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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

#191

Post by gowld »

amanaplanacanal wrote: post #167
purple-again wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My first inclination was just to move on but you didn’t post on a throwaway so I will take the bait. Why do you think the toilet issue you described is a problem that needs to be fixed? My experience in every corner of life in America to date has been separated bathrooms by sex and the men’s restroom containing far fewer sitting toilets. We all know this is because women sit for both natural duties and men, generally…

I’m in favor of a more modern arrangement, where all restrooms are for a single person and can be used by anybody. It works well no matter what the gender ratio of the workforce is. Eventually we will all wonder why the heck we did it the old way.

It's pretty obvious why -- people prefer to spend less money.

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

#192

Post by cmiles74 »

Veedrac wrote: post #186
cmiles74 wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Google did not want to fund research that conflicted with their bottom line, they could have avoided hiring researchers interested in that kind of work. Instead they hired these people and told them they would be free of censorship. Now that these people work there and depend on Google for their paycheck, Google is instituting this new policy. During a global pandemic. Sounds like censorship to me: hire the people…

You're confusing the ideas with their presentation. Google never allowed someone to post a paper under their name saying ‘datacentres generate CO₂, that's evil and we should focus on smaller datacentres’, but that doesn't mean they didn't care about CO₂ production; clearly they did, since they're now carbon negative. Same thing here. The researchers' jobs aren't to publically deface Google, they're to help direct Goo…

I agree that Google may have been interested in hiring these researchers to help "direct Google down the right path". That seems reasonable to me.

I'm not seeing where I confuse "the ideas with their presentation" or where anyone talked about researchers "publicly defacing Google". The Reuters article is talking about ML and AI researchers who are now (recently) finding their research subject to a new review policy, above and beyond the typical peer review that they expected.

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

#193

Post by _Nat_ »

cmiles74 wrote: post #157
_Nat_ wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Public institutions tend to observe the same policies, even when there's no direct commercial interest. For example, if you join a Math department and start publishing papers that cast the department's research interests in a negative light, that's often a good way to get fired. I mean, seriously, go ask just about any professor of any topic at any university if their field is undervalued or overvalued. They'll almos…

My understanding is that the Google is pressuring it's employees (who are research scientists) to refrain from publishing papers that Google management believes casts a negative light on a Google product. It's not theoretical, researchers are quoted in the article and papers have been altered. I find it difficult to come up with an analogy from a public institution. What is the product the math department would be pr…

I'm having trouble getting a clear perspective on what's going on. So many of the descriptions are vague and based on apparently informal descriptions, leaving much to the reader's imagination.

> It's not theoretical, researchers are quoted in the article and papers have been altered.

In grad school, PhD students' advisors typically insist on various revisions before publishing a paper, as publications reflect on the advisor and their institution. So there's nothing even slightly weird about Google having the same interest in revising the papers pushed by its researchers.

Unless there IS something weird about what Google's doing? But if so, what is it?

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

#195

Post by [deleted] »

xiphias2 wrote: post #50
purple-again wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My first inclination was just to move on but you didn’t post on a throwaway so I will take the bait. Why do you think the toilet issue you described is a problem that needs to be fixed? My experience in every corner of life in America to date has been separated bathrooms by sex and the men’s restroom containing far fewer sitting toilets. We all know this is because women sit for both natural duties and men, generally…

> Why do you think the toilet issue you described is a problem that needs to be fixed? Because this way Google was effectively paying me loads of money to just go through 7 floors of bathrooms to find an empty one when I needed to use it. It's a waste of corporate resources to use a human resource's time like this. At the end the solution for me was just using the disabled toilet, as we didn't have disabled people on…

[deleted]

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

#196

Post by daniel957 »

ruslanbogan wrote: post #122
daniel957 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, why are you championing the writer of a flagged comment? Like I said, I didn’t flag the comment. So clearly other people agree with me and saw what I saw. Sorry if that’s hard for you to swallow.

More likely it was flagged by the aforementioned academics rather than people like you imagining dog whistles that aren't there. hth

So what about the if statements and racism? Please elaborate.

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

#197

Post by gmkiv »

The directive to strike a positive tone could be nefarious or benign; we can’t tell from the info in the article. Every research paper has a tone that depends on the personality of the author - I’ve seen it even in my dry field of quantum optics. Every result has many implications and how you discuss them, which implications you emphasize, and the language you use will affect the tone, even if you are not explicitly furthering an agenda. A given article could have a range of legitimate tones, depending on who wrote it. Asking a researcher to be on the positive end of the legitimate spectrum is benign. It can of course go to far.

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

#198

Post by ativzzz »

aaaxyz wrote: post #155
jchallis wrote: post #146

Every specialty has taboos and learning what they are and how to avoid them is part of being successful with the job. As a physics graduate student I made an impassioned case to a high energy researcher that the money spent on high energy research was low yield and should be pushed to the biological sciences ... suffice it to say he did not take my points on their merits. Upton Sinclair’s famous “ It is difficult to…

Reminds me of an interview a cosmologist from my university gave to the CBC around the time the higgs boson was confirmed by the CERN. When asked about real world consequences of the discovery, he answered "None."

I mean Heinrich Hertz, who proved Maxwell's electromagnetic wave theory also said "It's of no use whatsoever[...] this is just an experiment that proves Maestro Maxwell was right—we just have these mysterious electromagnetic waves that we cannot see with the naked eye. But they are there." [1]

How wrong he was.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinrich_Hertz

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

#199

Post by nieve »

danmaz74 wrote: post #181
frankfrankfrank wrote: post #46

I deal with this on a regular basis in the research world, there is what is a really toxic and dangerous bias towards constructing the positive, i.e., making things seem, appear, and even fabricate outcomes that will be affirming of desired outcomes or other group biases. It is not research, let alone science when you are striking a positive tone, it’s fraud.

From what the article mentions, it looks like the sensitive subjects they worry about are those which can get a company burned at the stake on social media these days. It's not great, but it's un unsurprising effect of the current culture wars.

Or annoy the Chinese government, potentially make their self-driving cars project look less perfect, make it a bit too obvious how much location tracking Google is doing, make their home security integration plans not quite so shiny, and so forth. The actual list is very clearly not just about social media, if anything the majority is topics Google has a financial interest in that don't get that much attention on the big networks.

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

#200

Post by bumby »

_Nat_ wrote: post #54
nisuni wrote: post #13

And that’s why I was happier when basic research was mostly being carried out in public institutions.

Public institutions tend to observe the same policies, even when there's no direct commercial interest. For example, if you join a Math department and start publishing papers that cast the department's research interests in a negative light, that's often a good way to get fired. I mean, seriously, go ask just about any professor of any topic at any university if their field is undervalued or overvalued. They'll almos…

>They'll almost universally tell you that their field is undervalued, underappreciated

This is most likely due to an availability bias. They have concrete examples in their own sphere but not near as much detail about competing domains. This leads to the mistaken assumption that their own field more important than it possibly would be if viewed in the overarching context

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