About Google's approach to research publication – Jeff Dean

Not really. You want to leave. The company let you leave immediately. That's not bad faith.

What would be bad is letting a disgruntled employee hanging around company accessing company's material.

I mean their statements are public

I was re-reading The Gervais Principle this past week. It really does cover this situation & what you describe as the ambiguity in the rules in Part V, “Heads I Win, Tails You Lose.”

https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2011/10/14/the-gervais-principle-...

> This is a simple and child-like example of the operation of a basic human instinct: the heads-I-win-tails-you-lose or HIWTYL (let’s pronounce that “hightail”) instinct. It is the tendency to grab more than your fair share of the rewards of success, and less than your fair share of the blame for failure.

Now whether one buys into that as literally true or not is one thing, but I think it is definitely a useful way of thinking about situations like these.

In fact, the “Golden Ticket Reconsidered” section at the link sounds somewhat like I imagined incentives within AI ethics research at Google are structured:

1. Cut a deal for performance-linked bonus for successful initiative

2. Set up a committee and charter it to collect, vet & recommend ideas

3. Drop hints & suggestions to create things that leadership favors

4. Create appropriate urgency in the work of the committee to achieve the risk-levels you want in the ideas produced.

The outcome of such a system:

> If it works, you praise everybody generously, hand out a few gift certificates, keep your bonus to yourself, and move on. If it fails, you blame the people in charge of the work for failing to consider an “obvious” (with 20/20 hindsight) issue. The chair of such a committee would likely be Clueless [a term of art in the blog series], his appointment being a false honor — a case of being set up take a fall

Further on, the author brings up the “Hanlon Dodge.” Dean’s characterization of Gebru’s termination (“resignation”) seems quite like that to me.

> Is that what you truly believe I did above? That I am labeling you, and think you to be a white supremacist?

Looked like it to me, an uninvolved curious third party.

> the very real reality that these are uncomfortable conversations

Huh, that's what the poster that you replied to said. Weird that you got all up in their grill about it.

Let me just attempt to paraphrase the initiating series of comments, seeking only to illustrate how your comments looked to me, not attempting to do justice to the full meaning of each commenter.

nickff > advice on how the manager should do power dynamics

saagarjha > "strange power dynamic" [followed by lots of savvy commentary, irrelevant to my point here]

free_rms > CRT is all about power dynamics. That's the point. I find it exhausting, but me being exhausted is not the point, the point is that it's about power. [bit of a reductionist take on the parent comment, but probably correct?]

dvtrn > Are you exhausted because, as a beneficiary of oppression, you'd rather the oppression continue? Or is it because you're just too lazy to care about fairness?

free_rms > See, I dunno where you got that I'm an oppressor, where did this threat come from?

Yikes! And free_rms didn't even say that your implication that she/he is an oppressor was wrong, nor were they defensive about it. They just said that it's exhausting! I mean, it would be! Who would not be exhausted by that, whether or not it's a fair accusation!

I mean... now, at the bottom of this thread, you imply that you were seeking to know more, and not trying to imply that the exhaustion is evidence of being a bad person. Okay, I believe you, and nothing in your first comment belies that reading (though some of the intervening comments, hmn not so sure). But I don't think it's the natural read of what you said, at least it wasn't the natural read for me.

Me personally, btw, I dunno what CRT is, so in my privileged ignorance (enabled, of course, by my general white privilege) I'm immune to the exhaustion. I read this whole thread to see if I could learn something useful. Not so far, though I don't regret the time spent.

I dunno, is this helpful? Maybe I'm not being helpful.

Her contributions to the exchange were certainly unprofessionally hostile (“I don’t have time for this.”), but in and of itself that sort of behavior isn’t a real problem. The actual problem is that as a person with a large following, her hostility precipitated harassment by her followers that ultimately drove Lecun from Twitter. For someone on the receiving end there isn’t a meaningful distinction between whether someone harasses them directly or whether they incite harassment by others.

From what I’ve read about Gebru and this situation it doesn’t seem implausible to me that had she identified the reviewers she would have named them in a public venue and characterized their criticisms as being driven by discriminatory bias or an intent to suppress her work. Obviously nobody is going to present criticism, regardless of whether the criticism is legitimate, if that is a possible consequence.