Body of work aside, she absolutely is an aggressive-ranging-into-toxic Twitter personality and a very strident proponent of a divisive and dogmatic strain of diversity advocacy.
Maybe Yann LeCun was wrong, the way she conveyed the message disregarding any knowledge he might have on this was definitely not civil.
She could have chosen a different way to address the complaints here, not by getting overtly confrontational. Maybe the review group got it wrong, maybe they were right. But that is not how you handle disputes.
I agree that people should try to be kind and charitable to each other, and this conversation didn't show that.
That said, I think we also have to be cognizant of the way "civility" is not objective/neutral, often relies on codifying the norms of a dominant majority, and also preserves the status quo.
It might not have been very "civil" for instance when Google employees walked out of the office, but I also don't think it was "civil" when Google paid $90 million to someone fired for sexual harassment.
Sometimes big problems can't be met just with civil discourse, it's why many of us still voted for Biden (for instance) even after he told Trump to "shut up."
If they had fired him under more favorable circumstances his payout would have been significantly higher.
I don't understand your point of view here. If I sell something to someone else, I'm not expecting to get more payout for it fifteen years down the line unless some kind of residual was explicitly negotiated in the original sale agreement. Acquisitions would never happen at all if the acquiring company was on the hook for unbounded amounts of money decades later just because they made it successful. This point of view seems very un-businesslike. Andy Rubin was not owed that $90M, it shouldn't have been paid to him, and Google has admitted to its mistake and will not be paying out in similar cases going forward.
2. It doesn't matter what their deal was. It matters what public perception is. I'm talking entirely about public perception.
Regardless of what their deal was, Google has to send a signal that _impacts future deals_. If the general developer public thinks that Android was acquired for too little, then we will all be reluctant to sell our projects to Google. That's the whole point.
It has nothing to do with him thinking Google treated him fairly. It has to do with whether we think we could keep a company going long enough to make more money than his payout on _our_ work.
Google needs to make more Android-like deals in the future.
> If the general developer public thinks that Android was acquired for too little, then we will all be reluctant to sell our projects to Google. That's the whole point.
I'm still not understanding the point here. If you agree to sell your company for price $X, it doesn't matter who you're selling to; you've sold for that amount. If you think you should get more than $X, then don't sell to Google, or anyone else for that matter, for only $X. If you want less up front but more money over time as part of an incentive structure, then negotiate for that as part of the acquisition (which Andy Rubin did do and was paid out for). All of this is independent from a severance payout fully 15 years after the acquisition.
I think you'd be hardpressed to find a founder that wouldn't sell to Google for what they consider the right price if he didn't get $90M. Do you think any football players don't want to play for the Patriots, because Aaron Hernandez wasn't supported by them? People get that all bets are off with criminally poor behavior.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/25/technology/google-sexual-... https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/25/18023364/google-andy-rub...
Also, take a step back and consider how there was a worldwide walkout of 10k+ employees. That wouldn't have happened if Google's hands were tied here and they had been contractually forced to pay that money out to Andy Rubin. The outrage was because they knew about his misconduct and yet still chose to let him "retire" and give him a big amount of extra money, rather than firing him and giving him the $0 he was legally entitled to.
In settling on terms favorable to two of the men, Google protected its own interests. The company avoided messy and costly legal fights, and kept them from working for rivals as part of the separation agreements.
Real life isn't a melodrama. I suspect there's plenty of nuance here.
> If someone walks away with 8-digit sums, there were contracts involved
The NYT article is pretty unequivocal that that is false, even if you want to pull out quotes talking about different issues.
> paying them millions of dollars as they departed, even though it had no legal obligation to do so.
They had no legal obligation to pay the severance.
If you want to discuss a different reason to pay $90 million to someone fired for sexual harassment, fine.
But your original comment was unequivocally wrong, let's just recognize that.
In this case, the norm in question was respectful argumentation grounded in empirical evidence. Why does it matter that that norm belongs to a dominant majority?
It matters
a. if the norm is actually universally applied - I find that this norm of respectful argumentation is not universally applied.
