[HN Gopher] About Google's approach to research publication - Je...
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About Google's approach to research publication - Jeff Dean
Author : yigitdemirag
Score : 326 points
Date : 2020-12-04 20:14 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (docs.google.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (docs.google.com)
| tinyhouse wrote:
| In her email she claims that she is constantly being dehumanized.
| This is unacceptable to someone in her amazing position and to be
| honest sounds like she is a narcissist. I think Google couldn't
| wait to get rid of her (cannot blame them, she wanted to sue the
| company a year prior, also "represented" the company really bad
| on social media) and her email with demands was their
| opportunity. I don't think she would survive in any company. She
| is better off starting her own company or going to academia. I
| don't feel bad for her, I'm sure she already got multiple offers.
| Not from FB that's for sure though :)
| apta wrote:
| This is the problem with hiring SJWs. They will claim being
| victimized, racism, etc. the moment they don't have their way.
| I'm sure many people would have loved to be in her position and
| have her salary and benefits. Some people can't have enough it
| seems. "Wokeness" is a disease, the goal is to keep getting
| more and more power behind the guise of "equality".
|
| Hopefully more employers will reject hiring "woke" people after
| seeing the trouble they're causing.
| rebelos wrote:
| I suspect you're being downvoted because this post sounds
| like a denial of very real issues of sexism and racism.
|
| However, the suggestion that employers will work to identify
| and preemptively reject employees with an SJW bent is not
| only sound but almost certainly already underway.
| aphyr wrote:
| Dean writes:
|
| _Our aim is to rival peer-reviewed journals in terms of the
| rigor and thoughtfulness in how we review research before
| publication._
|
| But Gebru writes that HR and her management chain delivered her
| feedback in a surprise meeting where she was not allowed to read
| the actual feedback, understand the process which generated it,
| or engage in a dialogue about it:
|
| _Have you ever heard of someone getting "feedback" on a paper
| through a privileged and confidential document to HR?_
|
| _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..._
|
| _And you are told after a while, that your manager can read you
| a privileged and confidential document and you're not supposed to
| even know who contributed to this document, who wrote this
| feedback, what process was followed or anything. You write a
| detailed document discussing whatever pieces of feedback you can
| find, asking for questions and clarifications, and it is
| completely ignored._
|
| (from https://www.platformer.news/p/the-withering-email-that-
| got-a...)
|
| I've been through the peer review process at Physical Review
| Letters, SIGMOD, and VLDB. You get a document containing all the
| reviewer's comments, plus a metareviewer's take on the overall
| decision and what has to change. You can engage in dialogue with
| the metareviewer, including a detailed response letter justifying
| your choices, highlighting things the reviewers may have missed,
| and explaining where you plan to make changes. You get additional
| rounds of comments from the reviewers in light of that letter on
| later drafts.
|
| I'm not a Googler, and I have no idea what the standard review
| process looks like there, but what Gebru describes does not sound
| _at all_ like peer review. I also note that Dean does not
| contradict Gebru 's account of the meeting or feedback process.
| If I had a paper rejected in this fashion, I would also demand to
| know what the hell was going on and who was responsible.
|
| This feels _off_.
| xiphias2 wrote:
| I think the person who submitted feedback in privileged and
| confidential way made a great choice. I expect more people
| taking this route in the future actually, people are scared in
| the current political athmosphere. Look at what Jeff Dean is
| getting, even though he didn't do anything bad.
|
| A manager in ethics shouldn't ask Google to break the law by
| not providing confidientality that was requested.
| visarga wrote:
| He took one for the team, kept them safe.
| rlt wrote:
| I think we're starting to see companies discover the limits of
| how far they're willing to let employees push their "woke" agenda
| using the company's name.
|
| It seems disparaging your own company while ignoring research
| that counters yours is Google's limit, but we'll have to wait to
| see the research paper if it leaks.
| htrp wrote:
| Reading the abstract, it seems to be a pretty vanilla-esque
| survey paper.... which implies there's some more info that will
| only come out if this goes to court (doubtful).
| coffeemug wrote:
| TL;DR: Jeff and Co got sick of Timnit's woke bullshit, pushed
| back, she threw around some ultimatums, they called her bluff and
| pushed her out. Personally I'm glad that Google is finally
| cleaning house. More of this plz.
| [deleted]
| deanCommie wrote:
| Don't you have some more subordinates to sexually harass?
| courtf wrote:
| Wait, I thought the tech industry was literally North Korea,
| and as long as you sing the woke anthem every morning, you
| could never get fired?
| [deleted]
| wyldfire wrote:
| It appears that this was released intentionally by Dean. But in
| case it wasn't, or in case it gets altered/updated - it's been
| archived [1].
|
| [1] https://archive.is/VpAN8
| courtf wrote:
| Google's got five more HR reps working on the case. They got them
| working in shifts!
| greatwhitenorth wrote:
| Every "woke" company in SV is going to go through this. I really
| want to know how "diversity' will help someone build a software
| company say a CRM app. How does a skin color/race help with that?
| If ideas of a different race matter, why should they be employees
| and not found through user testing/customer feedback? Coinbase,
| Google, keep it rolling.. No fully remote company has to go
| through this bullshit.
| gcr wrote:
| Maybe different teams are different, but on my previous team
| within Google AI, we thought the goal of google's pubapproval
| process was to ensure that internal company IP (eg. details about
| datasets, details about google compute infra) does not leak to
| the public, and maybe to shield Google from liability. Nothing
| more.
|
| In all of my time at Google AI, I never heard of pubapproval
| being used for peer review or to critique the scientific rigor of
| the work. It was never used as a journal, it was an afterthought
| that folks on my team would usually clear only hours before
| important deadlines. We like to leave peer review to the
| conferences/journals' existing process to weed out bad papers;
| why duplicate that work internally?
|
| I'm disappointed that Jeff has chosen to imply that pubapproval
| is used to enforce rigour. That is a new use case and not how it
| has been traditionally used. Pubapproval hasn't been used to
| silence uncomfortable minority viewpoints until now. If this has
| changed, it's a very, very new change.
| eachro wrote:
| But in this scenario, shielding Google from liability is
| actually a primary concern given that Timnit is discussing
| ethics/bias. A paper on say novel transformer architecture, the
| lottery ticket hypothesis in a new setting, a new RL benchmark
| suite, etc is not going to expose Google to legal risk the way
| ethical AI research often can.
| aabhay wrote:
| This. I have been arguing the unpopular opinion that most AI
| ethics work in corporate settings is not designed to empower
| real research. It was a matter of time before an actual
| researcher with an ethical compass was removed
| unceremoniously. Anyone in an AI ethics team at a large
| company -- you need to know exactly what your job means to
| the company, because it isn't safe.
| lokar wrote:
| In technical infra I saw papers rejected that were deemed to be
| not interesting enough (not a big enough novel contribution).
| petulla wrote:
| This response really seems like gaslighting. He doesn't address
| her concerns and glosses over whether she was held to a
| different standard than others at GR.
| bmitc wrote:
| He was also extremely vague, perhaps intentionally, about
| what the issue actually was. His sentence about when the
| paper was submitted and approved and all that is impossible
| to parse and make sense of who did what and when.
| sbarre wrote:
| Of course he was vague. This just happened, tensions are
| high, and no doubt Timnit is talking to an employment
| lawyer to find out what both parties' right and obligations
| are, and I'm sure Google's lawyers are also getting all
| their ducks in a row.
|
| This is spin at best, gaslighting at worst. We'll never get
| the full story (and should we? it is an internal company
| matter made public, after all)..
| Barrin92 wrote:
| >We'll never get the full story (and should we? it is an
| internal company matter made public, after all))
|
| Not really sure what the point of an 'ethical AI'
| department is when there's no transparency or
| accountability facing the public because if it can be
| cancelled internally at any point if it threatens the
| company you've basically recreated some kind of Soviet
| ministry for truth
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| The point is to do foundational research, and to help
| Google ensure that its AI development complies with its
| own ethics. Google did try to set up an AI ethics board
| for accountability to the public, but it fell apart,
| because many segments of the public have ethical views
| which were seen as unacceptable.
| (https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/04/google-cancels-
| controversial...)
| ketzo wrote:
| Right -- he once again talks about "accepting" her
| resignation, when it reeeeeally just looks like they fired
| her. At the very least, she certainly _feels_ like she was
| fired; why is that not mentioned at all? Even just, I don 't
| know, "sorry we were abrupt?"
| x0x0 wrote:
| Dean previously said this [1]
|
| > 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.
|
| I find it unlikely Dean would lie about that, not least
| because the email would be easy to find.
|
| Now, were the actions leading up to that effectively a
| firing, ie Timnit would have been unable to effectively
| continue in her role? Quite possibly.
|
| [1] https://www.platformer.news/p/the-withering-email-that-
| got-a...
| jonathankoren wrote:
| Having your research -- the very rationale for your
| employment -- being squashed by execs suddenly without
| explaination, and in a highly unusual procedure, should
| make you question whether you are able to effectively
| continue in your role, or whether you're simply window
| dressing.
|
| It looks like Google's AI Ethics team is meant to be
| green washing.
| vecter wrote:
| Don't make ultimatums unless you're ready to accept the
| consequences of those ultimatums.
| aylmao wrote:
| > _...if we didn't meet these demands, she would leave
| Google and work on an end date._
|
| To be fair it doesn't sound like her ultimatum was "I'll
| leave immediately"-- that was forced on her by Google,
| and is an important detail.
| wpietri wrote:
| Definitely. "If we don't fix this I don't think I can
| continue working here" is not a resignation, it's a
| negotiating position.
| treis wrote:
| Sure, but sending out an e-mail accusing your colleagues
| of racism, exhorting them to stop working, and talking
| about potential lawsuits isn't. There's no way that
| Google (or any company) would continue to employ her
| after that.
| cavisne wrote:
| We know large language models are super important to google,
| and there are lots of competitors.
|
| If they approved the paper the message would be "google thinks
| language models are a waste of resources and racist". There
| would be no academic debate on this topic as its been framed as
| woke and published by a militant activist, so any disagreement
| would be racist (see prior interactions between this researcher
| and other researchers [1]).
|
| Thats why the standard process of publishing, peer reviewing,
| academic critique etc would not work.
|
| Why would their researchers working on language models stay?
| when they can go to Facebook, OpenAI etc. Why would new
| researchers join?
|
| [1] https://syncedreview.com/2020/06/30/yann-lecun-quits-
| twitter...
| freeone3000 wrote:
| Academic debate is, in fact, done through conferences and
| journals. You saying there can be no debate is a strawman
| position with no basis in reality. The idea that standard
| rigor cannot be applied to ethics research is absurd, and
| seems to insinuate that the entire field is absent
| discipline.
|
| The proper response to her position would be to publish a
| response or critique. Attacking her entire field does nothing
| to further the conversation.
| vikramkr wrote:
| They might have enough of a PR budget to make the Google
| version of the story stick. But, its concerning that, if what
| you say is true, they are hoping to make that work by
| leveraging the public's ignorance of how the Google specific
| process works. Its also not the smartest move, since Google is
| important enough and public goodwill towards tech is low enough
| that journalists will have a field day looking for evidence of
| double standards/a cover up. And they're not making it too
| difficult for the journalists if that evidence is found in the
| top comment on a hacker news post.
| hackcasual wrote:
| This really seems like whistling past the graveyard on
| google's part here. There's too much meat to the story for
| them to really do much more than obfuscate. The intersection
| of race and gender, ethical implications of big tech, the
| capitalistic pursuit of innovation at the expense of
| individual freedom. All of these look bad for google
| contemporary343 wrote:
| Ditto in my past experience at Microsoft Research. Never an
| actual review of paper's merits, just IP and maintaining trade
| secrets if applicable.
| lallysingh wrote:
| Also, when has feedback on a paper in this process been relayed
| via HR?
|
| You only bring in HR protections to protect the company from a
| legal standpoint.
| calf wrote:
| The key sentence is the bullshit about a paper not offering
| mitigation as not helping. Since when is a scientific paper
| required to do that.
| justicezyx wrote:
| If you are actually an academic researchers in an academia
| institution, and are exposed to a large scope of the dealings
| of the community, then you might find that professional is as
| political as corporations, if not more so...
| BeetleB wrote:
| When I was in academia, it was not unusual for the referees
| to reject a paper for this reason. Of course, you are
| informed of that and always have the option to rewrite the
| paper to include that information.
|
| In some cases, though, it's not simply a matter of listing it
| as other work in the Intro - you may need to incorporate it
| into your models, etc.
| cyrus20 wrote:
| At least when I was there, my papers were getting thoroughly
| reviewed and often had to make some adjustments before getting
| approval. Never occurred to me to make any demands from the
| reviewers or threaten to resign if my paper doesn't get
| immediately and unconditionally approved. Seems like she's
| asking for preferential treatment.
| theobeers wrote:
| And the examples of issues flagged in review that Jeff keeps
| highlighting--like Timnit's alleged failure to mention recent
| work to reduce the environmental impact of large models--are
| themselves a bit worrisome. Jeff gives the impression that they
| demanded retraction (!) because they wanted Timnit and her
| coauthors to soften their critique. The more I read about this,
| the worse it looks.
| visarga wrote:
| > Jeff gives the impression that they demanded retraction (!)
