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Margaret Mitchell fired from Google

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Re: Margaret Mitchell fired from Google

#201

Post by b3kart »

throwawayhaxx99 wrote: post #185
buildbot wrote: post #131

It’s a really common refrain here that if you are employee critical of your employer you should expect to get fired… Well perhaps, but you’d think that specifically someone in AI ethics needs to be empowered to speak up against both internal external issues. Or did google just want an research ethics hit team against other companies technologies? Makes me wonder if project zero is really trying as hard as possible wi…

It seems like Google really likes firing people instead of free speech. Sure they can do that because of at will employment but at some point it has to start leaving a bad taste in everyone's mouths especially when these firings get publicized. At some point CS grads will start taking this into consideration when it comes to working at places and having their own political views. Who wants to work at a place where th…

Maybe when Google stops paying these CS grads obscene amounts of money. Only people with very strong political views will convince themselves to not go there, and I doubt it's a large group of people.

Re: Margaret Mitchell fired from Google

#202

Post by leetcrew »

Booktrope wrote: post #181
leetcrew wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why would a company pay someone to publicly criticize them? in the case of google, there's already plenty of people willing to do that for free.

Yeah, why wouldn't a company want a workforce full of yes-men and engineers who care about nothing but making shareholders money and making executives look good?

that's clearly a strawman interpretation of my comment.

> why would a company pay someone to publicly criticize them?

by all means, a healthy company should encourage internal critiques. but if you're going to take that criticism public, you can't expect to also collect a paycheck at the same time. do you make a habit of paying people to work against your interests?

Re: Margaret Mitchell fired from Google

#203

Post by aerosmile »

duckfang wrote: post #123
sillysaurusx wrote: post #94

It's pretty important to get this story straight: She moved files when she wasn't supposed to. This seems like a pretty standard firing. People are already claiming on twitter that Google is assaulting ethical AI, and I just don't see it. Google did not immediately comment on those claims. Its statement said of Mitchell: “We confirmed that there were multiple violations of our code of conduct, as well as of our secur…

> She moved files when she wasn't supposed to. According to Google. Remember, an entity that has a reason and a justification to do what it wants will manufacture whatever evidence it needs to do that. And, it's not a court of law. At best, it's "allegedly moved files when they weren't supposed to".

The rule number 1 in letting people go: never go on record why you did that. There's a good reason for that - you're opening yourself up for lawsuits. Google violated that rule in a big way by making such a public and damaging statement. You bet they can back it up.

Re: Margaret Mitchell fired from Google

#204

Post by Cacti »

contemporary343 wrote: post #111

They also seem to have sidelined Samy Bengio (Yoshua's brother) who was the skip-level manager of the team and, as far as I can tell, backed both of them and continued to: https://twitter.com/L_badikho/status/1362892301979312128 As can be seen above, current team members state that Google is running a smear campaign against both of them. We should emphatically not take Google's words at face value here either. All of…

I haven’t seen any of the “smear campaign”, just what these two employees have written publicly and, honestly, they both seem like entitled self-absorbed pains in the ass who crap on everything around them just because they didn’t get their way, who view anyone who disagrees with them as an idiot (or worse, evil), and as completely unprofessional and poorly prepared to be dealing with something of such significance at a $50B company.

These are people who should have never made it past individual contributer.

There is a difference between pushing your company towards a better place and dropping bombs every time someone disagrees with you, a distinction neither of these two seem to realize.

Re: Margaret Mitchell fired from Google

#205

Post by KhitanMaps »

choppaface wrote: post #172
sillysaurusx wrote: post #94

It's pretty important to get this story straight: She moved files when she wasn't supposed to. This seems like a pretty standard firing. People are already claiming on twitter that Google is assaulting ethical AI, and I just don't see it. Google did not immediately comment on those claims. Its statement said of Mitchell: “We confirmed that there were multiple violations of our code of conduct, as well as of our secur…

It's pretty important to get it straight: what files did she move and why? So far it appears she did NOT do an Anthony Levandowski and steal IP. In particular Google has said zero about the actual dollar value of those files, or cited any damages from the movement of the files. It appears much more likely she was talking to a lawyer, which is a perfectly legal thing to do, and probably pretty wise given Google's maxi…

> So far it appears she did NOT do an Anthony Levandowski and steal IP.

