It is unfortunate that way too many commenters on a prior threads dismissed her as a some twitter personality and trivialized her body of work in spite of the fact that she is well regarded and reputable in the ML community.
It's becoming clear a rising number of her colleagues are in support of what she was seeking to publish. A reviewer on reddit mentioned the authors have plenty of time to make revisions if there were issues with the content. Not to mention, supposedly the internal reviewing processes are usually limited to the extent of sensitive disclosure and rarely the contents of the literature. Yet, emails from Google leadership seems to imply retraction was needed, providing very little reason.
The opaqueness of the internal feedback and expectations are highly suspicious and I was suprised to see no one bothered to question it. People have been bringing up the 2 weeks, yet internal Brain researchers have refuted that have never seen a policy like this excercised. It does appear as an attempt to suppress an important paper that was critical of another colleagues work (BERT) and the employer's intended research goals. It's similar to the kind of pushback Greenwald most recently received - yet the reactions here have been distinctly flipsidded - in support towards Google executives no less and unsympathetic to the researcher.
Body of work aside, she absolutely is an aggressive-ranging-into-toxic Twitter personality and a very strident proponent of a divisive and dogmatic strain of diversity advocacy.
Her spat against Yann LeCun felt very wrong to me. That is not how fellow academics/researchers should treat each other.
Maybe Yann LeCun was wrong, the way she conveyed the message disregarding any knowledge he might have on this was definitely not civil.
She could have chosen a different way to address the complaints here, not by getting overtly confrontational. Maybe the review group got it wrong, maybe they were right. But that is not how you handle disputes.
I agree that people should try to be kind and charitable to each other, and this conversation didn't show that.
That said, I think we also have to be cognizant of the way "civility" is not objective/neutral, often relies on codifying the norms of a dominant majority, and also preserves the status quo.
It might not have been very "civil" for instance when Google employees walked out of the office, but I also don't think it was "civil" when Google paid $90 million to someone fired for sexual harassment.
Sometimes big problems can't be met just with civil discourse, it's why many of us still voted for Biden (for instance) even after he told Trump to "shut up."
What about paying $90 million to the key person in creation of android? Honestly, he is a scumbag, but that doesn’t nullify his contribution to google (?) it’s not that he was paid for sexual harassment, it’s that he got paid for being creator of one of the most important products in the world.
He sold Android to Google in 2005 for a hefty sum, and he drew a large salary and stock package every year since. Why in the world would he need a $90M exit package on top of all that when he's being fired for severe workplace misconduct? He already got paid for those contributions.
Because Android is arguably worth a hell of a lot more than the $50 million + salary that he received and if they didn't kick him some money, they would never be able to make a similar acquisition deal in the future. Nobody would sell a technology like that for that little and Google would have to forever compete with future-Androids.
If they had fired him under more favorable circumstances his payout would have been significantly higher.
He sold the company to them in 2005. If he didn't think that was a fair price he wouldn't have agreed to the sale. That was when he was compensated for his creation. After that, he was compensated through salary.
I don't understand your point of view here. If I sell something to someone else, I'm not expecting to get more payout for it fifteen years down the line unless some kind of residual was explicitly negotiated in the original sale agreement. Acquisitions would never happen at all if the acquiring company was on the hook for unbounded amounts of money decades later just because they made it successful. This point of view seems very un-businesslike. Andy Rubin was not owed that $90M, it shouldn't have been paid to him, and Google has admitted to its mistake and will not be paying out in similar cases going forward.
1. It was an aquihire. Usually there's some performance secondary payout strings attached.
2. It doesn't matter what their deal was. It matters what public perception is. I'm talking entirely about public perception.
Regardless of what their deal was, Google has to send a signal that _impacts future deals_. If the general developer public thinks that Android was acquired for too little, then we will all be reluctant to sell our projects to Google. That's the whole point.
It has nothing to do with him thinking Google treated him fairly. It has to do with whether we think we could keep a company going long enough to make more money than his payout on _our_ work.
Google needs to make more Android-like deals in the future.
And all of that needs to be weighed against the huge worldwide negative PR resulting from the payout, the global walkout of tens of thousands of employees expressing their anger with the decision, and the depressive effect on hiring that has for specific targeted groups. You can't just analyze the payout in isolation; you have to analyze its sum total effects. Turns out, the payment wasn't worth it. Google has said as much and won't be doing it again in the future.
> If the general developer public thinks that Android was acquired for too little, then we will all be reluctant to sell our projects to Google. That's the whole point.
I'm still not understanding the point here. If you agree to sell your company for price $X, it doesn't matter who you're selling to; you've sold for that amount. If you think you should get more than $X, then don't sell to Google, or anyone else for that matter, for only $X. If you want less up front but more money over time as part of an incentive structure, then negotiate for that as part of the acquisition (which Andy Rubin did do and was paid out for). All of this is independent from a severance payout fully 15 years after the acquisition.
> Google needs to make more Android-like deals in the future.
I think you'd be hardpressed to find a founder that wouldn't sell to Google for what they consider the right price if he didn't get $90M. Do you think any football players don't want to play for the Patriots, because Aaron Hernandez wasn't supported by them? People get that all bets are off with criminally poor behavior.
Also, take a step back and consider how there was a worldwide walkout of 10k+ employees. That wouldn't have happened if Google's hands were tied here and they had been contractually forced to pay that money out to Andy Rubin. The outrage was because they knew about his misconduct and yet still chose to let him "retire" and give him a big amount of extra money, rather than firing him and giving him the $0 he was legally entitled to.
In settling on terms favorable to two of the men, Google protected its own interests. The company avoided messy and costly legal fights, and kept them from working for rivals as part of the separation agreements.
Real life isn't a melodrama. I suspect there's plenty of nuance here.
You shouldn't get severance packages if you're fired for egregious misbehavior. Google has admitted it was a mistake and will not be paying out severance packages in these situations going forward.
> "civility" is not objective/neutral, often relies on codifying the norms of a dominant majority, and also preserves the status quo.
In this case, the norm in question was respectful argumentation grounded in empirical evidence. Why does it matter that that norm belongs to a dominant majority?
> Why does it matter that that norm belongs to a dominant majority?
It matters
a. if the norm is actually universally applied - I find that this norm of respectful argumentation is not universally applied.
Remember: this is a twitter argument entirely unrelated to what Timnit is under discussion for now. Elon Musk and Linus have had unrelated arguments where they engaged in very offensive argumentation (calling their opponents pedophiles, telling them to kill themselves) without any evidence, yet I rarely see these issues brought up on unrelated issues about them. But for Timnit, it's a scarlet letter she has to bear.
b. I think we substantially underestimate how frustrating it might be to be a scientist of color where people are constantly discounting your expertise (because, yes, Timnit is an expert.) I'm sure seeing that same sentiment for the ith+1 time can evoke strong emotions and we are not necessarily seeing the context.
Regardless, maybe not an incredible look for Timnit but not super huge in the context of a large body of work.
I've tried to piece together the debate with LeCun, but I can't find anything she said that seemed all that bad. It seemed like, if anything, she just simply wouldn't let him off the hook. And it's very possible I missed several tweets that were really toxic...
Gebru did not engage LeCun in a reasoned debate. She said he should stop taking, listen to her and her allies (and only them). She said "Let us lead here and you follow" and "Just listen", essentially telling the inventor of convolutional neural nets that it was now his role to sit and shut up.
That's how woke Twitter works: you define the group of people who are allowed to speak as only you and your allies. You pursue the meta-argument whenever someone not in your group attempts to speak.
> Let us lead [here] (I'm assuming "her" was a typo) and you follow.
Aggressive, sure, but also seems:
a. reasonable for AI ethics experts to "lead" in issues surrounding AI ethics
b. not the cardinal sin of discussion that it appears to be viewed as here.
You'll see people here defending Linus or Elon Musk for saying objectively way worse stuff than this.
Somehow Timnit is defined by this discussion, but Elon isn't defined by calling a rescue diver a pedophile with no evidence or Linus telling someone to kill themselves.
OK, but imagine that you are the expert in your field and you have work for this person, who controls your career and compensation, who has a tendency to say that domain experts need to shut up and defer to her.
If the domain is AI ethics, then Yann is not a domain expert, she is. Indeed, it seems like this exact expansion of Yann's "domain" is what she is frustrated by, and you are playing exactly into it.
> the expert in your field and you have work for this person, who controls your career and compensation
Must be harder when your CEO boss has a tendency to call domain experts pedophiles, yet I see Musk praised frequently here.
I'm not the one saying people who criticize "domain experts" deserve to be fired. I think both are within the realm of discourse and shouldn't be retaliated against.
I think your sounds ask her actual reports what they think of her management (hint: essentially all of them have said "she's the best manager I've ever had" or the equivalent in the past week).
If you work in an area that is written off, you need a strong advocate, and from everything I've seen, she was that strong advocate both for herself and for those who reported to her.
> Even amidst of world wide protests people don’t hear our voices and try to learn from us, they assume they’re experts in everything. Let us lead her and you follow. Just listen.