|
| In paper reviews you can often see reviewers asking the
| authors to rewrite, clarify, add extra experiments, add
| missing citations. It's all normal.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| Usually those are "accept with minor revisions" or "revise
| and resubmit". Rarely are they grounds for complete
| rejection. This is extra true for internal review, since
| the actual conference review process would provide an
| additional layer to ensure that the scholarship was strong.
| omgwtfbyobbq wrote:
| That was my impression as well.
|
| Having said that, if Jeff were to make public the paper,
| criticisms of the paper, and improvements made to address the
| problems described in the paper, that could go a long way
| towards clearing the air.
| gcr wrote:
| oh yes absolutely, i would _love_ for timmit or jeff to
| release this paper as-is so we can see what happened. could
| be a good read.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| The draft is rolling around the web already.
| treis wrote:
| link?
| acoard wrote:
| Yeah, put more simply, they pushed out someone in their
| Ethical AI department because they did not soften critiques
| against AI enough. They couch these in terms of rigour, but
| the substance of the problem has to do with her criticisms
| against AI.
|
| Ultimately it makes the whole Ethical AI department look more
| like a rubber stamp for Google.
| btown wrote:
| Let's be even more clear - they pushed out someone in their
| Ethical AI department because she wanted to _have human
| conversations_ to determine the basis for being asked to
| soften critiques.
|
| It's one thing for reviewers, even anonymous reviewers, to
| reject a paper on its merits; it's another, in Timnit's own
| words [0], to be told "'it has been decided'" through "a
| privileged and confidential document to HR" _despite_
| clearing the subject matter beforehand. In light of a more
| general frustration, it 's very reasonable for Timnit to
| escalate the situation by putting her own career on the
| table, simply to request that people engage with the paper
| rather than flat-out rejecting it.
|
| And if Jeff wants to respond by immediately cutting ties,
| and by putting out a document that doesn't even address the
| situation at hand (edit: much less the underlying issues of
| unequal treatment for women that Timnit describes)...
| that's a reflection of _his_ ethics and the ethics of the
| company that stands behind him.
|
| [0] For those who haven't read Timnit's memo that Jeff
| references in the OP, it's worth reading:
| https://www.platformer.news/p/the-withering-email-that-
| got-a...
|
| EDIT 2: follow https://twitter.com/timnitGebru to see more
| of her side of the story. She retweeted
| https://www.wired.com/story/prominent-ai-ethics-
| researcher-s... as a good explanation of the situation for
| laypeople.
| tfehring wrote:
| Also from Gebru's memo ([0] in the parent comment):
|
| > _And you are told after a while, that_ your manager can
| read you _a privileged and confidential document_
|
| Emphasis mine. Showing your employee that _you don 't
| even trust her with a written copy of the rejection of
| her paper_ is not a great way to engender a good working
| relationship. Note that this pretty clearly seems to have
| happened before Gebru sent the email that Dean
| characterized as an ultimatum.
| orsenthil wrote:
| > Yeah, put more simply, they pushed out someone in their
| Ethical AI department because they did not soften critiques
| against AI enough.
|
| I didn't read that. I read the person _demanded_ who said a
| particular critical feedback, or questioned the approaches
| instead of addressing them. The person gave the ultimatum
| to resign if details were not shared.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| If your work is suddenly and unexpected roadblocked at
| the last second by internal review, the _only_ way to
| make changes that prevent that from happening in the
| future is to clearly understand the situations and
| criticisms that led to the roadblock. This is why
| understanding who raised these concerns is important.
| Anonymous feedback blowing up a project at the final
| moments is sure to frustrate anybody. If what she has
| said is true then it was also very difficult for her to
| even have access to the substance of the critique in the
| first place, with the initial story from her management
| being that she would not be able to see the documents
| explaining why the paper was to be retracted.
|
| The critique here appears to have been fairly minor, too.
| Failing to cite some recent research is rarely grounds
| for rejection.
| jariel wrote:
| "and unexpected roadblocked at the last second "
|
| This is a essentially false. The author submitted the
| paper the day before publishing, given there at least was
| some form of standard review - the actions by Google
| could not be construed as 'roadblock'.
|
| There is no 'roadblocking' and the review was certainly
| not 'unexpected.
|
| The constant misrepresentation of the facts in this
| situation is harmful for those ostensibly wanting to do
| good.
|
| "This is why understanding who raised these concerns is
| important."
|
| Since there was no roadblock - this answer makes no
| sense.
|
| The answer more likely that the researcher wanted a named
| list of what she perceived to be as her personal enemies.
|
| "Failing to cite some recent research is rarely grounds
| for rejection."
|
| There doesn't seem to be any reasonable cause for major
| concern in this whole issue - it seems the company raised
| some points and she could have managed them reasonably in
| professional terms.
| htrp wrote:
| >Now might be a good time to remind everyone that the
| easiest way to discriminate is to make stringent rules,
| then to decide when and for whom to enforce them.
|
| --Nicolas Le Roux
| nickff wrote:
| As a manager, if someone gives an ultimatum, you
| basically have to fire them. There's no real option; Ben
| Horowitz covered it somewhere, but the bottom line is
| that if you yield, you've given up all control.
| alangibson wrote:
| That is a psychotic reaction that assumes the world is
| just a Hobbesian nightmare of domination or death.
| chaps wrote:
| This sounds incredibly inhumane.
| cmsj wrote:
| I understand some of the reasons why some managers think
| that way, but you can't have such simplistic rules.
|
| An ultimatum like this is an opportunity for a
| responsible manager to talk and rethink, but it seems
| like Google jumped at the opportunity to double-down on
| their mistake and then send out cowardly emails claiming
| the employee had actually resigned.
|
| If I were to apply a simplistic rule here, I would
| actually invert it - if you get to a point where you are
| sufficiently undervalued that you feel the need to issue
| an ultimatum, you basically have to resign.
| neltnerb wrote:
| Uh, or you could compromise with them and act like two
| adults? This isn't a zero sum game.
| nostrademons wrote:
| Isn't the definition of "ultimatum" that no further
| compromise is possible? You can try or offer different
| alternatives, but if the other person is really at the
| ultimatum stage then you've both already lost.
| nickff wrote:
| If someone wants to negotiate, they don't use an
| ultimatum.
| mistermann wrote:
| > but the bottom line is that if you yield, you've given
| up all control.
|
| This doesn't seem logical to me. I don't doubt there are
| indeed scenarios where this is true, but as an absolute,
| this doesn't resemble my real world experience at all. It
| seems like kind of the opposite of how human interaction
| should work.
| siliconmountain wrote:
| Isn't the academic journal peer review process generally
| an anonymous feedback mechanism? Why does this need to be
| different?
| whimsicalism wrote:
| > academic journal peer review process
|
| Fro my understanding, this paper had already passed peer
| review and been accepted. Google management then decided
| to block the publication using the IP review process.
| ThomPete wrote:
| it got approved without the review from what i understand
| whimsicalism wrote:
| By peer review, I mean review by fellow academics, not
| Google management.
| tooltalk wrote:
| Please go read the link first. Jeff clearly states that
| Google has a review protocol for journal submission which
| requires a two weeks internal review period.
|
| Timnit shared the paper a day before the publication
| deadline, ie, no time for internal review, and someone
| with a fat finger apparently approved it for submission
| without the required review.
| geofft wrote:
| That's not under dispute. What's under dispute is:
|
| 1) Is the review protocol that requires a two-week review
| period a _peer review_ process intended to maintain
| scientific rigor, or an _internal controls_ process
| intended to prevent accidental disclosure of trade
| secrets etc.?
|
| Repeating the comment at the very top of the thread:
|
| > _Maybe different teams are different, but on my
| previous team within Google AI, we thought the goal of
| google 's pubapproval process was to ensure that internal
| company IP (eg. details about datasets, details about
| google compute infra) does not leak to the public, and
| maybe to shield Google from liability. Nothing more._
|
| If it's not a peer review process, arguments about why
| scientific peer review is generally anonymous are
| irrelevant, just like arguments about why, say, code
| review is generally not anonymous would also be
| irrelevant. It's a different kind of review process from
| both of those.
|
| 2) In practice, is the two-week review period actually
| expected / enforced? Other Googlers, including people in
| her organization, are saying that the two week
| requirement is a guideline, not a hard rule, and
| submissions on short notice are regularly accepted
| without complaint:
|
| https://twitter.com/le_roux_nicolas/status/13346245318860
| 718...
|
| https://twitter.com/ItsNeuronal/status/133463659611351040
| 0
|
| https://twitter.com/lizthegrey/status/1334659334689570817
|
| (I don't work for Google, but I work for another very IP-
| leak-sensitive employer that does ML stuff, and we also
| have a two-week review period on publications. It exists
| for the purpose of not causing last-minute work for
| people, but if you miss it, it's totally permissible to
| bug folks to get it approved, and it's not considered
| "someone with a fat finger." I think I've published
| things twice and missed the deadlines both times.)
|
| So, if this "rule" exists on paper, but only exists in
| practice for her, then this is the textbook definition of
| unfairness.
| DonaldPShimoda wrote:
| Because this isn't peer review -- or at least, it's not
| meant to be (per the top-level comment). That's the whole
| issue, really: there already exists a peer review process
| to ensure the paper's academic rigor, so why is Google
| hiding behind a claim of the necessity of anonymity for a
| corporate (not academic) process?
| ethbr0 wrote:
| Because typically your academic journal peers don't work
| for the same bosses you do.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| This isn't (or wasn't) a review process for scholarship.
| Oodles of people within Google (even within Brain) have
| gone through this process and it seems to have always
| been the case that it just checks for things like PR
| problems, IP leaks, etc.
|
| Further, she claims that initially she was not allowed to
| even see the contents of the criticisms, only that the
| paper needed to be withdrawn.
|
| Let's say you were working on a feature. At the 11th
| hour, just before it hit production, you get an email
| telling you to revert everything and scrap the release.
| Apparently somebody in the company thought it had
| problems but they won't tell you the problems. Then after
| prying you do get to see the criticisms and they look
| like ordinary stuff that is easily addressed in code
| review rather than fundamental issues. They still won't
| tell you who made the critiques. Would you be upset?
| pgodzin wrote:
| Seems like part of this was that the paper represented a
| PR problem
| Barrin92 wrote:
| One glaring difference here is the direct conflict of
| interest between Google as a company that stands to
| profit from AI as a business model and the 'ethical AI'
| research that Timnit is supposed to do.
| jonathankoren wrote:
| Given that internal prepublication review at every
| company I've ever been with is merely there to avoid IP
| leakage, I find it very hard to believe that the feedback
| is is given in good faith. It's like the oil industry
| claiming that a climate change paper isn't talking enough
| about the economic benefits of growing citrus in Alaska.
| Quite frankly, there's simply no reason to address them,
| because the problems with BERT, exist with every LLM.
|
| Google stepped in and changed the procedure for this
| paper, because they wanted to spike it because they were
| embarrassed by it.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| Unless she lied in her first e-mail, which it doesn't
| seem like she did, the reason she made those demands is
| because they asked for a retraction of the paper without
| indicating why the paper should be retracted.
|
| Asking for the identity of people that have the authority
| to ask for a withdrawal of your research without stating
| their issues with it seems understandable, if excessive.
|
| But maybe I misunderstood something.
| lokar wrote:
| AIUI, they asked her to retract it because she submitted
| it before getting final approval, and then they in fact
| decided not to approve it.
| Footkerchief wrote:
| Dean's statement is clear that it was approved before
| being submitted:
|
| > 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. [...] 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.
|
| There is no statement at all of how to reconcile
| "approved for submission" with "didn't meet our bar for
| publication", which probably means that there is no
| reconciliation, and the cancellation was done outside
| normal process.
| lokar wrote:
| I see what you mean.
|
| I wonder if he is trying to say that there was a process
| error, it was approved without review (in error), she
| sent it out, and then they came back to her and said
| "wait, no, you can't publish that after all"
| mtgx wrote:
| I remember when Google made a whole big deal about their
| "AI Ethics Board" (or something along those lines), and
| then not even a year later they reshuffled it because those
| people were too critical of the company's practices.
|
| And then when there was backlash they "promised to do
| better" and Sundar Pichai came out with some "principles"
| that the company would follow for AI.
|
| Another 1-2 years later and here we are again - this just
| proves that whatever "AI Ethics Board" they might set-up,
| it will end up being a sham, because they'd never allow
| that board to stop them from using AI however they like if
| it's in the interest of the company's profit growth.
|
| If we want real AI oversight we need to demand it from
| outside nonprofits or even government agencies (why not
| both?!) - and there should be zero affiliation between the
| company being monitored and those organizations/agencies.
| tempest_ wrote:
| At then end of the day the incentives for large companies
| are always monetary.
|
| It might be that they follow ethics because the
| appearance to do so has a monetary public relations
| value. It always comes down to that, and for publicly
| traded companies that set up things like an "AI Ethics
| Board" it is always for show since the incentives don't
| allow for anything else.
|
| At the end of the day someones compensation depends on
| these things and you can't be hurting the bottom line.
| that_guy_iain wrote:
| > Jeff gives the impression that they demanded retraction (!)
| because they wanted Timnit and her coauthors to soften their
| critique. The more I read about this, the worse it looks.
|
| I get the impression that she wrote a hit piece on Google and
| published with Google's name. For me, it's correct they
| demand a retraction. It's simply unprofessional to critque
| your company for something while not mentioning the work
| they're doing to combat that.
