81–90 of 179 posts
It disturbs me how much of a news story this is. This should be handled internally and not aired in public across several media sites. Why should I care about the dirty laundry of FAANG and some random individual?
Hopefully it's a lesson for other companies to be very careful for hiring "woke" SJW's after seeing the chaos they're causing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> if you say "I don't want to work here anymore." And you get your "resignation date moved up" you still get your unemployment benefits because you were fired. I can't speak for California, but in my state, if you are fired and not laid off[1], you don't get unemployment benefits. I've anecdotally heard this is also the case in California. However, I've also heard that many tech companies state they will not dispute…
I think there is a term in California - fired “with cause” - but I’m not sure if that has bearing on unemployment eligibility.
There might be specific criteria that needs to be met for each, so details matter. My guess is the reason my employer does not dispute unemployment claims is they've calculated that the cost to dispute them exceeds the amount they expect their unemployment insurance contributions to go up.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Legally speaking, that is not true at all. Edit: if you say "I don't want to work here anymore." And you get your "resignation date moved up" you still get your unemployment benefits because you were fired.
> if you say "I don't want to work here anymore." And you get your "resignation date moved up" you still get your unemployment benefits because you were fired. I can't speak for California, but in my state, if you are fired and not laid off[1], you don't get unemployment benefits. I've anecdotally heard this is also the case in California. However, I've also heard that many tech companies state they will not dispute…
Looking at all this drama, the AI researcher sounds toxic: * Picked a public Twitter fight with Yang LeCun * Her peers are so afraid of critiquing her paper, that they demand anonymity through HR * Tells co-workers to stop working on documents One of the things that has been emphasized in tech for the past several years is not to allow justifying retaining toxic people on account of their talent. In addition, your li…
Can I ask with the upmost politeness what is going on? I genuinely went into this considering that this was someone who is essentially decrying that normal work difficulties are sexism or racism. But I'm now finding that the procedure claimed actually essentially doesn't exist or if it did it was never enforced until now. What is going on? If this was an issue of the researcher unprofessionally airing her frustration…
Journalists got access to an early version of Gebru’s paper and reported on it: https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/12/04/1013294/google-a...
This whole thing is a confusing mess.
There's was an incident a while back where 2 engineers were joking between themselves about a "big dongle" and the woman seated in the row ahead heard it, turn around, took their picture and posted it online. It ruined everyone's life including hers. I thought we learned from this that airing things publicly is fraught with danger. I imagine there is a time and place for it, but very carefully with intention. https:/…
> It ruined everyone's life including hers. Source? Last I heard the two men were hired elsewhere fairly quickly. Their names are also hardly ever associated with the story.
Looking at all this drama, the AI researcher sounds toxic: * Picked a public Twitter fight with Yang LeCun * Her peers are so afraid of critiquing her paper, that they demand anonymity through HR * Tells co-workers to stop working on documents One of the things that has been emphasized in tech for the past several years is not to allow justifying retaining toxic people on account of their talent. In addition, your li…
But she isn't a victim because of her life experiences; it's because of her skin color and gender identity.
As a reminder, this isn't the first problematic incident involving Timnit Gebru either. She previously went on an unhinged Twitter attack against Yann LeCunn, one of the pioneers of deep learning. He won a Turing award for his work on this topic and is one of the foremost experts on it, and understands its various nuances very well. When she was challenged, Timnit's line of attack was leveraging a word soup of progressive identity politics, demanding Yann LeCunn apologize to her, claiming harm was done to the community, etc. This highlighted her aggressive tactics (weaponization of her Twitter following and leveraging cancel culture) and it is clear she must be a very difficult employee to manage or work with.
Coming back to the article linked here: whenever there is some incident (a firing, a walkout, a protest) at one of these big tech companies with a large activist employee population, articles get written that purport to present the opinion of the employee base at large. But usually, these articles only represent the loud minority that is willing to speak up and faces no repercussions. The employees that agree with Timnit Gebru leaving the company (supporting the company's stance) don't have psychological safety. Timnit wields the power of a big following of social justice activists on Twitter, and could shame/destroy people who speak up against her. The small number of employees voicing their support for her, even with total psychological safety, is a tiny percentage of Google's employee base. Those numbers paint a false picture that she has broad support when she doesn't. Perspectives from other Google employees are only available on anonymous forums like Blind (https://www.teamblind.com/post/We-stand-with-Jeff-Dean-and-Y...) and Reddit (https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/k77sxz/d_t...).
Lastly, this has all been discussed in depth previously in a few different discussions on HN. The one with the most comments is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25292386.
It disturbs me how much of a news story this is. This should be handled internally and not aired in public across several media sites. Why should I care about the dirty laundry of FAANG and some random individual?
Do you not care about Google censoring and firing one of the people who are supposed to keep it ethical?
It's 1 employee out of 120k. There are probably other ethicists in AI at Google.
Also the story seems to have devolved more specifically to employment rather than talking about the specific ethical issues relating to Google's language models.
There's was an incident a while back where 2 engineers were joking between themselves about a "big dongle" and the woman seated in the row ahead heard it, turn around, took their picture and posted it online. It ruined everyone's life including hers. I thought we learned from this that airing things publicly is fraught with danger. I imagine there is a time and place for it, but very carefully with intention. https:/…
Don't make genitalia jokes unless you have balls of steel.