Remember: this is a twitter argument entirely unrelated to what Timnit is under discussion for now. Elon Musk and Linus have had unrelated arguments where they engaged in very offensive argumentation (calling their opponents pedophiles, telling them to kill themselves) without any evidence, yet I rarely see these issues brought up on unrelated issues about them. But for Timnit, it's a scarlet letter she has to bear.
b. I think we substantially underestimate how frustrating it might be to be a scientist of color where people are constantly discounting your expertise (because, yes, Timnit is an expert.) I'm sure seeing that same sentiment for the ith+1 time can evoke strong emotions and we are not necessarily seeing the context.
Regardless, maybe not an incredible look for Timnit but not super huge in the context of a large body of work.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23739076
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18000698
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18083859
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16508921
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8415603
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2372096
I think the threads in articles specifically about Linus are better comparisons to this, rather than articles about computing that involve him. But, hey, folk like Torvalds and Gebru both really rub me the wrong way, so it's reasonable that I might be selectively remembering threads where HN said I'm right and that he's an asshole (and I did a lazy googling of "linus torvalds asshole site:news.ycombinator.com" which is biased too), so who knows.
That's how woke Twitter works: you define the group of people who are allowed to speak as only you and your allies. You pursue the meta-argument whenever someone not in your group attempts to speak.
Aggressive, sure, but also seems:
a. reasonable for AI ethics experts to "lead" in issues surrounding AI ethics
b. not the cardinal sin of discussion that it appears to be viewed as here.
You'll see people here defending Linus or Elon Musk for saying objectively way worse stuff than this.
Somehow Timnit is defined by this discussion, but Elon isn't defined by calling a rescue diver a pedophile with no evidence or Linus telling someone to kill themselves.
> the expert in your field and you have work for this person, who controls your career and compensation
Must be harder when your CEO boss has a tendency to call domain experts pedophiles, yet I see Musk praised frequently here.
Your description above sounds like gatekeeping to me - not saying that is the researcher’s intent - but it doesn’t seem to make for good science
If you work in an area that is written off, you need a strong advocate, and from everything I've seen, she was that strong advocate both for herself and for those who reported to her.
She says talking down to an actual expert in ML who gave an opinion on ML
I can see how this would get frustrating fast if your opinion is held among many Google engineers.
To use an example that comes up: do we solve the ethical qualms of a system that predicts incarceration rate based on facial structure by getting a better dataset? Is it even ethical to attain such a "better" dataset, what does "better" even mean in the context?
A: Training data is a cause of this bias
B: But not the only cause
A: True
A: Training data is a cause of this bias
B: I am so sick of this. You are not permitted to speak.
A: I am deleting my Twitter account.> You are not permitted to speak.
I really don't think this is a fair reading of her tweet. I don't see any way to read her actual tweet claiming Yann can't speak at all on the subject. I do see a plea to engage more with domain experts (which to reiterate: my understanding is that Yann has a history of ignoring on the subject)
But if you change to a different topic like privacy then these same people really get all of this nuance that they completely seem to miss here...
Also, to quote LeCunn: “I’d like to ask everyone to please stop attacking each other via Twitter or other means. In particular, I’d like everyone to please stop attacking @timnitGebru and everyone who has been critical of my posts… Farewell everyone.”
Conjecturing what could be the real reason, person A conjecturing why a person B does what he does (hates our freedom, for example) and why one should not take B's own explanation of his own actions -- these to me are an avoidable form of discourse. Nothing good comes of it other than an obligate outrage.
Welcome to engineers playing organizational politics.
As someone I saw post on Twitter relate to this... the best way to discriminate is to have rules, but apply them discriminately. So you can always point to the rule, but it really only applies to certain people.
And HN falls for it every single time.
Oh yeah, we totally didn't fire this Googler for the unionization push, it was because he looked at one of his bosses' publicly available calendar.
By definition the default position was "leave the company"
I agree with you that it was a "firing", we can debate over whether it was justified, but it wasn't a resignation.
Isn't that technically resigning if those things aren't given to her?
This was the email she sent, as a manager at the company.