She says talking down to an actual expert in ML who gave an opinion on ML
"Ethics" does not really encompass the topic. The topic was that a net trained mostly on white people's faces upsamples a downsampled photo of a half-black man (Barack Obama) into a generic white face. LeCun's point is this is no surprise. If you trained it on leopards, it would upsample pixelated human faces into leopard faces instead. LeCun is an expert on how these nets work.
And nowhere did Timnit disagree that the cause he identified was a cause of bias in the system. Her contention is that there are others, and reducing the problem to just "get better datatsets" is a bad idea (and a way for researchers to abdicate responsibility).
To use an example that comes up: do we solve the ethical qualms of a system that predicts incarceration rate based on facial structure by getting a better dataset? Is it even ethical to attain such a "better" dataset, what does "better" even mean in the context?
Not sure why you are being downvoted. I see how reasoned your response is to what I said. It is a clear contrast to how the AI ethics researcher engaged in the Twitter thread. Two totally different hypothetical conversations:
A: Training data is a cause of this bias
B: But not the only cause
A: True
vs.
A: Training data is a cause of this bias
B: I am so sick of this. You are not permitted to speak.
A: I am deleting my Twitter account.
Any support for Dr. Gebru seems to be against the HN ethos at the moment, I have some theories as to why ;)
> You are not permitted to speak.
I really don't think this is a fair reading of her tweet. I don't see any way to read her actual tweet claiming Yann can't speak at all on the subject. I do see a plea to engage more with domain experts (which to reiterate: my understanding is that Yann has a history of ignoring on the subject)
Reading these threads is really disappointing. I can in may ways already empathize with Timnit -- its exhausting seeing people who are typically bright just completely miss the point.
But if you change to a different topic like privacy then these same people really get all of this nuance that they completely seem to miss here...
And plenty of people attacking him. Every Linus thread has a massive debate about him being an asshole. Just like in this thread there are plenty on each side. Where’s the double standard?
I was thinking threads from before his big "shit, i'm an asshole, sorry. gonna take time off" phase. Maybe I have a selective memory, but I'm remembering threads from those couple years before and after Susan Fowler and Uber's culture implosion. It felt like there was a shift in how the whole industry felt about brilliant assholes around then (thank god).
I think the threads in articles specifically about Linus are better comparisons to this, rather than articles about computing that involve him. But, hey, folk like Torvalds and Gebru both really rub me the wrong way, so it's reasonable that I might be selectively remembering threads where HN said I'm right and that he's an asshole (and I did a lazy googling of "linus torvalds asshole site:news.ycombinator.com" which is biased too), so who knows.
Agreed, there's even an article floating around that purports to summarize the most offensive tweets. In my opinion, this whole thing is being vastly blown out of proportion.
By the judgement of her colleagues inside google this was not a normal internal review process, and according to her own writing, she tried to engage with the review process but was blocked.
Also, to quote LeCunn:
“I’d like to ask everyone to please stop attacking each other via Twitter or other means. In particular, I’d like everyone to please stop attacking @timnitGebru and everyone who has been critical of my posts… Farewell everyone.”
If she was truly removed for her abrasiveness, we would have a completely separate discussion entirely. What transpired, from both her disclosures and Google's leaderships response, has justifiably reigned in a lot of concern and skeptism from the broader research community.
The case being made in this thread is that that was how they got her, not why they fired her. I know none of the facts and am perfectly ignorant about this situation, but I have seen people get kicked out for semi-justifiable surface reasons that were totally unrelated to why their superiors didn't like them. So a-priori, the theory that the difference between someone's not-so-significant faults being tolerated or not being tolerated, is their willingness to comply with the goals that for whatever reason the leadership doesn't feel they can make explicit, is a reasonable suggestion.
> The case being made in this thread is that that was how they got her, not why they fired her
Conjecturing what could be the real reason, person A conjecturing why a person B does what he does (hates our freedom, for example) and why one should not take B's own explanation of his own actions -- these to me are an avoidable form of discourse. Nothing good comes of it other than an obligate outrage.
Well, refusing to consider the idea that someone might do something with more than zero layers of subtlety... would lead to falling for every trick anybody ever tries to play. ;) A more appropriate response would be to admit that it's not easy to tell the difference, and maybe, if the interlocutor cares enough, to do some research to determine whether or not it's still suspicious once the facts are known. One example of some facts that could resolve or strengthen the suspicion would be: How many other emails of equal or greater verbal strength were sent at Google, but then not followed up by dismissal?
I've seen way worse emails. Doesn't seem like a fireable offense to me. At least I've seen people not fired for worse and never seen anyone fired for something similar (or less).
As someone I saw post on Twitter relate to this... the best way to discriminate is to have rules, but apply them discriminately. So you can always point to the rule, but it really only applies to certain people.
> he best way to discriminate is to have rules, but apply them discriminately. So you can always point to the rule, but it really only applies to certain people.
And HN falls for it every single time.
Oh yeah, we totally didn't fire this Googler for the unionization push, it was because he looked at one of his bosses' publicly available calendar.
Ah yes, Google, where behavior befitting a manager such as sexual harassment (which is found to be credible by internal investigation) gets you $90 Million exit packages (Andy Rubin), or silence (Amit Singhal).
> "You are not worth having any conversations about this, since you are not someone whose humanity... is acknowledged or valued in this company," she said in the email.
"Stop writing your documents because it doesn't make a difference."
This was the email she sent, as a manager at the company.
> Imagine this: You’ve sent a paper for feedback to 30+ researchers, you’re awaiting feedback from PR & Policy who you gave a heads up before you even wrote the work saying “we’re thinking of doing this”, working on a revision plan figuring out how to address different feedback from people, haven’t heard from PR & Policy besides them asking you for updates (in 2 months). A week before you go out on vacation, you see a meeting pop up at 4:30pm PST on your calendar (this popped up at around 2pm). No one would tell you what the meeting was about in advance. Then in that meeting your manager’s manager tells you “it has been decided” that you need to retract this paper by next week, Nov. 27, the week when almost everyone would be out (and a date which has nothing to do with the conference process). You are not worth having any conversations about this, since you are not someone whose humanity (let alone expertise recognized by journalists, governments, scientists, civic organizations such as the electronic frontiers foundation etc) is acknowledged or valued in this company.
Thank you for the full quote, it does give it much more perspective! (It wasn't in the linked article).
If a manager within the company wants to publicly express her frustration with leadership, then this is an alright message to send — leaving aside the very implicative final sentence.
It still seems reasonable to fire anyone who sends such a message to their colleagues rather than working through the office's politics more quietly, but it also seems reasonable for staff to protest and rally behind that person in support of them.
It still seems reasonable to fire anyone who sends such a message to their colleagues rather than working through the office's politics more quietly
Can you unpack this a bit? Several employers, past and present have encouraged employees to communicate and attempt to resolve conflicts (presumably, maybe ostensibly, giving them opportunities to work it out as adults and professionals) amongst employees first as the first actionable steps. In fact, current employer has this as a point of policy for interpersonal conflicts barring severe enough circumstances where a reasonable person would say "yes this requires intervention from on high".
That said, why should it be any different in a situation such as this? I feel there may be context to your suggestion that isn't fully stated here-as to why it's reasonable to fire someone over this. Maybe there are implied parameters of just how egregious a situation has to be in your opinion that I didn't intimately tune into?
To me the final sentence reads as a continuation of the hypothetical the author is asking the reader to consider, as a metaphor for the treatment she experienced, not a direct j'accuse to the reader/recipient.
> In fact, current employer has this as a point of policy for interpersonal conflicts barring severe enough circumstances where a reasonable person would say "yes this requires intervention from on high".
I completely agree with you, but what happened here was that this manager sent this email to a large group of employees, not the specific employees she had the issue with (which would be fine!).
This email wasn't an attempt at conflict resolution, it was sharing how upset she was, at her manager, with a bunch of coworkers.
For the last sentence: in the event where one wants to complain to a large group of coworkers, I think it's pertinent to stick to the basic, unarguable facts of what occurred. Suggesting that you've been dehumanized by the company is adding fuel to a fire that you should instead be aiming to resolve privately, if you want to continue to work at the company.
And so then, this is immediately fireable? Not knowing Google's policy for corrective management, I then go back to my original question and taking in your response, why would it be reasonable to fire an individual over this?
or
Is it perhaps in fact more reasonable to fire them using this and other behavioral or disciplinary incidents? Of which-I must say, in terms this Googler, none of us are privy to
Isn't it reasonable to fire someone for dragging other employees into a personal dispute with the person's manager?
It'd be acceptable if it's a relevant party, like your skip or your manager's skip, even if it would anger your direct manager. This, however, is entirely different. It's venting your frustration to a large group of coworkers. It takes away from productivity as a whole, and is socially inappropriate.
I don't know about Google's management policies, but at most companies I've worked at, senior employees and managers are held to an even higher standard, and this would make firing a more likely choice than some type of correction.
