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The Jeff Dean Facts

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Re: The Jeff Dean Facts

#141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're conflating two different things: 1. The original choice: Kenton picked "Jeff Dean" because the name was more familiar/rhythmic in English. This wasn't about skin color, it was about name patterns. You're right that a Polish surname could have the same issue, and in that, you're demonstrating complete understanding of the issue at hand. 2. The reflection afterward: Recognizing that name-familiarity advantages s…

Yes, I actually do think if Sanjay Ghemawat were instead Wojciech Przemysław Kościuszko-Wiśniewski, white European but otherwise an equal engineer, and I chose to elevate Jeff Dean over him, I would later feel equally bad about it. (Which again to be clear I'm am not riven with guilt here, I just think maybe given another chance I would have made it about both of them.)

What you said was “in retrospect this feels a little racist.”

Obviously what’s in your head specifically is idiosyncratic to you. But the feeling you’re having certainly happens more generally, and is based on general social understandings. That’s what I’m commenting on.

If I say, “this feels a little rude,” isn’t it fair for people to chime in as to whether it’s actually rude by reference to general social standards?

Re: The Jeff Dean Facts

#142
post #66
post #8

It's nice that a company has senior engineers that are known by name and looked up to. It shows that engineers are valued, and a meritocracy exists.

Yes, but the downside is even highly accomplished engineers feel unworthy. For example, when I started in 2008, they said everybody should make a "Google Resume" (ongoing list of all the stuff you did at Google) and linked to Jeff's as an example. He rewrote the entire indexing pipeline at a critical time enabling Google's rapid growth... created mapreduce... helped create bigtable & gfs... wrote the search engine th…

Wasn't Peter Norvig one of the key people behind Google Search? Would it be correct to say that scientists did the research, maybe reference implementations in Lisp or Python, and later Jeff Dean did the actual C++ production?

Re: The Jeff Dean Facts

#143
post #142
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but the downside is even highly accomplished engineers feel unworthy. For example, when I started in 2008, they said everybody should make a "Google Resume" (ongoing list of all the stuff you did at Google) and linked to Jeff's as an example. He rewrote the entire indexing pipeline at a critical time enabling Google's rapid growth... created mapreduce... helped create bigtable & gfs... wrote the search engine th…

Wasn't Peter Norvig one of the key people behind Google Search? Would it be correct to say that scientists did the research, maybe reference implementations in Lisp or Python, and later Jeff Dean did the actual C++ production?

Peter worked on search, yes. I think he mainly focused on quality. See his comment on "Managing Gigabytes" (https://www.amazon.com/review/R33MIMY7A7C2H8/ref=cm_cr_srp_d...) which was an early reference for the compression techniques used to make search fast.

The way jeff described it was that there was a very early contingent who took Larry's original code and made a production system out of it, but it wasn't very good- the indexer basically had to be run all the way through without errors to make a new index- and that was delaying a release of a fresh new index, so results were getting stale. At that point Jeff "invented" mapreduce (the shuffle stage was Sanjay) and wrote the new indexer and the search engine as well.

I'm not aware of any LISP implementation of the Google search engine; if there was one, it would have been extremely early, like in the stanford days, I think.

Re: The Jeff Dean Facts

#144
post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Re Jeff and Sanjay - they recently were on Dwarkesh together I believe - so it looks like the partnership is still going strong. Regarding Dean over Ghemawat facts, the vibe from the convo is that Sanjay is the (very slightly) junior partner of the two, or at least he lets Jeff do more of the talking. Very, very nice vibes hearing them talk, and their war stories are clearly nuts.

The one thing I noticed when I worked near Jeff and Sanjay and talked to them over coffee is that Jeff is the smart one, but Sanjay is the wise one. Jeff always had an idea how to make something a bit faster using a clever trick, but Sanjay would respond by coming up with how to express the abstraction in a way that other mortals could comprehend, or just telling Jeff it wasn't a good idea because it would make thing…

Should google have involved though? Calico, Verily, isomorphic etc seem like theyre destined to not succeed.

Re: The Jeff Dean Facts

#145
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don’t see your joke as being in any way harmful towards Sanjay aside from potential knock on effects of Jeff Dean being more popular I mean… yeah. When two people are peers and comparably well regarded, and one is elevated above the other and enjoys increased popularity, familiarity, and respect, and the elevation is because that person's name comes from a culture that is more aligned with the dominant culture an…

I don't think it's really fair to call it racism. That is such a loaded accusation to levy today that it should only be used if someone really wronged another person. We all have cultural biases and familiarities, is that wrong? By this definition, we're all racist. Maybe that's true but it kind of ceases to be a useful distinction at that point. I wholeheartedly agree with your last sentence, but I don't know if thr…

> By this definition, we're all racist. Maybe that's true but it kind of ceases to be a useful distinction at that point.

Does it? I would argue that recognizing that we all swim in a soup of cultural biases and familiarities that advantage some people and disadvantage others is a noteworthy insight, an insight with practical implications. After all, we aren't volitionless molecules bouncing off walls. What if we made an effort to observe these biases more closely, to study there effects, and to better understand the way they effect our own behaviour? Then, what if we made an effort to counteract these biases, first in our own behaviour and then in our communities?