Here's the full paragraph that that is from:
> Imagine this: You’ve sent a paper for feedback to 30+ researchers, you’re awaiting feedback from PR & Policy who you gave a heads up before you even wrote the work saying “we’re thinking of doing this”, working on a revision plan figuring out how to address different feedback from people, haven’t heard from PR & Policy besides them asking you for updates (in 2 months). A week before you go out on vacation, you see a meeting pop up at 4:30pm PST on your calendar (this popped up at around 2pm). No one would tell you what the meeting was about in advance. Then in that meeting your manager’s manager tells you “it has been decided” that you need to retract this paper by next week, Nov. 27, the week when almost everyone would be out (and a date which has nothing to do with the conference process). You are not worth having any conversations about this, since you are not someone whose humanity (let alone expertise recognized by journalists, governments, scientists, civic organizations such as the electronic frontiers foundation etc) is acknowledged or valued in this company.
If a manager within the company wants to publicly express her frustration with leadership, then this is an alright message to send — leaving aside the very implicative final sentence.
It still seems reasonable to fire anyone who sends such a message to their colleagues rather than working through the office's politics more quietly, but it also seems reasonable for staff to protest and rally behind that person in support of them.
Can you unpack this a bit? Several employers, past and present have encouraged employees to communicate and attempt to resolve conflicts (presumably, maybe ostensibly, giving them opportunities to work it out as adults and professionals) amongst employees first as the first actionable steps. In fact, current employer has this as a point of policy for interpersonal conflicts barring severe enough circumstances where a reasonable person would say "yes this requires intervention from on high".
That said, why should it be any different in a situation such as this? I feel there may be context to your suggestion that isn't fully stated here-as to why it's reasonable to fire someone over this. Maybe there are implied parameters of just how egregious a situation has to be in your opinion that I didn't intimately tune into?
To me the final sentence reads as a continuation of the hypothetical the author is asking the reader to consider, as a metaphor for the treatment she experienced, not a direct j'accuse to the reader/recipient.
I completely agree with you, but what happened here was that this manager sent this email to a large group of employees, not the specific employees she had the issue with (which would be fine!).
This email wasn't an attempt at conflict resolution, it was sharing how upset she was, at her manager, with a bunch of coworkers.
For the last sentence: in the event where one wants to complain to a large group of coworkers, I think it's pertinent to stick to the basic, unarguable facts of what occurred. Suggesting that you've been dehumanized by the company is adding fuel to a fire that you should instead be aiming to resolve privately, if you want to continue to work at the company.
or
Is it perhaps in fact more reasonable to fire them using this and other behavioral or disciplinary incidents? Of which-I must say, in terms this Googler, none of us are privy to
It'd be acceptable if it's a relevant party, like your skip or your manager's skip, even if it would anger your direct manager. This, however, is entirely different. It's venting your frustration to a large group of coworkers. It takes away from productivity as a whole, and is socially inappropriate.
I don't know about Google's management policies, but at most companies I've worked at, senior employees and managers are held to an even higher standard, and this would make firing a more likely choice than some type of correction.
Regardless of the hypotheticals, from what I've read, she offered an ultimatum, and they declined her ultimatum, which resulted in her being fired:
> Dr Gebru had emailed her management laying out some key conditions for removing her name from the paper, and if they were not met, she would "work on a last date" for her employment. According to Dr Gebru, Google replied: "We respect your decision to leave Google... and we are accepting your resignation.
I absolutely do not believe it is, barring mitigating circumstances or policies that neither you nor I are privileged to access.
In most cases, this is called "venting". I have NO doubts my subordinates probably talk about me in DM or have gripes about some of my issues as their leader. But I know and have seen my direct reports be very opinionated with me in 1:1, they are very outspoken with me. One person had a moment of raw emotion, not because of something I had done but the organization at large.
And I encourage all of it because it means I can trust them to be honest with me when I need that candor, and in return, because I meet people where they are, give them room for expression and authenticity, they know they can trust me not to bring retribution upon them for being opinionated, even amongst themselves. I might not always be able to move the needle in the direction they wish, but they know I will always make sure their opinions have a voice at the leadership table-even if it means I am the one who has to take the hit for it while we continue trying to meet our mission as Ops Engineers. That's Leadership. Capital L.
Among larger groups? So what? No really, so what? Can I tell you that I am a founding and sitting member of an org wide DEI initiative and we actively encourage affinitized groups of employees to form resource groups, kvetch among themselves and present areas of contention to us to enact positive change at large? That we have two diverse members of the executive team on this initiative? That it has the full support of our board of directors and even our group of investors?
