341–350 of 460 posts
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Do you really mean that?
They are getting downvoted but may be genuine. I as a European person also didn't immediately see her as black, just based on appearance. Closer to North African / Arab / Middle Eastern. Given that Eritrea is right next to the Arabian peninsula, it's not surprising. It wasn't necessarily meant as an insult. Perhaps in America it's clear she's black, in countries with more North African and Middle Eastern immigration,…
I have contempt for a lot of the things that Google does, but I have a sincere question about all of this. Why should they employ anyone who criticizes them that way in public? I would say the same about Peter Norvig or Guido van Rossum. If you ran the company, or the department, or owned your own firm where employees aired your dirty laundry like this, why should you be expected to keep them on?
> Why should they employ anyone who criticizes them that way in public? [..] If you ran the company, or the department, or owned your own firm where employees aired your dirty laundry like this, why should you be expected to keep them on? Because owning a company doesn't necessarily mean owning people working for it. Ask yourself the same question about the government, why should your government be expected to keep y…
I can easily choose which company I want to work for, switching countries is something much harder.
A government that does not like what I say can do all sorts of horrible things, jail me, confiscate property and event kill me. Companies generally do not have that power.
I wonder what is the primary intended role of Google's "Ethical AI" efforts in the first place. You could hire a bunch of leading AI researchers and task them to do R&D to identify the pitfalls of latest-gen AI with a focus on prospective dangers, biases, unintended side-effects. You could ask them to create new methods to quantify the degree / severity of these effects. You could ask them to invent new methodologies…
I as well. Is their role to bring up adversarial viewpoints or to actually be adversarial? If it is the former, did her behavior cross over into the latter, and that is what upper management had a problem with?
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OK, so my top comment on this post calling out the ethical AI group and Gebru as toxic got flagged, and I'm still a bit salty about that, but I'll respond constructively to this statement: > a good chunk of HN seems to just go with the "she's a toxic person" narrative without ever relaying what she actually DID I didn't feel the need to add a ton of details because it all seemed quite clear. I mean, in this case, all…
Even if you don't want to rehash it, I feel like making concrete statement of which of her actions you feel were toxic is more constructive than vilifying her personally. Contrapoints made a good video on cancelling that highlights the difference between critique and cancelling, and there's a big difference between saying "she publicly accused Yann lecun of using his platform to direct his fanboys at her" and "after…
> In this case, the ethical AI group is doing the same thing: demanding a manager not have a role with them, demanding (again IMO) unwarranted apologies from other people, and worse, demanding the rehiring of someone has shown that she has no respect for others in her workplace.
When it comes to Gebru, it was specifically these demands that Jeff Dean mentioned (and which appear to be uncontested) that I find toxic:
> 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.
And, to the contrary, I find it dishonest how much of the "accepted" media narrative I've read in this case is that Google is "trying to silence marginalized voices", which I think is not supported by any reasonable reading of the evidence.
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People certainly could just quit when they feel their company is not doing the right thing. But people who care about their mission and the company might stay and do something like this because they genuinely want to improve things. Maybe if more employees used their leverage to improve companies from within we could see real progress in work environments and corporate ethics without having to wait on legislation or…
Yes, I think if people were really trying to improve their companies from within that's a great idea. I don't think that's what's happening here though. I like to pose the following thought experiment to people who like driving fancy cars: if your car looked like an old honda civic from the outside but had all the bells and whistles and looked stunning from the inside, would you still want it? The point of the experi…
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Even if you don't want to rehash it, I feel like making concrete statement of which of her actions you feel were toxic is more constructive than vilifying her personally. Contrapoints made a good video on cancelling that highlights the difference between critique and cancelling, and there's a big difference between saying "she publicly accused Yann lecun of using his platform to direct his fanboys at her" and "after…
In my post that was flagged, which was more directed to the demands from the ethical AI group mentioned in the article, I wrote: > In this case, the ethical AI group is doing the same thing: demanding a manager not have a role with them, demanding (again IMO) unwarranted apologies from other people, and worse, demanding the rehiring of someone has shown that she has no respect for others in her workplace. When it com…
The leaving Google and working on an end date is unconstested.
To me, unless we get the full email trail, these are he said-she said. But Timnit has less power (and can't even release the email thread because she's been locked out of her accounts as far as I know) and no-one I know who has worked with her seems to think of her as a vindictive person so until Google releases the email thread, I'm gonna slightly go with her version of the events.
I can't say I feel for Google, they've had it coming. A completely self-inflicted wound. What worries me is the woke culture creeping over from Google to other companies, and from US to other countries . Demanding vice-presidents be fired, taking over companies like a virus. But how can the virus stay alive while killing its hosts so vehemently? What will sustain it long-term?
> But how can the virus stay alive while killing its hosts so vehemently? Comparing a company to a host and the employees that create its wealth to a virus is illogical even for the most ardent capitalist. Isn't the capitalist idea that everyone, be it the employer or the worker, do their utmost to maximise their market value and use it to the best of their ability to their own advantage? Even the ancien régime reali…
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No, the jump/push analogy is too contorted to be meaningful. Employers and employees have a relationship that has processes that have common meanings and names like "resigned" or "fired". There's no accepted relationship if you push someone threatening to jump. You're just an a-hole committing assault and possibly murder. Is there a link to the letter that she sent? That could help to clarify.
There is. You probably can Google for it. The demand is something around exposing the identities of the peers who reviewed and rejected her paper. If Google doesn't give her the identities of those peers, she say she will leave the company. Comparing to suicide is a bit much though. When considering death, everything else becomes secondary, so we can't use that analogy for comparison.
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The paper was submitted on time, other papers at Google were submitted for review after they were released. By Jeff Dean's own admission the paper was approved for release. The demand for retraction was initially given while refusing to state what the reason(s) for the demand were. Only after the meeting where they demanded she retract the paper did they belatedly agree to read her the feedback that they stated as th…
Excerpt from Jeff Dean's email: > Timnit co-authored a paper with four fellow Googlers as well as some external collaborators that needed to go through our review process (as is the case with all externally submitted papers). We’ve approved dozens of papers that Timnit and/or the other Googlers have authored and then published, but as you know, papers often require changes during the internal review process (or are e…
For starters if the academic content of the paper were shoddy, that is what peer review is for. Secondly, if it was really about the paper lacking some new context, why did Google demand retraction while refusing to share why? That's what doesn't make sense.
It seems like there's some missing context in the situation because on the surface Google's actions don't line up with their stated reasoning.
Notice how in Jeff Dean's email he made no reference to the fact that they refused to share the reasons for the retraction with Gebru in that first meeting. He also skipped over where Gebru asked for the reasoning and a manager read it to her rather than letting her read for herself.
I just don't understand the secrecy and cageyness if the only problem with the paper was some academic omissions.