About Google's approach to research publication – Jeff Dean • Hacker News Board

Re: About Google's approach to research publication – Jeff Dean

#581

Post by that_guy_iain » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 10:58 AM UTC

zaksoup wrote: post #288

that_guy_iain wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, if someone had to use HR to give feedback on anything, I would be more concerned as to why they couldn't say it directly to me. HR wouldn't have made the final decision here, it seems other departments did. HR was just how someone felt it was safe to communicate that feedback, which for me is a major issue in a workplace.

I think there's a place for HR to help somebody give feedback about social or work-style issues. If somebody has a track record of getting defensive with face-to-face feedback it might be useful to have a manager present as a mediator and go through a formal process. That's just not the same as giving scientific feedback in the review process for research and shouldn't be in the way there.

I think you're missing the massive point that someone thought that doing it in a non-anonymous way would have resulted in retribution. That is not defensive, it's offensive. You seem to be missing the fact that the woman seems quite happy to try and bury people over seemed transgressions.

Someone thought they HAD to goto HR to provide the feedback because no other way was safe. If you want to act about the scientifc review process, that should never happen and when it does there should be serious action taken.

Re: About Google's approach to research publication – Jeff Dean

#582

Post by geofft » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 1:01 PM UTC

oefrha wrote: post #549

geofft wrote: post #536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BTW, a couple more examples of Googlers saying this isn't a firm deadline by any means and one-day reviews are quite permissible: https://twitter.com/william_fitz/status/1335004771573354496 https://twitter.com/mena_gonzalo/status/1335066989191106561 (an intern!)

Papers differ. A short, straightforward, low-impact paper on a non-controversial topic could probably be reviewed in a glance or even rubberstamped. A long, complex, high-impact paper on a controversial topic (or worse, a paper with a fundamental conflict of interest) might take a long time and definitely can't be rubberstamped. The paper at question seems to fall under the latter category? It's like skipping a stop…

I think the "skipping a stop sign" analogy doesn't quite work because there was someone around - someone had to approve it, and furthermore, the fact of the late submission and shortened approval is recorded in the review system. If they wanted to tell people "Hey, in the future, don't do that," they could. There'd be more of an argument there if the common case was that, say, people ignored the system and submitted anyway and hoped nobody would notice.

(... Also, comparing this rule to our overpoliced society where everyone commits some sort of crime and the police just choose who they go after kind of reinforces my point about unfairness. Sure, it may have been strategically wrong for her to not do everything by the book, but if so, it's very interesting that the in-house ethicist has to play by all the rules to not get fired and the practitioners can safely skip them.)

Anyway, the culpability for rubber-stamping this paper is on the person who rubber-stamped it, given that short approvals are commonplace. Saying "You should have known that this approval didn't really count, so it's your fault for going through the normal process and not realizing it should have been abnormal" is nonsense. That's literally the job of the reviewer, and if the reviewer can't do that, someone else needs to fulfill that role. At worst, if they told her on day one "Your job is publishing high-impact papers with fundamental conflicts of interest with the company, so everything needs detailed review from X in addition to the usual process," that would be different. But they didn't. Better yet, they could have flagged her in the publication review system as needing extra review. There were lots of options available to Google if they weren't trying to make up rules after the fact to censor a researcher.

And in any case, she gave advance courtesy notice of the planned work: https://twitter.com/timnitgebru/status/1335018694913699840 Someone could have said something then. They didn't.

Re: About Google's approach to research publication – Jeff Dean

#583

Post by mostafab » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 1:30 PM UTC

nickff wrote: post #224

UncleMeat wrote: post #109

Earlier 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…

As a manager, if someone gives an ultimatum, you basically have to fire them. There's no real option; Ben Horowitz covered it somewhere, but the bottom line is that if you yield, you've given up all control.

Can you post a reference? Some people are doing a lot of ultimatum with me these times

Re: About Google's approach to research publication – Jeff Dean

#584

Post by UncleMeat » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 1:31 PM UTC

kps wrote: post #367

UncleMeat wrote: post #109

Earlier 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…

I’ve only ever done the paper review process twice. In both cases I got it approved concurrently with submission to a conference. Other googlers have similar stories.

Re: About Google's approach to research publication – Jeff Dean

#585

Post by UncleMeat » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 1:33 PM UTC

jariel wrote: post #512

Ar-Curunir wrote: post #490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> when really their starting point is 'silence' and they really don't have to do anything at all. They can't have their cake and eat it too; if they want hire people to do AI ethics research, and then censor them for doing their job, then they should get called out for ethics-washing, which is exactly what's happening. I don't know why so many people love to defend power, especially when that power is not benevolent.