| chejazi wrote:
| > I get the impression that she wrote a hit piece
|
| Hopefully the paper gets leaked so we can judge for
| ourselves.
| freeone3000 wrote:
| Company with unethical practices hires ethics researcher
|
| Ethics researcher publishes piece critical of company's
| activities
|
| Company is shocked as to how this could happen.
| geofft wrote:
| For me, it's pretty unprofessional (and cowardly) to hire a
| well-respected ethics researcher, write some PR pieces
| about how the company takes ethical actions seriously, and
| then tell her that her publications have to follow the
| party line and cannot overly criticize the company.
| trhway wrote:
| Google isnt publicly funded academic institution. Whatever
| they are doing, in particular publishing, is part of the
| business/PR. So if the management sees something not good for
| business it is a reasonable that they decided to not do it.
| If i were a shareholder i can see how i may have questioned
| why a person being paid $1M+/year (my understanding this is
| minimum what a manager in AI at Google would be making) for
| publicly disparaging Google.
|
| Even more, it sounds like Google didn't ask originally for
| retraction, they just asked to take into account the newer
| research contradicting the paper - the thing that any
| researcher valuing integrity over agenda wouldn't refuse.
|
| If somebody wants to do that research and publishing they
| just have to find another source of funding, i guess.
|
| Anyway, the firing wasn't over the paper, the firing was over
| the unacceptably unprofessional reaction to it.
| omgwtfbyobbq wrote:
| In most cases, yes. In this case, because the paper was
| about bias in Google's AI models, it might not be just a
| business decision because the racial bias described in that
| paper might result in a disparate impact on users, which
| could be in violation of state or federal law.
| breatheoften wrote:
| This is pretty dystopian ...
|
| 1. There exist laws to prevent discrimination against
| people based on protected attributes 2. ML models make
| predictions based on attributes without interpretability
| (it's not possible to prove that protected attributes are
| not factoring into model predictions) 3. Empirical
| observation that a model proxies a protected property
| exposes corporation to liability for regulatory non
| compliance 4. Therefore any study that could expose bias
| of a model used in production is to be road blocked or
| prevented ...
|
| To combat flows like above -- seems like regulators are
| going to need to update rules with third party audits and
| an incentive structure that encourages self-regulation
| and derisks self-detection and self-reporting of non-
| intentional violations... ideally google should not be
| put into a position where it is incentivized to police
| its own ai ethics research to ensure that such research
| doesn't expose their own illegal/non-compliant activity
| ...
| omgwtfbyobbq wrote:
| A company can still protect themselves by fixing the
| model and delaying publication of a study about it's bias
| until after the statute of limitations had expired.
|
| In this case, there were recent changes to the statute of
| limitations for CA laws that extended it from a year to 3
| years, which could be why this whole process seems weird.
|
| https://www.ebglaw.com/news/ab-9-extends-employees-
| statute-o....
| trhway wrote:
| well, imagine a manager in your company publishing a
| paper stating that your company products are probably
| violating state or federal laws. All that without raising
| the issue up the proper management chain, without working
| through the correct procedure with compliance and legal
| depts, and without going to law enforcement if the law
| violation is still continues after all that.
| wpietri wrote:
| Even from the narrow view that in-house academic work is
| part of the PR budget (which I disagree with), Google has
| made a huge mistake here. This is a giant PR black eye for
| them. If the game is to pretend to have in-house ethical
| checks (say to avoid actual regulation), then they need to
| at least generate the appearance of independence. The
| correct sinister move here would either been to keep her on
| staff and give her the runaround or manage her out the door
| in a way that she wasn't particularly angry and where she
| signs a non-disparagement agreement.
|
| But as others point out, it's entirely in Google's long-
| term interests to have internal critics who prod Google and
| the rest of the industry toward long-term behavior. So I
| think it makes good sense for them to have independent
| academics that occasionally make people uncomfortable.
| aylmao wrote:
| > If i were a shareholder i can see how i may have
| questioned why a person being paid $1M+/year (my
| understanding this is minimum what a manager in AI at
| Google would be making) for publicly disparaging Google.
|
| Salary aside (because I do doubt she earned $1M+/year, my
| guess is probably more on the ballpark of $300k~$500k and
| either way not really denting Google's finances), you are
| not wrong, but also it's worth understanding here we're
| entering the realm of the notion that companies can (and
| for many reasons should) be about more than maximizing
| shareholder value.
|
| Also, if I'm being completely honest, from a PR perspective
| this could be worse than Timnit's paper might've been just
| given how public it has become and the people involved.
| People internally are perhaps more comfortable having that
| paper not be published and not having Timnit in their
| ranks, but as far as PR for Google goes this isn't great.
| albatruss wrote:
| From a certain narrow, selfish perspective it's reasonable
| for Google to not want to have an AI ethics department
| placing a check on their leading edge research at all.
| Fortunately, we don't live in a world where corporations
| are the ones to determine right from wrong with total
| impunity.
| trhway wrote:
| > AI ethics department placing a check on their leading
| edge research
|
| that reminds how in USSR each non-miniscule factory,
| organization, etc. had "the department #1" - it was an
| ideological check and control department which at
| sufficiently large/important organizations even included
| KGB officers.
| albatruss wrote:
| You have identified a similarity between two situations,
| but it is not a similarity that matters. The distinction
| that matters is one of normativity, and on that measure
| there is clearly no equivalence to be drawn here.
| trhway wrote:
| every time it is the same - somebody got the power to
| enforce the prevalent ideology of the time and place,
| they happily do it under the premise that it is the most
| right and good ideology, and because of being such
| visibly pious followers and strict enforcers these self-
| declared occupants of high moral ground start to feel and
| behave themselves as more entitled and better than
| others. The main point here is that once something
| becomes an ideology the "right", "good", etc. gradually
| lose any meaning in that context, and the only thing
| which continue to matter and grow more and more is the
| enforcement of the ideology.
| albatruss wrote:
| You are right that there have been many iterations of
| normative standards, but that does not imply that all
| situations, ideologies, positions and so on are equally
| correct. It does not mean that we should stop trying to
| do better, nor that we have made no progress made through
| these efforts toward a better world.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Even the fact that the USSR had factories at all makes
| the concept of a factory suspect to me.
|
| Should we really keep manufacturing cars using the same
| tools that Stalin used?
| jariel wrote:
| "Jeff gives the impression that they demanded retraction (!)
| because they wanted Timnit and her coauthors to soften their
| critique. The more I read about this, the worse it looks."
|
| Representing a more truthful reality is not 'softening'.
|
| It's only 'softening' for those who have an already accepted,
| extremist view, and for whom any evidence to the contrary
| doesn't help their arguments.
|
| While initially sympathetic to the author - the more I read -
| the more I have completely the opposite view.
| logicslave wrote:
| Do you want to know whats interesting? I read alot of computer
| science research, particularly what comes out of Google. Its
| clear to me that details are left out of specific papers,
| especially how things are done in sub systems. But, like a jig
| saw puzzle, I discovered that many papers are actually
| descriptions of computing systems and algorithms that interact.
| If you read between the lines and squint your eyes, you can get
| a much bigger picture of internal google AI systems than you
| guys think you can.
| SirYandi wrote:
| Would love to read a blog post of your observations about
| that
| dzdt wrote:
| Yes it is disingenuous for Dean to pretend that this was a
| normal process applied to a normal situation. Clearly whatever
| happened on that team, this latest round was not the beginning
| or even most important part. Gebru's letter mentions her
| threatening to sue Google previously, for instance. [1] The
| discussion about rigour in a conference paper or internal
| review is obviously a pretense.
|
| [1] https://www.platformer.news/p/the-withering-email-that-
| got-a...
| pengstrom wrote:
| Increased scrutiny on minorites speaking up is a common
| historical occurance.
| kazamaloo wrote:
| Every paper we submitted went through a technical review as
| well as legal and IP reviews. They were along the lines of cite
| this, cite that, run these experiments etc.
|
| What's different in her case is that you don't see the names of
| the people reviewing. Being the devil's advocate, she MIGHT
| have a pattern of aggressively attacking people who reviewed
| their work before. So they might have made the reviewers
| anonymous this time.
| [deleted]
| jariel wrote:
| "Pubapproval hasn't been used to silence uncomfortable minority
| viewpoints until now."
|
| This is sad gaslighting of a reasonable concern the team had.
|
| Having to endure some external review for what could otherwise
| be sensitive material.
|
| The inability for the SJW crowd to work reasonably within very
| reasonable terms, to then resort to aggressive tactics such as
| 'demand the names and opinions of everyone on the board' and
| then publicly misrepresenting the situation is going to lose
| you a lot of favour.
|
| Every time I read one of these stories I immediately feel
| sympathetic to the individual, but then upon learning more, I
| feel duped and maligned for having been effectively lied to.
|
| The doors are wide open for progress, those who take it to
| micro-totalitarian lengths are not doing anyone any favours.
| contemporary343 wrote:
| Similar experience to another current Google Brain researcher:
| https://twitter.com/le_roux_nicolas/status/13346019609729064...
|
| Submitting conference papers last minute is... normal.
| kwillets wrote:
| That confused me as well -- where I work we have a legal dept.
| approval for IP issues, and that's it. Academic review doesn't
| make sense in that context or time frame.
| nova22033 wrote:
| _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._
|
| This sheds some new light...
| wilde wrote:
| Not really. People bluff in negotiations all the time. A normal
| response would have been, "I can't do that. Are you still
| committed to leaving?" Instead Google went all scorched earth
| and it's still unclear why. It also indicates that they don't
| particularly value her in progress work in the lab since
| normally you want the 2 weeks or whatever to squeeze some wrap
| up work out of folks.
| hobofan wrote:
| > Google went all scorched earth and it's still unclear why
|
| Possibly because she made a personal problem into a
| team/department problem by asking their colleagues to stop
| working ("stop writing your documents because it doesn't make
| a difference"). I couldn't imagine a company where such a
| call for work refusal wouldn't immediately lose you a ton of
| goodwill.
| vecter wrote:
| It's so obvious that she was "negotiating" in bad faith by
| threatening to quit if she didn't get what she wanted (i.e.
| throwing a tantrum) that I'm surprised that other people
| are surprised at Google's response.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > People bluff in negotiations all the time. A normal
| response would have been, "I can't do that. Are you still
| committed to leaving?" Instead Google went all scorched earth
| and it's still unclear why. It also indicates that they don't
| particularly value her in progress work in the lab since
| normally you want the 2 weeks or whatever to squeeze some
| wrap up work out of folks.
|
| I strongly encourage people to read some books on
| negotiations - as well as read up on legal ramifications to
| some negotiations.
|
| Pretty much _all_ books /courses on negotiations say:
| Ultimatums have their place, but are a minefield (i.e. they
| can blow up on you), and should be used as a last resort.
| From a negotiations standpoint, the response was adequate -
| which is why they all caution against using such an approach.
|
| As for the 2 week thing, this is a convention, but not a
| requirement. In my company, it's not unusual for someone to
| be shown the door the same day they announce they plan to
| leave to another company (it's not the norm, but not at all
| unusual). The manager/company always ponders whether there
| are risks in keeping the employee for a few more weeks vs the
| gains, and this is the question Jeff pondered - that he did
| this is quite normal. Will the employee provide anything
| useful to us in those two weeks (e.g. handoff work to others,
| etc)? Could he/she cause problems (bad mouth people to fellow
| employees, steal IP, etc). If it's a disgruntled employee,
| they are usually shown the door the same day. In Timnit's
| case, it's unlikely there was any value in letting her stay
| for 2 more weeks.
|
| I once intended to leave the company I was working for. The
| night before, I took out everything of (personal) value from
| my cubicle, as well as from my work machine. Only then did I
| have the discussion with my manager.
|
| Having seen how she communicates and handles difficult
| situations, I think she really should read those kinds of
| books. Sometimes her behaviors are _textbook examples_ of
| what not to do.
|
| (Hint: If you're trying to influence someone, or a whole
| industry, you are negotiating, whether you choose to think of
| it that way or not).
| aylmao wrote:
| I agree. Worth highlighting:
|
| > ...if we didn't meet these demands, she would leave Google
| _and work on an end date_.
|
| Google's response to this was not accepting of her terms, it
| was to force an end-date for her --immediately-- and lock her
| out of their systems ASAP.
| apta wrote:
| Which makes a lot of sense. You don't want to keep an
| unstable employee around.
| ghaff wrote:
| People bluff but you generally have to be prepared to walk if
| your bluff is called. If I walk into a manager's office and
| demand 2x salary or I walk and the response is "we believe
| you are fairly compensated," you're now in a rather
| uncomfortable situation.
|
| Which is of course not to say you can't have a more measured
| negotiation. But it can be hard to walk back from give me X
| or I do Y, especially if there isn't a lot of middle ground
| between giving you X or not giving you X.
| nebulous1 wrote:
| > People bluff but you generally have to be prepared to
| walk if your bluff is called.
|
| Then you aren't bluffing.
| tome wrote:
| How do you figure that? If I hold 27 off suit then I
| still have to be prepared to show my hand if you call me.
| Doesn't mean my all-in raise wasn't bluffing.
| nebulous1 wrote:
| Yeah, but your all-in raise is you saying that you have
| two aces. You're bluffing because you don't actually have
| the hand you're pretending to have.