Regardless of the hypotheticals, from what I've read, she offered an ultimatum, and they declined her ultimatum, which resulted in her being fired:
> Dr Gebru had emailed her management laying out some key conditions for removing her name from the paper, and if they were not met, she would "work on a last date" for her employment.
According to Dr Gebru, Google replied: "We respect your decision to leave Google... and we are accepting your resignation.
Isn't it reasonable to fire someone for dragging other employees into a personal dispute with the person's manager?
I absolutely do not believe it is, barring mitigating circumstances or policies that neither you nor I are privileged to access.
In most cases, this is called "venting". I have NO doubts my subordinates probably talk about me in DM or have gripes about some of my issues as their leader. But I know and have seen my direct reports be very opinionated with me in 1:1, they are very outspoken with me. One person had a moment of raw emotion, not because of something I had done but the organization at large.
And I encourage all of it because it means I can trust them to be honest with me when I need that candor, and in return, because I meet people where they are, give them room for expression and authenticity, they know they can trust me not to bring retribution upon them for being opinionated, even amongst themselves. I might not always be able to move the needle in the direction they wish, but they know I will always make sure their opinions have a voice at the leadership table-even if it means I am the one who has to take the hit for it while we continue trying to meet our mission as Ops Engineers. That's Leadership. Capital L.
Among larger groups? So what? No really, so what? Can I tell you that I am a founding and sitting member of an org wide DEI initiative and we actively encourage affinitized groups of employees to form resource groups, kvetch among themselves and present areas of contention to us to enact positive change at large? That we have two diverse members of the executive team on this initiative? That it has the full support of our board of directors and even our group of investors?
Would you believe me if I told you we had five people accept offers at the company who specifically said the reason, not one reason, the reason they accepted the offer was learning that this was something our organization has in place?
Now:
This is not most cases-granted, but I am regressing my interpretation to the mean intentionally because reacting to outliers in any direction as a default response gives room for extraneous and unnecessary harm. I default to maximizing good and giving people a voice, not looking for a reason to exclude them from making the business better for customers and employees with equal vigor.
> Isn't it reasonable to fire someone for dragging other employees into a personal dispute with the person's manager?
Microsoft last year had a similar thing, but related to sexual harassment [0]. I've never heard anyone fired as a result of airing their grievances. And to the contrary it sounds like, at least to the public media, they really tried to embrace and discuss what was at the heart of these encounters.
There's a problem at Google, and I don't think they solved it by firing this researcher.
If a manager tells anyone at their company that their humanity is not valued in the company, I would expect them to be walked out the door on the spot.
Managers act as agents of the company and the amount of legal assfucking that statement opens the company up to is enormous.
> If a manager tells anyone at their company that their humanity is not valued in the company, I would expect them to be walked out the door on the spot.
Well thank god I don't work for you. Most tech companies don't fire everyone engaging in employee activism or they would have much larger labor issues to deal with.
You can engage in employee activism without making shrill claims about how you're being treated as a subhuman. If this seems difficult then thank god I don't work with you.
She might be really great at her work but personally I would never want to work with someone like this. Even if the current issue gets resolved, this will just sow acrimony for future.
Let’s be honest, Google knew this was going to blow up and they didn’t want to have a public conversation about whether she’s “abrasive”. Whether you agree or not with what Google did, it seems clear that they wanted to fire her for a while. They made the calculation that using this as a justification would allow them to get rid of her at a PR cost that was acceptable to them. None of the comments coming out of either side should be taken at face value, what’s being said is just window dressing and justification of the real motivations.
This above is very intolerable in Corporate America. First and foremost, she works for the corporation and get paid, no matter how great she is, she has to follow the corporate culture and norms or she won't be surviving in Corporate America.
Stanford Business School professor Jeffrey Pfeffer wrote a book about this[1] in particular.
>she works for the corporation and get paid, no matter how great she is, she has to follow the corporate culture and norms
Doesn't this cut both ways? Google employed her to critique the company's ethics; she is critiquing the company's ethics - as such, she is literally doing the job she was employed to do.
If Google doesn't want that role to exist or wants a puppet to do it, why did Google employ her in the first place?
"Corporate culture" is a culture of bland, and empty niceties, with a veneer of politeness and it's 100% needed so that a large corporation can focus on getting things done without every interaction turning into twitter.
Hacker news also requires a certain amount of politeness in the way you speak and it's one of the many reasons the discourse is better than twitter.
What makes you think our discourse is better? We have plenty of low-quality comments (see this one for an example) and nearly every thread goes off-topic (like what we're discussing now).
They're free to offer a dissenting opinion, my comment was on the rhetorical flourishes around diversity advocates being "divisive", "dogmatic", uncivil are very reminiscent of that period.
I think it is very illuminating to read letters from that period, because they aren't just vitriolic racists like schools often teach. These are people trying to come off as "very reasonable", offering a civil, moderate path forward for the South, etc., etc. It's fascinating to see that rhetoric being deployed to defend what is an obvious evil and compare to who is using that rhetoric now.
I don't think that words become permanently unusable if they have been deployed once by a historical losing side... If that could happen, then pretty much every rhetorical technique would already have been burnt to the ground and salted forever by now.
But what is the conclusion we are meant to draw from the historical comparison? Accusations of belligerence have been thrown around many times in history - Soviets accusing NATO, the Allies accusing the Axis, the Axis accusing the Allies, North Korea accusing NATO, pretty much everyone accusing NATO... NATO accusing everyone else... ;) Virtually every pair of groups that don't get along exchange accusations of aggression.
In order for the comparison to be informative, it must also be accompanied by some argument about whether or not the accusations are accurate, which sort of takes us back to the original question.
Then it's a good thing I never made an argument about whether she deserved to be fired.
Top level comment said, paraphrased, "it's a shame people dismiss her as a Twitter personality when she has a highly respected body of work in the field."
My reply was to press that, in my view, she's not being dismissed as "just a Twitter personality", but rather her Twitter behavior is worthy of examination in itself.
Finally, I've never read civil rights era letters to the editor, so I'm not referencing or borrowing any specific rhetoric from there. I'm using bog standard English language words to describe the arguments and advocacies that I am seeing in the present.
I agree historical context on rhetoric can be absolutely eye opening, but your example was not a 1:1 comparison (neither the victims or actions being of equal consequence). It also reminds me of Goodwin's Law [1] where disagreements on the internet so often devolve into calling someone a Nazi (to me a '60s segregationist apologist is one or two steps removed from a Nazi).
I think I'm being pretty explicit that I'm not calling them a segregationist, but I think their rhetoric is illuminating. Not really sure how I can be more explicit on this point.
You are the one bringing up comparisons to Nazis, so it appears that you have now fallen prey to Godwin's law.
Nobody summoned you to "respond" to my comment. And you certainly didn't do that. You took a circuitous rhetorical tack that only hinted at arguments without making them. Other commenters did a fine job covering that. But you certainly felt comfortable declaring things to be "bad arguments" without having made any yourself yet.
So let me make some arguments for you to consider.
-To declare that certain people (on the basis of their minority status) have inherently privileged knowledge of boundary-less, undefined, fuzzy social dynamics is a divisive assertion. It seeks to divide authority along identity lines.
-To advocate that certain people (on the basis of their minority status) should actively be given privileged decision-making status over collective processes or structures is a divisive and dogmatic advocacy. It seeks to divide power along identity lines.
-To denounce as ethically compromised the people who disagree with you on complex open topics, such as the above two notions, is outright dogmatic. To assume one's perspective is so undeniably true that discussion can only be aggression is a dogmatic position.
I contend that all three of these dynamics are rampant in the preferred methods and among the prominent leadership of the currently en vogue Racial Justice and DEI movements (lots of crossover).
To tie it back to the start: I've observed Timnit engaging in these things, fanning these flames and boosting others who do so too.
But note that my comment implies there are other ways to advocate for diversity and justice. The broad BLM/Kendi/DiAngelo/Gebru style is not the only form and theory of diversity advocacy.
A simple alternative, for example, would be to call attention to the same problems without 1) preemptively attacking other people based on their own immutable identity characteristics, and 2) trying to draw new lines and hierarchies of privileged voice and power.
Lots of people (I suspect the majority of the sympathetic) practice this alternative. However, the louder, Timnit-aligned strain seems to enjoying social privilege in this area at this moment. How ironic.
Actually, you're right, but you're making the opposite point than you think you are. I wasn't alive in 50's or the 60's (and I was too young to even remember the 70's), so my whole life I just took for granted that what the history books had to say about racial inequalities at those times was true. It's hard to miss, though, that people are saying the exact same things today when I can look around and observe that they aren't true and haven't been at any point in my lifetime. It doesn't make me question my perspective on the world as it is today, it makes me wonder how true the history books reflected reality at that time.
How is that relevant to this discussion of her getting dismissed? It's okay to unceremoniously let her go because she is outspoken on Twitter? That's the only way your comment would seem relevant to this discussion.