Would you believe me if I told you we had five people accept offers at the company who specifically said the reason, not one reason, the reason they accepted the offer was learning that this was something our organization has in place?
Now:
This is not most cases-granted, but I am regressing my interpretation to the mean intentionally because reacting to outliers in any direction as a default response gives room for extraneous and unnecessary harm. I default to maximizing good and giving people a voice, not looking for a reason to exclude them from making the business better for customers and employees with equal vigor.
Microsoft last year had a similar thing, but related to sexual harassment [0]. I've never heard anyone fired as a result of airing their grievances. And to the contrary it sounds like, at least to the public media, they really tried to embrace and discuss what was at the heart of these encounters.
There's a problem at Google, and I don't think they solved it by firing this researcher.
[0] https://hub.packtpub.com/microsofts-metoo-reckoning-female-e...
Managers act as agents of the company and the amount of legal assfucking that statement opens the company up to is enormous.
Well thank god I don't work for you. Most tech companies don't fire everyone engaging in employee activism or they would have much larger labor issues to deal with.
While it sounds difficult for her, I can't imagine how Google's behavior here amounts to not acknowledging someone's humanity.
Stanford Business School professor Jeffrey Pfeffer wrote a book about this[1] in particular.
[1]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/24331490-leadership-bs
A book about how toxic this is and how it needs to change, right? This small detail seems sort of missing from your comment.
"Corporate culture" isn't fixed, the whole point is that it needs changing.
Hacker news also requires a certain amount of politeness in the way you speak and it's one of the many reasons the discourse is better than twitter.
Doesn't this cut both ways? Google employed her to critique the company's ethics; she is critiquing the company's ethics - as such, she is literally doing the job she was employed to do.
If Google doesn't want that role to exist or wants a puppet to do it, why did Google employ her in the first place?
Reading the HN comments section sometimes feels akin to doing archival research on letters to the editor during the peak of the civil rights movement.
It's astonishing how consistent the tropes are.
I think it is very illuminating to read letters from that period, because they aren't just vitriolic racists like schools often teach. These are people trying to come off as "very reasonable", offering a civil, moderate path forward for the South, etc., etc. It's fascinating to see that rhetoric being deployed to defend what is an obvious evil and compare to who is using that rhetoric now.
You are the one bringing up comparisons to Nazis, so it appears that you have now fallen prey to Godwin's law.
Don't really know how else to respond to vague accusations of engaging in a "divisive and dogmatic strain of diversity advocacy."
So let me make some arguments for you to consider.
-To declare that certain people (on the basis of their minority status) have inherently privileged knowledge of boundary-less, undefined, fuzzy social dynamics is a divisive assertion. It seeks to divide authority along identity lines.
-To advocate that certain people (on the basis of their minority status) should actively be given privileged decision-making status over collective processes or structures is a divisive and dogmatic advocacy. It seeks to divide power along identity lines.
-To denounce as ethically compromised the people who disagree with you on complex open topics, such as the above two notions, is outright dogmatic. To assume one's perspective is so undeniably true that discussion can only be aggression is a dogmatic position.
I contend that all three of these dynamics are rampant in the preferred methods and among the prominent leadership of the currently en vogue Racial Justice and DEI movements (lots of crossover).
To tie it back to the start: I've observed Timnit engaging in these things, fanning these flames and boosting others who do so too.
But note that my comment implies there are other ways to advocate for diversity and justice. The broad BLM/Kendi/DiAngelo/Gebru style is not the only form and theory of diversity advocacy.
A simple alternative, for example, would be to call attention to the same problems without 1) preemptively attacking other people based on their own immutable identity characteristics, and 2) trying to draw new lines and hierarchies of privileged voice and power.
Lots of people (I suspect the majority of the sympathetic) practice this alternative. However, the louder, Timnit-aligned strain seems to enjoying social privilege in this area at this moment. How ironic.
In order for the comparison to be informative, it must also be accompanied by some argument about whether or not the accusations are accurate, which sort of takes us back to the original question.
I was only trying to point out the parallels in bad argumentation between now and then.
Top level comment said, paraphrased, "it's a shame people dismiss her as a Twitter personality when she has a highly respected body of work in the field."
