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Google told its scientists to ‘strike a positive tone’ in AI research

reuters.com

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Re: Google told its scientists to ‘strike a positive tone’ in AI research

#131

Post by unishark »

daniel957 wrote: post #110
lawnchair_larry wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An absurd and highly inappropriate comment. You’re the first to bring up race. There is absolutely no reason to infer that parent has any issue with race or sex whatsoever.

It’s called a dog whistle. You don’t have to specifically mention race or gender in order to imply something about it. It’s not inappropriate. I didn’t flag his comment. Someone else did. It should have been flagged and rightfully was. I think your points would come across better if you didn’t use such extreme words (absurd, highly inappropriate, absolutely). It’s your opinion, not a fact. I also find it funny that _…

You are supposed to assume good faith about other posters though. And philosophy is (as far as I know) yet another male-dominated major so I don't get what you mean.

Personally I think the flagged poster was just ranting about technophobia among machine learning bias researchers.

Re: Google told its scientists to ‘strike a positive tone’ in AI research

#132

Post by tempodox »

bite_tongue wrote: post #107

Seems reasonable for a company to not fund research that directly goes against their bottom line.

When the result is predefined it's not research anymore, it's advertisement. Still calling it “research” is fraud.

Re: Google told its scientists to ‘strike a positive tone’ in AI research

#133

Post by ludamad »

tomcam wrote: post #98
curiousllama wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a really important point. Executive-land is all about image and framing, so I can totally see how execs think it's not a big deal to "just make the case" or frame things less negatively. But while that's ok in a slide deck, it's _not_ ok in a research paper. Researchers aren't (shouldn't be) accountable to business outcomes, but rather the truth of what they argue. It's tough to see this play out real time.

Grant-land is very very often about image and framing. How often are grant administrators interested in pure research and let the chips fall where they may vs getting results that yield happy articles, then more grants?

Agreed, the bias towards culling negative results is not unique to Google, although the mechanism may be

Re: Google told its scientists to ‘strike a positive tone’ in AI research

#134

Post by glitcher »

tanilama wrote: post #15

It is at will employment, the company makes it clear what you have done there, they want to have a say on it. If you want independence, goes to academia instead (though it is not easy to obtain it either)

It is at will research funded by google, the researcher makes it clear what their findings were, they want the original research paper to have its say based on results not spin.

If google wants specific outcomes from research, go to the marketing department instead of funding real research.

Re: Google told its scientists to ‘strike a positive tone’ in AI research

#135

Post by ludamad »

Wonnk13 wrote: post #37
xiphias2 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, but my work life was amazing. There are important things to address at Google, like not having enough sitting toilets for men (there's 3 times as much for women even though there are much less women in the office where I was working) that an union may help with, but that's different from the product PR.

I've seen these comments on internal email threads, but this is the first time seeing one out in the wild. Still blows my mind people who make >300k a year can't be bothered to walk 100ft to cut a shit.

We're all in tech, can we talk poop etiquette without regard to salary?

Re: Google told its scientists to ‘strike a positive tone’ in AI research

#136

Post by whimsicalism »

_Nat_ wrote: post #94
kovac wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

General proposition may be true, but how can a math publication place the department interests in a negative light? Like "Doesn't matter how hard we try, there are always undecidable facts in our own system"? :p I still have faith in the research done by hard science research teams.

> how can a math publication place the department interests in a negative light? With Math, the sensitive topic is utility. Math departments would tend to be upset by someone pushing papers that, say, call attention to the lack of social benefit relative to other fields of research that taxpayers could be funding instead. I guess a researcher could also spin a narrative about mathematicians' contributions to cryptogr…

It sorta sounds like you aren't familiar with how actual math departments function, just by your examples.

Re: Google told its scientists to ‘strike a positive tone’ in AI research

#137

Post by whimsicalism »

throw_m239339 wrote: post #10
dls2016 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I didn't talk bad about the company that I was getting my paycheck from Have you ever been in a union workplace?

> Have you ever been in a union workplace? why would he want to be in a union when he is a top earner compared to great majority of people in the same country? and aside from a relative freedom of speech he works in very favourable conditions with a lot of perks and a generous severance package if he gets fired? working at google is the very definition of privilege.

> union when he is a top earner compared to great majority of people in the same country

Why does that make creating a union/engineer council less desirable? It seems good to have a democratically elected representative of Google engineers who can talk to management, even if those engineers don't feel like negotiating on wage stuff, they still have a real avenue to air concerns.

Re: Google told its scientists to ‘strike a positive tone’ in AI research

#138

Post by daniel957 »

unishark wrote: post #131
daniel957 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s called a dog whistle. You don’t have to specifically mention race or gender in order to imply something about it. It’s not inappropriate. I didn’t flag his comment. Someone else did. It should have been flagged and rightfully was. I think your points would come across better if you didn’t use such extreme words (absurd, highly inappropriate, absolutely). It’s your opinion, not a fact. I also find it funny that _…

You are supposed to assume good faith about other posters though. And philosophy is (as far as I know) yet another male-dominated major so I don't get what you mean. Personally I think the flagged poster was just ranting about technophobia among machine learning bias researchers.

I’ve read enough of HN comments over the years and been in the industry even longer to know not to assume good faith. Sorry. Like I said, someone else flagged the comment, not me.

As a simple example when Kobe Bryant died there were numerous comments on the post saying “Why is this here? This shouldn’t be on Hacker News.” (Even though he was an angel investor). Yet when some random (to me) soccer player died a couple of weeks ago, I didn’t see a single “This doesn’t belong on Hacker News” comment. I looked for them. I also looked up the soccer player to find anything he did remotely related to HN. There was none.

It’s ok to accept that racist and sexist people exist, even on sites like Hacker News. After all, this is just Reddit, right?

Maybe his comment was just so wacky that it made me think this. Is there an article or something that references researchers thinking if statements are racist? Is this like an in-joke at a certain company? I just don’t get it.

What I do get is that lots of people will go out of their way to defend the writer of a _flagged_ comment.

Re: Google told its scientists to ‘strike a positive tone’ in AI research

#139

Post by zeku »

tomcam wrote: post #95
Wonnk13 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen these comments on internal email threads, but this is the first time seeing one out in the wild. Still blows my mind people who make >300k a year can't be bothered to walk 100ft to cut a shit.

Still blows my mind there are people who don’t understand how some folks are older, have conditions like IBS or are disabled, and that that number can be way, way more than 100’. It can even be a multiple building thing on a bad day.

Right? I had a CS professor who had to pee every hour. After 4+ years in the same building with him you notice.

Re: Google told its scientists to ‘strike a positive tone’ in AI research

#140

Post by indymike »

_cs2017_ wrote: post #14

IMHO, a scientist capable of striking any tone in their work, positive or negative, is doing marketing / PR work rather than science. There's nothing wrong with that. Just like any other member of society, a scientist may want to contribute to a (for-profit or non-profit) organization of their choice, be it for material or spiritual rewards. However, I think it's important not to get science and marketing confused. S…

Scientific papers often have a "research implications" or "implications" section that generally is optimistic or pessimistic depending on the results. There's nothing wrong with this, so long as the implications are not steering the results.
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