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Comment by throawaydmg | Hacker News Reader

> 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

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Isn’t it pretty normal to ask to “face your accuser” and engage with feedback specifically, instead of an anonymous and unassailable red stamp?

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.

This is a great point I hadn’t considered the academic peer review component, to whatever extent that plays a role with the internal process they use

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.

This is incorrect, she did receive the feedback, then demanded the source to be deanonimized.

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.

According to her account, she was not given the feedback when she was told that the paper had to be retracted. After discussion, she was told her manager would read her the feedback without telling her who wrote it or what process was followed.

This is different than a normal peer review process that, anonymous or not, aims to provide feedback to the author so they can incorporate it.

Sure that’s a fair point but asking for the reviewers to be identified is way out of bounds. What possible legitimate reason could she have for that request?

I think it was less "who said this?" and more "who was the reviewer, how were they chosen, what guidelines did they follow?"

Peer review in Academia is anonymous but has relative guarantees that the reviewer will have sufficient knowledge to judge your paper, won't be an academic rival out to skewer your work, and is generally capable of being a disinterested judge. As many others have pointed out here, Google doesn't do peer review in the academic sense, they do pre-publication review, almost always on short notice, for the purposes of protecting IP, mainly.

So imagine you're called in and told to retract your paper on substantive grounds provided by an anonymous reviewer whose feedback is sufficiently bad for you that you don't get a chance to amend your paper, it's just retracted, full stop. You can't have their written feedback, but after you kick up a fuss, you'll be granted a recitation of the feedback that won't change anything about the fate of your paper.

All this in the context of review that's normally a rubber stamp when trade secrets aren't involved.

Demanding to know who torpedoed your paper in an extraordinary way doesn't seem so unreasonable.

Good point. Asking who gave the feedback could mean their qualifications but be interpreted as their names. Or their qualifications might be enough to identify them.

Yes, that’s what I understood. It’s a completely inappropriate request really. And a scientist should understand that.

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

That's in court, or whatever, not academic or industrial anonymous peer review.

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...

I agree with that. But it would be strange for HR to be handling peer review for scientific papers.

Which, if I understand correctly, is in fact what happened. Or did I get lost in this saga somewhere?

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.

That pretty much sums up every employee/employer relationship, and it isn't a bad thing.

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.

Are you replying to the right person?

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.

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?

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)

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.

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

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