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

About Google's approach to research publication – Jeff Dean

docs.google.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 607 posts

Re: About Google's approach to research publication – Jeff Dean

#181

Post by aylmao »

vecter wrote: post #103
ketzo wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right -- he once again talks about "accepting" her resignation, when it reeeeeally just looks like they fired her. At the very least, she certainly feels like she was fired; why is that not mentioned at all? Even just, I don't know, "sorry we were abrupt?"

Don't make ultimatums unless you're ready to accept the consequences of those ultimatums.

> ...if we didn’t meet these demands, she would leave Google and work on an end date.

To be fair it doesn't sound like her ultimatum was "I'll leave immediately"— that was forced on her by Google, and is an important detail.

Re: About Google's approach to research publication – Jeff Dean

#182

Post by visarga »

bgribble wrote: post #79
nova22033 wrote: post #19

Timnit 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…

According to her Twitter feed, Timnit was asking for the same transparency that normally goes with Google pub reviews -- where all the reviewers and their feedback are known to the reviewee. This red-stamp "review" did not follow the normal review process. Not a Googler, just going on what she says: https://twitter.com/timnitGebru/status/1334881120920498180

> According to her Twitter feed, Timnit was asking for the same transparency that normally goes with Google pub reviews

She has a Twitter army ready to set their aim on her reviewers and a track record, they can't reveal the names.

Re: About Google's approach to research publication – Jeff Dean

#184

Post by mstg »

kneel wrote: post #163
mstg wrote: post #117

Earlier 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?

There are many people in SV that are very quick to bring up race, gender and diversity whenever a dispute arises. It's becoming predictable to the point of being problematic. As a POC myself, I understand there is a time and place for this.. and it definitely isn't all the time, publicly, on social media. I fear that people like Timnit are inappropriately wielding justice rhetoric to benefit their own careers, at the…

That is very sad indeed. I am a second degree immigrant and active in politics in Norway. This behaviour is actually limiting our abilities to work towards eliminating real discriminatory behaviour. I've seen it first hand where someone has accused someone else of racism, when it was there own fault. I guess it benefits them, because they get their way but it also creates a divided and toxic society. Working with people like that is also very tiring and stressing.

Re: About Google's approach to research publication – Jeff Dean

#185

Post by nx7487 »

nova22033 wrote: post #19

Timnit 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…

Yeah the way I see it, once someone makes an ultimatum, the relationship is destroyed, there's no trust. You can ignore the quality of her paper or the critiques from Google, they probably just decided to end the relationship because of this.

Re: About Google's approach to research publication – Jeff Dean

#186

Post by jkbhzsdfkhjnzs »

wilde wrote: post #50
nova22033 wrote: post #19

Timnit 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.

People are consistently leaving out the fact that she wrote an internal email encouraging her coworkers to reach out to congress about Google's behavior, at a time when big tech companies are being dragged in front of congressional hearings nearly every month

Re: About Google's approach to research publication – Jeff Dean

#187

Post by mpihaditfirst »

hartator wrote: post #29
typon wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jeff Dean did not invent map/reduce

He did: http://cacs.usc.edu/education/cs653/Dean-MapReduce-CACM08.pd...

The key ideas were part of the MPI interface for a decade before Jeff came along and applied the new branding

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Message_Passing_Interface

Re: About Google's approach to research publication – Jeff Dean

#188

Post by ergocoder »

pseudalopex wrote: post #169
ergocoder wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an unfair take. If an employee is adversary toward the company, the trade off needs to be made no matter how much valuable the employee's work is. This is a non-issue tbh. She wants to leave. Company wants her to leave. They both agree to part way because the premises are fulfilled (i.e. company can't meet her requirements). If you want to get technical, I'd bet her employee's status is still in tact for 2 we…

Her manager said "effective today".[1] [1] https://twitter.com/timnitGebru/status/1334364736457240577

I don't know what that means. It could mean her employment status is off today. Or it could mean she can't access any corp material but her status is on.

It's fairly standard to let the employee leave the building immediately but still on payroll for 2 more weeks.

Again, I think it's a non-issue. Both wants to part way. Either party can singlehandedly make that date earlier.

It seems one side brings up this point because other points are not salient, so they try to make it like "you see they fire me today. I actually want to leave in 10 days instead. This is unethical!!". It's a weak point and muddles the main point.

Re: About Google's approach to research publication – Jeff Dean

#189

Post by visarga »

UncleMeat wrote: post #141
asfadfdsa wrote: post #46

There are a lot of people commenting that she didn't actually resign. I agree, but it sounds like the conversation went like this: employee: I'm not happy about x, y and z. If you don't do those, I'm going to quit. manager: well we are not going to do those, so thank you for your time. We accept your resignation and would like it to start immediately (i.e. you're fired). If you are gonna tell your manager that you pl…

There are three different discussions happening all at the same time, which is muddying things. 1. Was the treatment of her research in internal review reasonable? 2. Was terminating her employment reasonable after she sent the (now public) email to the women-and-allies brain listserv? 3. Was the end of her employment at Google a resignation or a firing? To me, (3) is by a wide margin the least interesting part of th…

For what it's worth, I have read the abstract of the paper and discussions around it and I have seen more than one person rate it as not very interesting. Why is all this fuss about a paper restating common knowledge? For example, they say datasets need to be filtered for bias, and that large models consume ... duh ... a lot. We already know that, where's the new shiny architecture for fair modelling?

link to abstract and discussion - https://old.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/k69eq0/n_t...

Re: About Google's approach to research publication – Jeff Dean

#190

Post by albatruss »

trhway wrote: post #161
albatruss wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From a certain narrow, selfish perspective it's reasonable for Google to not want to have an AI ethics department placing a check on their leading edge research at all. Fortunately, we don't live in a world where corporations are the ones to determine right from wrong with total impunity.

> AI ethics department placing a check on their leading edge research that reminds how in USSR each non-miniscule factory, organization, etc. had "the department #1" - it was an ideological check and control department which at sufficiently large/important organizations even included KGB officers.

You have identified a similarity between two situations, but it is not a similarity that matters. The distinction that matters is one of normativity, and on that measure there is clearly no equivalence to be drawn here.
Post reply on HN