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Margaret Mitchell fired from Google

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Re: Margaret Mitchell fired from Google

#641

Post by monocasa »

JamesBarney wrote: post #573
pseudalopex wrote: post #547

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There wasn't an announced leaving date.

To get back to basics, the definition of resign is "voluntarily leave a job or other position." It doesn't mentioning leaving at the exact date and time you choose. She didn't want to work @ Google anymore, and she told them she didn't and she'd find a good time to leave with her boss. Google responded with "now is the best time to leave".

Jumping from a legal definition to the Oxford English Dictionary's definition doesn't look great for your argument.

"Well sure, but if we use another definition about this legal situation that has no basis in the applicable law then Google wasn't lying" doesn't really hold a lot of water.

To be a resignation she needed to set the final date of employment. She did not, so it was not a resignation. Google knows this fact very well and therefore lied to the press about the circumstances.

You even use the phrase "Gebru firing" in your first post in this particular thread.

Re: Margaret Mitchell fired from Google

#642

Post by DoreenMichele »

taurath wrote: post #629
DoreenMichele wrote: post #512

My general impression of this entire thing, starting with Gebru being fired, is that the department should have never been named "ethical AI" anything. It's research into social stuff. How AI interacts with things like faces and how that gets biased by a lot of social issues, like racism and existing class stratification related to race (among other things). These are things that can have "ethical" implications but w…

I feel as though people looking joining such a group would have at the very first question “what is the scope of what we will be studying” or something similar. I don’t think people take jobs like that without having a decent answer to that question and I haven’t seen any accusations of bait and switch, only of poor treatment over a disagreeing researcher ballooning into this.

I'm pretty confident the crux of the issue is "We expected to be treated better in this department than what we have had to tolerate elsewhere due to sexism, racism, etc."

And I think they expected that based on "This is the Ethical AI department. We are trying to make the world a better place. You do that by walking the walk first, not just researching how AI works."

That's what I think. It's not something I can prove. For various reasons, I'm not really wanting to debate it. I tossed it out there because some folks know I post as openly female here (and HN skews rather strongly male) and some folks know I have studied social stuff and sometimes people find my take on certain subjects of value or at least food for thought.

Re: Margaret Mitchell fired from Google

#643

Post by monocasa »

knorker wrote: post #580
yuliyp wrote: post #563

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"company policy" at large corporations is not designed to do anything other than provide cover for the corporation to do what it wants.

Is "no e filtration of company data" an arbitrary "gotcha" policy?

If it comes out that they mean discussing specific emails with an employment lawyer, then yeah, kind of.

Re: Margaret Mitchell fired from Google

#644

Post by gretch »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #449
davesque wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, I think this attitude makes much more sense in the present era than it did before about ten years ago. There was a time when IMHO you weren't just naive for believing that Google was sincere about its "don't be evil" mantra. The current age really is one of cynicism. Of course, in my mind that's a completely separate question from whether or not Google is being evil in this case. As far as that goes, I hone…

I suspect very few employees actually think that google is evil. The phrase was noteworthy at the time because it was so hyperbolic. It was only now when nuance has been thrown out the window that everything has to be black and white.

Disclosure: employee

I hate that the HN audience put so much significance on google “abandoning” (it didn’t) this mantra. Anyone who actually understands depth in any topic knows that it’s not as simple as “don’t be evil”.

Like oh cool thanks man. Yeah now I know exactly what the right moral path is - just don’t be evil duh.

It adds no practical value to decision making other to serve as directional inspiration. But you’re not going to be sitting there trying to find the right balance of weights in search ranking in order to keep fairness and equity and just be like “right, don’t be evil”

Re: Margaret Mitchell fired from Google

#645

Post by supergirl »

bitcharmer wrote: post #611
supergirl wrote: post #570

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why would she email it from her corp account to various accounts instead of emailing it to her personal account or just uploading it directly to some personal drive account

> all outgoing email And of course this same applies to file uploads. Again, this is standard practice in any company with IT security.

