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Margaret Mitchell fired from Google

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Re: Margaret Mitchell fired from Google

#241

Post by nodesocket »

strangeloops85 wrote: post #139

Somehow Microsoft Research manages to be a much more open place than Google and has researchers publish critical pieces all the time. It's ultimately a bit sad that Google, the company started by two PhD students, is incapable of creating a similar culture to MSR.

This behavior starts all the way at the top with Sergey. See Google's leaked internal all-hands[1] after Trump won basically calling for the end of the world without any regard to employees who may be fiscally conservative or Trump supporters. Google is by far the worse of the big bay area tech companies in terms of stifling speech, equality of outcome policies, and being an echo chamber.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/09/12/leaked-video-from-alphabet-t...

Re: Margaret Mitchell fired from Google

#242

Post by NikolaeVarius »

dukeofdoom wrote: post #178
bobbylarrybobby wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“My employer is doing something wrong” is not a political belief

Google manipulates search results to favour certain political beliefs. Censors people on youtube for expressing counter view points. And quite likely has enough power to skew elections. Plenty of what they do wrong is political in nature. And should be open to criticism.

I seem to remember Google being criticized for having a disproportionate amount of left leaning employees pushing a left agenda while simultaneously being criticized for showing/pushing right/far right content on youtube. So which is it?

Re: Margaret Mitchell fired from Google

#243

Post by joshuamorton »

2-tpg wrote: post #207
contemporary343 wrote: post #111

They also seem to have sidelined Samy Bengio (Yoshua's brother) who was the skip-level manager of the team and, as far as I can tell, backed both of them and continued to: https://twitter.com/L_badikho/status/1362892301979312128 As can be seen above, current team members state that Google is running a smear campaign against both of them. We should emphatically not take Google's words at face value here either. All of…

The political activist collective is slowly falling apart. If you get blamed for racism when firing an employee for telling colleagues not to pursue KPIs, there is not much you can do to continue placating these professional victims. They are now resorting to calling Google gaslighting for replacing Gebru with a Black person. It is low-brow ugly neo-racism, but then again, I don't really want Google AI in charge of A…

> They are now resorting to calling Google gaslighting for replacing Gebru with a Black person.

The complaint isn't what they did, it's what they didn't do. There were no substantive policy changes that could address the underlying issues. Tokenism without change isn't improvement.

Re: Margaret Mitchell fired from Google

#244

Post by fmajid »

newsclues wrote: post #175
strangeloops85 wrote: post #139

Somehow Microsoft Research manages to be a much more open place than Google and has researchers publish critical pieces all the time. It's ultimately a bit sad that Google, the company started by two PhD students, is incapable of creating a similar culture to MSR.

Google didn’t have time to establish and solidify corporate culture before the current trends began. Microsoft was more entrenched and stable.

IIRC MSR was started by Rick Rashid (the inventor of the Mach microkernel that NeXTstep and Mac OS X are based on), and it was always very independent of the rest of Microsoft and its business priorities.

Re: Margaret Mitchell fired from Google

#245

Post by monocasa »

aerosmile wrote: post #203
duckfang wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> She moved files when she wasn't supposed to. According to Google. Remember, an entity that has a reason and a justification to do what it wants will manufacture whatever evidence it needs to do that. And, it's not a court of law. At best, it's "allegedly moved files when they weren't supposed to".

The rule number 1 in letting people go: never go on record why you did that. There's a good reason for that - you're opening yourself up for lawsuits. Google violated that rule in a big way by making such a public and damaging statement. You bet they can back it up.

Or they believe the PR win from spinning the story early is worth more than what they'll pay out from the lawsuits.

Re: Margaret Mitchell fired from Google

#246

Post by cambalache »

2-tpg wrote: post #186
guardiangod wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>She moved files when she wasn't supposed to If that's true, that's not very ethical is it?

She is an authority on Ethics, being listed on the ICLR conference as part of the Ethics Review Committee: > Margaret Mitchell, Google Research and Machine Intelligence But I do think they can miss her, since there are already 8 people responsible for Ethics and Diversity, with 11 responsible for the actual organization of the conference. Maybe they can update https://iclr.cc/ to reflect the fact that she is not repr…

> She is an authority on Ethics

This is so pretentious. Ethics is a branch of philosophy and even religion with deep debates raging from 4000 years ago and no end in sight. Hundreds of specialists have been going at it in multi-decades efforts and yet any of their opinions must not carry more weight than the average citizen's. Mitchell has a BS in Linguistics an MS in computational linguistics and a PhD in CS. Her fist paper about something even tangentially related to ethics is from 2015.

Re: Margaret Mitchell fired from Google

#247

Post by hn8788 »

crawfordcomeaux wrote: post #229
leetcrew wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that's clearly a strawman interpretation of my comment. > why would a company pay someone to publicly criticize them? by all means, a healthy company should encourage internal critiques. but if you're going to take that criticism public, you can't expect to also collect a paycheck at the same time. do you make a habit of paying people to work against your interests?

I'm seeking to normalize community accountability practices that are pretty core to many indigenous cultures, including my Irish ancestors. So, yeah...I'll pay for that in every organization I get involved with from here on out. Just cause it's not normalized doesn't mean it isn't useful. The reason to do it is for the sake of actual accountability, as strictly internal accountability is nonsense. This is the busines…

"community accountability practices" just sounds like mob justice. It seems like an especially bad idea in the current environment where people who are more than happy to join in an outrage mob after only hearing one side of the story, and sometimes aren't even affected by whatever they're targeting. A "community" shouldn't be anyone who happens to agree with you on twitter.

Re: Margaret Mitchell fired from Google

#248

Post by jeffbee »

xiphias2 wrote: post #220
buildbot wrote: post #131

It’s a really common refrain here that if you are employee critical of your employer you should expect to get fired… Well perhaps, but you’d think that specifically someone in AI ethics needs to be empowered to speak up against both internal external issues. Or did google just want an research ethics hit team against other companies technologies? Makes me wonder if project zero is really trying as hard as possible wi…

It's not just the employer. James' Damore's memo silenced a lot of the more conservative thinkers, especially as he didn't even want that memo to be public, just a research on a mailing list. Harassment from the political left was very strong at Google, that it was just a matter of time until it bit back. As for me as a white man although I was just doing my job silently, I didn't feel appreciated and tried to isolat…

Damore posted his stupid screed all over the place for months. He posted it to mailing lists, he printed it out and waved it around at conferences.

Re: Margaret Mitchell fired from Google

#249

Post by NikolaeVarius »

joshuamorton wrote: post #231
kristianc wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’d have to think there was some middle ground between investigating and adding ethical accountability to AI programs and exfiltrating thousands of sensitive files.

In this context, it's very likely that you can translate "exfiltrating thousands of sensitive files" to "downloaded some of her emails", perhaps related to fear of retaliation

That is the same thing? In large companies I have never been allowed to export my emails, since it could be used to do this very exact thing.

Re: Margaret Mitchell fired from Google

#250

Post by ggm »

jimbokun wrote: post #191
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…

"unpacked deep seated entrenched breach of social norms" What does this mean in English?

Unpacked, uncovered, documented, found. Deep seated, ingrained, established, systematic, breach non aligned, wrong, social societal, norms expectations laws, behaviours,

Please. Don't be that person. What did you think it meant? What specifically. Was without meaning. Not what do you disagree with: to even pose the question, you have to be literate and capable of reading. At this point your question is actually a statement. In other channels I'd say it more bluntly.

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