From what I've seen, neither Google nor Margaret Mitchell have described the file transfer event in detail. We don't yet know the content of the thousands of documents she allegedly exfiltrated.

> It appears much more likely she was talking to a lawyer, which is a perfectly legal thing to do, [...]

I'm curious about this. Is it legal to copy and store _any_ documents that you deem necessary for your lawyer to see? Seems unlikely.

Re: Margaret Mitchell fired from Google

#206

Post by deanCommie »

jseliger wrote: post #157
legostormtroopr wrote: post #110

Out of curiousity I checked out Dr. Mitchells Twitter feed. On her feed for the past several months, shes been posting and reposting articles that are heavily critical of her employer. Now there is a line between public and private space, but many people use Twitter as a professional network. And Dr. Mitchell includes her Google credentials in her bio. So given her substantial, critical, public views of her employer…

I wouldn't be surprised to find more companies shifting to a "leave politics and religion at the door" stance again: https://jakeseliger.com/2020/12/03/dissent-insiders-and-outs...

Your "politics" is someone else's "fundamental human survival rights".

The exact details matter from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. There are parts of the world where you can be fired for being gay. In most of the US where you can be fired for being trans. There are parts of the US where having TAMPONS in a women's bathroom is considered "political".

Re: Margaret Mitchell fired from Google

#207

Post by 2-tpg »

contemporary343 wrote: post #111

They also seem to have sidelined Samy Bengio (Yoshua's brother) who was the skip-level manager of the team and, as far as I can tell, backed both of them and continued to: https://twitter.com/L_badikho/status/1362892301979312128 As can be seen above, current team members state that Google is running a smear campaign against both of them. We should emphatically not take Google's words at face value here either. All of…

The political activist collective is slowly falling apart. If you get blamed for racism when firing an employee for telling colleagues not to pursue KPIs, there is not much you can do to continue placating these professional victims. They are now resorting to calling Google gaslighting for replacing Gebru with a Black person. It is low-brow ugly neo-racism, but then again, I don't really want Google AI in charge of AI ethics, with or without Gebru, so may the mess and reputation damage linger for a long time.

Re: Margaret Mitchell fired from Google

#208

Post by Wolfenstein98k »

Booktrope wrote: post #181
leetcrew wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why would a company pay someone to publicly criticize them? in the case of google, there's already plenty of people willing to do that for free.

Yeah, why wouldn't a company want a workforce full of yes-men and engineers who care about nothing but making shareholders money and making executives look good?

There's a gulf between "hire only yes-men" and "hire activists who openly state a desire to undermine the company, who break its policies and share its internal documents to forward that agenda, and generally spend their global-0.1%-level salary accusing the company of actively harming the least among us".

False dichotomies are bad.

Re: Margaret Mitchell fired from Google

#209

Post by kapp_in_life »

ALittleLight wrote: post #82
andyxor wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gebru wasn't fired because she "cast Google in a bad light", she gave an ultimatum to her boss threatening to resign if they don't disclose names of all reviewers who criticized her work AND blasted group emails calling for sabotage https://docs.google.com/document/d/1f2kYWDXwhzYnq8ebVtuk9CqQ... https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/k77sxz/d_t...

Her research does cast Google in a bad light. She writes about how language models (like Google's BERT which influences somewhere between 10% and 100% of searches) are environmentally unfriendly and encode hegemonic language making them subtly racist and sexist. Her solutions are to use smaller language models and more curated data sets, which are probably not palatable for Google. Dr. Gebru was told the paper should…

>In other words, if her paper had made Google look good

A more charitable assumption might be that they wanted her paper to address feedback from the reviewers in lieu of being published as is. The feedback that she was presenting a biased interpretation by leaving unmentioned the existing work being done to combat bias in the models.

Re: Margaret Mitchell fired from Google

#210

Post by Dirlewanger »

cobraetor wrote: post #166
minimaxir wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's impossible to work on the ethics of AI without involving politics.

> It's impossible to work on the ethics of AI without involving politics. Wouldn't that conflict with Google's no-politics policy? https://www.businessinsider.com/google-community-guidelines-...

Maybe it's better for the world that Google doesn't do anything AI research-related.
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