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Staff disquiet as Alan Turing Institute faces identity crisis

theguardian.com

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Re: Staff disquiet as Alan Turing Institute faces identity crisis

#71

Post by coolhand2120 »

tonyarkles wrote: post #44
bell-cot wrote: post #24

Lots of talk about Alan Turing's "legacy" being at stake, "cornerstones", and such - when the story admits that the Institute is only 11 years old. And that the gov't cut & pasted Turing's name onto the front door, 60 years after his death. And trying to read the article - the narcissistic Dilbert-speak never stops. Theory: The ATI was founded purely as an exercise in pretentious political posturing. And even on Day…

And uhhh... while us computer science types know him for vast contributions to our field... the biggest contribution that the UK Government likely cared about at the time was a massive contribution to (inter)national security and defence!

Right? I had a picture of Turing on my wall long before this institute existed and it will hang there long after no matter what these fools do.

Re: Staff disquiet as Alan Turing Institute faces identity crisis

#72

Post by Animats »

"ATI has recently notified about 50 staff – or approximately 10% of its workforce – that they are at risk of redundancy and is shutting down projects related to online safety, tackling the housing crisis and reducing health inequality."

Why did they have projects in those areas at all?

Re: Staff disquiet as Alan Turing Institute faces identity crisis

#73

Post by Fade_Dance »

astrange wrote: post #69
rhubarbtree wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AKA academics. A lot of academic researchers who couldn’t get jobs elsewhere ended up there. The org is fundamentally dysfunctional according to an insider I spoke to. They blamed leadership. They should have isolated it from academia - no hires from universities allowed, only hiring people who had previously worked in industry for the last few years.

You can get a lot of valuable work out of "unmanageable" academics if you figure out how to manage them. That's most of the secret of early Google's success. If we knew anything about the NSA it'd probably be how they work too. Now this may be difficult in the UK because all jobs pay two quid a year, you have to live in a closet somewhere with a name like Pennyfarthing-upon-Longbottoms, and you can't get air conditio…

Renaissance Technologies as well. One of the top quant trading firms, with a bit of a mythical aura around them, was specifically seeded with academics, and it also has an academic-style internal environment (vs other quant funds, which also hire academics but leave most of the culture at the door).

Also seeded with NSA talent, with a founder who worked in academia and codebreaking, just to make your comment even more relevant.

Re: Staff disquiet as Alan Turing Institute faces identity crisis

#74

Post by troad »

homefree wrote: post #47
Temporary_31337 wrote: post #4

When it was founded in 2014 it was criticized as yet another glass building in London (technically a floor in this case) in a very prestigious location. And indeed as you could a lot of the funding went into the building, maintenance, events/catering and you could see random freeloaders loosely associated with the Institute using the space as a free coworking space. I think since the beginning, the PhD funding was gr…

This is sort of the problem with nonprofits and NGOs generally - they have bad incentives, are easily corrupted, and attract people that don't create any value. It's the communist form of a company and shares similar failures. IMO we're better off just not having them for the most part.

The purpose of most non-profits would not make any sense as a company, and is not easily amenable to being measured in terms of 'value'. What value is feeding poor people? Technically negative, as that food could have been sold for a profit. But that is of course not a useful metric here.

I agree that it is difficult to align incentives for non-profits, but turning them into companies would simply add a profit motive and an obligation to shareholders on top of those difficult-to-align incentives.

The people that non-profits are accountable to (the poor, minorities, etc) are generally powerless vis-à-vis those non-profits, and there is a perpetual risk of corruption arising from that effective lack of accountability. The paying customers of a business are relatively much more powerful vis-à-vis that business. If Gmail upsets you, you switch to Fastmail; if your soup kitchen upsets you, you... what? Don't eat?

This stuff is very, very hard, and something I'm sceptical will ever be solved, least of all here on HN.

Re: Staff disquiet as Alan Turing Institute faces identity crisis

#75

Post by musicale »

Angostura wrote: post #46
nmeofthestate wrote: post #11

Reading between the lines - actually, just reading the lines - it sounds like another organisation that got infested with the kind of people who are apt to ruin organisations, and perhaps an attempt it being made to fumigate it, and they don't like that.

I’m sure exactly those words were said about Turin

Though its authenticity may be discredited in the modern AI era, many computer scientists still venerate the shroud of Turing.

Re: Staff disquiet as Alan Turing Institute faces identity crisis

#76

Post by ungreased0675 »

>In March last year more than 180 staff wrote a letter to leadership expressing “serious concerns” about the organisation’s approach to diversity after it appointed four men to senior roles.

These are not serious people interested in cutting edge AI research.

Re: Staff disquiet as Alan Turing Institute faces identity crisis

#77

Post by theossuary »

incone123 wrote: post #58
theossuary wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If he had done that work after they castrated him and drove him to suicide, sure, but that wasn't the order of events.

Had he not bothered with the work and the axis powers had been victorious, we would be executing homosexuals today. Modern threats from Russia and Iran hardly bode any better. Your reasoning that putting his name on an institution that does as much liberal arts as it does science is ok but not if it does defence work, is hard to fathom.

I don't know who you're arguing with. I simply stated that Turing met the call to protect his country, and they turned around and chemically mutilated him and drove him to suicide.

The UK is doing the same thing to queer people today; all the while pretending like they're enlightened because they slapped their victims names on their institutions.

Re: Staff disquiet as Alan Turing Institute faces identity crisis

#78

Post by wiml »

astrange wrote: post #68
Der_Einzige wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least some greek states used to assign leadership in a lottery system designed in such a way partially to avoid the issues with this... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kleroterion

Also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition I think a reasonable compromise would be to elect a top 2-3 and then choose randomly between them.

The old election system for one of the Italian city-states was fascinating along these lines - multiple rounds (like, a dozen) alternating between sortition/lot and voting. The benefit, I guess, being that the lottery rounds make strategic voting unworkable, and the voting rounds allow better candidates to be preferred over worse ones.

Re: Staff disquiet as Alan Turing Institute faces identity crisis

#79

Post by FerretFred »

gedy wrote: post #3

> "In March last year more than 180 staff wrote a letter to leadership expressing “serious concerns” about the organisation’s approach to diversity after it appointed four men to senior roles" This is part of the "identity crisis"?

Gods forbid that these four men might have been best qualified for the job, or are we reducing suitability to box-ticking again?

Re: Staff disquiet as Alan Turing Institute faces identity crisis

#80

Post by phendrenad2 »

trentnix wrote: post #31
nmeofthestate wrote: post #11

Reading between the lines - actually, just reading the lines - it sounds like another organisation that got infested with the kind of people who are apt to ruin organisations, and perhaps an attempt it being made to fumigate it, and they don't like that.

Without knowing any details, I'm guessing what's happened is the inevitable result that befalls organizations as predicted by Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy: Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bure…

This is great, I've been looking for a way to express this vague notion I had about organizations. I was thinking along the lines of "nonprofits tend to become generic donation-seeking, rent-seeking entities, keeping their original goals only nominally" but the quote above is a less harsh way to put it.
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