Are we evaluating her as a researcher or as an activist?
I’ve read some of her research (that’s on arxiv) and it’s... not on the level that “Google AI researcher” implies. It’s good that they hire from the Humanities, but we tend to smush all academics as if they all had equal rigor and value.
Maybe she’s a great activist. Or a great cook. Being it that I’m not into activism, I can’t judge that.
----
Edit: I have to hijack my sudden spike in karma (and, I assume, visibility) to "amplify" some important research milestones in the Humanities that impact the problem of "AI ethics" taken seriously.
Gebru has a BS and MS in electrical engineering, and a PhD in computer science, specializing in artificial intelligence; all from Stanford. After receiving her MS, she worked at Apple's hardware engineering group. After her PhD, she worked Microsoft's AI research lab.
That's... surprising. I've read (really read) a handful of her papers on arxiv, and the only that isn't a gooey Problematic Studies fondue has ten coauthors (with her in 5th or 6th place). She really has the lingo down pat.
Maybe the problem is precisely that they didn't actually hire from the Humanities? Although the cynic in me thinks they just hired someone with a "SJW" discourse rather than find themselves criticized for their market strategy -- whether their use of their monopoly power is ethical.
As it stands it really sounds like they got someone to offer Yann LeCun as a scapegoat for AI products (Amazon Rekognition is infamous); these services then serve as scapegoats for police departments, which...
> Are we evaluating her as a researcher or as an activist?
I honestly don't know how to take this comment.
Are you comparing her work to cultural theorists like Baudrillard, etc.? Because a brief read through her papers and they seem to be dealing with common-sense ethical concepts, not French social critique.
Otherwise, this comment is just odd - no real specific criticism of her body of work except to suggest that it is less good than what you'd expect from a "Google AI researcher".
> Gebru is a successful "scholar" as far as the credentials game goes; I don't presume to have anything to teach her.
Again: back up your assertions or they are worthless. I'm reading her papers and have also read many of the authors you are mentioning, there is very little in common.
> Are we sure calling something "common-sense ethics" is a common-sense proposition? Are we comfortable deriving this Ought from that Is?
So your critique now is that her papers are steeped in a moral realist perspective? It seemed you were going for the dogwhistle-y "diversity hire" rhetoric, but I'd welcome any actual critique on the merits.
You're starting to sound like you're writing in good faith.
I'm not proposing a critique of her work. What I've found on arXiv reads like standard fare for its genre. Hotelling famously joined an early seminar on linear programming with Dantzig only to interject "... but the world is nonlinear!" That's not what I'm out to do -- not with this particular researcher, nor with its proxies on twitter and HN.
The scenario I'm looking at is one where the polarities are not left versus right or woke versus straight, but Humanities versus STEM. If people are to reject her kind of work -- and I'll be glad if they do, even if I'm not really willing to press them in that rejection with a proper "critique" -- then they could walk away burned by theory and postmodernism and all such crap. I'm proposing an entirely different path, or a space of different paths even.
Even when we do the response is quite often some form of "not like that" or the goalposts get moved back another 40 yards from the back of the endzone.
Because it "disrespects the veterans" in some people's eyes. Astonishing, isn't it, that the same people who found issue with Kaepernick's protest probably have never heard the name "Nate Boyer"[1] before-who is both a veteran of the armed forces, and a veteran of the NFL.
It is unfortunate that way too many commenters on a prior threads dismissed her as a some twitter personality and trivialized her body of work in spite of the fact that she is well regarded and reputable in the ML community.
Both the positive aspects of her contributions and the clear negatives of her approach were rightly pointed out by various people (as well as problems with process and politics at Google); perhaps your reading of a long and complicated morass of comments was unintentionally selective.
I think the tone on HN was markedly more critical than elsewhere and I certainly notice that the divergence in tone seems greatest when discussing black people and women.
I personally find HN to be generally liberal-leaning but not excessively so, and have noticed a welcome openness to centrist opinions that might once have been dismissed here out of hand as right-wing (and are still being dismissed elsewhere) that I take as a good sign of an increasingly aware local commentariat with respect to the excesses of the more ideological elements of the left and right.
Agreed. It feels like there is a lot of tone policing that happens around the way women and people of color talk about these issues (especially with regard to their Twitter posts) which is pretty disappointing.
The big online communities I'm a part of are twitter, reddit, hacker news, and facebook.
It's true that hacker news seems to be different from those when discussing culture war topics. With hacker news being father to the right than twitter and reddit, and more center right than my facebook feed.
One conclusion is hacker news exists in a right wing bubble. The other is that twitter and reddit exist in a left wing bubble. Given that the median voter in the last election voted for Biden, but just barely, and maybe voted for a republican senator. And even the people arguing her being let go was justified are probably pretty center or center left. I would guess your "elsewhere" exists in a ideological bubble that is much stronger than the one hacker news exists in.
> I would guess your "elsewhere" exists in a ideological bubble that is much stronger than the one hacker news exists in.
I am in a bubble where I mostly talk to college educated people and people who have educated themselves in a similar tradition or are well-read. Perhaps it is snobbish of me, but I am mostly okay with that bubble for discussion forums.
Conditioning on that type of person, who make up most people on HN, Reddit, and Twitter, HN seems like it is in a right-leaning bubble.
> Given that the median voter in the last election voted for Biden, but just barely, and maybe voted for a republican senator
Your assessment of the median voter is being super distorted by the geographic layout of the US, btw. The median voter did not vote for a republican senator.
You are self-aware enough to acknowledge you are in a bubble in that respect (as most of us are but not everybody likes to admit); you should consider going a step further and understand that the larger community you talk of ("Conditioning on that type of person, who make up most people on HN, Reddit, and Twitter") is itself a bubble that is perhaps rather more liberal leaning than society as a whole - or at least not as sympathetic to the more activist types being discussed here.
Even if in the long run it turns out your position becomes the mainstream, that isn't necessarily nearly the case now.
This is why your original "elsewhere" is being questioned as it's likely not a representative baseline in that regard.
> I am in a bubble where I mostly talk to college educated people and people who have educated themselves in a similar tradition or are well-read. Perhaps it is snobbish of me, but I am mostly okay with that bubble for discussion forums.
> Conditioning on that type of person, who make up most people on HN, Reddit, and Twitter, HN seems like it is in a right-leaning bubble.
If most of the people you talk to are college educated people who live in a city than you most definitely exist in a bubble. Remember 47% of the country voted for Trump(I doubt Hacker news came anywhere near this number). Of your friends how many voted for Trump? As an example I'm a college graduate in his 30's who lives in the city. 0% of the 20 people I talk to most often voted for Trump, and maybe 4% of the the extended 200 people I know, voted for trump. And of that 4%, 3/4ths voted for him begrudgingly. And I live in a southern state that voted for Trump. So when you look at hacker news and encounter opinions that are different than your own it might seem like Hacker News exists in a bubble, but I think it's far more likely your life exists in a bubble that's stronger than hacker news.
> Your assessment of the median voter is being super distorted by the geographic layout of the US, btw. The median voter did not vote for a republican senator.
The median senate voter would have voted for a Republican but that's mostly because California and New York didn't have senate races this year.
Why am I getting so many comments like this - I am pretty explicitly stating that I am aware that I am in a "bubble", my social circle isn't perfectly representative of America. That said, I think that restricting the forums I frequent to one's with primarily people who are well educated is a defensible practice.
My claim is this: among the sort of forums where people are actually having discussions about Timnit Gebru's firings (ie. highly educated crowds of people who pay attention to the goings ons in AI ethics, Google, etc.), HN skews right-leaning.
All this talk about the "median American" is irrelevant to what I'm talking about because I don't really care to be in a discussion forum with the "median American", particularly post-Thanksgiving.
> My claim is this: among the sort of forums where people are actually having discussions about Timnit Gebru's firings (ie. highly educated crowds of people who pay attention to the goings ons in AI ethics, Google, etc.), HN skews right-leaning.
There are two groups of people who are interested in this firing. People who are very interested in race and race relations. These people skew extremely left wing.
And people who are interested in technology, ai and machine learning who are probably center left.
The machine learning subreddit and hacker news are both part of this second group and only look like it's skews right leaning because the other discussion skew so far left leaning.
Absolutely. The supposedly objectionable tone in the EMails she posted was after leadership censored her paper in an apparently unprecedented and intransparent internal review. She has a track record of publishing peer reviewed and well received papers, and the paper in question was going through a normal peer review process when it was halted internally. To any academic the explanations of leadership are transparently absurd.
No academic of integrity could accept that as a work environment, doubly so if you were hired as Ethical AI Lead. It simply indicates to me that Google as an organisation is no longer capable of having a serious Ethical AI Lab.
I think that even if her work was spot on, Google has every right to have her retract her research. You can say that this is hypocritical of Google, which I actually don't really agree with.