My reply was to press that, in my view, she's not being dismissed as "just a Twitter personality", but rather her Twitter behavior is worthy of examination in itself.
Finally, I've never read civil rights era letters to the editor, so I'm not referencing or borrowing any specific rhetoric from there. I'm using bog standard English language words to describe the arguments and advocacies that I am seeing in the present.
Actually, you're right, but you're making the opposite point than you think you are. I wasn't alive in 50's or the 60's (and I was too young to even remember the 70's), so my whole life I just took for granted that what the history books had to say about racial inequalities at those times was true. It's hard to miss, though, that people are saying the exact same things today when I can look around and observe that they aren't true and haven't been at any point in my lifetime. It doesn't make me question my perspective on the world as it is today, it makes me wonder how true the history books reflected reality at that time.
> it makes me wonder how true the history books reflected reality at that time.
What parts of the history books do you think might not be true?
It's never good enough.
[1] https://ftw.usatoday.com/2018/05/nfl-49ers-colin-kaepernick-...
I’ve read some of her research (that’s on arxiv) and it’s... not on the level that “Google AI researcher” implies. It’s good that they hire from the Humanities, but we tend to smush all academics as if they all had equal rigor and value.
Maybe she’s a great activist. Or a great cook. Being it that I’m not into activism, I can’t judge that.
----
Edit: I have to hijack my sudden spike in karma (and, I assume, visibility) to "amplify" some important research milestones in the Humanities that impact the problem of "AI ethics" taken seriously.
[General]
* Baudrillard - "Forget Foucault"
* Delanda - "Philosophy and simulation"
[Science and technology issues]
* Latour - "The Pasteurization of France"
* Latour - "Reassembling the social"
* Caillon - "Acting in an uncertain world"
[Computers and society]
* Various authors - "Software Studies: a lexicon", available here https://monoskop.org/images/a/a1/Fuller_Matthew_ed_Software_...
Gebru has a BS and MS in electrical engineering, and a PhD in computer science, specializing in artificial intelligence; all from Stanford. After receiving her MS, she worked at Apple's hardware engineering group. After her PhD, she worked Microsoft's AI research lab.
Maybe the problem is precisely that they didn't actually hire from the Humanities? Although the cynic in me thinks they just hired someone with a "SJW" discourse rather than find themselves criticized for their market strategy -- whether their use of their monopoly power is ethical.
As it stands it really sounds like they got someone to offer Yann LeCun as a scapegoat for AI products (Amazon Rekognition is infamous); these services then serve as scapegoats for police departments, which...
I honestly don't know how to take this comment.
Are you comparing her work to cultural theorists like Baudrillard, etc.? Because a brief read through her papers and they seem to be dealing with common-sense ethical concepts, not French social critique.
Otherwise, this comment is just odd - no real specific criticism of her body of work except to suggest that it is less good than what you'd expect from a "Google AI researcher".
Gebru is a successful "scholar" as far as the credentials game goes; I don't presume to have anything to teach her.
Edit: Are we sure calling something "common-sense ethics" is a common-sense proposition? Are we comfortable deriving this Ought from that Is?
Again: back up your assertions or they are worthless. I'm reading her papers and have also read many of the authors you are mentioning, there is very little in common.
> Are we sure calling something "common-sense ethics" is a common-sense proposition? Are we comfortable deriving this Ought from that Is?
So your critique now is that her papers are steeped in a moral realist perspective? It seemed you were going for the dogwhistle-y "diversity hire" rhetoric, but I'd welcome any actual critique on the merits.
I'm not proposing a critique of her work. What I've found on arXiv reads like standard fare for its genre. Hotelling famously joined an early seminar on linear programming with Dantzig only to interject "... but the world is nonlinear!" That's not what I'm out to do -- not with this particular researcher, nor with its proxies on twitter and HN.
The scenario I'm looking at is one where the polarities are not left versus right or woke versus straight, but Humanities versus STEM. If people are to reject her kind of work -- and I'll be glad if they do, even if I'm not really willing to press them in that rejection with a proper "critique" -- then they could walk away burned by theory and postmodernism and all such crap. I'm proposing an entirely different path, or a space of different paths even.