| ghaff wrote:
| But presumably you understand that your opponent may call
| you. The relevant MW definition is "a false threat or
| claim intended to deter or deceive someone." So in this
| context, it's a claim you won't really leave if you don't
| get your way. But the other party may decide to get rid
| of you anyway based on the bluff. (Thinking about it,
| it's probably reasonable to call it a bluff but that
| doesn't mean there aren't consequences if the other party
| calls you on it.)
| tome wrote:
| I suppose there is an ambiguity regarding whether the
| "bluff" was that she wasn't actually prepared to leave or
| whether it was that she actually was.
| ghaff wrote:
| Yep. You don't really know the ranking of stay with
| conditions granted, leave without conditions granted, and
| leave without conditions granted rank. (Well #1 is
| obvious but the others less so.)
| ghaff wrote:
| Fair enough. And maybe the lesson is don't bluff in
| situations where you aren't prepared to deal with the
| consequences if the other party calls your bluff.
| vecter wrote:
| It's fine to call bluffs. In fact, the definition of a bluff
| is something that, with perfect action on the other end,
| should be called.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| That's correct, but calling a bluff can mean different
| things. In this case, it could be "No, and we don't think
| you will actually leave" or 'No, goodbye".
|
| My guess is they chose the latter because they don't like
| employees that run such hard negotiation tactics, and she
| was becoming too internally disruptive. Either way, any
| employee should know they are at risk after playing those
| cards, if not in the short term, then in the long term.
| Dig1t wrote:
| "Do X or I'll quit" is a childish way to negotiate, its akin
| to a child throwing a tantrum if they don't get their way.
| It's extremely unprofessional and not something a team player
| would do. I think its clear why they took her up on her
| offer.
| aylmao wrote:
| > "Do X or I'll quit" is a childish way to negotiate
|
| I disagree with this. It's really the only way to
| negotiate, pretty common. The wording is important here. If
| you word it as "Do X or I'll quit" it sounds childish, if
| you word it as "I believe the company should X, otherwise I
| can't see myself working here comfortably and will have to
| consider my resignation" it sounds professional, but the
| idea is the exact same.
| meetups323 wrote:
| Better to word it as "I believe the company should X
| instead of the current W, and to that end I will work
| with Y and Z to come up with a plan for moving to W' and
| what that should look like, once that is complete I will
| have better clarity over how to get to (W+X)/2, or if
| perhaps some V would actually be better for all parties.
| tantalor wrote:
| > the idea is the exact same
|
| Yes, in that they are both childish. Your version just
| added more weasel words. The second you bring up the "R"
| word as a threat you have played your hand; everything
| else is window dressing.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > It's really the only way to negotiate, pretty common.
|
| As I point out in another comment[1], not only is this
| not true, negotiation experts universally criticize this
| as a way to negotiate.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25309003
| macmac wrote:
| I would respectfully recommend that you read "Getting to
| Yes" by Roger Fisher and William Ury. Effective
| negotiation is often about expressing interests, not
| specific actions or ultimative positions.
| neatze wrote:
| Some people don't have time for an bluff game, person choose
| the tone in negations with in power opponent without
| considering full extent of bluffing consequences.
| [deleted]
| ergocoder wrote:
| This is an unfair take.
|
| If an employee is adversary toward the company, the trade off
| needs to be made no matter how much valuable the employee's
| work is.
|
| This is a non-issue tbh. She wants to leave. Company wants
| her to leave. They both agree to part way because the
| premises are fulfilled (i.e. company can't meet her
| requirements).
|
| If you want to get technical, I'd bet her employee's status
| is still in tact for 2 weeks; she just doesn't have access to
| laptop and etc.
| pseudalopex wrote:
| Her manager said "effective today".[1]
|
| [1]
| https://twitter.com/timnitGebru/status/1334364736457240577
| ergocoder wrote:
| I don't know what that means. It could mean her
| employment status is off today. Or it could mean she
| can't access any corp material but her status is on.
|
| It's fairly standard to let the employee leave the
| building immediately but still on payroll for 2 more
| weeks.
|
| Again, I think it's a non-issue. Both wants to part way.
| Either party can singlehandedly make that date earlier.
|
| It seems one side brings up this point because other
| points are not salient, so they try to make it like "you
| see they fire me today. I actually want to leave in 10
| days instead. This is unethical!!". It's a weak point and
| muddles the main point.
| wpietri wrote:
| No, she did not want to part ways. If she did, she would
| have quit. Instead, she said she needed certain things to
| keep working there. That pretty obviously indicates a
| desire to keep working.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Instead, she said she needed certain things to keep
| working there.
|
| And, from what I understand, that she wanted to discuss
| the issue in person when she returned from vacation
| (which she was on at the time.)
| pseudalopex wrote:
| You brought it up.
|
| "Effective today" has legal meaning. It's an issue
| because it shows Google acting in bad faith.
| jkbhzsdfkhjnzs wrote:
| People are consistently leaving out the fact that she wrote
| an internal email encouraging her coworkers to reach out to
| _congress_ about Google 's behavior, at a time when big tech
| companies are being dragged in front of congressional
| hearings nearly every month
| bgribble wrote:
| According to her Twitter feed, Timnit was asking for the same
| transparency that normally goes with Google pub reviews --
| where all the reviewers and their feedback are known to the
| reviewee. This red-stamp "review" did not follow the normal
| review process. Not a Googler, just going on what she says:
|
| https://twitter.com/timnitGebru/status/1334881120920498180
| mstg wrote:
| Considering her previous attacks to anyone who disagrees with
| her and her previous public feuds, I'd say people may be
| afraid of being stamped as a racist/sexist because they had
| to reject her paper. She was a disruptive employee who
| threatened her employer and the employer didn't accept it.
| Why is Google obliged to keep her employed?
| kneel wrote:
| There are many people in SV that are very quick to bring up
| race, gender and diversity whenever a dispute arises. It's
| becoming predictable to the point of being problematic.
|
| As a POC myself, I understand there is a time and place for
| this.. and it definitely isn't all the time, publicly, on
| social media.
|
| I fear that people like Timnit are inappropriately wielding
| justice rhetoric to benefit their own careers, at the cost
| of actual injustices that may occur to others. This is just
| my opinion.
| ryanobjc wrote:
| The funny thing is she isn't going to be harmed by this.
| In fact if she felt like she needed a different job this
| is one way to do it. I personally would hate the stress,
| but some people like it.
|
| One thing I rarely see is people talking about her email
| where she said "give me a and b or else I'll leave" -
| paraphrasing slightly. This isn't in dispute, she readily
| admits this.
|
| What ... is an employer supposed to do with this? Also
| she's a manager, so there are extra lame legal crap. It
| feels like they could have not taken her bait - which
| sounds like hyperbole to me - but I guess they did, and
| do they have to?
|
| I can't say about any of the review things, if she is
| being over reviewed or not, could be. Demanding to know
| everyone who looked at her work so she could... wage a
| Twitter war of destruction, well I could understand not
| wanting to do that. I mean if I was asked to review her
| paper, I would decline. Who would get into that?
| mstg wrote:
| That is very sad indeed. I am a second degree immigrant
| and active in politics in Norway. This behaviour is
| actually limiting our abilities to work towards
| eliminating real discriminatory behaviour. I've seen it
| first hand where someone has accused someone else of
| racism, when it was there own fault. I guess it benefits
| them, because they get their way but it also creates a
| divided and toxic society. Working with people like that
| is also very tiring and stressing.
| genericone wrote:
| That's an angle I had not considered. She has a reputation
| for retaliation using -isms and those reviewers were able
| to successfully ask their employer for protections against
| a historically confrontational coworker. Google as a
| company takes the hit, as it is in their great interest to
| prevent their less-vocal employees from getting raked into
| a public fight.
| mstg wrote:
| Exactly. That would be very unfair to those employees.
| How she treated Yann LeCun and how she now publicly
| bashes Jeff Dean it is no doubt that those employees
| would also be named and shamed publicly. She threatened
| to resign and her resignation was accepted. Don't talk
| the talk if you can't walk the walk :)
| visarga wrote:
| > According to her Twitter feed, Timnit was asking for the
| same transparency that normally goes with Google pub reviews
|
| She has a Twitter army ready to set their aim on her
| reviewers and a track record, they can't reveal the names.
| mikeryan wrote:
| You can read Timnit's letter/POV here
| https://www.platformer.news/p/the-withering-email-that-
| got-a...
| [deleted]
| nx7487 wrote:
| Yeah the way I see it, once someone makes an ultimatum, the
| relationship is destroyed, there's no trust. You can ignore the
| quality of her paper or the critiques from Google, they
| probably just decided to end the relationship because of this.
| paijiut wrote:
| I don't know why Google is bothering to say anything. It's pretty
| obvious that those who support the person who left have anchored
| their opinions and won't change under any circumstances, and
| those defending Google are anchored as well.
| deeviant wrote:
| I feel that Jeff Dean is a much better engineer than he is a
| leader.
| Imnimo wrote:
| This reads to me like Google felt that the paper painted some of
| their other technologies in a poor light, and wanted to insert
| language that made them look better. The way he describes their
| objections, they strike me as the sort of thing that is routinely
| addressed in the camera-ready version of papers by adding a few
| lines to the related work section. Not the sort of thing that a
| conference reviewer or an internal reviewer would reject a paper
| over.
|
| Previously, we only had one side of this story. But if this is
| Dean's best spin on Google's side of the story, I'm very tempted
| to conclude they're in the wrong here. Obviously I don't have all
| the information, but the information I do have feels consistent
| with the idea that someone important at Google didn't like
| Gebru's paper for corporate-political (meaning making Google look
| good, as opposed to political-political) reasons, they tried to
| get Gebru to play ball, she refused, and now they have to back-
| project a justification in the name of "scientific integrity".
|
| Unfortunately, I think this is a story where most people's
| opinions about who's in the right will be more informed by their
| previous opinions about Gebru and Dean than the narrower question
| of what happened with this particular paper. I'm probably even
| guilty of that to some extent myself, given that I'm a fan of
| some of Gebru's previous work.
| asciident wrote:
| I've seen these review comments before and I don't know if we
| can say from our position whether it's corrections that can be
| made for camera ready or not.
|
| If a paper does not analyze the improvements from recent work,
| and just older work that has been surpassed (deemed inefficient
| by Dean), the new reanalysis might not be as favorable to the
| results as the paper proposes which means the paper is moot.
|
| Or the second point is about bias in language models, but it
| sounds like these issues are mitigated in recent research,
| which means people are already aware and have solved a bulk of
| the issue being described in the paper.
|
| But certainly it's possible that the paper's contributions
| stands strong even after accounting for the recent work that
| Dean mentions. In that case, it could be corrected for camera
| ready. But my point is that we can't tell right now without
| seeing the paper, and the relevant research that was omitted.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| But this review process had never been used for introducing
| comments of this sort to a paper ever before. Plus, there was
| no suggestion of change, just retraction.
| lokar wrote:
| > But this review process had never been used for
| introducing comments of this sort to a paper ever before
|
| How do you know that?
| skissane wrote:
| > they strike me as the sort of thing that is routinely
| addressed in the camera-ready version of papers by adding a few
| lines to the related work section
|
| What I don't understand is why in the discussion nobody
| proposed _amending_ the paper rather than withdrawing it. If
| Dean 's issue was it didn't cite papers X,Y and Z, rather than
| demand a withdrawal, why didn't he just demand "I want you to
| amend the paper to add cites to X,Y,Z". And then, if Gebru and
| her coauthors were willing to add those cites, that would
| resolve it.
|
| Indeed, from what I understand, "you should add a cite to X" is
| common peer review feedback, and a lot of papers get citations
| added due to requests from peer reviewers. So this isn't hugely
| different from that scenario.
|
| It would seem that withdrawal over this issue would only make
| sense if Gebru and her coauthors refused to amend the paper to
| add the requested citations, but I haven't heard anything
| saying that she did refuse to do so. It isn't clear if the
| alternative solution of amending rather than withdrawing was
| ever brought up in the discussion by either party.
|
| Not that I'm a researcher or anything, but if I was, and a
| superior told me "we need you to withdraw your paper because it
| doesn't cite X,Y,Z", my immediate response would be "How about
| I add the citations you are requesting and resubmit it with
| those additions?"
| htrp wrote:
| > What I don't understand is why in the discussion nobody
| proposed amending the paper rather than withdrawing it. If
| Dean's issue was it didn't cite papers X,Y and Z, rather than
| demand a withdrawal, why didn't he just demand "I want you to
| amend the paper to add cites to X,Y,Z". And then, if Gebru
| and her coauthors were willing to add those cites, that would
| resolve it.
|
| Unless corporate tells you to kill the paper and you need
| something that resembles legal cover.
| quest88 wrote:
| Maybe they did? We know, from Jeff's doc, feedback was given
| and then demands were made.
| pseudalopex wrote:
| Gebru complained about not being told what the criticisms
| were. That implies she was willing to consider feedback.
| tfehring wrote:
| More specifically, she stated in her original email [0]:
|
| > _Have you ever heard of someone getting "feedback" on a
| paper through a privileged and confidential document to HR?
| Does that sound like a standard procedure to you or does it
| just happen to people like me who are constantly
| dehumanized?_
|
| So she did get feedback of some kind, though my reading is
| that it was probably vague legalese that she reasonably
| deemed insufficient.
