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Comment by king_magic | Hacker News Reader

After reading everything that has come out (e.g. her email) and her history of highly toxic Twitter behavior, I honestly can't blame Google for accepting her resignation (she was not fired).

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There was something about the writing in her email that felt.. loaded and questionable without enough factual assertions to carry her point.

In Jeff Dean's email, he made one point that could be pretty salient: she submitted the paper for approval right at deadline. If that's true, that is poorly handled.

The ultimatum is easily a step too far.

And all of this right before a vacation/holiday.

I mean the machiavellian interpretation looks like this to me: Google's AI in Ethics initiative is a PR exercise, similar to greenwashing and other models employed by big business. It fundamentally has to be, because large parts of the underlying business model at Google are based on unethical practices. By hiring researchers from underrepresented groups they additionally hoped to a) profit from the power imbalance of the relationship and b) co-opt parts of the social justice movement by having ethics research focus on issues that do not directly touch the bottom line. Now you have a researcher not towing the company line and being fired for it.

I think Google genuinely wants their AI to be better in most of the same ways the ethic researchers want it to be better. I think Google is more willing to compromise on having an ethical AI to meet other goals and priorities than the researchers. Google probably also expects researchers who are publishing papers critical of Google to highlights Google's efforts to mitigate those issues.

> she submitted the paper for approval right at deadline. If that's true, that is poorly handled.

That's not poorly handled on her part. If she'd submitted it late, that would be her problem. If getting a submission right at the last valid time to make a submission (the deadline) is an issue then it's a problem caused by whoever set the deadline, not the submitter.

For internal approval, which has a 2 week process, at the paper deadline. From Jeff Dean's email:

JD> Unfortunately, this particular paper was only shared with a day’s notice before its deadline — we require two weeks for this sort of review — and then instead of awaiting reviewer feedback, it was approved for submission and submitted.

I mean, Google spends billions on lobbying and PR, so if you heard anything new and bad about her in the past day or two you gotta wonder.

Her job involves ethics, if you're not stirring the pot a bit you're probably not doing ethics and just acting as PR for your company?

*Also, while my reply is source/fact free your comment is as well, so I think they're both reasonably at the same level.

What bad info has come out about her, that was not released by her or her allies?

I know her from her communications with LeCun, and from the emails she herself (or someone allied with her) leaked, that were posted in the original article outlining her "firing".

From those things, I know enough that I would avoid her at all costs because of her toxicity. You can have the loftiest ideals and goals in the world - that doesn't mean you can act with impunity and any action of yours is unquestionably good.

Her own Twitter behavior is testament enough. Unless you think Google has control over that, too.

Exactly, most new stories bringing up the July Twitter dispute as context for her current firing is extremely polarizing.

The story could just be "well known Google ethics research quickly let go over paper dispute" but instead the "also she had an altercation in July which really riled people up."

Does the twitter dispute context help as much as her contributions to her field and whatever the specific paper and terms of its publication?

No clue personally, but now I know it's a "bad thing" and she's a "rabble-rouser that likely had it coming".

She can stir the pot, but to boil it is another matter. As others have said, she is "toxic". Many of her sentences hurt as they're emotionally charged, but provide no actual value or content. Just crying.

She’s made the front page here before for her Twitter behavior, long before google would have reason to do any conspiracy theory stuff. If anything, when that was news they had the opposite incentive.

I first heard about her by coming across her Twitter thread out of the blow, the night before this firing was posted here. Seeing her going nuclear on Twitter immediately after this went down just seems by default to be behavior which is Not Great.

She was absolutely fired, her boss even admitted as much (paraphrasing, "we accept your resignation but can't agree to your timeline, termination is effective immediately"). TBH, given the behaviour (public email saying "stop working on what mgmt asks you to, it doesn't really matter!" and email to manager saying "do X,Y or I'll quit!") - the way this was handled is not discriminatory, it's what would happen to 99% of the employees. She was a star employee and thought it can't happen to her, but apparently she overstepped some boundaries.

Hopefully these "woke" SJWs will receive a dose of reality.

I don't buy this line. Toxic personality types are a hallmark of the technology sphere and they are typically given a free pass on such behavior in the name of meritocracy. The problem for Gebru is that her particular type of toxicity is not palatable to the entrenched culture, merit be damned.

Those free passes ended years ago as can be seen by many high-profile removals and resignations (for both corporate policy and social pressure reasons).

