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Margaret Mitchell fired from Google

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Re: Margaret Mitchell fired from Google

#291

Post by Cacti »

aerosmile wrote: post #261

You will learn a lot about Margaret Mitchell's firing by simply reading this piece she shared publicly on Twitter: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ERi2crDToYhYjEjxRoOzO-uO... A few punchlines: "Every moment where Jeff Dean and Megan Kacholia do not take responsibility for their actions is another moment where the company as a whole stands by silently as if to intentionally send the horrifying message that Dr. Geb…

The whole piece of so amazingly self-entitled.

> Dr. Gebru refused to subjugate herself to a system

Like working at a gigantic publicly traded US corporation?

> belittle her integrity as a researcher and degrade herself below her fellow researchers

Funny way of phrasing "paper wasn't good enough yet to pass peer review."

> let those of us in positions of privilege and power come to terms with the discomfort of being part of an unjust system

Like those who went to elite academic institutions and then went on to make boatloads of money at one of the worlds best known, respected, and profitable companies? Must be nice to have that sort of economic privilege where you can go out of your way to get fired and not to have to worry about losing your home or not being able to pay your bills.

> part of an unjust system that devalued one of the world’s leading scientists

I don't mean to insult her or anything, but one of the _world's leading scientists_? Really? The myopia and self-important of the Valley never fails to baffle me.

> In short, she was getting paid handsomely while calling out her bosses by name and taking them through the dirt.

Exactly. Who wants to work with someone who craps on everyone around them when they don't get their way? And what company is going to tolerate that sort of behavior out of someone who is supposed to be a leader?

News flash: if even Jeff Dean thinks you're an unbearable asshole, you got some issues.

Re: Margaret Mitchell fired from Google

#292

Post by joshuamorton »

true_religion wrote: post #256
2-tpg wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 A…

Who was Gebru replaced with? I couldn't find anything when I looked it up (ironically on Google).

She wasn't, really.

For context, you had a reporting chain of Jeff Dean -> Megan Kacholia -> Samy Bengio -> Timnit Gebru/Meg Mitchell.

Timnit and Meg have been fired. Samy appears to have been sidelined, despite everyone involved in the ethical work liking Samy and finding him willing to protect them.

My best Guess is that Marian Croak (a Black woman who is currently an Engineering VP in an unrelated area) will approximately replace Megan Kacholia with Megan focusing on other areas, except that "ethical AI" was only a part of Samy's purview, much less Megan's, and its unclear if Marian is stepping down from her former position, or if she's going to split her time between ethical AI and completely unrelated work.

So there are no direct leads of the ethics team currently. There's a VP in charge who has other significant responsibilities and relatively junior researchers (some of whom are very recent hires with limited experience), and no one in the middle. So any chance of mentorship is gone, and the system is quite clearly adversarial. Those researchers have lost their direct and skip level manager, with no clear replacement. Lovely.

Re: Margaret Mitchell fired from Google

#293

Post by refenestrator »

konjin wrote: post #274
rayiner wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We need to ask: is it always a good idea to make marginalized groups more visible? Whom does it benefit? No it doesn’t. And I wish people would stop experimenting with this sort of thing and treating it as some sort of fad. I grew up, as an immigrant from a Muslim country, in a white Republican suburb in the 1990s. And it was great. I can’t imagine what life would have been like today - constant reminders of the fa…

You think your kids won't be white? My father wasn't white when he came here 30 years ago. Somehow magically I am. The same thing will happen to you too. I call it Schrodinger's whiteness. You are white enough to be blamed for right wing racism yet not white enough to not be the target of it.

It's hilarious to me that the "diversity in tech" movement scrupulously avoids noticing that all kinds of asian people exist in our industry.

Acknowledging them would undercut narratives about white supremacy, but you can't get away with calling them white either... so they're invisible! Good for them, frankly, I'm jealous.

Re: Margaret Mitchell fired from Google

#294

Post by karmasimida »

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…

Well paying someone to bite yourself is never a good sale in private organizations.

Otherwise, why regulation, like at all?

Google is a giant corporate with deeply vested interests all around. It is laughable that it still tries to put up an ethnical makeup to just feel good about itself. Which inlines with my observations that Googlers often have this narcissism rooted deeply in themselves, the eagerness to appear to be better.

So happy it backfires.

Re: Margaret Mitchell fired from Google

#295

Post by carmen_sandiego »

ggm wrote: post #250
jimbokun wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"unpacked deep seated entrenched breach of social norms" What does this mean in English?

Unpacked, uncovered, documented, found. Deep seated, ingrained, established, systematic, breach non aligned, wrong, social societal, norms expectations laws, behaviours, Please. Don't be that person. What did you think it meant? What specifically. Was without meaning. Not what do you disagree with: to even pose the question, you have to be literate and capable of reading. At this point your question is actually a sta…

I’m sorry but as a native speaker your phrasing is awkward and a pain to parse. Unpack isn’t synonym for ‘uncover’ and the rest was equally clumsy. The “if the rules didn’t stop me I’d give you the finger, you imbecile” tact is a little ironic.

