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About Google's approach to research publication – Jeff Dean

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

#21

Post by Imnimo »

This reads to me like Google felt that the paper painted some of their other technologies in a poor light, and wanted to insert language that made them look better. The way he describes their objections, they strike me as the sort of thing that is routinely addressed in the camera-ready version of papers by adding a few lines to the related work section. Not the sort of thing that a conference reviewer or an internal reviewer would reject a paper over.

Previously, we only had one side of this story. But if this is Dean's best spin on Google's side of the story, I'm very tempted to conclude they're in the wrong here. Obviously I don't have all the information, but the information I do have feels consistent with the idea that someone important at Google didn't like Gebru's paper for corporate-political (meaning making Google look good, as opposed to political-political) reasons, they tried to get Gebru to play ball, she refused, and now they have to back-project a justification in the name of "scientific integrity".

Unfortunately, I think this is a story where most people's opinions about who's in the right will be more informed by their previous opinions about Gebru and Dean than the narrower question of what happened with this particular paper. I'm probably even guilty of that to some extent myself, given that I'm a fan of some of Gebru's previous work.

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

#22

Post by exolymph »

thisgoodlife wrote: post #14
dang wrote: post #7

Previous threads on this ongoing story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25292386 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25285502 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25289445

one link says she resigned. The other one says she was fired. Which one is it then?

People have argued both cases. The tl;dr is that she said "I will resign if XYZ" and Google was like "we accept your resignation effective immediately." Whether or not that counts as firing is a matter of opinion.

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

#23

Post by sp332 »

thisgoodlife wrote: post #14
dang wrote: post #7

Previous threads on this ongoing story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25292386 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25285502 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25289445

one link says she resigned. The other one says she was fired. Which one is it then?

The headline on the platformer.news article was updated to reflect the fact that she was fired.

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

#24

Post by throawaydmg »

> 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

It always amazes how blatantly authoritarian these "woke" types are. I would not be surprised if the sole reason she wanted the identities of every consultant was to engage in some sort of witch-hunting and bigoteering[0]

[0] https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Bigoteering

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

#25

Post by qppo »

Yesterday the conversation was all over the tone of the email exchange, and my gut was regardless of the research it discussed that Google was probably alright to choose to accept that researcher's resignation.

Now I think I was wrong, Google looks like they're full of crap. If the research doesn't pass muster I'd like to read it and pass my own judgement. I'm guessing the tone was justified.

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

#26

Post by ethanp61 »

thisgoodlife wrote: post #14
dang wrote: post #7

Previous threads on this ongoing story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25292386 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25285502 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25289445

one link says she resigned. The other one says she was fired. Which one is it then?

She made demands and gave a resignation date if those demands were not met. Google said that they could not meet those demands and accepted her resignation but because of her conduct (emailing hundreds of Googlers), the resignation date was made immediate.

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

#27

Post by pm90 »

bnj wrote: post #5

While I’m a spectator to this unfolding story and am reacting to a pretty cursory overview of what happened, this has the distinct feeling that Google thought they were moving in for a checkmate by, in their words, “accepting a resignation”, only to have it — very predictably? - blow up in their faces completely. Even if Google is acting presenting the chain of events faithfully, their final move to jump on an opport…

This sums it up almost perfectly. The only thing I would add is that things like these tend to have a pattern. If a single person speaks up and you have multiple others claiming similar treatment, it significantly increases the likelihood of the workplace being hostile to such persons.

Also: Googles bar for hiring is extremely high. For multiple senior engineers/managers to corroborate this description is rather damning.

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

#28

Post by foobarian »

typon wrote: post #17
hartator wrote: post #9

It sadden me that they make Jeff Dean work on these kind of issues. His map/reduce invention brought to the world a lot more than managing his coworker egos.

Jeff Dean did not invent map/reduce

OK then tensor flow

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

#29

Post by hartator »

typon wrote: post #17
hartator wrote: post #9

It sadden me that they make Jeff Dean work on these kind of issues. His map/reduce invention brought to the world a lot more than managing his coworker egos.

Jeff Dean did not invent map/reduce

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

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

#30

Post by choppaface »

It's frankly unprofessional for Jeff Dean to post only his email in this document without providing more context. The news media has in cases provided balanced coverage that included the email from Timnit that prompted Google's action: https://www.platformer.news/p/the-withering-email-that-got-a...

This post from Jeff Dean simply underscores that he has failed to balance the need for diplomacy with the research thesis of his own research group. I'm not saying he's being malicious, but incredibly tone deaf. While I appreciate he gets "attacked" at nearly every talk (at one retinopathy talk I saw him grilled for 10 minutes on race), he's going to continue to get this sort of attention until he can stop being the Googler who wants to tell you why their view is right.

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