"Those free passes ended years ago as can be seen by many high-profile removals and resignations (for both corporate policy and social pressure reasons)."

Linus still has a job, AFAIK. So does Lennart Poettering. Both have plenty of defenders on HN.

That's not to mention people like Peter Thiel and his fans.

Linus had like one outburst a year in between spending all day every day reading/writing emails.

And a bunch of them weren't actually hostile to his team, they just got taken out of context. He'd refer to a userspace program they had to keep from breaking as a "braindead abortion" or something and people would report it as if he said it to/about a kernel developer.

I think it's fair to say there is less tolerance for certain extremes in public spaces, but practically speaking the meritocratic mentality still rules the day. If you're a well-known public face of an organization you might have to watch what you say in public (but not always, e.g. Elon), but this is the exception not the rule.

Her particular type of toxicity is the only reason she remained employed for as long as she did.

What do you mean? Are you saying she was undeserving of the position based on her qualifications?

I think they mean that a brilliant asshole of a different type of assholery would have been fired much sooner. The fact that she’s qualified is separate.

Ah, I see. I would say in response that we're pretty much at a subjective impasse then. The thrust of my argument is that brilliant assholes are generally well tolerated. By "asshole" I don't mean someone who got canned for a harmless joke, I'm talking about toxic aggressive egomaniacs who wield their expertise and prestige as a cudgel to demean and abuse their colleagues.

I think we're in agreement, to a degree. There are some types of asshole that the industry has agreed to not tolerate. Then they say "See? We don't tolerate any kinds of assholes! You have to partner well and communicate well with people now!" Even though they absolutely do still tolerate certain kinds of assholes, like the kind you mean, and, to a degree, people who wield popular ideas like a cudgel.

I feel like the industry has at least made big leaps forward. Went I joined (during the great recession) it felt way worse, but I've also found a great company, so maybe I'm insulated in a kind bubble.

I absolutely agree that the industry has made big strides in an overall less toxic direction.

A subtle but important aspect of her complaint that I would like to point out is she offered to resign, but after some period X. I'm not sure if that was two weeks or a month. Instead, Google layed her off on the same day.

Firing her much sooner than the date she requested seems really foolish on Google's side. Arguably, one of the primary reasons a profit-oriented company would hire someone for this kind of job is for the good PR. If they offer to resign why would you not simply accept the terms of resignation, why would you rush it to happen faster.

Even if she is acting in bad faith Google could have saved themselves a big headache by at least giving her a month or something, even two weeks, to exit the company.

Because she became toxic. It can happen - when one's relationship with mgmt turns sour, sometimes that one person can become really negative. A respected, "star employee" that turns sour can really destroy morale in entire departments if given time to do so.

Yes, she can complain on Twitter and still do some harm; but without her, management at least has a chance to control the internal conversation.

If someone has a negative attitude towards their employer it could be a liability to let them run with that negative attitude for weeks or months. From what I understand she had already told other researchers at the company to stop their work and was being quite disruptive.

NOTE: I am not trying to take sides as I don't know enough information. Just saying I believe there are good reasons why you'd let someone go immediately.

The 'Google Ai ethicist resigns...' headlines wouldn't have been any better unless she was willing to sign a gag clause as a condition of getting her preferred leaving date (which sounds highly unlikely) and I doubt they had any particular need to pay her to finish anything off or hand over to fellow staff. Ultimately if she felt strongly enough about something to indicate she would leave if they didn't budge and they felt strongly enough about not budging to let her go then the finishing date is moot.

Edit: also you put the stuff about 'agreeing a leaving date' instead of 'I will quit' in your ultimatum to make it clear that you're dead serious about leaving and are trying to be reasonable rather than threatening, not because you need next month's paycheque.

I stand with you. This is Google's best decision this week. Workplace should remain workplace and should not be turned into political arena.

That approach seems somewhat naive.

I think we should definitely acknowledge that politics do play a role in these mega corporations. This is especially true in the ML field, where choosing something as "innocent" as a training data set would most likely have political and societal implications.

But that being said I don't think the combative cancel culture is helping anyone.

Good luck keeping politics out of ethics.

Can you please provide some context? What’s the toxic Twitter behavior?

A overview of some Twitter behaviour considered toxic by some that was posted here by people yesterday in the previous discussion:

https://syncedreview.com/2020/06/30/yann-lecun-quits-twitter...

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