[deleted]
About Google's approach to research publication – Jeff Dean
171–180 of 607 posts
Re: About Google's approach to research publication – Jeff Dean
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
If your work is suddenly and unexpected roadblocked at the last second by internal review, the only way to make changes that prevent that from happening in the future is to clearly understand the situations and criticisms that led to the roadblock. This is why understanding who raised these concerns is important. Anonymous feedback blowing up a project at the final moments is sure to frustrate anybody. If what she ha…
Isn't the academic journal peer review process generally an anonymous feedback mechanism? Why does this need to be different?
Because this isn't peer review — or at least, it's not meant to be (per the top-level comment). That's the whole issue, really: there already exists a peer review process to ensure the paper's academic rigor, so why is Google hiding behind a claim of the necessity of anonymity for a corporate (not academic) process?
Re: About Google's approach to research publication – Jeff Dean
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
> This is little more than gossip unless you can point to something specific that people can judge for themselves. Saying “she basically did X” is a clever way to influence how people feel about her. It's gossip as in I haven't seen anyone confirm the validtiy of https://www.platformer.news/p/the-withering-email-that-got-a... but I've also not seen anyone deny it. In fact, it seems everyone is confirming it unoffical…
That is totally not the same thing as telling your fellow employees to stop working. I like to think I’m a pretty reasonable fellow, but it’s hard to see that point of view. I felt similarly to you yesterday. Now I’m not so sure. It sounds like she was criticizing company process and was frustrated not being able to have any impact on what she perceived were real problems to the integrity of the process. I can empath…
[deleted]
Re: About Google's approach to research publication – Jeff Dean
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
Seriously, I'm kinda a little wondering how people expect that when someone makes an extremely demanding ultimatum that includes challenging the rights of other people in the company, and the company declines to agree to that ultimatum, that we should be shocked that the person doesn't get to dictate all of the details around their resignation. What I get most from this whole discussion is the extremely nauseating le…
Fewer people would be criticizing Google if they just called the firing a firing.
If I storm into my manager's office and demand a set of conditions, or else I resign on some date, and my manager says "Well, fine, we accept your resignation, but it's effective immediately" I don't really have a problem with my manager calling it a resignation.
Re: About Google's approach to research publication – Jeff Dean
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
Considering her previous attacks to anyone who disagrees with her and her previous public feuds, I'd say people may be afraid of being stamped as a racist/sexist because they had to reject her paper. She was a disruptive employee who threatened her employer and the employer didn't accept it. Why is Google obliged to keep her employed?
That's an angle I had not considered. She has a reputation for retaliation using -isms and those reviewers were able to successfully ask their employer for protections against a historically confrontational coworker. Google as a company takes the hit, as it is in their great interest to prevent their less-vocal employees from getting raked into a public fight.
Exactly. That would be very unfair to those employees. How she treated Yann LeCun and how she now publicly bashes Jeff Dean it is no doubt that those employees would also be named and shamed publicly. She threatened to resign and her resignation was accepted. Don't talk the talk if you can't walk the walk :)
Re: About Google's approach to research publication – Jeff Dean
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
If your work is suddenly and unexpected roadblocked at the last second by internal review, the only way to make changes that prevent that from happening in the future is to clearly understand the situations and criticisms that led to the roadblock. This is why understanding who raised these concerns is important. Anonymous feedback blowing up a project at the final moments is sure to frustrate anybody. If what she ha…
Isn't the academic journal peer review process generally an anonymous feedback mechanism? Why does this need to be different?
Because typically your academic journal peers don't work for the same bosses you do.
Re: About Google's approach to research publication – Jeff Dean
#177> Our aim is to rival peer-reviewed journals in terms of the rigor and thoughtfulness in how we review research before publication. I can see how this might be frustrating for academics working within Google. The field already has systems in place for peer-review. While I admire the idea of Google holding their research to a certain standard, it also provides a mechanism for dismissing research that paints Google (th…
If your company pays for your research, expect them to review it. This is not surprising and is par for the course in corporate research environments.
Re: About Google's approach to research publication – Jeff Dean
#178Timnit responded with an email requiring that a number of conditions be met in order for her to continue working at Google, including revealing the identities of every person who Megan and I had spoken to and consulted as part of the review of the paper and the exact feedback. Timnit wrote that if we didn’t meet these demands, she would leave Google and work on an end date. We accept and respect her decision to resig…
Not really. People bluff in negotiations all the time. A normal response would have been, “I can’t do that. Are you still committed to leaving?” Instead Google went all scorched earth and it’s still unclear why. It also indicates that they don’t particularly value her in progress work in the lab since normally you want the 2 weeks or whatever to squeeze some wrap up work out of folks.
I agree. Worth highlighting:
> ...if we didn’t meet these demands, she would leave Google and work on an end date.
Google's response to this was not accepting of her terms, it was to force an end-date for her —immediately— and lock her out of their systems ASAP.
Re: About Google's approach to research publication – Jeff Dean
#179Why doesn’t Jeff just suck up his pride, apologize and hire her back rather than write increasingly thin rationalizations for his reaction? High level research (and engineering) will involve egos and you should expect this kind of push back when you stop someone from publishing. Nothing here justifies how he handled it Of course, I think many of us have seen this reaction before, maybe even done it ourselves. It’s ba…
Ok, put another way. What interest does Google have in re-hiring her? She left on a bad note and brought tremendous negative PR. The company isn't losing business over this as the treatment didn't rise to abuse or harassment. Her team will operate just fine - everyone is replaceable.
Apparently Google has varying degrees of transparency when it comes to decision making. To be expected at a large company. There are some things my company & boss do that seem abnormal and out of character. You have to go with the flow sometimes and shut up. It seems like this person had some kind of utopian mindset where she felt management was obligated to explain everything around the blocking of her paper.
I doubt a guy like Jeff who wants to do tech all day has a vendetta against black women that want to publish papers.
What a way to go.
Re: About Google's approach to research publication – Jeff Dean
#180Maybe different teams are different, but on my previous team within Google AI, we thought the goal of google's pubapproval process was to ensure that internal company IP (eg. details about datasets, details about google compute infra) does not leak to the public, and maybe to shield Google from liability. Nothing more. In all of my time at Google AI, I never heard of pubapproval being used for peer review or to criti…
Do you want to know whats interesting? I read alot of computer science research, particularly what comes out of Google. Its clear to me that details are left out of specific papers, especially how things are done in sub systems. But, like a jig saw puzzle, I discovered that many papers are actually descriptions of computing systems and algorithms that interact. If you read between the lines and squint your eyes, you…
Would love to read a blog post of your observations about that