|
| [0] https://www.platformer.news/p/the-withering-email-that-
| got-a...
| pseudalopex wrote:
| She also implied she had to push just to get that.
| fatbird wrote:
| In Timnit's account, she said she asked for specific feedback
| so it could be addressed and the paper published; this was
| denied to her and is part of her complaint over which she
| resigned.
| skissane wrote:
| One thing I don't understand about this situation is which
| of the following was she denied:
|
| (1) the substance of the feedback and actionable specifics
| (e.g. "you didn't cite X")
|
| (2) the actual text of the feedback (if it was given in
| written form)
|
| If she was denied (1), I agree that is grossly unfair. If
| she was denied (2) but granted (1), I don't think that is
| so unreasonable. If feedback is anonymous, sharing its
| exact text can give away who gave it (you can often work
| out who wrote something just from the style of language the
| author used, especially if these are people you know and
| work closely with.)
|
| If she was given actionable specifics ("add a cite to X"),
| then knowing who it came from and the exact text of it is
| irrelevant and I don't think she has a right to it. If she
| was denied actionable specifics, that is grossly unfair to
| her. I think one difficulty is that her account makes it
| sound like she was denied that, Dean's makes it sound like
| she wasn't, I wasn't there so I don't know whose account is
| more accurate.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| freediver wrote:
| Funny that Jeff Dean would write and share this in a google doc.
| After 20 years of being a driving force for the web, there was no
| other easier, more appropriate tool avaialable to a senior google
| employee to share his opinion online.
| throawaydmg wrote:
| > 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
|
| It always amazes how blatantly authoritarian these "woke" types
| are. I would not be surprised if the sole reason she wanted the
| identities of every consultant was to engage in some sort of
| witch-hunting and bigoteering[0]
|
| [0] https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Bigoteering
| jsmith12673 wrote:
| I would caution you by saying that no quote, paraphrase, or
| evidence of exactly what Timnit said.
|
| Since this is Google's side of the story its in their interest
| to use words that would imply she's overbearing, or otherwise
| unaccommodating
|
| (for all I know she could be all of those things, but this
| narration isn't sufficient evidence to prove that)
| brown9-2 wrote:
| Do you work in an environment where design or code review
| feedback is anonymous? So why would it be the case for internal
| peer review of a paper?
| root_axis wrote:
| Woke politics is a red-herring. Google is typically cool with
| woke politics, as "anti-sjw" types are usually quick to point
| out. If you take it out of the culture-war context its a lot
| easier to see what this story is all about.
| harrylove wrote:
| I wonder if stories like these should be off-limits for
| accounts that were created specifically to spread FUD. Several
| accounts just like this one appeared simultaneously in one of
| the other submissions as well. They added nothing to the
| discussion other than to make ad hominem attacks on Gebru.
| We're seeing the same thing here.
|
| edit: typo
| foota wrote:
| I can imagine she felt helpless when her work was being
| blocked. Imagine you were going to start a project and was told
| someone in your org was against it and that you couldn't do it
| as a result.
| [deleted]
| kevinskii wrote:
| That pretty much sums up every employee/employer
| relationship, and it isn't a bad thing.
| throawaydmg wrote:
| Maybe take a step back, consider the possibility that you may
| be wrong, and if you still think you are right, then attack
| their ideas and arguments, instead of acting entitled and
| demanding to know who said this or that.
|
| Like PG wrote, the worst thing you can say about an idea is
| that it is wrong, you don't need to resort to personal
| attacks or x-isms.
| Orthw2020 wrote:
| That is the only reason.
|
| If your entire career is built around solving a problem, then
| actually solving it is against your personal best interest.
| deeviant wrote:
| Authoritarian? Please. You seem to be confused.
|
| > I would not be surprised if the sole reason she wanted the
| identities of every consultant was to engage in some sort of
| witch-hunting and bigoteering[0]
|
| Right...
| bnj wrote:
| Isn't it pretty normal to ask to "face your accuser" and engage
| with feedback specifically, instead of an anonymous and
| unassailable red stamp?
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| It is. It's not a request you're ever going to get when
| you're dealing with the HR department, though.
|
| Which puts you in a no-win situation when you suspect that HR
| is doing shady stuff against you...
| chris11 wrote:
| I agree with that. But it would be strange for HR to be
| handling peer review for scientific papers.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Which, if I understand correctly, is in fact what
| happened. Or did I get lost in this saga somewhere?
| Aunche wrote:
| This tweet may explain why the reviewers do not want to be
| confronted:
|
| > Nothing like a bunch of privileged White men trying to
| squash research by marginalized communities for marginalized
| communities by ordering them to STOP with ZERO conversation.
| The amount of disrespect is incredible. Every time I think
| about it my blood starts boiling again.
|
| https://twitter.com/timnitGebru/status/1331757629996109824
| dekhn wrote:
| That's in court, or whatever, not academic or industrial
| anonymous peer review.
| sidlls wrote:
| In the context of peer review it's common, or at least not
| uncommon, for reviewers to be anonymous. Personally I think
| it should be completely blind both directions to promote
| maximum objectivity.
|
| Whether that applies at all in this case is a separate
| matter.
| fatbird wrote:
| True, but it's also the norm that peer reviewer's feedback
| _is_ provided to allow the author the address issues. In
| Timnit 's account, she received neither identities nor the
| feedback itself.
| lostmsu wrote:
| This is incorrect, she did receive the feedback, then
| demanded the source to be deanonimized.
| sidlls wrote:
| Yes, that's what I understood. It's a completely
| inappropriate request really. And a scientist should
| understand that.
| geodel wrote:
| I think Google can't be force to admit that when postmodernist
| racial theory ideologues are in the research / leadership ranks
| this kind of review is necessary. So Google is just going to say
| this is how we do it (or did it always).
| temp8964 wrote:
| This whole sh*t show only proves certain kind of people are
| extremely toxic.
| samizdis wrote:
| This topic, over the past couple of days, seems to me to have
| become fraught, polarised and argued to distraction and faction.
|
| It's not a stretch to say that the world has a problem with
| discrimination, or that big personalities can rock the boat when
| they go against the grain. Or that corporates have interests to
| defend.
|
| I'd like in this case, though - not to say that all the other
| factors aren't worthy of examination as subjects in their own
| right - to see this paper. The authors/collaborators are leaders
| in the field. There are legitimate concerns about AI/ML; the
| validity/reliability of data from which, nowadays, consequential
| outcomes are derived.
|
| Please, let's ignore - at least for now - the corporate politics,
| the heat of the race/gender politics, the PR machines weighing in
| (look at all the news outlets grabbing this atm), and take a look
| at what the paper says. The right people (those in the field and
| qualified/able to do so) should be listened to.
|
| As for the politics of this, and the posturing and politicising
| and agenda-building on all sides: that doesn't help.
|
| AI and ML affect us all now. This is a trend. Let's at least
| expose the findings of acknowledged leaders in the field - let's
| see this study - before we descend into the sideshows of politics
| and factionalism. Please.
|
| Edit to clarify: tl;dr - I've not seen/read this contested paper.
| Whatever its contents, I want to see them, and imo that is more
| important than the current controversy blizzard etc.
| agentdrtran wrote:
| it's absurd to want to wave away stuff like "race/gender
| politics" when the impact of that "politics" is overwhelmingly
| obvious in the field.
| samizdis wrote:
| Sorry for not being clear. My only point is that I would like
| to see the research paper. I respect acknowledged and
| qualified domain expertise. It's an education for people like
| me, non-academics and not domain experts (but working with
| some ML/AI stuff). I want to see the thoughts and discoveries
| and recommendations and cautions and all that - from people
| who know their stuff.
|
| The rest, to me, is a distraction. This specialist/academic,
| has a really good rep. I care not about character or
| friendliness or whatever. As a brain, this person is
| documented as having the chops. I want to see the report.
| qppo wrote:
| Yesterday the conversation was all over the tone of the email
| exchange, and my gut was regardless of the research it discussed
| that Google was probably alright to choose to accept that
| researcher's resignation.
|
| Now I think I was wrong, Google looks like they're full of crap.
| If the research doesn't pass muster I'd like to read it and pass
| my own judgement. I'm guessing the tone was justified.
| google234123 wrote:
| If oyu are paid by Google, Google has a right to vet your
| external work related to your position.
| zemo wrote:
| ok google234123
| javajosh wrote:
| What's even worse is that Google ignored Timnit's attempts to
| figure out what went wrong, handing down a decision by fiat. I
| am surprised that this doesn't violate Google's standards! It
| would certainly violate mine.
|
| OTOH Timnit sounds like a down-the-middle SJW type, which means
| that every conflict is about identity, privilege, and so on,
| which honestly hurts her message. To me, its enough that Google
| shut her paper down and wouldn't tell her why or give her even
| a chance for a different outcome -- perhaps it is, ironically,
| her SJW nature that makes it risky for Google to engage her in
| the way she wants to be engaged, because a deeper conflict
| _cannot_ look good for Google in the current cultural climate.
| (E.g. sounds like she 's got strong intellectual integrity
| points, and weak SJW points to make about Google, but they
| couldn't engage the former without also dealing with the
| latter.)
| visarga wrote:
| > ignored Timnit's attempts to figure out what went wrong,
| handing down a decision by fiat
|
| Funny, because she mobbed Yann LeCun and after she obtained a
| forced apology from him and an invitation to a civilised and
| serious discussion she said "this is not worth my time".
|
| Maybe it wasn't worth their time.
| oivey wrote:
| I would be absolutely furious if a manager blocked my work from
| being published. Even a manager who has worked as a researcher,
| in my experience, significantly lacks the expertise to be making
| such judgments. A research manager's job is to be familiar with
| work across an entire portfolio, so they will be necessarily less
| knowledgeable than individual senior researchers. Presumably
| Google generally also feels this way seeing as this appears to be
| the first case where prepublication approval was denied for
| content. I would never work somewhere where management had such a
| lack of respect for my own judgment as a researcher.
| visarga wrote:
| Then you probably have to get hired at a corporation that never
| puts its own well being above the rest.
| supergirl wrote:
| sounds to me that google hired this ethics researcher but now
| they don't like what she found
| danbrooks wrote:
| It's standard practice to check in with stakeholders before
| submitting a paper.
|
| The important issue in the paper seems to be that the paper
| villainized large language models, which Google has a vested
| interest in.
|
| The paper was likely publishable with a bit more context in the
| introduction.
|
| I've been in similar situations and they were handled offline.
|
| The explosiveness of this situation seems to have been prepared
| the history of Timnit's relationship with Google.
|
| This incident was just the spark.
| kaymanb wrote:
| > Our aim is to rival peer-reviewed journals in terms of the
| rigor and thoughtfulness in how we review research before
| publication.
|
| I can see how this might be frustrating for academics working
| within Google. The field already has systems in place for peer-
| review. While I admire the idea of Google holding their research
| to a certain standard, it also provides a mechanism for
| dismissing research that paints Google (the corporation) in a bad
| light. If a paper is good enough to pass an (external) review
| process, why should it not be published?
| iab wrote:
| I think this is the crux, in that google is not academia; so
| naturally a band-gap would arise if your expectations were that
| it should behave like an academic institution. From their
| perspective, what requirement is there to publish work that is
| not well aligned with their goals (optics, financial, etc)?
| htrp wrote:
| The problem is also that Google's AI labs are treated more or
| less as academia, that's one of the big selling points for
| recruiting.
|
| I'm in industry and am not allowed to even talk about the
| projects I work on, much less publish papers, it kills
| recruiting conversations with maybe 10% of the people at
| conferences.
| danpalmer wrote:
| > If a paper is good enough to pass an (external) review
| process, why should it not be published?
|
| There are many journals that have a poor track record on peer
| review, and in fact even those that have a generally good track
| record often have times that it famously failed.
|
| Whether we agree or not, Google want to protect their
| reputation. Because not every journal will be up to their
| standards, ensuring that papers do meet a standard is going to
| be important for them.
|
| They could do this by only allowing submission to certain
| journals, but this would require an understanding of each
| journal, its processes reputation, etc. Perhaps easier is just
| to review papers before they are submitted.
|
| This does also allow them to protect potentially NDA'd info
| from being accidentally included in a paper given to external
| reviewers, which is (whether you agree or not) something they
| will clearly want to do.
| stagger87 wrote:
| If your company pays for your research, expect them to review
| it. This is not surprising and is par for the course in
| corporate research environments.
| mrDmrTmrJ wrote:
| Great question! Here's a scenario, though I don't know if it's
| the case here:
|
| Image that one set of NDA'd data was included in the paper,
| that painted Google in a bad light, but a different set of
| NDA'd data was excluded in paper, that painted Google in a good
| light.
|
| I have no idea if that's what's going on here. But if some of
| the people who objected to publishing the paper thought this
| was happening, it may explain their objections to publishing
| the work.
| choppaface wrote:
| It's frankly unprofessional for Jeff Dean to post only his email
| in this document without providing more context. The news media
| has in cases provided balanced coverage that included the email
| from Timnit that prompted Google's action:
| https://www.platformer.news/p/the-withering-email-that-got-a...
|
| This post from Jeff Dean simply underscores that he has failed to
| balance the need for diplomacy with the research thesis of his
| own research group. I'm not saying he's being malicious, but
| incredibly tone deaf. While I appreciate he gets "attacked" at
| nearly every talk (at one retinopathy talk I saw him grilled for
| 10 minutes on race), he's going to continue to get this sort of
| attention until he can stop being the Googler who wants to tell
| you why their view is right.
