Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Margaret Mitchell fired from Google

axios.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 864 posts

Re: Margaret Mitchell fired from Google

#61

Post by thundergolfer »

schoolornot wrote: post #28

No qualms for Googlers getting a reality check. I don't get why people think they work at a liberal think-tank where no consequences exist for sharing opinions or confidential data about the company publicly. Had someone on my team decided to write a similar doc like the one Margaret published, I'd have fired them on the spot. Shut your mouth and move on if your ideology conflicts with your employer's.

Which doc are you referring to? Could you link it?

Your last sentence has the implication that people should not attempt the change or challenge from within the corporate capitalist ideology of the big tech companies, which together make up a large portion of the entire technology industry and the US stock market. They should just concede and “move on”.

I’m kind of sympathetic to this view. Someone who joins a corporate law firm to “change things from within” is going to get a deserved skeptical smirk. It’s not just attempting to dismantle the master’s house with the master’s tools. It’s attempting the dismantling while standing next to the master inside his own house, asking him to pass the hammer.

Re: Margaret Mitchell fired from Google

#62

Post by thewarrior »

I’ve been wondering how sincere the Silicon Valley corporate mantra of Be yourself, Be authentic, be open to management really was.

There was so much idealism even on Hacker news. Nowadays I witness the strange contradiction of people bashing giant tech companies while mostly discussing how to found the next giant tech company.

A lot of us did genuinely believe it. However as the companies grew and became mega corps the realities of life in normal companies have slowly made themsleves felt.

It’s a bit like the Adam Curtis documentary hyper normalization. Where we all pretend that everything is still the same as before, but beneath the still free sushi ,massages and high compensation a lot has changed.

Re: Margaret Mitchell fired from Google

#63

Post by johncena33 »

freeone3000 wrote: post #44
schoolornot wrote: post #28

No qualms for Googlers getting a reality check. I don't get why people think they work at a liberal think-tank where no consequences exist for sharing opinions or confidential data about the company publicly. Had someone on my team decided to write a similar doc like the one Margaret published, I'd have fired them on the spot. Shut your mouth and move on if your ideology conflicts with your employer's.

Hiring an ethics in AI research team presupposes you want to have ethics in your AI. It's disappointing, but not surprising, to find they want a bunch of syncopants. Perhaps they shouldn't have bothered creating the department if they didn't want people working there to speak out.

Everytime I see cases like activist employees getting fired for violating company policy, the sentiment seems to be the company is the bad guy. At what point it becomes the fault of the activist employee? At what point we can have an introspective look that are we enabling toxic behavior of people suffering from Messiah Complex?

This is my personal anecdote. I had experienced working with an online activist co-worker. She was one of the people who are very popular online, but most of her co-workers hated her. She was extremely entitled, always bossed people (who are at the same level as her) around, did very little of her actual job because she was busy in more important online activism. She had a Messiah Complex, and we were all there just to support her in her worthy cause. That's why I am conflicted when I see activist employees getting fired.

Re: Margaret Mitchell fired from Google

#64

Post by thundergolfer »

foolinaround wrote: post #23
xiaolingxiao wrote: post #19

She gave a talk at my school once, she was invited by my then advisor. This was in 2017 right after she left MSR. We had a brief change, and even back then you can tell she’s not into kowtowing to the patriarchy. It’s quite hard for ambitious women in compsci, they have to walk a tight edge between firm and “motherly”. Men have no such constraints. —————————————— Clarification: I’m speaking about women researchers in…

what makes you assert that were she male, she would have gotten different treatment in this case? genuinely asking..

Reading their comment I don’t see that specific claim being made. The comment discussed different treatment with regards to personality, but doesn’t relate that to this firing directly.

Re: Margaret Mitchell fired from Google

#65

Post by brailsafe »

benlumen wrote: post #48

I'm not interested in the details of this, but from a distance - people sure do make life difficult for themselves, bringing politics and their opinions and controversy into workplaces. It's always tech and academia, too - you'd think it'd be enough to get just paid shitloads of money for interesting knowledge work and save the drama for friends in the pub (or the bar, or whatever).

Above a certain amount, unless you're a sociopath, selling your soul just makes you depressed.

