It’s directly in the email Timnit wrote, among just the first few lines. If you were unable to find it, then either you did not try whatsoever, or you are disingenuously pretending like there is some other potential way to interpret Timnit’s email that miraculously causes it to not refer to the explicit labor tasks of the Google employees she sent it to.
The direct quote (which can be read in the link [0]) is:
> “What I want to say is stop writing your documents because it doesn’t make a difference.”
This is a direct, explicit, unequivocal reference to researchers and ethicists employed by Google to write research and policy documents on fairness, DE&I, and bias, within machine learning, staffing and hiring, and other areas.
The phrase, “stop writing your documents because it doesn’t make a difference,” cannot be falsely made to apply to any context other than actively encouraging coworkers to specifically stop performing their direct job responsibilities.
My suspicion is that you would try to falsely misrepresent Timnit’s imploring to stop work as instead being about some type of non-work related activities or optional / extra-curricular activities that Google wouldn’t have a formal labor productivity stake in - and if that is in fact what your response would be, it is completely and wholly false and wrong.
What was communicated on social media was that the company had fired her, but it appears that the researcher tied the continuation of her work to the company accepting her conditions. The company did not accept.
In poker terms: one party bluffed and the other party called the bluff.
Now whether the clauses were abusive and the company was compelled to satisfy these conditions is left to lawyers, I suppose. I'm not privy to more details to have an opinion one way or the other.
This isn't poker. She made demands and stated she'd discuss it further after her PTO. Google accepted a resignation never made as a punishment (it has financial implications).
Sure it's not poker. I believe the researcher was looking for an employment lawyer, and the pressure is increasing. The email was discussed in public and subsequently "published" by the company's people. Again, not privy to more details.
She directly said stop writing these documents. They are not effective for doing the job. The data shows this. She doesn’t say stop doing your job. In one example she gives job is to increase diversity in gender and lamenting that all of this talking has had no impact yet Samy seems to have done it with no incentive (I’d like more of the backstory on Samy).
The job is to increase diversity and inclusion, not to write documents. Programmers get this in other domains (the job isn’t to write lines of code, but to provide value to customers), but suddenly become naive when it comes to things like this.
Re: Damore, I agree. He was pushing a bad agenda that tried to draw more than is reasonable from some academic research on gender disparity.
Very, very similar to what Gebru did as well. First by pushing agendas in a publication leading to its disapproval, then in her follow up email.