[HN Gopher] Google's Margaret Mitchell Has Been Fired
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Google's Margaret Mitchell Has Been Fired
Author : jbegley
Score : 52 points
Date : 2021-02-19 22:22 UTC (38 minutes ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| underseacables wrote:
| She was fired for violating company confidentiality, anything she
| says otherwise about her gender, race, culture, etc is just a
| deflection, but it's probably coming.
| xiaolingxiao wrote:
| She gave a talk at my school once, she was invited by my then
| advisor. This was in 2017 right after she left MSR. We had a
| brief change, and even back then you can tell she's not into
| kowtowing to the patriarchy. It's quite hard for ambitious women
| in compsci, they have to walk a tight edge between firm and
| "motherly". Men have no such constraints.
| foolinaround wrote:
| what makes you assert that were she male, she would have gotten
| different treatment in this case? genuinely asking..
| minimaxir wrote:
| As noted in her pinned tweet
| (https://twitter.com/mmitchell_ai/status/1357819673455202304),
| she was locked out of Google's system after sending an email
| supporting Timnit Gebru.
|
| This new tweet makes the firing official.
| reaLg_move_in_3 wrote:
| IIRC she was leaking internal information to the outside press,
| it was not based on her position of supporting Timnit.
| gwern wrote:
| No. Her tweet does not say that sending the email got her
| fired, even if it's written to give you that impression.
| andyxor wrote:
| no, she was locked out after extracting thousands of files
| illegally, see Google response from January:
|
| https://venturebeat.com/2021/01/20/google-targets-ai-ethics-...
| ALittleLight wrote:
| Here[1] is a document she wrote on the subject of Dr. Timnit
| Gebru's recent firing from Google.
|
| 1 - https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ERi2crDToYhYjEjxRoOzO-
| uO...
| LatteLazy wrote:
| Person who called their employer sexist and racist is fired (no a
| second person).
| Someone1234 wrote:
| Well I guess it is easier to sweep hard problems under the rug
| than have a dialog with unsatisfied employees.
|
| This is one of those times where people are going to
| intentionally conflate Google's legit right to terminate
| employment with what is best for the long term culture of the
| company.
| LatteLazy wrote:
| I think if you have more that 3 employees you can't have a
| dialogue on every issue with all of them. You have to just
| decide and accept that X% of people won't like the decision
| and leave. So you minimise X while maximising profit.
| tantalor wrote:
| & saying your SVP has "ideas that are obviously very dumb".
| eat_veggies wrote:
| Are you quoting something they said?
| tantalor wrote:
| It's from this doc:
|
| https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ERi2crDToYhYjEjxRoOzO-
| uO...
| rmk wrote:
| For people who are familiar with this, I have a question. How
| does research in an industrial lab vs. a university work, insofar
| as independence is concerned? In a university, aside from well-
| defined ethics guidelines for conducting research (e.g.,
| involving animal or human subjects), staff are generally free to
| publish the findings of their research at any venue they see fit.
| Many are tenured professors, so they also have the added
| guarantee of tenure, which makes them unfireable save for clear
| violations of policies such as sexual harassment.
|
| How do these things work at industrial labs, such as those of
| Google and Microsoft?
| rsj_hn wrote:
| >Unfireable save for clear violations of policies such as
| sexual harassment
|
| I would take a look at (and consider donating to) FIRE to
| understand the current state of academic freedom in
| universities.
|
| https://www.thefire.org/news-and-media/
|
| Just to give two examples:
|
| Bret Weinstein was fired from Evergreen for not participating
| in a no-white-people-on-campus day (and he was also subject to
| credible death threats, requiring police escorts when present
| on campus)
|
| Gordon Klein was suspended for refusing to promise to give
| higher grades to black students.
| https://nypost.com/2020/06/10/ucla-suspends-professor-for-re...
|
| And then we have the epidemic of academic mobbing, where
| colleagues engage in herding behavior that focus their rage on
| one of their colleagues in a type of modern equivalent of
| Monsters on Maple Street. It is estimated that 12 percent of
| those mobbed end up committing suicide.
| https://www.universityaffairs.ca/opinion/in-my-opinion/acade...
|
| There are many, many things that will get you fired or subject
| to attack in the modern university, and I don't see any reason
| to view academia as a place that provides more intellectual
| freedom than private industry. Indeed, it is often the
| epicenter of cancel culture and petty utopian dictators.
| ggm wrote:
| Not withstanding what you say, how do you counter this with
| related responses to your parent comment which note corporate
| research is legally bound and ownership vests strongly in IP
| law and not your research your brain.
| foolinaround wrote:
| considering that there are no market forces at play in the
| universities, it is almost guaranteed that intellectual
| freedom is much lesser due to the very polarizing, take no
| prisoners approach currently in place.
|
| Dissent is not being tolerated, when in former times, it even
| used to be welcome.
| driverdan wrote:
| Apparently the way it works at Google is they fire you when you
| don't rubber stamp everything.
| maps7 wrote:
| Who? The name drop in the title implies we should know who a
| seemingly random Google employee is/was. And I actually followed
| the original story of the ethical ai researcher getting fired.
|
| There's no info in the tweet other than "I'm fired". Is there
| reason to believe this was an unfair firing?
| eat_veggies wrote:
| She was Google's other AI ethics lead. There were two (the
| other was Timnit Gebru), now there aren't any, I guess.
| viraptor wrote:
| The bio still mentions the position:
|
| > Founder/Lead, Google Ethical AI team; Interdisciplinary
| researcher focused on shaping AI towards long-term positive
| goals.
|
| The pinned tweet from Feb 6:
|
| > I am concerned about @timnitGebru 's firing from Google and
| its relationship to sexism and discrimination. I wanted to
| share the email I wrote to Google press the day my access was
| cut off.
|
| No reason to speculate without more details. I'm sure if it was
| unfair we'll get a follow-up (from her).
| ggm wrote:
| There is unfair == against current employment law and norms.
|
| There is unfair == legal but retaliatory.
|
| There is unfair == legal, not retaliatory but stupid.
|
| Are you a reductionist, arguing
|
| There is no evidence this is unfair
|
| because to me, strict evidence aside,the causal chain as told
| in public strongly suggests its retaliatory,and, due to
| underlying issues which go to academic view of freedom and peer
| support
|
| Or are you just unwilling to accept this could be legal, but
| unfair and stupid?
|
| Nobody really knows is often better said as "this is
| speculative" if you don't like speculative statements, fine
| too. I love 'em. I'm not assuming this is unfair dismissal but
| it sure as hell looks retributive.
| ABS wrote:
| you mean apart from her twitter bio next to that tweet (or a
| tap away, depending on how you access twitter) stating:
|
| "Founder/Lead, Google Ethical AI team; Interdisciplinary
| researcher focused on shaping AI towards long-term positive
| goals. Opinions my own."
| andyxor wrote:
| Google response (from Jan):
|
| "Our security systems automatically lock an employee's corporate
| account when they detect that the account is at risk of
| compromise due to credential problems or when an automated rule
| involving the handling of sensitive data has been triggered. In
| this instance, yesterday our systems detected that an account had
| exfiltrated thousands of files and shared them with multiple
| external accounts. We explained this to the employee earlier
| today. We are actively investigating this matter as part of
| standard procedures to gather additional details."
|
| https://venturebeat.com/2021/01/20/google-targets-ai-ethics-...
| thewarrior wrote:
| That seems like a pretty serious accusation. Looks like
| relations between management and employees has seriously
| deteriorated.
| vicpara wrote:
| So what? Why is this important?
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(page generated 2021-02-19 23:00 UTC)