Even if we take it as fact that she was somehow going to be releasing something very damaging and that Google was weary of that (which I already think is quite generous to her), I would imagine that her role as a researcher is not to be an in-house whistleblower but rather to be someone who helps Google mitigate the biases etc that they may be perpetuating. If that's the case, her first job is to serve Google and help them address these shortcomings and her second role (if there even is one) would be to publish this for the community at large.
Most companies will not let people publish their findings at all, and I think this is something that sets Google and a few other companies apart from the pack. The fact that there even is a mechanism to share results outside of your employer is really rare.
So, even if Google said "wow, this is spot on and will make us look terrible", they should be 100% able to tell her "don't publish this, instead let's work to fix this and then possibly publish a post mortem".
She seems like a fantastic researcher and brilliant person, but also an new subvariety of the old tech trope of a brilliant asshole. Or the trope of a 10x’er whose toxic behavior should be overlooked because she’s right with regards to her research.
Saying a brilliant asshole is a net negative isn’t trivializing their work. It’s saying the work isn’t the most important factor.
Timinit has been showing her aggressive side without much self awareness for a long time. Instead of relying on her research work and data, she routinely try to shut down the opposite side's "matter of fact" statements.
In contrast, the proclaimed "bad" guy, Jeff Dean, never do that. I know a co-worker who is level 4 engineer, reviewing Jeff's code changes, with Jeff never show a slight hint of his status. At the moment Jeff is level 11 engineer.
If Timinit could be that patient, then given enough time, she will make impact equal or beyond Jeff as in pure engineering. Instead, she tried to let loose her emotions.
Her continue staying at Google and the ethical AI research community would become a long term risk and overall negative factor, given the trajectory. That's my pessimistic prediction.
I'm not sure why everyone refer to the process as "retracting" rather than "withdrawing", given the paper was not accepted yet. It sounds for me pretty reasonable to withdraw the paper which has flaws to fix and resubmit it, rather than rush into fixes before conference deadline (given that those fixes should probably be reviewed too). I didn't see any claims that the requirement was to never publish this paper.
It also seems to be reasonable that the papers published by company are internally reviewed, like the papers by lab members are reviewed by PI before submission.
I see different claims from Google researchers, but it seems that at least for some internal review is used to access quality of the work [1,2]. It might potentially harm the freedom of the researcher, but once again, unless I missed something, there is no evidence that Google asked her to withdraw the paper and never resubmit.
As I already wrote in different comment, I can not think of a single reason to ask for reviewers identities unless she wanted to confront them personally.
That's exactly what a lot of companies do when someone gives 2 weeks notice. Send them home right away and pay them for the 2 weeks so you can keep them from filing unemployment and have them on the hook for any exit interview / handoff questions etc. They always want you to sign "something" as part of the process, too.
Definitely! The terms of her resignation are unclear.
If you give an employer an ultimatum and they don't want to give in to your demands then is that giving notice or quitting on the spot or something else? Should her managers/google legal have waited for her to tell them when exactly she was going to leave?
> Should her managers/google legal have waited for her to tell them when exactly she was going to leave?
Yes, if they wanted her to resign they should have waited for her to resign rather than fire her. If they fired her, seems odd to call it a resignation.
> Timnit wrote that if we didn’t meet these demands, she would leave Google and work on an end date. We accept and respect her decision to resign from Google.
As an employee, I agree, it is twisted to call it a resignation.
As an employer, of course that's exactly what they'd do with any employee who says "I quit, I'll tell you exactly when" and then proceeds to blast out a disruptive email.
You cannot file for unemployment aid if you resign or are terminated for cause. You can only get assistance if your termination is the result of your position being eliminated, otherwise known as a reduction in force. This is valid in California and I believe true in every other state in the US.
Employees file for unemployment all the time when they may or may not be eligible. There is a whole appeal process which takes a look at who is really the "moving party" when an employee leaves.
> Frequently after notice of a quit, layoff, or discharge has been given, either the claimant or the employer will act to accelerate the separation. Such action can alter the character of the separation.
If you sent your boss a letter that said "I will resign if you do not meet conditions X, Y, and Z." and they decide to not meet those demands, what do you expect the company to do?
Let you continue to have access to company resources? My expectations are they would immediately terminate access to all company resources, pay me 2 weeks, send me a letter wishing me good luck on my future endeavors, and send an email to my co-workers saying I resigned.
Now later I might think, shoot maybe I shouldn't have threatened to quit if they didn't meet my demands because I really liked my job. But I don't think we should pretend this isn't exactly what 95% of all corporations would do in a similar situation.
I assumed she was paid out her 2 weeks. Do you have reason to believe the didn't or won't do that?
I think the wishing of luck was circumvented by the media firestorm. Her first tweet was about losing corporate access which is usually the first thing H.R. does once a decision has been made.
She shared what she claimed was an email from her manager. It said her employment was terminated immediately because of her email to non management employees. I believe it was sent before the first tweet. She shared it before the media picked it up.
The employee remains employed in your scenario. Just without duties or access. Terminating employment immediately and not saying anything about severance implies not paying.
It doesn't matter if she is aggressive or demure, brilliant or stupid. It doesn't really matter if her work changes the world, or benefits mankind. All that matters for her employment status currently is whether Google sees value in paying her salary.
There is an endless river of souls being callously, unfairly fired every day. The only reason we are even talking about this one is because it is controversial, and has been blasted out on social media. Gebru seems like a smart cookie to me, but being smart, hardworking, just, kind, or any other number of other adjectives simply doesn't matter. Google, just like every other profit driven company on the planet, only cares about the value you provide. They are only different in degree from companies running sweatshops in SE Asia, and if the law allowed it, there would be _zero_ hesitation to bring that reality back here in the US. People in tech would get whiplash from how fast the industry would pull that u-turn.
We want to believe there is a social contract, that Google, or the tech industry, or America, or some group of people, somewhere, is above the competitive fray, and would not stoop so low as to abuse us for profit. Even at the very heights of privilege in the richest country in the world, working at one of the richest, most enlightened companies in the world, you are still getting exploited, and nothing will change that as it stands today. Google will probably keep investing in AI ethics, as long as people keep believing that actually makes them committed to some kind of standard.
After reading everything that has come out (e.g. her email) and her history of highly toxic Twitter behavior, I honestly can't blame Google for accepting her resignation (she was not fired).
There was something about the writing in her email that felt.. loaded and questionable without enough factual assertions to carry her point.
In Jeff Dean's email, he made one point that could be pretty salient: she submitted the paper for approval right at deadline. If that's true, that is poorly handled.
I mean the machiavellian interpretation looks like this to me: Google's AI in Ethics initiative is a PR exercise, similar to greenwashing and other models employed by big business. It fundamentally has to be, because large parts of the underlying business model at Google are based on unethical practices. By hiring researchers from underrepresented groups they additionally hoped to a) profit from the power imbalance of the relationship and b) co-opt parts of the social justice movement by having ethics research focus on issues that do not directly touch the bottom line. Now you have a researcher not towing the company line and being fired for it.
I think Google genuinely wants their AI to be better in most of the same ways the ethic researchers want it to be better. I think Google is more willing to compromise on having an ethical AI to meet other goals and priorities than the researchers. Google probably also expects researchers who are publishing papers critical of Google to highlights Google's efforts to mitigate those issues.
> she submitted the paper for approval right at deadline. If that's true, that is poorly handled.
That's not poorly handled on her part. If she'd submitted it late, that would be her problem. If getting a submission right at the last valid time to make a submission (the deadline) is an issue then it's a problem caused by whoever set the deadline, not the submitter.
For internal approval, which has a 2 week process, at the paper deadline. From Jeff Dean's email:
JD> Unfortunately, this particular paper was only shared with a day’s notice before its deadline — we require two weeks for this sort of review — and then instead of awaiting reviewer feedback, it was approved for submission and submitted.
She can stir the pot, but to boil it is another matter. As others have said, she is "toxic". Many of her sentences hurt as they're emotionally charged, but provide no actual value or content. Just crying.
She’s made the front page here before for her Twitter behavior, long before google would have reason to do any conspiracy theory stuff. If anything, when that was news they had the opposite incentive.
Exactly, most new stories bringing up the July Twitter dispute as context for her current firing is extremely polarizing.
The story could just be "well known Google ethics research quickly let go over paper dispute" but instead the "also she had an altercation in July which really riled people up."
Does the twitter dispute context help as much as her contributions to her field and whatever the specific paper and terms of its publication?
No clue personally, but now I know it's a "bad thing" and she's a "rabble-rouser that likely had it coming".
I first heard about her by coming across her Twitter thread out of the blow, the night before this firing was posted here. Seeing her going nuclear on Twitter immediately after this went down just seems by default to be behavior which is Not Great.
What bad info has come out about her, that was not released by her or her allies?
I know her from her communications with LeCun, and from the emails she herself (or someone allied with her) leaked, that were posted in the original article outlining her "firing".
From those things, I know enough that I would avoid her at all costs because of her toxicity. You can have the loftiest ideals and goals in the world - that doesn't mean you can act with impunity and any action of yours is unquestionably good.