| gundmc wrote:
| It seems reasonable to choose to publish something you wrote
| yourself (and presumably cleared with legal/PR) and not publish
| something written by someone else with an intended internal
| audience. It would be WAY worse if they unilaterally published
| Timnit's private emails publicly.
| [deleted]
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| I'm not sure what you mean by "unprofessional" here. In my
| eyes, a vague statement that they had some irreconcilable
| differences but she's still a great researcher is nearly the
| archetype of professionalism. It would be extremely
| unprofessional for him to publicly criticize an email Timnit
| sent privately to the Women in Google Brain group.
| saagarjha wrote:
| I mean, this is obviously a place where Jeff Dean is providing
| the voice of Google on the topic. Why would they provide
| balanced context?
| hackcasual wrote:
| A large part of the criticism directed towards google is that
| they weren't particularly transparent in their handling of
| this situation. This is making that look worse.
| nullc wrote:
| Excerpts were already being leaked on HN.
|
| The 'email from Timnit' doesn't exactly look good... I would
| expect a manager posting company lists in that manner to be
| dismissed (or a junior employee to receive some mentioning
| about professional conduct, if not dismissed).
|
| I don't believe anyone has published the ultimatum email, which
| I think would be more accurately described as what precipitated
| the outcome.
| aylmao wrote:
| I hope Timnit finds it [1]. Google has it in their email
| servers but I doubt they'll publish it.
|
| [1]:
| https://twitter.com/timnitGebru/status/1334881120920498180
| jl2718 wrote:
| If she submitted, does that mean we are going to be able to read
| it? Is it on preprint?
| [deleted]
| bnj wrote:
| While I'm a spectator to this unfolding story and am reacting to
| a pretty cursory overview of what happened, this has the distinct
| feeling that Google thought they were moving in for a checkmate
| by, in their words, "accepting a resignation", only to have it --
| very predictably? - blow up in their faces completely.
|
| Even if Google is acting presenting the chain of events
| faithfully, their final move to jump on an opportunity to remove
| the researcher and call it resignation seems so aggressive and
| incongruous that from the outside it makes it seem like this
| conflict is rooted in a larger and more difficult relationship
| that they calculated was no longer in their interest.
|
| I'm wondering if the cost benefit analysis is still looking that
| way on the inside, because this move and the attention it's
| causing is so contrary to their stated goals that I have to
| wonder if Google is committed to those goals at all. Others must
| be wondering exactly the same thing.
| Aunche wrote:
| I think that Google viewed her as a ticking time bomb, so they
| might as well detonate it early to try to contain explosion.
| She had threatened to sue Google in the past and was most
| likely gathering even more ammunition for her lawyers.
| visarga wrote:
| You might be on to something. The paper doesn't seem too
| controversial or especially amazing, the objections seem
| minor (some citations and updates), maybe it's just a
| pretext. Could be about a lawsuit.
| karmasimida wrote:
| One thing that is missing here is the demands the said
| researcher had brought up to the leadership. Didn't see either
| party bring it up in their side of story.
| [deleted]
| pm90 wrote:
| This sums it up almost perfectly. The only thing I would add is
| that things like these tend to have a pattern. If a single
| person speaks up and you have multiple others claiming similar
| treatment, it significantly increases the likelihood of the
| workplace being hostile to such persons.
|
| Also: Googles bar for hiring is extremely high. For multiple
| senior engineers/managers to corroborate this description is
| rather damning.
| quotemstr wrote:
| Did it blow up in Google's face? A bunch of perpetually angry
| people on Twitter are angry. So what? Google's actual
| operations are affected not only tiny bit by this episode.
| Outrage has no power.
|
| Social media is not real life. Every company, Google included,
| needs to simply ignore social media outrage and focus on their
| mission instead.
|
| Internet outrage only has power because companies give it
| power. Angry words and hit pieces from biased media do nothing
| on their own. If you don't let them make you afraid, you have
| no reason to be afraid of them. The internet screamed at
| Coinbase after the company showed their internal activists the
| door, but Coinbase is doing just fine. See? Nothing to be
| afraid of. Just get rid of troublemakers.
| noitpmeder wrote:
| I don't see what else they should have done? This researcher
| made some ultimatum. As part of it, she said if Google refused,
| she would set a date to leave the company. Google obviously did
| not concede to her demand, and obviously didn't think it
| beneficial to let her be a thorn any longer, so took her up on
| her offer.
| pseudalopex wrote:
| She didn't offer to resign immediately. Fewer people would be
| criticizing Google if they just accepted her actual offer.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Seriously, I'm kinda a little wondering how people expect
| that when someone makes an extremely demanding ultimatum
| that includes challenging the rights of other people in the
| company, and the company declines to agree to that
| ultimatum, that we should be shocked that the person
| doesn't get to dictate all of the details around their
| resignation.
|
| What I get most from this whole discussion is the extremely
| nauseating level of entitlement from some employees at
| Google.
| pseudalopex wrote:
| Fewer people would be criticizing Google if they just
| called the firing a firing.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| If I storm into my manager's office and demand a set of
| conditions, or else I resign on some date, and my manager
| says "Well, fine, we accept your resignation, but it's
| effective immediately" I don't really have a problem with
| my manager calling it a resignation.
| pseudalopex wrote:
| Firing someone who's given notice is still firing them.
| johncena33 wrote:
| > She didn't offer to resign immediately.
|
| Just out of curiosity why would Google let her resign on a
| sepcific date given that she was already sending
| inflammatory emails to her coworkers?
|
| > Fewer people would be criticizing Google if they just
| accepted her actual offer.
|
| Highly unlikely. This issue has become politicized, so
| people would keep ciriticizing Google even if they let her.
| that_guy_iain wrote:
| > While I'm a spectator to this unfolding story and am reacting
| to a pretty cursory overview of what happened, this has the
| distinct feeling that Google thought they were moving in for a
| checkmate by, in their words, "accepting a resignation", only
| to have it -- very predictably? - blow up in their faces
| completely.
|
| I wouldn't say this has blown up in their face. But to be
| honest, I've not seen that much drama about it than one post.
| Have I been missing something?
|
| This seems a very solid move from Google. Someone tried to
| bully their way into getting information from Google they
| shouldn't give out. If you go to HR in confidence that
| confidence should be upheld. The fact someone had to go to HR
| for a peer review and the fact it was upheld states something.
|
| If someone says "Do X or I'll quit" when you're not going to do
| X, it is a resigination and seems quite standard that they
| don't want such an active detractor within their company ranks.
|
| I believe she basically sent an email to fellow employees
| basically telling them to stop working. That alone is a
| firable. That is completely nuts and unacceptable work place
| behaviour. The fact Google didn't fire her for that should
| speak volumes.
|
| To me, from a HR point of view, this is completely the right
| move to make.
| bnj wrote:
| I don't think you're incorrect on any particular point.
|
| Just anecdotally, I don't think a man sending a "do x or I'll
| quit" email would be met with the same response. I think
| issues of race and gender are playing a role here, and that's
| a shame, because while firing (accepting this resignation) of
| this researcher might make short term business sense, it
| seems like it does harm to Google's long term credibility in
| trying to engage with reducing the barriers faced by (among
| others) women and people of color.
|
| It's a shame there wasn't a pathway to keeping the dialogue
| going, for example by getting in touch with her and letting
| her know that some things she was asking for wouldn't work,
| but that you could work with her to accomplish her goals in
| some other way.
|
| From my privileged outside point of view, that seems like it
| could have been a more humane response which could have
| disarmed the conflict. I think opportunities to pursue
| options like that are de-emphasized when management are put
| in an all or nothing position.
|
| A missed opportunity for leadership.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| > I don't think a man sending a "do x or I'll quit" email
| would be met with the same response.
|
| Ugh, this is a bit infuriating to me. I think there are a
| ton of parallels in this whole situation to the James
| Damore memo issue, and IIRC Damore was fired pretty
| quickly: Google employee sends out an email to a wide
| distribution, and while that email may make some valid
| points, the overall tone of the post guarantees it to be a
| net negative to the company, and then when the employee is
| let go, they bitch and moan about how there is some sort of
| conspiracy in the company against them.
|
| I believe firing Damore was the right decision and I
| believe Google was right to accept Gebru's resignation.
| zaksoup wrote:
| If somebody used HR as the mechanism to communicate feedback
| on the scientific rigor of research I was leading I would
| also find that concerning and objectionable. Human Resources
| is not peer review.
| that_guy_iain wrote:
| Honestly, if someone had to use HR to give feedback on
| anything, I would be more concerned as to why they couldn't
| say it directly to me.
|
| HR wouldn't have made the final decision here, it seems
| other departments did. HR was just how someone felt it was
| safe to communicate that feedback, which for me is a major
| issue in a workplace.
| zaksoup wrote:
| I think there's a place for HR to help somebody give
| feedback about social or work-style issues. If somebody
| has a track record of getting defensive with face-to-face
| feedback it might be useful to have a manager present as
| a mediator and go through a formal process.
|
| That's just not the same as giving scientific feedback in
| the review process for research and shouldn't be in the
| way there.
| runako wrote:
| > not seen that much drama about it than one post
|
| This morning, there were front-page posts about this on the
| New York Times, Washington Post, Wired, Google, BBC, and
| Financial Times. It's being covered pretty widely.
| nebulous1 wrote:
| > If someone says "Do X or I'll quit" when you're not going
| to do X, it is a resigination
|
| I mean, whether or not this stands up legally isn't worth
| discussing but I don't think this is typically how an
| ultimatum goes. Rather it's more along the lines of "this or
| I'll quit", "okay, we're not doing this", "right, I quit".
| It's not called calling your bluff for nothing.
|
| I agree that her email to the Brain group makes her position
| at google almost untenable, but that's a separate question.
| However, it might make her choose not to fight them on the
| resignation.
| that_guy_iain wrote:
| > However, it might make her choose not to fight them on
| the resignation.
|
| How can she fight? Just curious, the US is almost
| completely an at will employment. Fighting to get your name
| dirted that you didn't resign but were fired, seems odd.
| Google seems to saving face for her if anything.
| nebulous1 wrote:
| > How can she fight? Just curious, the US is almost
| completely an at will employment.
|
| Even with a contract? I know little enough about US
| labour laws, although I'm pretty sure it's not at-will
| all over. Where I am (not the US) you can sue for unfair
| dismissal.
|
| > Fighting to get your name dirted that you didn't resign
| but were fired, seems odd.
|
| Yeah, I agree if there's a good chance if the resignation
| stands. However if she could get a court to say she was
| unfairly dismissed it might be a different case, as it
| would help her case that Google have acted unfairly
| towards her. None of this publicity is going to help her
| future employment potential generally but may help in
| niche circles that she might be aiming for.
| pseudalopex wrote:
| Resigning means giving up unemployment benefits or suing
| for unfair dismissal.
|
| Resigning sounds better than being fired when no other
| details are available. It's irrelevant when the parties
| publish their sides of the story.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| _I believe she basically sent an email to fellow employees
| basically telling them to stop working. That alone is a
| firable. That is completely nuts and unacceptable work place
| behaviour. The fact Google didn 't fire her for that should
| speak volumes._
|
| This is little more than gossip unless you can point to
| something specific that people can judge for themselves.
| Saying "she basically did X" is a clever way to influence how
| people feel about her.
|
| I'll admit, I had negative thoughts till this thread. Now I'm
| not so sure. She's definitely passionate, and one might say
| aggressive, but more and more people are saying that it's
| extremely unusual for Google to demand a rejection for
| academic reasons rather than business concerns. Whether she
| was a good employee is kind of beside the point now.
| that_guy_iain wrote:
| > This is little more than gossip unless you can point to
| something specific that people can judge for themselves.
| Saying "she basically did X" is a clever way to influence
| how people feel about her.
|
| It's gossip as in I haven't seen anyone confirm the
| validtiy of https://www.platformer.news/p/the-withering-
| email-that-got-a... but I've also not seen anyone deny it.
| In fact, it seems everyone is confirming it unoffically.
|
| From the blog post:
|
| > "What I want to say is stop writing your documents
| because it doesn't make a difference."
|
| Is telling your fellow employees to stop working, if their
| job is writing those documents which I highly suspect it
| will be.
|
| > Whether she was a good employee is kind of beside the
| point now.
|
| I think it goes to show the good faith Google tried to have
| with someone who in my opinion was creating a hostile work
| envoirment.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| That is totally not the same thing as telling your fellow
| employees to stop working. I like to think I'm a pretty
| reasonable fellow, but it's hard to see that point of
| view.
|
| I felt similarly to you yesterday. Now I'm not so sure.
| It sounds like she was criticizing company process and
| was frustrated not being able to have any impact on what
| she perceived were real problems to the integrity of the
| process. I can empathize with that feeling, and I've done
| some embarrassing or unprofessional things when I was
| younger and slightly less wiser in similar situations.
|
| I dunno mate, people here are suddenly trying _awfully_
| hard to repeat their points about her personal behavior
| / paint her as an unprofessional loon. And that's a
| pretty convenient distraction if her criticisms were
| true, wouldn't you say?
| dmix wrote:
| Even Jeff Dean had to include:
|
| > 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.