"and then censor them for doing their job" This is false. The requirement for a fairly light review process, and asking for more, truthful, factual and contextualizing information to be disclosed is not censorship . Nobody is suppressing research, or even asking that specific opinions or results be changed. The commenter above used the term 'draconian' to refer to this process, which is just superlatively false. "I d…

But they didn’t ask for more factual and contextualizing information. She wasn’t given a chance to revise the paper to include that. It was just canned.

Re: About Google's approach to research publication – Jeff Dean

#586

Post by UncleMeat » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 1:43 PM UTC

jariel wrote: post #256

UncleMeat wrote: post #109

Earlier 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…

"and unexpected roadblocked at the last second " This is a essentially false. The author submitted the paper the day before publishing, given there at least was some form of standard review - the actions by Google could not be construed as 'roadblock'. There is no 'roadblocking' and the review was certainly not 'unexpected. The constant misrepresentation of the facts in this situation is harmful for those ostensibly…

I’ve personally submitted papers for this form of review on the same timeline that she did. No problems. So no, I don’t consider the method by which her paper was rejected to be normal practice.

Re: About Google's approach to research publication – Jeff Dean

#587

Post by mostafab » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 3:41 PM UTC

acituan wrote: post #461

freeone3000 wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to have an exceptionally narrow view of research; notably, that you can't start with a thing you want to prove, which is in fact step 2 of the elementary-school scientific method. You disagree with the conclusions, so like Google, you have retroactively declared the research incompetent. You seem to think this is within their rights, but this renders any future research from them irrevocably tainted -- from…

> notably, that you can't start with a thing you want to prove, which is in fact step 2 of the elementary-school scientific method. On the contrary, I totally agree with you on this, researcher needs to pick a particular part of the combinatorially explosive knowledge space to explore, in that they get to be opinionated on what hypothesis they want to prove. What they can't do is however to ignore opponent research t…

Ignoring future Google research in ethics has low-risks, as top ethics talent will certainly avoid working for Google, and prefer academic freedom elsewhere (where reviewers are external, to avoid CoI).

Re: About Google's approach to research publication – Jeff Dean

#588

Post by mandevil » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 3:57 PM UTC

nickff wrote: post #224

UncleMeat wrote: post #109

Earlier 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…

As a manager, if someone gives an ultimatum, you basically have to fire them. There's no real option; Ben Horowitz covered it somewhere, but the bottom line is that if you yield, you've given up all control.

As a manager, your job is to manage people to get results, and if you are insecure enough about managing those people that you feel you have to enforce some sort of idiotic one size fits all policy then you shouldn't be a manager and should resign yourself, immediately.

Re: About Google's approach to research publication – Jeff Dean

#589

Post by whimsicalism » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 4:03 PM UTC

geofft wrote: post #582

oefrha wrote: post #549

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Papers differ. A short, straightforward, low-impact paper on a non-controversial topic could probably be reviewed in a glance or even rubberstamped. A long, complex, high-impact paper on a controversial topic (or worse, a paper with a fundamental conflict of interest) might take a long time and definitely can't be rubberstamped. The paper at question seems to fall under the latter category? It's like skipping a stop…

I think the "skipping a stop sign" analogy doesn't quite work because there was someone around - someone had to approve it, and furthermore, the fact of the late submission and shortened approval is recorded in the review system. If they wanted to tell people "Hey, in the future, don't do that," they could. There'd be more of an argument there if the common case was that, say, people ignored the system and submitted…

> Anyway, the culpability for rubber-stamping this paper is on the person who rubber-stamped it, given that short approvals are commonplace. Saying "You should have known that this approval didn't really count, so it's your fault for going through the normal process and not realizing it should have been abnormal" is nonsense. That's literally the job of the reviewer, and if the reviewer can't do that, someone else needs to fulfill that role.

This is key, and I don't see it being mentioned as much in other comments. It was approved.

Re: About Google's approach to research publication – Jeff Dean

#590

Post by mandevil » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 4:10 PM UTC

pgodzin wrote: post #319

UncleMeat wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't (or wasn't) a review process for scholarship. Oodles of people within Google (even within Brain) have gone through this process and it seems to have always been the case that it just checks for things like PR problems, IP leaks, etc. Further, she claims that initially she was not allowed to even see the contents of the criticisms, only that the paper needed to be withdrawn. Let's say you were working on a…

Seems like part of this was that the paper represented a PR problem

And their handling of it has only given them more PR problems.