Re: The Jeff Dean Facts

#147
post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The one thing I noticed when I worked near Jeff and Sanjay and talked to them over coffee is that Jeff is the smart one, but Sanjay is the wise one. Jeff always had an idea how to make something a bit faster using a clever trick, but Sanjay would respond by coming up with how to express the abstraction in a way that other mortals could comprehend, or just telling Jeff it wasn't a good idea because it would make thing…

Should google have involved though? Calico, Verily, isomorphic etc seem like theyre destined to not succeed.

At the time I first got involved, Google Health was still a thing but it was clear it was not going to be successful. I felt that Google's ML (even early on, they had tons of ML, just most of it wasn't known externally) was going to be very useful for genomics and drug discovery.

Verily was its own thing that was unrelated to my push in Research. I think Larry Page knew Andy Conrad and told him he could do what he wanted (which led to Verily focusing on medical devices, which is a terrible industry to be in). They've pivoted a few times without much real success. My hope is that Alphabet sheds Verily (they've been trying) or just admit it's a failure and shut it down. It was just never run with the right philosophy.

Calico... that came out of Larry and Art Levinson- I guess Larry thought Art knew the secret to living forever and by giving him billions Art would come up with the solution to immortality and Larry would have first access to it. But they were ultra-secretive and tried to have the best of both worlds- full access to Google3 and borg, but without Googlers having any access to calico. That, combined with a number of other things, have led Calico to just be a quiet and not very interesting research group. I expect it to disband at some point.

Isomorphic is more recent than any of the stuff I was involved in, and is DeepMind (specifically Demis's) attempt to commercialize their work with AlphaFold. However, everybody in the field knows the strategy of 1. solve protein structure prediction 2. ??? 3. design profitable drugs and get them approved... is not a great strategy because protein structure determine has not ever been the rate limiting step to identifying targets and developing leads. I agree I don't really see a future for it but Demis has at least 10-20 years of runway before he has to take off or bail.

All of my suggestions were just for Google to do research with the community and publish it (especially the model code and weights, but also pipelines to prep data for learning) and turn a few of the ideas into products in Google Cloud(that's how Google Genomics was born... I was talking to Jeff, and he said "if we compress the genome enough, we can store it all on Flash, which would make search fast but cheap, and we'd have a useful product for genomics analysis companies"). IMHO Jeff's team substantially achieved their goals before the DeepMind stuff- DeepVariant was well-respected, but almost every person who worked on it and related systems got burned out and moved on.

What is success, anyway, in biotech? Is it making a drug that makes a lot of money? What if you do that, but it costs so much that people go bankrupt taking it? Or is the goal to make substantial improvements to the technology, potentially discovering key biological details that truly improve people's lives? Many would say that becoming a successful real estate ownership company is the real destination of any successful pharma/biotech.

Re: The Jeff Dean Facts

#148
post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Should google have involved though? Calico, Verily, isomorphic etc seem like theyre destined to not succeed.

At the time I first got involved, Google Health was still a thing but it was clear it was not going to be successful. I felt that Google's ML (even early on, they had tons of ML, just most of it wasn't known externally) was going to be very useful for genomics and drug discovery. Verily was its own thing that was unrelated to my push in Research. I think Larry Page knew Andy Conrad and told him he could do what he wa…

Whoa. Finally someone I relate with! Thanks for such amazing intel!

In my opinion forays into biology by moonshot hopefuls fail for one of two reasons: either they completely ignore all the current wisdom from academia and industry, or they recruit the very academia people who are culturally responsible for the science rot we have at this time. Calico (and CZI, and im starting to fear, Arc) fell prey to the latter. Once you recruit one tenured professor IMO youre done. The level of tenure track trauma and academic rot they bring in can burn even a trillion dollars into dead-end initiatives.

IMO (after decades of daydreaming about this scenario), the only plausible way to recreate a Bell labs for Biology is to start something behind a single radical person, and recruit the smartest undergrads into that place directly. Ensure that they never become experts at just one thing so they have no allegiance to a method or field. And then let that hoarde loose on a single problem and see what comes out. For better or worse neuralink seems to be doing that right. Just wish they didnt abuse the monkeys that much!

To me success in biotechnology is if I measurably help make a drug that makes a person smile and breathe easy that would otherwise not have. Surprisingly easy and hard at the same time.

Re: The Jeff Dean Facts

#149

Jeff Dean liquidated Google's entire AI ethics team because they wouldn't revise an academic publication to align with the corporate PR spin on AI.

reading about this incident years later, i gotta say, dang Gebru was right on a lot of things

https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/12/04/1013294/google-a...

Re: The Jeff Dean Facts

#150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I actually do think if Sanjay Ghemawat were instead Wojciech Przemysław Kościuszko-Wiśniewski, white European but otherwise an equal engineer, and I chose to elevate Jeff Dean over him, I would later feel equally bad about it. (Which again to be clear I'm am not riven with guilt here, I just think maybe given another chance I would have made it about both of them.)

What you said was “in retrospect this feels a little racist.” Obviously what’s in your head specifically is idiosyncratic to you. But the feeling you’re having certainly happens more generally, and is based on general social understandings. That’s what I’m commenting on. If I say, “this feels a little rude,” isn’t it fair for people to chime in as to whether it’s actually rude by reference to general social standards…

I feel like most of us understand roughly what 'kentonv means. He unconsciously put Sanjay in an out-group and feels bad about it. I for one comment Kenton for owning up to it. It's a hard thing to do.

For what it's worth, I personally regard Sanjay in just as much awe as Jeff and understand that the meme is just an Internet meme and nothing more.

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