We read the paper that forced Timnit Gebru out of Google • Hacker News Board

Re: We read the paper that forced Timnit Gebru out of Google

#461

Post by remote_phone » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 3:38 PM UTC

sillysaurusx wrote: post #338

throwaway74453 wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Re the existence of an internal review (tl;dr: it definitely does exist!): A Google employee here who's actually published research there. There definitely IS an internal review and an approval process and every single paper I have published while there had to go through it. Everyone I knew had to submit for an internal review well in advance and I personally couldn't even submit to a conference review once because w…

Thank you for speaking up! To be clear, there’s no question it exists. But multiple (admittedly former) google researchers have gone on record saying that this is meant to be a quick scan for trade secrets leakage, and nothing more than that. Certainly not some kind of academic integrity review. That’s what the journal reviewers are for. The point of the scientific process is to be allowed to fail and to be mistaken.…

The fact is that you’re wrong. There is an thorough internal review process. It’s not just a rubber stamp. So please stop spreading misinformation. What Dr. Gebru went through was standard.

Re: We read the paper that forced Timnit Gebru out of Google

#462

Post by UncleMeat » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 3:42 PM UTC

derangedHorse wrote: post #460

jpm_sd wrote: post #391

Here's why I have absolutely no sympathy for Google in this situation. They hired Gebru as a professional thorn in their side. "Come up in here and be a pain in the ass! Tell us what we're doing wrong!", they said. "We're Enlightened Corporate America, after all!" She is a chess piece in the game of Wokeness Street Cred. She then proceeded to do the job she was hired for, and now they're all "Hey lady, Here At Google…

I've always found it funny how we treat companies like Google as imaginary people with no single individual bearing responsibility. To be fair, some people are aware of the people involved like Jeff Dean, but I look forward to a shift in the future where individuals within companies are as popular and held to the same standards as individuals within politics. Some of these corporate individuals already seem to have j…

> With respect to this particular case of Timnit Gebru, it sounds like she was already on her way to being let go.

This is just wild speculation and part of a frustrating pattern where all sorts of questionable behaviors by authorities are justified by other unrelated properties of the victims.

Re: We read the paper that forced Timnit Gebru out of Google

#463

Post by rbanffy » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 3:42 PM UTC

mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #429

thinkingemote wrote: post #365

Anyone else see the narrative on Twitter to be so much different than Reddit and hacker news? On reddit and hacker news I have never seen any unconditional support for Timmit. Even amongst those anti Google and broadly in support of her, there's no whole agreement with all of what Timmit says; the assertion of her story, the reasons why and the conclusions. that a. She was fired b. That she was fired because of sexis…

This is not surprising. On Twitter there is a strong cancel culture to irrationally oppose anything that fails to unquestioningly accept “wokeness” narratives. Critical thinking and evaluation of evidence is not really permitted. Twitter is more about trying to look (publicly) like you affiliate with this or that celebrity, so the regular person can feel some sense of patronage to their chosen circle of intellectuals…

The basic difference is that she implied I&D work at Google was ineffective while he implied half his co-workers were unworthy of their jobs.

She made her managers mad while he made half the company mad.

Re: We read the paper that forced Timnit Gebru out of Google

#464

Post by UncleMeat » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 3:45 PM UTC

ur-whale wrote: post #422

eecks wrote: post #410

AI ethics research is funny. It's obviously important but it's also kind of ... obvious. I am surprised they get paid so much. * Lots of processing uses more energy.. * Large amounts of data might contain bad data (garbage in, garbage out) * Wealthy countries/communities have the most 'content' online so less wealthy countries/communities will be unrepresented. here's some more: * AI being forced to chose between two…

>AI ethics research is funny. Calling "AI ethics" research makes it feel like it's actual science. It's in practice much closer to "social science" than actual science. And just like "social science" it isn't funny at all but rather a giant hoax.

She's got a PhD in CS from Stanford. She is published in CS conferences. Even if you want to shit on the social sciences for some reason, it is clear that this work is computer science.

Re: We read the paper that forced Timnit Gebru out of Google

#465

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 3:48 PM UTC

UncleMeat wrote: post #462

derangedHorse wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always found it funny how we treat companies like Google as imaginary people with no single individual bearing responsibility. To be fair, some people are aware of the people involved like Jeff Dean, but I look forward to a shift in the future where individuals within companies are as popular and held to the same standards as individuals within politics. Some of these corporate individuals already seem to have j…

> With respect to this particular case of Timnit Gebru, it sounds like she was already on her way to being let go. This is just wild speculation and part of a frustrating pattern where all sorts of questionable behaviors by authorities are justified by other unrelated properties of the victims.

[deleted]

Re: We read the paper that forced Timnit Gebru out of Google

#466

Post by oblio » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 3:51 PM UTC

ur-whale wrote: post #422

eecks wrote: post #410

AI ethics research is funny. It's obviously important but it's also kind of ... obvious. I am surprised they get paid so much. * Lots of processing uses more energy.. * Large amounts of data might contain bad data (garbage in, garbage out) * Wealthy countries/communities have the most 'content' online so less wealthy countries/communities will be unrepresented. here's some more: * AI being forced to chose between two…

>AI ethics research is funny. Calling "AI ethics" research makes it feel like it's actual science. It's in practice much closer to "social science" than actual science. And just like "social science" it isn't funny at all but rather a giant hoax.

