I think we agree on the difficulty here. I believe the reverse is also true: if the person is fired for a legitimate, non-watchdog reason, they have an incentive to say the firing was due to them bring up privacy/ethics concerns.
In this case, it seems like the technology review article supports the idea that there are real concerns being raised, and elsewhere it has been suggested that the reasoning for the firing is not credible.
Jeff Dean is a solitary worker (male, white, known political agenda).
Google is one of the largest players in AI, not to mention one of the largest companies in the world, and the focus politics surrounding Tech in general.
Defending Google’s AI ethics is politics.
But it's not a solitary worker, many Google AI workers have spoken up and said that even if the management narrative is true as to what happened in the specific case, it would represent a radically different review process — both as to what the review looked at and the request to retract rather than correct when there was a plenty of time for corrections for the conference — than is applied in Google AI research to other workers.
This strongly suggests that even if Google's incident-specific behavioral narrative is true as far as it goes that the entire incident was constructed as personally-targeted harassment, and that the narrative about qualitative motivations and regular process are false.
My implication was that in the absence of all the facts, many are making a deliberate choice to believe one side or the other.
As far as this specific community, I'm not surprised that many (not all) take Google at their word.
My weakly-held assessment agrees with your comment here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25316014
The following comment and thread demonstrate how many in the HN community reflexively defend Google.
It seems like we share an overall impression of what is going on.
It seems to me that ‘reflexive’ and ‘deliberate’ are contradictory adjectives when assessing people’s responses.