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Comment by claudeganon | Hacker News Reader

So if you don’t do what your boss says at a job, even if you disagree, your boss can fire you, and this is good. But if you tell your boss that they should do something or you’ll quit, this is bad and makes you unemployable.

You realize that this is just an argument that whoever is in a position of authority over you is right by virtue of having that authority?

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> So if you don’t do what your boss says at a job, even if you disagree, your boss can fire you, and this is good.

Gonna take a quick guess you're still in undergrad.

Yes, this is literally how employment works. Your future boss's job will be to use your labor efficiently for the company. You may disagree with your boss on an assignment, in which case it would be wise to schedule some time and professionally discuss your concerns. Your boss may be persuaded, and good bosses will try their best, within reason, to keep their subordinates content with the work they're doing.

However, at the end of the day, the boss may disagree with your points and still require you to do the job as assigned. If you refuse, you will likely be fired. Note that you also have agency here: If you don't like the work the boss makes you do, and you feel like your concerns are consistently falling on deaf ears, you can quit.

Just because that is how the world works, doesn’t mean it has to be a that way (or should be that way).

It doesn't have to be no, but y s it should...

What is your proposal?

Without commenting on the politics of this particular case, I think what you describe is built into the definition of "boss".

Not universally though. In countries with stronger labor protections and unions, you can’t just fire people for philosophical disagreements (not without those disputes being mediated anyway).

I don’t understand how we arrived at some conception of workplaces as little dictatorships, where bosses can treat people however they want and that’s somehow good or legitimate.

A boss controls the work that you, via a contract, agreed to do.

If you want out of the contract the boss cannot make you do the work. You have agency, they cannot threaten you with violence as a dictator could.

Managers are supposed to exercise power on behalf of the company. In this case, it’s unclear whether the manager was exercising power in the best interests of the company or of himself.

In my opinion, might doesn’t make right. Managers aren’t de facto right purely by virtue of being a manager.

Really depends on your definition of right. Do you mean legally? Morally? Logically?

When it comes to who has the ability to steer subordinates, managers are always right. Except if their managers disagree...

So just blanket appeals to authoritarianism then. Completely rational.

A company is not a government... Yes, someone who owns a company has the legal right to do whatever they want, as long as it's not criminal, with their property.

They have complete authority... They don't have to have someone else endow it to them or give it to them...

So yes, they are by definition authoritarian. That's one of the cornerstones of being able to own private property.

Other people’s labor is not a company’s private property. That was known as slavery and we have mostly abolished it in the developed world.

But my point is that all of your arguments rest on an unquestioned assumption about how ownership translates to authoritarian control of others without explaining how or by what justification that power is arrived at.

The answer of course is that it’s a social construct enforced by states to varying degrees, present and historically, and thus no way inherent to the thing itself. Appeals to status quo are therefore not justifications for the validity of the relationship, as it has changed over time, proving malleable to all kinds of political and social forces (e.g. the abolition of slavery, the formation of unions, worker collectives). Defending an authoritarian relation to property as it relates to other people’s labor thus require an actual and explicit defense, which you have so far not provided.

Citizen of country with some of the strongest worker protections here: not over philosophical differences.

Very much so for refusing to do work assigned to you.

And it doesn't mean "bosses can treat people however they want". It means "you are employed to do a job, if you refuse to do that job, you are no longer employed"

As much as I support employment rights, you are paid by a company to do their bidding. If you don't like it start a company, but then you're just doing the bidding of the customer.

This is a uniquely American notion of employment. “Do my bidding or be done away with” is not the norm across countries with strong unions and worker protections.

No, this is not uniquely American. Which country are you from that doesn't require employees to act in a way as directed by the company that employs them?

Literally any country with strong laws protecting strikes and work stoppages? In many parts of Europe, I can convince my coworkers that our bosses are treating us unfairly, unsafely, etc, we can walk off the job and not get fired. I doubt any employer would want us to do that, so it would be entirely against their “direction.”

"Do my bidding" is different from "do my bidding being paid way below market rate" or "do my bidding and I don't care if that involves a high likelihood of losing a limb".

Also, "do my bidding" should be written as "do your job."

I'm from a country with strong labor protections (striking, 3 strike dismissal etc.), and you're moving the goalposts.

Just to clarify, in many parts of Europe you cannot do that, you would need to be a recognised union and in many cases at least hold a vote of some sort, there would probably also be requirements around negotiations. You would also be restricted in what you do to people who refuse to join your strike.

The UK is an example of a European country with relatively tough union laws. The list of issues that it's legitimate to strike over is restricted, votes are required, the general secretary of the union must authorise the strike and so on. Strikes do happen of course but not because some random middle manager threw a hissy fit about feedback on a paper she wrote.