The most important problems in life are ill-defined.

We still need to work at solving them, with the limited means we have.

If we'd only work with hard sciences, life would never get better.

Many things in our lives have advanced based on what could be considered guesses (for example capitalism doesn't really have a rigorously defined mathematical model, yes, they are some hand-wavy explanations but nothing you'd put in a solid math or physics paper).

Re: We read the paper that forced Timnit Gebru out of Google

#467

Post by qsort » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 3:52 PM UTC

ionwake wrote: post #445

qsort wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Playing the devil's advocate here, I'm with you that half of AI ethics is obvious and the other half is wrong, but is't it the goal of the field to try and give meaning to things that aren't obviously well defined? To make an example that's en vogue right now, AI explainability. Nobody even has a definition of what it means for a model to be explainable (is a linear regression "more explainable" than ML? isn't Google…

Sorry to ask, but I don't understand the points you are making. Could you please elaborate on them? I had trouble with the last 2 paragraphs. Thanks

AI explainability is a concept that's being thrown around frequently these days; it revolves around the idea that machine learning models should be "explainable", that is, their predictions should be traceable not just to the mathematical operations that define it, but also to some properties of the input which should be understandable by a human.

While I won't deny that the concept is interesting, it's terribly difficult to understand what it would translate to, technically speaking. It's true that machine learning models make predictions that are hard to check (and sometimes even understand), but they aren't inherently "less explainable" than even the simplest statistical models, like linear regressions. For example, it's pretty weird to be angry that "ML is not explainable" but to be okay with things like Google search that have literally zero transparency.

My main problem with it is that people with poor understanding of computer science and math in general - let alone machine learning - throw around the term like it's obvious what they mean, when their real goal is generating social media clout in the case of journalists and influencers, or, more darkly, to enforce political control of the industry in the case of politicians.

Re: We read the paper that forced Timnit Gebru out of Google

#468

Post by free_rms » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 3:52 PM UTC

qsort wrote: post #428

eecks wrote: post #410

AI ethics research is funny. It's obviously important but it's also kind of ... obvious. I am surprised they get paid so much. * Lots of processing uses more energy.. * Large amounts of data might contain bad data (garbage in, garbage out) * Wealthy countries/communities have the most 'content' online so less wealthy countries/communities will be unrepresented. here's some more: * AI being forced to chose between two…

Playing the devil's advocate here, I'm with you that half of AI ethics is obvious and the other half is wrong, but is't it the goal of the field to try and give meaning to things that aren't obviously well defined? To make an example that's en vogue right now, AI explainability. Nobody even has a definition of what it means for a model to be explainable (is a linear regression "more explainable" than ML? isn't Google…

Yes, a linear regression is explainable. You know what your features represent, and the regression puts a straight-up co-efficient on each of them.

You can look at the weights you trained, see how strongly your input features contribute to the output prediction, and say things like "if all else is equal, 25-49 males are 0.08 likely to click on this ad".

Deep nets aren't explainable in that way, even if you devoted a lot of effort. Maybe someone will come up with a novel method for doing it but as far as I know the best we can do is statistics about what the net's likely to predict.

Re: We read the paper that forced Timnit Gebru out of Google

#469

Post by mlthoughts2018 » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 3:53 PM UTC

rbanffy wrote: post #463

mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not surprising. On Twitter there is a strong cancel culture to irrationally oppose anything that fails to unquestioningly accept “wokeness” narratives. Critical thinking and evaluation of evidence is not really permitted. Twitter is more about trying to look (publicly) like you affiliate with this or that celebrity, so the regular person can feel some sense of patronage to their chosen circle of intellectuals…

The basic difference is that she implied I&D work at Google was ineffective while he implied half his co-workers were unworthy of their jobs. She made her managers mad while he made half the company mad.

I would say she did much more than imply - she wrote a workplace email imploring her coworkers to stop doing their jobs - something that would get you fired anywhere, any time. I also think you’re overstating Damore’s claims and you’re taking the interpretation or reaction to his claims to be equivalent to the claims themselves.

The claims themselves, that innate biological differences between men and women can partly account for their different representation in hiring in certain professions, is pretty much beyond dispute and has so much academic research supporting it that it’s pure gaslighting to treat someone like they are sexist or discriminating or biased for saying so. Note this has to do with factors that lead to representation in certain fields, and is not a statement about whether people of a given gender actually perform jobs in that field in any better or worse way.

Both Gebru and Damore are pushing agenda-based interpretations of existing facts, and both are doing so in ways that are not appropriate for a professional workplace.

I am glad at least to see that Google handled both situations relatively consistently, given how extremely similar in scope and impact Gebru’s comments are to Damore’s.

Re: We read the paper that forced Timnit Gebru out of Google

#470

Post by e_proxus » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 3:54 PM UTC

mustuhfa wrote: post #412

textgel wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A word you seem to have no reservations about using against your opponents just from a quick search of your comment history. Why such outrage when it's turned back on your own sacred cows?

Why are you assuming anything about me? You realise I e used the word toxic in my whole comment history only related to this topic right? I, like many others, dont like the way she deals with people. It is toxic. You call a toxic person, a toxic person. Ample evidence for it. Its not outrage, its just facts.

Can you provide said evidence? The article linked above by a throwaway account didn’t contain anything I would label as toxic.