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About Google's approach to research publication – Jeff Dean
421–430 of 607 posts
Re: About Google's approach to research publication – Jeff Dean
#422Earlier quoted context omitted.
How would publishing a paper open a 3rd party up to legal risk? Research papers aren't laws, and it is chronologically impossible for a research paper to influence already on the book laws.
I can imagine a scenario where a politician who wants to pick a fight with Google uses some of the unflattering findings in the published work as supporting material for why Google needs to be regulated/fined/etc: "Google does {bad thing}. Look at this research report from Google researchers! They admit to doing {bad thing}!"
That would be a future act, not making previous acts illegal ex post facto.
Re: About Google's approach to research publication – Jeff Dean
#423Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is sorta my entire point. The fact that this has over-flowed into the public sphere is a failure. If they handled the situation correctly it should have been sorted internally. Whether the person in question spilled the beans at all is proof of that. Managing people is a skill, and being good at computer science does not make you a good manager. They should know that complaining to social media is an option that…
You asserted: "a good manager would have handled this and it would never have reached this point, public or otherwise. This whole episode is failure of management top to bottom." My point is that I do not know whether this situation could have been handled better. We don't know enough to judge whether this could have been sorted out neatly. You seem to think that a clean resolution was possible, and you might be righ…
Fair, but I don't think we need to know what happened to asses what is happening now.
I consider that this being discussed in a public sphere a failure regardless of situation as it looks bad on the company no matter what.
If a person feels their only way out is to appeal to the mob then I think the people doing the management have made a misstep. If that person has a history of appealing to the mob then it is still a misstep as that should have been considered when dealing with the issue.
Perhaps they did the calculus and this is the best result, but looking in, it doesn't feel like it.
Re: About Google's approach to research publication – Jeff Dean
#424[deleted]
Re: About Google's approach to research publication – Jeff Dean
#425Earlier quoted context omitted.
If your work is suddenly and unexpected roadblocked at the last second by internal review, the only way to make changes that prevent that from happening in the future is to clearly understand the situations and criticisms that led to the roadblock. This is why understanding who raised these concerns is important. Anonymous feedback blowing up a project at the final moments is sure to frustrate anybody. If what she ha…
>Now might be a good time to remind everyone that the easiest way to discriminate is to make stringent rules, then to decide when and for whom to enforce them. --Nicolas Le Roux
It would be pretty easy to discriminate if you had loose underspecified rules, then decide action on a case by case basis. The problem seems to not be in the rules but in the deciding.
Re: About Google's approach to research publication – Jeff Dean
#426Earlier quoted context omitted.
If your work is suddenly and unexpected roadblocked at the last second by internal review, the only way to make changes that prevent that from happening in the future is to clearly understand the situations and criticisms that led to the roadblock. This is why understanding who raised these concerns is important. Anonymous feedback blowing up a project at the final moments is sure to frustrate anybody. If what she ha…
> at the last second It was only ‘at the last second’ because Gebru chose not to follow the normal procedure. If the paper genuinely can't be ready until one day before the external deadline, the right thing to do is engage with the reviewers in advance, explain the problem, and provide them with drafts and work in progress, so that they can complete their work a few hours after yours. What Gebru did is the equivalen…
The top comment seems to imply that that was/is SOP.
Re: About Google's approach to research publication – Jeff Dean
#427After reading Jeff Dean's response, I can only come to the conclusion that Timnit Gebru acted like a primadonna. It is completely normal to have to obtain prepublication signoff on material before it is submitted to a conference (and manager signoff even before abstract submission). Given the breadth of experience at Google, it seems strange not to avail yourself of this. Demanding to know the identity of reviewers i…
Gebru's email to team members: https://www.platformer.news/p/the-withering-email-that-got-a...
Tweet explaining how she "resigned": https://twitter.com/timnitGebru/status/1334343577044979712?s...
An external reviewer of the paper: https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/k69eq0/n_t...
