I feel very disheartened that whatever good Timnit Gebru is doing in her work seems to be undermined by her constant antagonism and hostility. Based on this article, and additional context from other Google employees, I think she is in the right, but that she herself is such an obnoxious person it's hard for a lot of us here to be able to separate the issue with her personality.

My first introduction to Gebru (and probably a lot of others here) was through her fight with Yann LeCun. Whatever everyone thinks about that debate, one thing was clear: LeCun consistently asked his supporters to not attack Gebru, and tried to engage the discourse, whereas she repeatedly encouraged her supporters to attack LeCun, and avoided his points.

FWIW, I myself am a minority. I am very sympathetic to the investigation of AI ethics and Gebru's general area of work. I also completely understand and support the need for activists to disrupt norms: we wouldn't have civil liberties if activists weren't willing to disrupt middle-class norms.

But I think for exactly that reason activists have a responsibility (a greater responsibility even) to be selective about which norms or civilities they choose to disrupt. They do such enormous harm when their actions can be picked apart and dismissed for completely unrelated issues - in this case because Timnit doesn't seem to engage in good faith discussions with other experts in her field. It sucks, I really hate that this is what ethics in tech is going to be associated with.