| [deleted]
| johncena33 wrote:
| I've read her email. In my first job, right after college, I have
| also sent an inflammatory email (nothing compared to the email
| she has sent) to my manager (not a whole group of coworkers). And
| I got seriously reprimanded for it by my then manager. Even after
| a decade I cringe when I remember the email I wrote. I have no
| idea why people think it's okay to send emails like this and
| expect not to get fired.
| apta wrote:
| It's because of a culture that praises playing victim, no
| matter how successful you are, and regardless of whether or not
| they're telling the truth.
| Footkerchief wrote:
| The followup does not answer the major questions raised by this
| part of Dean's original email:
|
| > 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. [...] 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.
|
| When it was "approved for submission," was that approval final
| and actionable, or some kind of conditional approval? Is
| demanding a retraction after an approval the normal way it works
| at Google, or was this an unusual occurrence that Gebru was right
| to question?
| angry_octet wrote:
| After reading Jeff Dean's response, I can only come to the
| conclusion that Timnit Gebru acted like a primadonna. It is
| completely normal to have to obtain prepublication signoff on
| material before it is submitted to a conference (and manager
| signoff even before abstract submission). Given the breadth of
| experience at Google, it seems strange not to avail yourself of
| this. Demanding to know the identity of reviewers is absurd (no
| journal would tolerate that) and deeply unprofessional. Making it
| an explicit ultimatum was her decision. Denigrating the entire
| area of research at Google on a large mailing list is the action
| of someone who wants to be terminated.
|
| People claiming that the deficiencies in the paper are minor and
| wouldn't be blockers obviously have little experience submitting
| to academic journals. Other parts of Google doing deeply
| technical work probably don't have the same level of review as
| the Ethical AI group -- for obvious reasons.
|
| There is usually a long back and forth -- there are even memes
| about the infuriating comments from "Reviewer 2" [1][2]. Omitting
| to mention argument-obsoleting developments in the field (from
| your own lab!) is more than enough to send you back to extensive
| redrafting.
|
| To be clear on terminology -- a retraction is an academic black
| mark, and occurs to a paper after publication, usually for
| reasons of research misconduct. This is not an instance of that.
|
| [1]
| https://twitter.com/redpenblackpen/status/113344056990719590...
| [2] http://jasonya.com/wp/wp-
| content/uploads/2016/01/PowerRespon...
| joshuamorton wrote:
| > It is completely normal to have to obtain prepublication
| signoff on material before it is submitted to a conference (and
| manager signoff even before abstract submission)
|
| To be clear, both of these had been received for the paper in
| question.
| angry_octet wrote:
| That isn't the impression I had from reading the principal's
| statements, to wit:
|
| > 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.
|
| It seems like someone short-circuited the review process and
| submitted without review to meet a deadline, with a post-
| submission review. When this occurred, it was not all green
| lights. The expectation is that you then pull the submission
| and, post review, submit elsewhere. After all, conferences
| are all virtual now, it is not a hardship to submit
| elsewhere.
|
| If you have other information as to the facts or the internal
| process do tell.
| Footkerchief wrote:
| How do you interpret "approved for submission" as
| "submitted without review"?
| joshuamorton wrote:
| Jeff's statement is a lie. I work at Google, and the
| publication approval process doesn't normally take to
| weeks. Any Google employee can verify this, and others
| have, both in this thread, and on twitter. There's some
| documentation that asks for 2 weeks, but it's not followed,
| and inconsistent application of policy is absolutely a
| concern in a case like this.
|
| A summary of the events, as best as I can tell, is the
| normal presubmission review was done. After the paper was
| approved and submitted, someone, whether this was upper
| management or some other entity, did some additional review
| and required that the authors un-publish (?, but retract is
| the wrong term) the paper.
|
| From what I know, both firsthand and from other sources[0],
| while not spotless, the issues with the paper were mostly
| nitpicks and fairly straightforward to resolve. That they
| _weren 't even provided_ until some escalation from Dr.
| Gebru is strange. That even after they were, sort of,
| provided, she and her team were not given the option to
| address them in the paper, is extraordinarily strange.
|
| [0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/k69e
| q0/n_t...
| mattdeboard wrote:
| I think, given the top comment on this post, your comment is
| far too credulous about Google's incentives being aligned with
| scientific rigor alone.
| claydavisss wrote:
| very long winded way of saying: "she was a pain in the ass and I
| was looking for an excuse to get her out the door"
| chrisdinn wrote:
| Why doesn't Jeff just suck up his pride, apologize and hire her
| back rather than write increasingly thin rationalizations for his
| reaction?
|
| High level research (and engineering) will involve egos and you
| should expect this kind of push back when you stop someone from
| publishing. Nothing here justifies how he handled it
|
| Of course, I think many of us have seen this reaction before,
| maybe even done it ourselves. It's bad for everyone, don't do it
| Jeff!
| schoolornot wrote:
| Ok, put another way. What interest does Google have in re-
| hiring her? She left on a bad note and brought tremendous
| negative PR. The company isn't losing business over this as the
| treatment didn't rise to abuse or harassment. Her team will
| operate just fine - everyone is replaceable.
|
| Apparently Google has varying degrees of transparency when it
| comes to decision making. To be expected at a large company.
| There are some things my company & boss do that seem abnormal
| and out of character. You have to go with the flow sometimes
| and shut up. It seems like this person had some kind of utopian
| mindset where she felt management was obligated to explain
| everything around the blocking of her paper.
|
| I doubt a guy like Jeff who wants to do tech all day has a
| vendetta against black women that want to publish papers.
|
| What a way to go.
| rajangdavis wrote:
| Had Gebru not raised an ultimatum, what would have been the
| consequence of the paper not passing internal review be? It
| sounds like she submitted the paper anyway, would there have been
| consequences to those actions?
| visarga wrote:
| Copyright infringement? She doesn't own the paper, even though
| she signed it.
| drfuchs wrote:
| My researcher acquaintances at industry labs at IBM, Microsoft,
| HP, Xerox, ATT, Bell, DEC, Compaq, etc. never have had to have
| their papers reviewed internally before submitting them to
| conferences or journals. What's up with Google?
| [deleted]
| gcr wrote:
| Until now, nobody on my previous team at Google had to have
| their papers reviewed internally for scientific rigour either.
|
| (We have a publication approval process, but its purpose is to
| prevent IP leaks and maybe shield liability, not uphold
| scientific rigour standards)
| lokar wrote:
| I've seen Urs reject papers out of Tech Infra that he thought
| were not interesting enough
| lallysingh wrote:
| This is the AI Ethics team in a company betting their future
| on AI.
|
| They know they have a bubbling ethics problem and they've
| screwed over their best chance to do anything other than
| completely fuck it up.
|
| In history, this will be a wtf double facepalm moment.
| kazamaloo wrote:
| Technically you can submit it without pubapprove unless
| somebody rats you out and you might face some repercussions.
| Otherwise every paper is supposed to go through AI Ethics
| committee review along with other types of reviews.
| bnj wrote:
| I wonder how consistently these standards are applied, even
| zeroing in on Google. If it turns out that most people within
| the company don't face a barrier from this process in the same
| way then that sounds like a really problematic symptom.
| htrp wrote:
| Apparently not very consistently, at least if you're Google
| Brain CA
|
| https://twitter.com/le_roux_nicolas/status/13346019609729064.
| ..
| spinningslate wrote:
| I don't know Jeff Dean. I have read some of his work, watched
| some of his presentations. He seems a credible bloke.
|
| This, though, looks and feels like thinly-veiled retroactive and
| pretty unconvincing PR. It's short on detail and appears somewhat
| at odds with several points from Timnit Gebru's resignation note
| [0]:
|
| - Dean says the paper was reviewed by a "cross-functional team".
| Gebru says she received the feedback through a "privileged and
| confidential document to HR"
|
| - Dean says the paper was submitted for review on the day it was
| due to be published; Gebru says they had notified "PR & Policy 2
| months before".
|
| - Dean suggests the feedback was due to the paper not
| highlighting mitigating work for some of the limitations the
| paper was exposing. That seems like a very normal part of the
| research process. Why, then, does Gebru claim that she was told
| that a "manager can read you a privileged and confidential
| document" and that no other recourse or exploration of the
| feedback was permissible?
|
| The only thing we know from the outside is that reality will be
| far more nuanced and complicated than the tidbits that leak out.
| Even allowing for that though - and reading some of the related
| comments here - Google isn't coming out of this well at the
| moment.
|
| [0]: https://www.platformer.news/p/the-withering-email-that-
| got-a...
|
| EDIT: Fixed spelling of Timnit Gebru's name.
| kevinskii wrote:
| > Gebru says she received the feedback through a "privileged
| and confidential document to HR"
|
| I agree that Google isn't looking good at the moment. But if I
| had a colleague who seemed intent on finding ways to place the
| company in legal jeopardy, then I too would avoid direct
| communication whenever possible.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| _Dean says the paper was submitted for review on the day it was
| due to be published; Gebru says they had notified "PR & Policy
| 2 months before"._
|
| Wait, really? That's an important detail if true. The one-day
| timeline was a central part of the narrative surrounding this
| story. Notifying them two months ahead of time makes this a
| completely different situation.
|
| I'm a bit skeptical. Could this claim be verified somehow?
| Since it's very public news at this point, we may as well try
| to be rigorous.
| usmannk wrote:
| From what I read it sounds like Timnit cleared the general
| idea of the paper 2 months before. The paper itself seems to
| have been submitted for approval 1 day prior to the deadline.
| Another HN commenter says that submitting papers for approval
| "hours" before the deadline is common at Google.
| kazamaloo wrote:
| It is common to submit for approvals hours before the
| deadline. However, if pubapprove process finds something
| that needs to be redacted, you have to withdraw the paper.
| That's basically the risk in it.
| htrp wrote:
| Since most people are frantically working on their papers
| until day of/ hour before ML conference submission
| deadlines, the "final" version of the paper may very well
| have been submitted the day before the deadline.
|
| Someone in the ML community posted the abstract and
| provided feedback, which seems to indicate that this
| followed the typical review cycles for conference papers.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| Thank you. I'm not sure what to think. It seemed absurd to
| submit a paper for internal academic review one day prior
| to a major deadline. Yet today we're hearing that it's
| common (I can believe that; standard big company stuff) and
| that Google hasn't been doing academic reviews at all until
| very recently / possibly this incident.
|
| So it feels like, suddenly, the cornerstones of the
| arguments against her are vaporizing before our eyes. This
| could go badly for El Goog unless they stop making official
| statements on the matter.
|
| Saying nothing would have been better than giving a
| convenient post for all the former Google employees to come
| out of the woodwork and say "That's not true! Google never
| did academic reviews; they solely checked whether business
| IP was being exposed."
|
| It's ironic that people are painting her as unprofessional
| in that context; I'd be frustrated too, if that's really
| the situation.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| > It seemed absurd to submit a paper for internal
| academic review one day prior to a major deadline
|
| I think that there isn't internal academic review of the
| sort implied by Jeff at Google.
|
| Timnit seems pretty clearly in the right here. As an AI
| researcher at a competitor, this impacts my desire to
| join Google in the future. I imagine these sort of PR
| disasters hurt their standing in the academic labor
| market.
| lokar wrote:
| > I think that there isn't internal academic review of
| the sort implied by Jeff at Google.
|
| Why do you think that?
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| I'm interested to know too. Because although I treat my
| ML work professionally, I haven't worked at a large AI
| lab. So I had no idea whether academic review was common
| inside DeepMind/OpenAI/Facebook AI, or whether
| researchers generally did their own thing -- i.e. that
| the researcher and their co-authors are the main judges
| of their own academic integrity.
|
| And in hindsight, it seems dumb to think it'd be any
| other way. _Of course_ the researchers are their own
| judge. That 's what the reviewers are for! You submit
| your paper for academic review at a journal, and the
| reviewers are in charge of reviewing.
|
| Would you really want to mess with that dynamic if you're
| a big company? It's been a tried-and-true way to do
| science for more than a century. It's also a recipe for
| failing at science, as many will attest. But being
| allowed to fail at science _is a key aspect of science_.
| It would be terrible if we only published papers that
| were completely correct in every detail, because it means
| everyone is playing it safe rather than pushing the
| boundaries. The most interesting work is usually on the
| frontier of some new idea.
|
| When the news broke, I didn't give it a second thought.
| "Oh, Jeff is saying that there's an academic review
| process. Yeah, obviously DeepMind would have something
| like that. And what's this -- she sent the paper _one
| day_ before the journal deadline? That 's almost giving
| them the middle finger. Yeah, pretty clear-cut firing."
|
| ... But when you think back on it, none of that adds up.
| Researchers are paid to do research. Being hamstrung by
| some manager insisting that you namedrop every relevant
| paper from the last decade would certainly be rigorous,
| but not necessarily productive. Sure, you can argue that
| maybe she should have talked about X or Y. But you could
| also write your own paper.
|
| I'll admit, I didn't think highly of her. All I knew was
| that she liked to stir up drama. Why won't she just keep
| quiet and do her job like everyone else? Yet now it seems
| like she was doing her job. And if I ask myself how I'd
| react in that situation -- some middle manager is forcing
| a bogus new "review" process, and now they're demanding
| us to retract a paper that we put several months of work
| into, for reasons other than "You're revealing Google's
| IP," then my thoughts would be: (a) where were you during
| the two months I've been writing this and asking for
| feedback? (b) what are you trying to accomplish here, and
| is this really how a world-class institution treats the
| process?