She was absolutely fired, her boss even admitted as much (paraphrasing, "we accept your resignation but can't agree to your timeline, termination is effective immediately"). TBH, given the behaviour (public email saying "stop working on what mgmt asks you to, it doesn't really matter!" and email to manager saying "do X,Y or I'll quit!") - the way this was handled is not discriminatory, it's what would happen to 99% of the employees. She was a star employee and thought it can't happen to her, but apparently she overstepped some boundaries.
I don't buy this line. Toxic personality types are a hallmark of the technology sphere and they are typically given a free pass on such behavior in the name of meritocracy. The problem for Gebru is that her particular type of toxicity is not palatable to the entrenched culture, merit be damned.
Those free passes ended years ago as can be seen by many high-profile removals and resignations (for both corporate policy and social pressure reasons).
I think it's fair to say there is less tolerance for certain extremes in public spaces, but practically speaking the meritocratic mentality still rules the day. If you're a well-known public face of an organization you might have to watch what you say in public (but not always, e.g. Elon), but this is the exception not the rule.
"Those free passes ended years ago as can be seen by many high-profile removals and resignations (for both corporate policy and social pressure reasons)."
Linus still has a job, AFAIK. So does Lennart Poettering. Both have plenty of defenders on HN.
That's not to mention people like Peter Thiel and his fans.
Linus had like one outburst a year in between spending all day every day reading/writing emails.
And a bunch of them weren't actually hostile to his team, they just got taken out of context. He'd refer to a userspace program they had to keep from breaking as a "braindead abortion" or something and people would report it as if he said it to/about a kernel developer.
I think they mean that a brilliant asshole of a different type of assholery would have been fired much sooner. The fact that she’s qualified is separate.
Ah, I see. I would say in response that we're pretty much at a subjective impasse then. The thrust of my argument is that brilliant assholes are generally well tolerated. By "asshole" I don't mean someone who got canned for a harmless joke, I'm talking about toxic aggressive egomaniacs who wield their expertise and prestige as a cudgel to demean and abuse their colleagues.
I think we're in agreement, to a degree. There are some types of asshole that the industry has agreed to not tolerate. Then they say "See? We don't tolerate any kinds of assholes! You have to partner well and communicate well with people now!" Even though they absolutely do still tolerate certain kinds of assholes, like the kind you mean, and, to a degree, people who wield popular ideas like a cudgel.
I feel like the industry has at least made big leaps forward. Went I joined (during the great recession) it felt way worse, but I've also found a great company, so maybe I'm insulated in a kind bubble.
A subtle but important aspect of her complaint that I would like to point out is she offered to resign, but after some period X. I'm not sure if that was two weeks or a month. Instead, Google layed her off on the same day.
Firing her much sooner than the date she requested seems really foolish on Google's side. Arguably, one of the primary reasons a profit-oriented company would hire someone for this kind of job is for the good PR. If they offer to resign why would you not simply accept the terms of resignation, why would you rush it to happen faster.
Even if she is acting in bad faith Google could have saved themselves a big headache by at least giving her a month or something, even two weeks, to exit the company.
If someone has a negative attitude towards their employer it could be a liability to let them run with that negative attitude for weeks or months. From what I understand she had already told other researchers at the company to stop their work and was being quite disruptive.
NOTE: I am not trying to take sides as I don't know enough information. Just saying I believe there are good reasons why you'd let someone go immediately.
The 'Google Ai ethicist resigns...' headlines wouldn't have been any better unless she was willing to sign a gag clause as a condition of getting her preferred leaving date (which sounds highly unlikely) and I doubt they had any particular need to pay her to finish anything off or hand over to fellow staff. Ultimately if she felt strongly enough about something to indicate she would leave if they didn't budge and they felt strongly enough about not budging to let her go then the finishing date is moot.
Edit: also you put the stuff about 'agreeing a leaving date' instead of 'I will quit' in your ultimatum to make it clear that you're dead serious about leaving and are trying to be reasonable rather than threatening, not because you need next month's paycheque.
Because she became toxic. It can happen - when one's relationship with mgmt turns sour, sometimes that one person can become really negative. A respected, "star employee" that turns sour can really destroy morale in entire departments if given time to do so.
Yes, she can complain on Twitter and still do some harm; but without her, management at least has a chance to control the internal conversation.
I think we should definitely acknowledge that politics do play a role in these mega corporations. This is especially true in the ML field, where choosing something as "innocent" as a training data set would most likely have political and societal implications.
But that being said I don't think the combative cancel culture is helping anyone.
Reading down the names, it is indeed the usual woke people who are chronically enraged on corp. G+ and mailing lists and whatever. There's also the person who kept harassing me on corp chat about whether I had a non-binary gender identity. I am so completely done with woke bullshit in the workplace.
If you think it's a good move to complain to HR against the visible activists who have assigned themselves to a legally protected class, you don't understand this workplace.
It's unfortunate. It shows their true colors, that they're just after virtue signaling and gaining power, so hopefully people will not listen to their lies anymore.
The numerator is such a small percentage because so many fear losing their jobs for speaking out. In that context, this number is quite significant. Even if you disagree with their stance, you have to admit that it takes courage to speak up in these kinds of situations.
Given the number of people I know who privately think that she resigned rather than got fired and similarly won't speak out (there's tons of internal threads talking about her being fired from what I can tell here), I think it actually is a small percentage.
I agree with you: When you say "do X or I quit", that's resigning and not being fired.
There's still a ton of people, including her, who think that she was fired. The amount of pushback from those folks for saying that she resigned has silenced a lot of people, from what I've seen.
It shows how deluded the far left is honestly, when they think that anyone who doesn't agree with them is afraid to speak up, and not because what the far left stands for is outrageously foolish.
No one at Google worries that signing a petition or Tweeting something is going to get them fired. No one in any kind of position of power reads or cares about these kinds of petitions, and it certainly doesn't ever reach the eyes of anyone on a promo committee.
> where the numerator is such a small percentage of the denominator
Especially considering that we don't know how many people would have "rallied" in favor of her firing (if there were such a thing), even if we could believe that they could do so without fear of reprisals as those rallying "against" it can.
Google (and Google Brain in particular) benefited immensely from Gebru's work, and her being affiliated with them. This can be seen in how often they (including Jeff Dean) pointed to her work to show they were taking questions of fairness and bias in AI algorithms seriously.
The flip side is that you have to respect the researcher, who frankly has more credibility than you do as an organization in this space.
Even to corporate researchers, demanding (through an HR procedure? bizarre) the researchers retract a paper without a discussion or an opportunity to revise it (which is still possible since the paper is only in review!) is highly unusual. To do that to a researcher whose work you loudly (and seemingly proudly) advertise, is insulting to them and the broader team they hired. And to do it over not citing literature? Unheard of and clearly indicative of something else going on. This seems like some kind of turf war.
I don't get why anyone is surprised that Google doesn't want a paper saying ‘we should spend less money on ML’ published under their name, when the whole company is ML driven and pushing for growth there.
What other large company would allow that sort of thing?
I'm not sure where you get 'we should spend less money on ML' from the abstract. If anything it suggests investing more in ML, from data curation to architecture development, that would be perfectly within Google's general aim to convey itself as being thoughtful about how to use the capabilities they're developing.
There's still time for discussion! The paper's only in review and they would have had to make revisions anyway. I'd say it's the management that made an ultimatum to the research team.
Once you submit your paper it is visible to experts you probably know (or at least know of). The double blind process does not work when the subject matter, and writing style, and citations correspond closely to specific labs or researchers. You stake your reputation as well as that of your lab/company from the moment you submit.
I say this from personal experience, I once published last minute for a conference and was violently chewed out by my bosses because of things they disagreed with in the paper.
Unless the underrepresented people got their deserved social and economic status, these so called fairness ethical study would just be building a mansion over empty air.
I am also wholly assured that the rich and powerful progressives know very well of this truth. And they are very willing to indulge these self-righteous elite intellectual. As long as they do not roll up their sleeves and get to help the unprivileged to rectify the system.
I was wondering if anyone knew enough to clarify a couple of things from this part of Dean's letter:
> Unfortunately, this particular paper was only shared with a day’s notice before its deadline — we require two weeks for this sort of review — and then instead of awaiting reviewer feedback, it was approved for submission and submitted.
There seems to be something between the lines here. How was it approved for submission? Did Gebru or one of the other authors approve it? And if so, would that be unusual?
> A cross functional team then reviewed the paper as part of our regular process and the authors were informed that it didn’t meet our bar for publication and were given feedback about why. It ignored too much relevant research — for example, it talked about the environmental impact of large models, but disregarded subsequent research showing much greater efficiencies. Similarly, it raised concerns about bias in language models, but didn’t take into account recent research to mitigate these issues. We acknowledge that the authors were extremely disappointed with the decision that Megan and I ultimately made, especially as they’d already submitted the paper.
Does this contradict what Gebru has said so far? Didn't she say she wasn't given any feedback?