Re: Margaret Mitchell fired from Google

#296

Post by spoonjim »

katbyte wrote: post #265
ggm wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unpacked, uncovered, documented, found. Deep seated, ingrained, established, systematic, breach non aligned, wrong, social societal, norms expectations laws, behaviours, Please. Don't be that person. What did you think it meant? What specifically. Was without meaning. Not what do you disagree with: to even pose the question, you have to be literate and capable of reading. At this point your question is actually a sta…

Someone asked you a question and you belittled them assuming worst intent. Please don't be THAT person. For one not everyone speaks english as a first language, two while i _think_ i understand what your getting at you picked a very obtuse way to phrase it and even i'm uncertain if i understand, three when speaking to a diverse audience from around the globe who probably are not aware of the language used when speaki…

Honestly I’m an extremely proficient English speaker and don’t know what that sentence was referring to, or trying to say.

Re: Margaret Mitchell fired from Google

#297

Post by renewiltord »

wbl wrote: post #170
jseliger wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

You can leave politics and religion at the door, but if you serve ham sandwiches at the Christmas party don't be surprised when people complain.

We have ham at Christmas. Now I've got this weird feeling I've been doing something that's a faux pas but I can't find a reference on the Internet anywhere. Why will people complain about the ham sandwiches?

Re: Margaret Mitchell fired from Google

#298

Post by Cacti »

thirtyseven wrote: post #290
aerosmile wrote: post #261

You will learn a lot about Margaret Mitchell's firing by simply reading this piece she shared publicly on Twitter: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ERi2crDToYhYjEjxRoOzO-uO... A few punchlines: "Every moment where Jeff Dean and Megan Kacholia do not take responsibility for their actions is another moment where the company as a whole stands by silently as if to intentionally send the horrifying message that Dr. Geb…

Why hire an Ethics team if you won't let them interrogate unethical behavior?

Yeah, that's not why they were fired.

Re: Margaret Mitchell fired from Google

#299

Post by dragonwriter »

thirtyseven wrote: post #290
aerosmile wrote: post #261

You will learn a lot about Margaret Mitchell's firing by simply reading this piece she shared publicly on Twitter: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ERi2crDToYhYjEjxRoOzO-uO... A few punchlines: "Every moment where Jeff Dean and Megan Kacholia do not take responsibility for their actions is another moment where the company as a whole stands by silently as if to intentionally send the horrifying message that Dr. Geb…

Why hire an Ethics team if you won't let them interrogate unethical behavior?

> Why hire an Ethics team if you won't let them interrogate unethical behavior?

The same reason to hire a token minority in a position of on-paper significance: something to point to for PR purposes. But, with an ethics team, there's also another advantage; if you get strong people who would be contributing to the field anyway and constrain their output to suit your interests, you reduce the degree to which areas you wish to exploit come under ethical scrutiny.

Re: Margaret Mitchell fired from Google

#300

Post by achenatx »

cambalache wrote: post #246
2-tpg wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

She is an authority on Ethics, being listed on the ICLR conference as part of the Ethics Review Committee: > Margaret Mitchell, Google Research and Machine Intelligence But I do think they can miss her, since there are already 8 people responsible for Ethics and Diversity, with 11 responsible for the actual organization of the conference. Maybe they can update https://iclr.cc/ to reflect the fact that she is not repr…

> She is an authority on Ethics This is so pretentious. Ethics is a branch of philosophy and even religion with deep debates raging from 4000 years ago and no end in sight. Hundreds of specialists have been going at it in multi-decades efforts and yet any of their opinions must not carry more weight than the average citizen's. Mitchell has a BS in Linguistics an MS in computational linguistics and a PhD in CS. Her fi…

Philosophers have already identified the problem. There is no universal standard of morality or ethics.

The core of ethics derives from evolution. Societies with certain sets of cooperative and competitive values destroy, dominate, and expand. Mutations are constantly happening and some of those ethics can lead to the self-destruction of a culture, while some make a culture even more dominant. Some are neutral and just background noise and have no substantial impact on the society.

In the grand scheme of things the only thing that matters for morals and ethics is whether the culture that embodies those ethics can survive against pressure from other cultures.

Some ethics have been selected into the genome as they provide superior fitness of individuals.

The idea that we should pursue equal outcomes is a mutation. In general it has been shown to destroy a culture (socialism) when competing with more capitalistic cultures. The victim type culture is likely to be much weaker than one where people constantly compete to rise to the pinnacle of power and wealth.

Ultimately power and wealth drive innovation; and innovation, especially of weapons, drives domination. There are other types of domination, such as media, food, language, etc.

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