Re: Margaret Mitchell fired from Google

#66

Post by rmk »

freeone3000 wrote: post #54
rmk wrote: post #4

For people who are familiar with this, I have a question. How does research in an industrial lab vs. a university work, insofar as independence is concerned? In a university, aside from well-defined ethics guidelines for conducting research (e.g., involving animal or human subjects), staff are generally free to publish the findings of their research at any venue they see fit. Many are tenured professors, so they also…

MSR has a very free research culture. People there are technically fireable by normal means, but Microsoft chooses not to terminate employment for "outside-of-work" engagements, or for the subject of their research. Some very critical papers of Microsoft's AI approach were published under the MSR header. Not all of the findings were put into place, and Aether has the unenviable job of balancing ethical behavior with…

You are talking about the Google ethicists who are leaving, right?

Also, can you clarify what you mean by 'shouting themselves into the void'? Are they being denied venues to publish their research, thereby rendering their shouting inaudible, or did you mean something else?

Re: Margaret Mitchell fired from Google

#67

Post by ggm »

katbyte wrote: post #45
madamelic wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you fire your "Ethical AI" team lead for disagreeing with you... maybe you are only interested in the appearance of being ethical. Just a thought.

There is disagreeing with your employer and then flagrantly breaking rules and confidentiality and comparing the two like you are doing here is disingenuous.

No, its not disingenuous. It has to be thought about, sure. I think by the time you're archiving company secrets outside the firewall you mentally left some time ago. What led you there? Is that maybe the interest for me? I don't think she wound up there for entirely base reasons, maybe that's what I'm thinking. Most strict legal compliance answers aren't "wrong" but boy, they feel limited. Hard to change things when it's down to contact terms. Why have smart people, paid to critique if you want to wind up submarining their work?

Re: Margaret Mitchell fired from Google

#68

Post by benlumen »

minimaxir wrote: post #60
benlumen wrote: post #48

I'm not interested in the details of this, but from a distance - people sure do make life difficult for themselves, bringing politics and their opinions and controversy into workplaces. It's always tech and academia, too - you'd think it'd be enough to get just paid shitloads of money for interesting knowledge work and save the drama for friends in the pub (or the bar, or whatever).

It's impossible to work on the ethics of AI without involving politics.

Well, maybe. But it's not like this sort of drama is unusual. Maybe you have to be outside looking in to see the absurdity (I'm not in Silicon Valley, or the US for that matter).

Re: Margaret Mitchell fired from Google

#69

Post by ggm »

d1zzy wrote: post #38
ggm wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think society at large really benefits from employers doing things this way? If you were in the ethics department of a company, unpacked deep seated entrenched breach of social norms and were blocked from talking about it but still believed in ethics, what would you do? I am unsure I would be prepared to do what she and Timbru did but that's a long way from the implied cynicism and also frankly abject legalist…

> If you were in the ethics department of a company, unpacked deep seated entrenched breach of social norms and were blocked from talking about it but still believed in ethics, what would you do? Whatever you do, just don't try to engage in things that go against the rules of employment (and quite possibly are illegal) like downloading and send confidential documents to third-parties.

Sure, simply said its obvious. Now, idieate into the circumstance. Can you find no path to "i better make sure can prove my side of the story factually" as a thought process?

Re: Margaret Mitchell fired from Google

#70

Post by ggm »

rsj_hn wrote: post #34
ggm wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not withstanding what you say, how do you counter this with related responses to your parent comment which note corporate research is legally bound and ownership vests strongly in IP law and not your research your brain.

My counter is what foolinaround also said in reply to my post. Intellectual freedom is a question of culture , not of any legal or financial apparatus. There was enormous intellectual freedom at the for-profit Bell Labs. There was enormous intellectual freedom in the publicly owned Berkeley in the 70s-80s. The culture present in the organization will determine whether you need to always be on the guard from saying th…

The evidence to me, late stage career (I was in government, and uni research and then latterly in systems and networks in the uni system, latterly outside in the NFP internet public governance space), is we're off the rails both inside academia and in private industry research. Neither feel like fully open minds.
Post reply on HN