Part of her demand/resignation/not resignation letter was asking to know who specifically gave what feedback. So she said she was given the feedback, but she didn't know who the feedback was from.
She quit. The reason she quit is legitimate, but it's pretty clear that she quit here.
If you say "I quit unless...", and they don't agree to the conditions—you've quit. If I'm running a business, I certainly have no use for an employee who has quit under fairly unfriendly conditions. I definitely wouldn't want someone who has quit spending another month or so using corporate resources for what is now their own personal agenda.
I don't think Google is in the clear here either, but don't I think calling her a fired AI researcher is realistic. The story here is an AI researcher quit because Google wouldn't let her publish.
No, that's still "fired". Don't get me wrong, it's an entirely legitimate reason to fire someone - but one doesn't quit unless they actually submit the unconditional resignation. What she did was threaten to quit, and Google (rightfully, IMO) fired her as a consequence of that threat (plus previous email where she was advising colleagues to stop working on some company initiatives - that was very likely a preview of things to come, had she stayed any longer at the company).
Probably "AI researcher was let go after threatening resignation" is probably the most accurate description.
Also "AI researcher was let go after submitting resignation letter" is pretty close to accurate.
But if we had to choose between "AI researcher resigned" and "AI research was fired" I think the first would give you a more accurate idea of questions like
"did she submit a resignation letter" (yes), or "who initiated the break up" I feel
resignation tells you she initiated it, which I think that is closer to the truth Google initiating it.
I don't know - the outcome was desired by the management (who jumped at the opportunity to "accept" it) but not by her (who publicly complained about it). That tilts it towards "fired" for me - I believe she miscalculated how desirable she was (as an employee), and made the resignation threat believing management would do their best to avoid that outcome.
If one of my engineers emailed me saying they would quit unless I conceded to some set of demands then I would very likely have HR accept that resignation on the spot, terminate their access, and deal with any contractual separation concerns.
If you weren't serious about resigning, you shouldn't have made the threat.
Because the article was written based primarily on Gebru's Twitter feed, which casts her in a sympathetic light. This is a common problem news organizations face these days; Twitter drama is an unreliable source, but it's so much faster than independent research that you almost have to use it sometimes.
There should be a bare minimum percentage of a company that "rallies behind X" before news articles are written on the subject.
Google has just about 100,000 employees + 120,000 temps/contractors. If hundreds - lets say 500 employees - sign something (aka click a button), currently we're sitting at .2% of the company that feels a certain way.
What other petitions could you get .2% of the company to sign onto?
"Google staff rally behind overthrowing the US government to create a Marxist utopia"
"Google staff rally behind mandatory veganism in the US"
As i understand it, she was supposed to submit to google for an internal review a fews prior to externally publishing it. She simultaneously submitted and published it, and Google sought a retraction after internal review. She met that with an ultimatum with do X or I'll quit. They took that as a resignation (as Google wasn't going to do X), and accepted it.
I'm not fully informed about what she wanted, but I don't think it was particularly unreasonable, the controversy more has to do with headlines and spotlights about this person and her conduct/history in the past.
I got the impression that the paper wasn't the controversial part, but rather how both sides handled the internal peer review. Which amounted to her offering her resignation which Google accepted.
Saying she was fired over the paper is a leap without any evidence. It's possible her paper was perfectly benign, with minor issues, and she handled the response to the minor issues in a "we accept your resignation" kind of way.
For an extreme example: I could say "I got tazed and arrested for doing 5 mph over the speed limit". That sounds insane. That cop should be fired and in jail! What I haven't told you is: I was doing 5 mph over the speed limit, and I was just going to get a warning from the cop, but I became combative and tried to physically fight the cop, at which point I got tazed and arrested.
It's also possible she was fired for the paper. But she has published many papers while at Google without issue, so it would have to be something stunningly different than her previous papers.
I don't fully understand the controversy and so take neither side. However, as I started in IT in in 84, it is curious to me that workforce culture has changed so. I recall the dourly suited IBM guys, all in lockstep, sharing identities, so to speak. One's role was well understood, and conforming to that role -conduct, performance, behavior- was very circumscribed and universally understood.
Criticizing one's employer was possible within very defined circumstances, and always privately, but doing so in a public square was a sure route to termination. This seemed reasonable at the time.
Has the relationship of employee/employer changed so?
I think part of this is the FAANG companies have so much money they can afford to hire these huge quantities of folks to fight the company while getting paid by the company. No one else could afford to do this because it just wouldn't work business / productivity wise. The only other example is perhaps the govt which generally does fund people who then sue the govt around policies the govt adopts.
Do you consider an internal mailing list a public square?
Researchers are used to having more freedom. IBM didn't pretend to be egalitarian and fun. And part of the controversy is Google firing her but characterizing it as accepting her resignation.
I think post WW2, there was this unwritten social agreement. The company took care of you, and you took care of the company. At some point that agreement was severed. Companies stopped being loyal to employees, and slowly employees have learned to stop being loyal to companies.
Contrarian view. Some of these points can individually be refuted. As an outsider, here’s what it looks like:
- you have an employee who (in her letter) hired attorneys to sue you.
- you have an employee who was given an award for impact who openly mocks it and thinks it’s a joke, which detracts from culture
- you have an employee who went on a Twitter tirade and send several pages of information teaching a leading person in your space how to apologize. Humiliating.
- you have a paper of questionable quality that maybe needs more review and maybe doesn’t but at a minimum appears to be BERT related which could impact your business. It’s not unreasonable to want to look at it.
- you have an employee whose tone is very aggressive. It seems reasonable you’d be apprehensive of working with her. It doesn’t seem googles point is to make a model that is biased towards any group, etc, so you should be on the same team?
- you get a volley email which requires information (give me all the conversations you had) which could be used to publicly shame the head of a business unit (Jeff Dean)
- the employee emails, says she’s going on vacation, and then expects you to be waiting for her when you get back
I don’t know. It’s probably mixed. But it seems she’s well respected and given significant leeway. If we strip race and sex from this (if you can do that, perhaps it ruins it, but this is why this is a throwaway): this seems like a very high drama employee. Let’s say there was no hidden bogey man and we take Jeff at his word: more time was needed to give comments on the paper. From there, a) either paper is fine and she submits. Obviously the initial publication space for which she missed the internal review deadline is out, or B) if the paper is not fine and Google makes reasonable points to improve the quality, you incorporate them, then it’s published, or C) if the paper is not fine, but Google is making bogus claims to surpress you because of (in this thought experiment) some racial bias or business model conflict, then you can escalate internally or leave or fight in the media.
The problem is you didn’t let a)/b)/c) play out. By jamming the list serve as a way to influence and over ride the internal system the employee is trying to circumvent the operation practice of the group and it undermines leadership. Note, I’m not claiming she is incorrect in her work being suppressed potentially. I’m just claiming if I was her manager my inner voice mental response would be: “shut the fuck up and stop being such a shit disturber. I was willing to work this out with you, even though you could have followed the normal process everyone else does, but now you created a company internal hurfuffle so I need to loop in MY manager (Jeff) and the last time you interacted with public exposure with someone of that high stature (the Twitter incident) you caused a highly abraisive outcome. Ugh. What do I do? Oh you resigned unless you publicly humiliate my boss? Yeah okay, let’s just accept that, I’m not being paid enough to baby sit you. I’m at Google brain to do ai research, not manage temper tantrums. Ok, so will talk to Jeff, tell the team you resigned to help you save face (which she spun btw, lol) and oh yeah we should probably shut off your devices to avoid more damage. This sucks. Ugh I wish that list serve and email to Jeff didn’t go out. “
That’s a jaded view. You can be potentially (or not) repressed and simultaneously an asshole. Would any of you want to work with someone like her? Who low key threatens your job or attempts to publicly humiliate you if she doesn’t get what she wants?
Note, using a throw away because it’s too scary to post this publicly. Because I can’t judge what the “public consensus” is (and it seems to be changing), I can’t tell if the above is a 1/10 and like lunatic level, or 4/10 and highly offensive, or maybe a 6/10 and just highly insidious (by design). The bigger point is this incident shows how Twitter flames and self censor ship can perhaps make certain topics hard to discuss.
Sorry if this was offensive. But the “HR policy drone” view seems otherwise underrepresented.
Turns out, even Timnit Gebru, making ~500k a year researching AI ethics at Google, can still be fired.
Turns out, Google would feed each and every one of their employees, feet first, into a giant wood-chipper if that was the most cost-effective, legal way of disposing of them.
Turns out, the tech industry isn't really all that structurally different than any other industry.
Ignore that pipe full of blood and guts y'all, none of those people were marginalized. Back to work!
It’s not illegal for a company to marginalize someone for rocking the boat. I’ve worked with tons of people who have been relegated to basement offices or positions where they just “advise” but do nothing all day. Someone thought they had something left of value to add. Then they get a new boss or their current boss has enough and kicks them out.
Indeed! And even that outcome would be considered merciful from most other perspectives.
