion in the matter (and have no connection to Google), but if she in fact unambiguously offered her resignation conditioned on her paper not being approved to publish a…

She didn't offer to resign immediately. Her manager explicitly rejected her actual offer and imposed new terms as punishment for her email to the group.

If the text Jeff Dean wrote below is overwhelmingly true, I'd agree that she resigned rather than was fired. I suspect that it is overwhelmingly true as I'm fairly sure that Google legal would have reviewed it and ensured they didn't say anything falsifiable and likely that this paragraph is entirely true.

> Timnit responded with an email requiring that a number of conditions be met in order for her to continue working at Google, including revealing the identities of every person who Megan and I had spoken to and consulted as part of the review of the paper and the exact feedback. Timnit wrote that if we didn’t meet these demands, she would leave Google and work on an end date. We accept and respect her decision to resign from Google.

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

#620

Post by rozab »

qsort wrote: post #467
ionwake wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry to ask, but I don't understand the points you are making. Could you please elaborate on them? I had trouble with the last 2 paragraphs. Thanks

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 linear regressions are perfectly explainable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proofs_involving_ordinary_leas...

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