I think you should be more open about what potentially actually happened because your first sentence seems very accusatory without proper information, the very bias that Gebru speaks of. According to her email that Dean references in his, her "feedback" for the paper was given in the form of a confidential HR document. That seems highly nonstandard for a review process supposedly only concerned with scientific rigor and is not addressed at all by Dean's statement. Further, his statement clearly, likely intentionally, muddies the water about what the actual sequence of events were that led to the paper being created, internal reviewers originally being notified, when the submission happened, who approved it, who submitted it externally, who asked for this to be retracted, and when and in what order all this happened. The fact that his statement, that was apparently meant to clarify these exact proceedings, makes it even more vague about what actually happened seems pretty damning to Dean's case, in my opinion.
Both Gebru's and Dean's statements have very little overlap in flavor and in facts, so it's pretty apparent something is going on here that is nontrivial and abnormal.
Re: About Google's approach to research publication – Jeff Dean
#428Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ethics researcher omits relevant research in paper to smuggle in a particular agenda. Company calls it out. Researcher realizes the limits of her narrative setting powers. Non-vocal majority is happy to see runaway activism being curbed in corporate settings. Slow march through institutions is slowed down for a day.
It's not "runaway activism" if you hire ethics researchers who find ethics problems. Reasons for not citing research, especially recent research, range from lack of relevance (since even though environmental improvements could have been done, they were not done! So the actual impact wasnt lessened by them at all!); To simply not having known about it. The correct reviewer response to this would be an "accept with cor…
> It's not "runaway activism" if you hire ethics researchers who find ethics problems.
The fundamental difference between activism and research is that activism sets the agenda ahead of time while research explores the knowledge space and reports findings. One helps us incrementally make better sense of the world, the other wants us to narrow on particular facts while omitting other relevant facts in the name of advancing a cause.
> Reasons for not citing research, especially recent research, range from lack of relevance ... To simply not having known about it
The omitted research is clearly relevant. Deciding what is relevant and what is not is precisely what narrative warfare is. If they did not know about the adjacent research, then they would simply be incompetent researchers (which I highly doubt is the case).
> The correct reviewer response to this would be an "accept with corrections" to "revise and resubmit"; retraction is overboard.
There is no retraction because there was no external publication. Jeff Dean states reviewer response as you stated was there but was ignored by the approver.
> Once your employer starts interfering with what you can and can't publish, it's time to find a new affiliation indeed.
Corporate researchers are still employees and are bound by a job description. Independent of the content of the research, it is also entirely within the rights of the employer to set a certain bar of quality being cleared. In this case it seems like Google didn't want affiliation with this paper, not the other way around.
Re: About Google's approach to research publication – Jeff Dean
#429Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Jeff gives the impression that they demanded retraction (!) because they wanted Timnit and her coauthors to soften their critique. The more I read about this, the worse it looks. I get the impression that she wrote a hit piece on Google and published with Google's name. For me, it's correct they demand a retraction. It's simply unprofessional to critque your company for something while not mentioning the work they'…
> I get the impression that she wrote a hit piece Hopefully the paper gets leaked so we can judge for ourselves.
I've read it internally. It's rather bland and doesn't actually indite google. I'm inclined to believe that it was a paper-submission-process issue.
Re: About Google's approach to research publication – Jeff Dean
#430Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 What I don't understand is why in the discussion nobody proposed amending the paper rather than withdrawing it. If Dean's issue was it didn't cite papers X,Y and Z, rather than demand a withdrawal, why didn't he just demand "I want you to amend the paper to add cite…
In Timnit's account, she said she asked for specific feedback so it could be addressed and the paper published; this was denied to her and is part of her complaint over which she resigned.
I can easily see how both accounts can be true.
For example suppose that Timnit was told to withdraw after an incomplete review indicates that they don't want to publish. If she asked at that time for a complete list of things to fix, nobody can give it to her because the review isn't finished. Nor can they produce it in a timely matter because it takes time to do the review.
Later the detailed feedback is ready. And if she wanted to submit the paper elsewhere, she could have fixed it and done so. But by then things have blown up and it is too late.