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Comment by commandlinefan | Hacker News Reader

But how many applaud it? (In secret because supporting this is something you might get fired for...)

Judging from the comments from some of her ex-colleagues, she was not exactly an easy person to deal with:

> The GPT-3 thread you describe was my first exposure to Timnit. Watching that thread unfold left me feeling upset, frustrated, and disappointed.

> I was so excited in anticipation of other Googler's reactions and insights about GPT-3, but that thread got immediately derailed by Timnit into claims of racism, not being listened to, dehumanization, that the whole forum became icy and dead after that.

https://old.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/k77sxz/d_t...

I'm still trying to gather more insight into what actually happened here. But you have to know upper management calculated there'd be blowback for firing someone of her stature, position, background, race, gender, etc. They did it anyway. That to me says that keeping her around was worse than the storm they knew they'd generate by firing her.

You might get fired for... supporting your bosses' decision to fire someone?

More like, you support the decision, but your immediate boss doesn't, so they start looking for reasons to get rid of you that don't have any official connection to your stance. I remember a while back seeing leaked documents from Google where some managers shared an unofficial blacklist of employees to never promote and try to get rid of because of their political views.

Every non-union employee in every state other than Montana has this potential problem.

The difference is in smaller companies the unspoken rules are often spoken out loud and the employees don’t make Google money.

How does Montana deal with that problem differently?

Is that true?

Why do people call it "the land of the free" then?

Why are we conjuring hypothetical situations in which you are oppressed, instead of condemning the concrete case where Jeff Dean looked for flimsy reasons to get rid of Timnit Gebru?

CA is an at will state. He can fire her for no reason if he wishes, let alone a "flimsy" one.

There is a strange thing in modern discourse where there is an advantage in first establishing yourself as a victim before making your point.

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