On one hand, I'm glad that people are sensitive enough to at least pretend to care about this, but on the other hand, they're completely deluded about the nature of work, and the nature of their relationship to their employer. It must come as a shock when, after spending a decade in school and moving directly from a university dorm/cafeteria to a corporate one, all of a sudden they can just ask you to leave. Maybe Google should start charging tuition.
It's just wild to me that HN commenters are predominantly starting the timeline at her resignation ultimatum, and not what prompted it.
She was working on a known-to-all controversial research project, which was asked to be retracted via an anonymous feedback doc delivered via HR! That is a very screwed up thing to do. All reactions from her from that to me are totally justified.
Do google employees actually do work or just rallies, protests and walkouts.
Seriously, google staff are walking out / protesting / rallying behind stuff every week. How can you afford to pay 120,000 folks who seem to be focused on being outraged, striking and walking out all the time.
I participated in a walkout ONCE when I was much younger, over an issue that was pretty clean cut (this was before me too, things had to go WAY WAY over the line - we'd call it a crime now - to get a walkout going). It was still a bit cheesy, but ...
Do I have this right - a google employee doing public attacks against other google staff / how to apologize etc? And googlers want this kind of culture, where having a discussion get's you social media blasted? It just seems these cultures are getting very unhealthy. Why do this all working for google?
Google must just have boatloads of cash to be able to afford this all. Do customers for GCP ever worry that some staff will protest what they are doing and take some kind of direct action?
The largest employee protests are driven by legitimate engagement, but there's a small core of Google employees who don't do work. One guy Tim Chevalier actually sued Google (https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/21/17038430/google-james-dam...), claiming that Google broke the law by telling him to do more work and less social activism.
It’s pretty much the same at all tech companies now - Twitter, Facebook, Amazon, etc. This is both because the companies are primarily located in far left cities but also because they are powerful institutions that committed extremist activists seek to take over and weaponize for their own causes.
For many, the way these employee activists operate is in fact very unhealthy and distracting. But with leaders often letting these disruptive activities and ignoring the fact that these activists aren’t actually doing work on paid company time, it feels to the majority that they have no psychological safety to speak up. And so they remain silent while a vocal aggressive minority takes over.
That's not how company works... Any legal documents regarding business and money is very particular and wordy to let things clarified outside of courts.
That email she wrote is a jumbled almost unreadable mess and the moment "micro aggressions" was mentioned I turned off. There was a process, she went around it and lost her job. Not everything in life is bias, sometimes you are just an ass.
Hi everyone,
I’m sure many of you have seen that Timnit Gebru is no longer working at Google. This is a difficult moment, especially given the important research topics she was involved in, and how deeply we care about responsible AI research as an org and as a company.
Because there’s been a lot of speculation and misunderstanding on social media, I wanted to share more context about how this came to pass, and assure you we’re here to support you as you continue the research you’re all engaged in.
Timnit co-authored a paper with four fellow Googlers as well as some external collaborators that needed to go through our review process (as is the case with all externally submitted papers). We’ve approved dozens of papers that Timnit and/or the other Googlers have authored and then published, but as you know, papers often require changes during the internal review process (or are even deemed unsuitable for submission). Unfortunately, this particular paper was only shared with a day’s notice before its deadline — we require two weeks for this sort of review — and then instead of awaiting reviewer feedback, it was approved for submission and submitted.
A cross functional team then reviewed the paper as part of our regular process and the authors were informed that it didn’t meet our bar for publication and were given feedback about why. It ignored too much relevant research — for example, it talked about the environmental impact of large models, but disregarded subsequent research showing much greater efficiencies. Similarly, it raised concerns about bias in language models, but didn’t take into account recent research to mitigate these issues. We acknowledge that the authors were extremely disappointed with the decision that Megan and I ultimately made, especially as they’d already submitted the paper.
Timnit responded with an email requiring that a number of conditions be met in order for her to continue working at Google, including revealing the identities of every person who Megan and I had spoken to and consulted as part of the review of the paper and the exact feedback. Timnit wrote that if we didn’t meet these demands, she would leave Google and work on an end date. We accept and respect her decision to resign from Google.
Given Timnit's role as a respected researcher and a manager in our Ethical AI team, I feel badly that Timnit has gotten to a place where she feels this way about the work we’re doing. I also feel badly that hundreds of you received an email just this week from Timnit telling you to stop work on critical DEI programs. Please don’t. I understand the frustration about the pace of progress, but we have important work ahead and we need to keep at it.
I know we all genuinely share Timnit’s passion to make AI more equitable and inclusive. No doubt, wherever she goes after Google, she’ll do great work and I look forward to reading her papers and seeing what she accomplishes.
Thank you for reading and for all the important work you continue to do.
-Jeff
I'm curious why this is flagged. Isn't this topic about tech culture and dynamics in both tech companies and tech communities, which is legit per HN's guideline?
Comments got spicy. Several of them. Understandably so. It's nuanced; nuance seems to be not much of a favorable flavor around these types of discussions. Instead of hitting the "hide" button and moving on since it doesn't interest them, it would seem flaggers would rather see the conversation nuked entirely.
Ultimatums never work, and threatening to resign is never a good strategy (compared to either trying to amicably work things out OR just resigning).
However Google's passive-aggressive response wasn't terribly great either ("We respect your decision to leave Google ... and we are accepting your resignation.")
It's a firing packaged up as fake "respect".
I wish both sides learned more about how to de-escalate situations.
They could have written “we won’t meet your ultimatum but we don’t think you’ll resign like you threatened, so see you after vacation”. Would that be better?
I mean she resigned. She put conditions on her staying at the company. By accepting her resignation, Google simply stated: "We are not gonna comply with these conditions, therefore we accept your resignation".
Let's focus the discussion around if that was a good or bad decision, to not comply with her conditions. She fired herself, there is no discussion around that.
Companies can't straddle the line. They're either going to have to go all-in on diversity, inclusion, and politics, or they're going to have to clamp down hard like Brian Armstrong.
Google needs to decide what it wants to be. Given its choices, I think it's clear what they want. They just need to say it.
It'll help employees and potential employees know if they want to work there.
Most companies want to appear to have a diversity of people who look different but have the same opinions and viewpoints as the rest of the group.
What they should strive for is a diversity of backgrounds, viewpoints, experiences and have that process account for the differences in how those people arrived at where they currently are.
Most companies don't care about diversity of any kind for any reason besides PR. Every hiring manager knows that the most productive engineering teams are made up of 100% Asian cis-male Libertarians.
Diversity in terms of measurable metrics, such as women/minorities/LGBT++ being adequately represented, is simply a benchmark that can be paraded around for appeasement purposes.
If my company decides to "go all-in on diversity, inclusion, and politics", could there ever be any legitimate reason to fire an employee who's also "all-in on diversity, inclusion, and politics"?
When they try to illegally hire/not-hire people based on protected class, which if I read correctly is something she was pushing for. Forgive me if this is mischaracterized.
I don't want to work anywhere that pushes any ideology so far that they break the law. That goes for if it's in pushing their bottom line as well, so regulatory gray-area companies like Uber & AirBnB are also a no-go for me.
It is hard to find a reputable tech firm or startup that has not been publicly or internally accused of breaking a rule, regulation or law. It's engrained in the ideology of innovation.
I think we are saying the same thing. Though I’ll add that are a lot of people in positions of power openly running with that opinion at their tech firms, and that does influence ideals around tech innovation.
Also running an ethical business goes far beyond adhering to rules and regulations, as many of them don’t currently penalize unethical practices.
That's the entire reason behind it, if they fire a "diversity and inclusion" individual, the latter will just claim (racism, homophobia, transphobia, latest fad of the day)
They've been cycling BS at least 10 years now since I left. Some should face the inescapable truth: no one cares. Another year and it's the same BS without change. As is the plan.
At the advent of anything, it won't matter. They'll just be some place.
People want to work there still? Separate from just wanting to work (who wants to be unemployed)? Why? It was stupid to be that way as far back as 2003, as they had already IPO'd by then. Stupid like an idiot trying to buy once/since a stock started to surge upward. Stupid. Anything after is in a class by itself.
I wonder how they are viewed among young people now. Both college students and those with 2 or so years of experience. Hmmm..
It's becoming clear a rising number of her colleagues are in support of what she was seeking to publish. A reviewer on reddit mentioned the authors have plenty of time to make revisions if there were issues with the content. Not to mention, supposedly the internal reviewing processes are usually limited to the extent of sensitive disclosure and rarely the contents of the literature. Yet, emails from Google leadership seems to imply retraction was needed, providing very little reason.
The opaqueness of the internal feedback and expectations are highly suspicious and I was suprised to see no one bothered to question it. People have been bringing up the 2 weeks, yet internal Brain researchers have refuted that have never seen a policy like this excercised. It does appear as an attempt to suppress an important paper that was critical of another colleagues work (BERT) and the employer's intended research goals. It's similar to the kind of pushback Greenwald most recently received - yet the reactions here have been distinctly flipsidded - in support towards Google executives no less and unsympathetic to the researcher.