> an account had exfiltrated thousands of files and shared them with multiple external accounts

I'm just questioning why she would email to multiple external accounts directly from her corp email instead of saving to 1 personal account and then sharing from there, undetectable, many times. And yes, they would still have detected the 1 email but I'm questioning the accuracy of this explanation; sounds partly made up to make it sound more serious.

Re: Margaret Mitchell fired from Google

#646

Post by bryanrasmussen »

dbbk wrote: post #617
bryanrasmussen wrote: post #566

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean multiple external parties could mean two parties and technically not be a lie. It could also be multiple external services that she has an account at and still not technically be a lie. I guess someone could not be specifying more clearly how nefarious the goings on because of legal reasons, but it could also be that they're not specifying more clearly because then everyone would make the pffft noise and point…

Sending it to two parties is still just as bad as sending it to 200 parties...

no, sending it to the wrong 2 parties is still just as bad as sending it to more than 3 wrong parties, but if you send to 200 external parties there is more of a chance that you are sending something to the wrong party.

Re: Margaret Mitchell fired from Google

#647

Post by [deleted] »

creato wrote: post #624
sgt101 wrote: post #618

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a bit of a tragedy to be honest. We/I lived through both developing social networking and big data, and it's pretty clear that the community made huge mistakes that both hurt loads of people and we can't really take back or clear up at this point. Bad things happened to innocent people. Bad people got power over good people and did bad things with it. AI has at least as much potential to be dangerous, ethical co…

I think most of the "AI ethics" thing is two things: first, for people that are actual AI practitioners, it makes "AI" seem a lot more powerful and interesting than it is. I think AI is a small part of the example problems you mentioned. Second, it's a way for humanities types to wedge themselves into a hot, high paying field.

[deleted]

Re: Margaret Mitchell fired from Google

#648

Post by vkou »

cornel_io wrote: post #499
dragonwriter wrote: post #489

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google doesn't need to, and no one needs to assume that Google’s description is accurate, either.

I've said this before, but if it's not accurate then whoever said it publicly should be fired immediately because that is actionable if it's a lie. Google has extremely good lawyers and a PR machine that cares what they say. There's absolutely no way that they are plainly making it up.

I know nothing of the particulars of this situation, but you are committing a simple error in your reasoning.

The purpose of PR isn't to tell the truth. PR people don't get fired for lying.

The purpose of PR is to make whomever is paying you look good. Sometimes, that involves telling the truth. Sometimes, that involves telling a highly cherrypicked, out-of-context subset of the truth. Sometimes, that involves torturing the truth beyond any recognition. Sometimes, it has nothing to do with the truth.

We don't happen to live in a just world.

Re: Margaret Mitchell fired from Google

#649

Post by knorker »

monocasa wrote: post #643
knorker wrote: post #580

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is "no e filtration of company data" an arbitrary "gotcha" policy?

If it comes out that they mean discussing specific emails with an employment lawyer, then yeah, kind of.

It's a theory. If she doesn't sue then we can assume that's not what happened.

If she does sue, then it'll probably still be a secret settlement, so we won't know. :-(

Personally i don't believe this theory. Because it's so easy to counter what google said, then, and google's lawyers are not that stupid.

Re: Margaret Mitchell fired from Google

#650

Post by skywhopper »

Crash0v3rid3 wrote: post #387

“After conducting a review of this manager’s conduct, we confirmed that there were multiple violations of our code of conduct, as well as of our security policies, which included the exfiltration of confidential business-sensitive documents and private data of other employees,” a Google spokesman said in a statement. This feels pretty cut and dry to me. Meg exported business material from the company. That a fire-abl…

Does it? As pointed out, this could mean a lot of things and I suspect the majority of Google’s tech employees are “guilty” of violating this particular guideline, including the execs and the investigators involved in this case. Getting “sensitive” data on a personal device is actually really easy to do and just goes overlooked until they want a reason to fire you.

But the part of this that stands out to me is that they are giving this much detail to the press. The standard reply is always that “personnel matters are confidential” even when the person being fired has been publicly accused of something criminal. But for this case Google chose to make specific public allegations. Now why do you think they would do that?

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