|
| Every company is different. And at Google scale,
| different teams are different. But now it's looking
| pretty bad. They certainly had grounds to fire her, and
| for many folks perhaps that's enough, but as a researcher
| I'm thinking "Why did Google try so hard to retract her
| paper anyway?" They keep dancing around that. And the
| article certainly doesn't address it:
|
| _Our aim is to rival peer-reviewed journals in terms of
| the rigor and thoughtfulness in how we review research
| before publication._
|
| Why? That's the point of publishing! Do reviewers just
| say "Oh this is from Google" and click the "approve"
| button? Maybe, but the whole point is for people to read
| a paper and decide for themselves whether it's mistaken.
| This whole "keep it under the rug until it's polished
| perfectly for six months for no reason other than
| prestige" is... well, rather a grim-sounding idea.
|
| Outsiders can't know what insiders know. But we can
| picture various things based on the information we're
| getting. And this reads like some manager tried to double
| down, and she called him on it each time. After four or
| five doublings, now it's headline news and Google is
| looking like they went nuclear without some _very_ solid
| reasons.
| mdanger007 wrote:
| Your honor, I didn't beat my wife. But if I did, she deserved
| it.
| tfehring wrote:
| > _Dean says the paper was reviewed by a "cross-functional
| team". Gebru says she received the feedback through a
| "privileged and confidential document to HR"_
|
| I don't think these two takes are at odds with each other at
| all. It sounds like a cross-functional team reviewed the paper
| and produced that "privileged and confidential document" but
| Gebru didn't find that document sufficiently detailed.
| dang wrote:
| Previous threads on this ongoing story:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25292386
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25285502
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25289445
| thisgoodlife wrote:
| one link says she resigned. The other one says she was fired.
| Which one is it then?
| [deleted]
| dang wrote:
| It's fuzzy, and people are disagreeing about which aspect to
| emphasize.
| exolymph wrote:
| People have argued both cases. The tl;dr is that she said "I
| will resign if XYZ" and Google was like "we accept your
| resignation effective immediately." Whether or not that
| counts as firing is a matter of opinion.
| swyx wrote:
| well; also whether google has to pay severance.
| sp332 wrote:
| The headline on the platformer.news article was updated to
| reflect the fact that she was fired.
| ethanp61 wrote:
| She made demands and gave a resignation date if those demands
| were not met. Google said that they could not meet those
| demands and accepted her resignation but because of her
| conduct (emailing hundreds of Googlers), the resignation date
| was made immediate.
| danpalmer wrote:
| I believe on currently available information she did not
| give a date, but said she wanted to "discuss her exit
| timeline".
|
| Also it's likely that her contract allows Google to provide
| her pay in lieu of her working out the end of her contract,
| so they are probably able in general to move dates like
| this (not commenting on the other aspects of this situation
| though).
| asfadfdsa wrote:
| There are a lot of people commenting that she didn't actually
| resign. I agree, but it sounds like the conversation went like
| this:
|
| _employee: I 'm not happy about x, y and z. If you don't do
| those, I'm going to quit.
|
| manager: well we are not going to do those, so thank you for your
| time. We accept your resignation and would like it to start
| immediately (i.e. you're fired). _
|
| If you are gonna tell your manager that you plan to resign if a
| condition isn't met, then what do you expect them to say if they
| don't plan to fulfill that condition? It sounds like she was
| expecting them to say _" Hey, well we don't want to meet your
| demands, but sure, we're happy to have a disgruntled employee
| around here, so feel free to stick around, or you could just quit
| on your own timeline, no sweat"._
|
| I suspect that _many_ people would be fired on the spot for
| threatening to resign, so don 't threaten it if you aren't okay
| with that consequence.
| ghaff wrote:
| Yes. I probably didn't use the word "resign" as such but there
| was a time in my career when I went to my manager's manager or
| maybe another level up the chain and basically said I could not
| work for my direct manager. I got my way even though it
| involved working in a bit of a backwater for a time. But I was
| prepared to leave if I didn't get my way. (Didn't hurt that I
| knew said manager was a bit on the outs with the exec who I
| knew quite well.)
| driverdan wrote:
| As a manager I would only do this if I really wanted to fire
| the person already. For employees I care about I would give
| them an out.
|
| Part of being a good manager is understanding your employees
| and helping them succeed. If someone makes a statement like
| this in the heat of frustration it doesn't necessarily mean
| they will actually quit. If they're a valuable member of the
| team you should present them with an opportunity to save face
| and remain.
|
| To me this seems like taking an opportunity to fire someone
| they already wanted to get rid of. Either that or a bad manager
| who wanted to flex their power as a threat to the rest of the
| team.
| nebulous1 wrote:
| > manager: well we are not going to do those, so thank you for
| your time. We accept your resignation and would like it to
| start immediately (i.e. you're fired).
|
| The thing is, there's a big difference between resigning and
| being fired for cause, even if both end with you not working at
| the company anymore.
| fdasfsdafsa wrote:
| IANAL, but my best guess is that she was just let go without
| cause. Your employer can fire you at any time and technically
| doesn't need a reason. Typically, "terminated with cause" is
| a specific thing where they fire you and give a specific
| reason (e.g. stealing) that might have bearing on whether you
| receive unemployment benefits, accrued vacation, etc. It's
| hard to imagine that they fired her in that way and that she
| was just plain-old-fired (there's a reason for it, but not
| legal _cause_ ).
| visarga wrote:
| There were causes. The email to the women group and the
| demands. The paper wasn't so great either, based on the
| analysis of the abstract.
| jskajakzkjx wrote:
| Firing for cause would be something of a "nuclear option"
| here and IMO would significantly increase the risk of a
| court battle. The peanuts Google would save in severance
| costs would not be worth the PR damage.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| There are three different discussions happening all at the same
| time, which is muddying things.
|
| 1. Was the treatment of her research in internal review
| reasonable?
|
| 2. Was terminating her employment reasonable after she sent the
| (now public) email to the women-and-allies brain listserv?
|
| 3. Was the end of her employment at Google a resignation or a
| firing?
|
| To me, (3) is by a wide margin the least interesting part of
| the story and all of the discussion here is missing the point
| entirely. Whether she was fired or resigned has zero bearing on
| whether (1) and (2) show reasonable or unreasonable actions.
| visarga wrote:
| For what it's worth, I have read the abstract of the paper
| and discussions around it and I have seen more than one
| person rate it as not very interesting. Why is all this fuss
| about a paper restating common knowledge? For example, they
| say datasets need to be filtered for bias, and that large
| models consume ... duh ... a lot. We already know that,
| where's the new shiny architecture for fair modelling?
|
| link to abstract and discussion - https://old.reddit.com/r/Ma
| chineLearning/comments/k69eq0/n_t...
| reikonomusha wrote:
| What if the language weren't so direct? For example,
|
| > If I can't know who is providing reviews to my work, it's
| difficult for me to imagine continuing to work as a part of
| this group.
|
| Many people would still describe this (erroneously) as an
| ultimatum even though it could be bleakly summarized in the
| same vein as a true ultimatum.
| fdasfsdafsa wrote:
| It's more nicely worded to be sure, and definitely less
| aggressive, but it still says the same thing, which is "I'm
| gonna be an unhappy employee if I can't find out who reviewed
| my work". If they aren't willing to tell her who reviewed her
| work (which they may or may not have valid reasons for doing,
| but clearly they don't want to do), then they are dealing
| with someone who is going to be an unhappy employee since
| their conditions won't be met. Sure, not a resignation, but
| if your employer doesn't think you'll be a happy employee,
| why keep you around?
|
| In any case, she has been very vocal on twitter and has not
| seemed to deny that she gave some sort of ultimatum. If she
| didn't give an ultimatum, it would only make Google look
| worse, so why not mention that on Twitter (given that she has
| tweeted probably 100 things about this incident in the last
| two days)? Given the absence of a denial, I'm going to assume
| that it _was_ worded as an ultimatum.
| reikonomusha wrote:
| I vehemently disagree with just your first paragraph. (Your
| second and arguably more important paragraph I'm
| sympathetic to.) People state their feelings toward things
| all the time and none of it should ever be considered
| permanent. I've told my boss many times something of
| similar ilk, "if you're going to have me and my team do
| this last minute demo when it was fully in your capacity to
| plan better, I'm going to be pretty unhappy." Even to that
| I demand things change. Yet, for some reason, I'm not fired
| afterward as a "disgruntled employee" or "somebody who
| can't be happy working". I take time to understand my
| boss's disposition and I strongly seek my boss to
| understand mine, and hopefully we end up in a better place
| afterward.
|
| What's wrong with Google saying, "we refuse to comply with
| your demands, and we understand you may feel blablabla. We
| are trying to streamline our submission process and we
| would like you to help us do that."? Maybe it's because
| Google doesn't _actually_ have a desire to work with her,
| in which case, the ultimatum (or whatever it truly was) is
| just a convenient out.
| fdsafdsafd1 wrote:
| (grandparent here, different throwaway)
|
| > _Maybe it's because Google doesn't actually have a
| desire to work with her, in which case, the ultimatum (or
| whatever it truly was) is just a convenient out._
|
| There's almost no question about that in my mind. Maybe
| google didn't see her work as useful. Maybe she was just
| an asshole and they didn't like working with her. I have
| no idea. But if you are already on thin ice (or your
| company even feels just neutral about you) and you give
| an ultimatum, prepare for them to use it against you.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| We don't know the exact language, but by Timnit's account she
| made a numbered list of demands, which is pretty inherently
| direct.
| ryanobjc wrote:
| And she said her email contained language like "and if my
| demands aren't met, then I will find an exit date."
|
| It sounded from her account a straightforward threat to
| leave.
| jkbhzsdfkhjnzs wrote:
| > "So if you would like to change things, I suggest focusing on
| leadership accountability and thinking through what types of
| pressures can also be applied from the outside. For instance, I
| believe that the Congressional Black Caucus is the entity that
| started forcing tech companies to report their diversity numbers.
| Writing more documents and saying things over and over again will
| tire you out but no one will listen."
|
| People are forgetting about the part where she basically
| encourages her colleagues to talk to congress, at a time when
| tech CEOs are regularly being hauled in front of congressional
| committees. At the point when that is written, this clearly is an
| adversarial relationship between her and Google. And it wasn't
| Google that made it adversarial
|
| I couldn't imagine writing something like that and keeping my job
| hartator wrote:
| It sadden me that they make Jeff Dean work on these kind of
| issues. His map/reduce invention brought to the world a lot more
| than managing his coworker egos.
| geodel wrote:
| How do you know they are making him to this. It seems to me
| Jeff chose to accept leadership position at Google. So managing
| egos would be first class task to deal with for him.
| tempest_ wrote:
| Exactly.
|
| If managing people were the same skill set as computer
| science perhaps we would not be seeing this play out as it
| has.
|
| This is seriously a massive failure on the part of Google to
| handle their own shit. I often wonder if these people are too
| old or out of touch to appreciate how this kind of thing may
| or may not blow up on social media.
|
| To not consider how this might cause public relations issues
| especially when dealing with someone who has an established
| social media presence seems like a misstep.
|
| On the flip side maybe they thought it was worth it. Weather
| the storm for a few days and twitter will move one. It's hard
| to say.
| typon wrote:
| Jeff Dean did not invent map/reduce
| dekhn wrote:
| Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat developed the system called
| MapReduce at Google and published a paper about it. They
| didn't invent the map or reduce functions, nor is the
| MapReduce system they published really about map or reduce
| functions.
|
| The correct name is really MapShuffleReduce and the most
| important step is the shuffle, because it's a distributed
| sort. Of course, they didn't invent distributed sort, but
| combining these three concepts together in a distributed
| fashion and running it as a production system is really what
| was important.
| foobarian wrote:
| OK then tensor flow
| hartator wrote:
| He did: http://cacs.usc.edu/education/cs653/Dean-MapReduce-
| CACM08.pd...
| mpihaditfirst wrote:
| The key ideas were part of the MPI interface for a decade
| before Jeff came along and applied the new branding
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Message_Passing_Interface
| dekhn wrote:
| MapReduce and MPI are very different. MapReduce doesn't
| use message passing- the map phase reads inputs from
| sharded files in a separate disk system, applies map to
| the inputs, and writes out the mapped outputs to temp
| sort files on a seperate disk system. Then the shuffler
| sorts those and writes the outputs to the appropriate
| destination output shards in a seperate disk system, at
| which point the reducer reads them, applies reduce, and
| writes the final outputs, sharded by key to a seperate
| disk system.
|
| The mappers, shufflers, and reducers are all independent
| of each other, reading and writing from the filesystem,
| and managed by a coordinator. There's nothing like MPI,
| other than the use of the Stubby RPC system, which sort
| of resembles MPI but has completely different distributed
| communication semantics.
| brown9-2 wrote:
| No one is forcing him to be the head of Google's Brain division
| or to manage other people.
| [deleted]
| deeeeplearning wrote:
| A lot of people mistakenly think Google is part of their family
| and has incentives other than making profit and avoiding bad PR.
| It's not really a surprise they took the first opportunity they
| could to fire someone who has in the past threatened them with
| Lawsuits... Don't be evil Google died a long time ago, there's
| nothing to see here, just business as usual.
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