Giving ultimatums and threatening to quit generally isn't a good way to remain employed with any company.

It's called "insubordination".

Is insubordination to have a different opinion, and then offer paths to agreement between professionals?

Is insubordination to represent your responsibility area, as Ethical AI Researcher?

Is insubordination to send an email in order to establish dialogue around matters of disagreement between professionals?

Good point. I think its important to leave a link to the paper here for HN. Please read it or at least its intro & conclusion.

https://gofile.io/d/WfcxoF

After reading, it seems very much in line with her role as an ethicist. She merely states that there are various risks associated with processing large datasets.

Its a bit sad that they attempted to censure such an innocuous paper that without malice states “there are risks to consider.”

> She merely states that there are various risks associated with processing large datasets.

What's the strongest argument against her "merely" doing this?

We haven't heard any arguments, only that management can do as they please when they don't like results of AI Ethics Research. We'll likely not get anything substantial, ever, either.

As I've stated in other post, this is very, very troublesome for AI and Google.

OTOH, Google has much emphasis on ethics in AI/ML otherwise. But the whole company, especially management, need to put actions in alignment with their words on this matter.

What is the strongest argument that you can come up with? Not that's been presented.

My strongest argument is AGAINST managers at Google getting to micromanage, censor and to revenge-fire a researcher, just because they personally disagree with their published AI Ethics Research. A job said researcher was tasked with and leading.

Such behaviour, unless corrected, undermines Google's entire AI/ML and cloud operations.

That's not what I asked. If you can't argue the counter of your own position in the most honest way possible then either you're not prepared or not honest.

It's called steel manning.

The best rebuttal so far has been to decline to comment.

However, without revealing names the paper outlines internal company matters, presenting opinions and tautology that do not fit proper format of professionally published research. Instead of reworking a flawed paper, the researcher escalated and exposed individual opinion, publicly. Such company representation is out of scope for research positions. As Google could not agree to terms of email, it was taken as resignation notice.

Let's try applying this, shall we:

I believe we should have no curruption in Russia. By your logic, unless I can give a strong argument in favour of corruption, I am not prepared or not honest?

Are you prepared to give a rigorous argument in favour of: terrorist attacks, slavery, eugenics, facism, child labour, sexism

Bribes functions as oil in the machinery of society, and empowers strong men against rampant decadence. So is working for good when it is sanctioned and goes to the right people and their agendas, comprising of: terrorist attacks, slavery, eugenics, facism, child labour, and of course sexism.

This is what I said.

> If you can't argue the counter of your own position in the most honest way possible then either you're not prepared or not honest.

I didn't say that if your position is on the opposite side of child abuse and you don't want to change your position that you aren't honest.

Yes, I'm prepared to try and make the strongest argument possible for things I may not fully understand, until I do. Whatever those things make me feel.

Sometimes the strongest arguments have large flaws (mostly moral with you examples) but sometimes we just don't understand the opposing arguments and then just create strawmen to rage against.

I'm opposed to this type of irrational emotional behaviour. It causes things like mob violence which I'm very familiar with.

So when someone can't articulate the opposing views then they need to be warned or directed to do so. If they refuse and run back to a strawmen then yes they are not honest and obviously not prepared.

uMkhonto we Sizwe was a terrorist organization. But they had a very strong argument for why terrorism was an appropriate action.

I don't say that I agree with their use of violence, but they had an argument that makes blanket statements like "terrorism is evil" harder to make.

"No artificial neural network is near a point where we can talk about it having moral responsibility separate from its trainers’ and deployers’ – but we can make it sound like it does, and exonerate them, if we call it AI." https://twitter.com/shashashasha/status/1335067153402355714

Modern ethical AI / ML, is both that and beyond that. Issues range vastly in how complex algorithms can be used, misused and misinterpreted. There are also issues of uncovering hidden biases, unfairness, manipulative effects, privacy issues, risk and impact analysis, explanatory AI, who is accountable for accidents and malicious acts, etc. The list goes on covering both the legal and the political. This may not be unique to ML / AI, but is harder to quantify and prove, with more prevalent usage of complex algorithms.

https://analyticsindiamag.com/how-is-ethical-ai-different-fr...

https://www.kdnuggets.com/2016/03/ethics-machine-learning-ta...

The strongest argument for Google is it not wanting people to know that there are risks, no?

The strongest argument for her not doing it is keeping her job vs maintaining her professional responsibility as an ethicist, no?

That's not a strong argument. Can you come up with anything better?

Do Google employers work in barracks?

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