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Comment by hn_throwaway_99 | Hacker News Reader

Wow, Google's ethical AI group sounds like the most toxic group of individuals I've ever heard of.

I'm going to sidestep the debate about whether Gebru was "fired" or she "resigned", because that debate primarily centers on how one defines the words. But clearly she did do this: She sent a letter that made a bunch of (IMO) outrageous demands, outrageous because it essentially attacked other people at the company, and said that if her demands were not met, that she would leave. In this case, the ethical AI group is doing the same thing: demanding a manager not have a role with them, demanding (again IMO) unwarranted apologies from other people, and worse, demanding the rehiring of someone has shown that she has no respect for others in her workplace.

A bunch of overpaid toxic babies from my opinion. I don't care who you are, going around demanding "my way or the highway" in a large company just makes you an asshole. If they don't like what happened they should simply resign with integrity and move on.

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I've noticed a trend where toxic people hide behind a veneer of a righteous cause, usually something related to social justice. It's effective and usually short circuits the public's willingness to see the nuance of the issue.

> toxic people hide behind a veneer of a righteous cause

Motte and Bailey: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-bailey_fallacy

This is another good article on the M&B fallacy for those who are interested: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/03/all-in-all-another-bri...

SSC is actually where I learned about it myself. Shame he's stopped writing.

"toxic people hide behind a veneer of a righteous cause"

Anyone who has grown up around religious fundamentalists like I did learns this at a very young age. Frustratingly, when you grow up around that, you recognize the behavioral pattern very quickly, but the upper-middle class, suburban raised people with two college educated parents that make up the bulk of software engineers at the FAANGs don't, and therefore think these people are ACTUALLY virtuous.

I committed the grave sin of asking a wealthy woman (who happened to be black and who has done incredibly well in tech but complains constantly on twitter about the horrendous obstacles she faced despite being in executive positions with zero coding experience) how we could measure improvements and evaluate progress in companies with numbers, and was told that "this is a moment where you need to shut up and #listenToBlackWomen". By relying entirely on anecdotes and disallowing interrogation of her theories against data without being attacked as immoral, she has prevented any quantifiable way of evaluating progress or even recognizing companies that have done well. This tactic of ignoring facts by simply engaging in ad hominem attacks on a questioners morality, she mimics the tactics that were used against me when I dared suggest in Sunday school that dinosaurs existed billions of years ago, and humans were long after.

The irony that you can't challenge these people while they're simultaneously insisting that you're the one with an unfair unearned advantage is always lost on them, too.

Struggle sessions don't and can't have facts.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Struggle_session

https://www.wsj.com/articles/get-ready-for-the-struggle-sess...

See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auto-da-fe. Questioning the righteous narrative will not be tolerated.

This is just how you behave: when faced with opposing pressure you roll over. That's fine, I do the same in some situations: I don't fight people who can cause me great damage like police or air stewards or immigration agents.

But rolling over all the time is not an optimal strategy. The more power you have, the rarer you should roll over.

And of course many without power will see those with power and say "In their place, I'd roll over". Yes, naturally. That's because you don't have any power. So being a pushover comes naturally to you, you've optimized well.

> So being a pushover comes naturally to you, you've optimized well.

Talk about damning with faint praise. While my mind is honestly saying "seriously, fuck off", I'll try to put this in a more constructive response.

It's not about "rolling over". It's about having the maturity to realize when you are dealing with management, if by your demands you put them in an absolute no-win situation, then you've only screwed over yourself. That no-win situation was the demands by Gebru and the ethical AI team that management throw their colleagues under the bus. Management simply can't accede to that demand without saying to a huge portion of their employees "We're going to trash the reputations of other employees based on who yells the loudest".

Gebru and the ethical AI team most probably could have gotten huge portions of what they wanted (perhaps not all, but most), and especially would have better actually implemented the organizational change they say they want, if they hadn't handled the situation so extremely unprofessionally.

Google tried to prevent her from publishing a paper, which is outside of their normal practice, then dissembled about what happened (pretending internal reviewers are anonymous, for example)

Again, I'm not really trying to defend Google one way or the other. At the end of the day it seemed like Gebru published a paper that was quite critical of how Google intends to make a sizable portion of their revenue, and anyone should understand that when you do that in a large company, it's going to get extra scrutiny. And it could very well be that the whole purpose of Google's "ethical AI" team in the first place is to just provide a "veneer of morality" over what are some fairly unnerving practices and consequences of AI. But regardless, the honorable thing then for anyone on that team is to simply resign, say that "I don't agree with Google's values", and find someplace else to do your work (it's not like these people couldn't get highly paid jobs elsewhere). Instead they're throwing tantrums.

So basically Gebru was fired for turning Googles fake ethics group into a real ethics group?

She wasn’t fired for trying to publish the paper.

She threatened to resign if her demands were met, so Google pre-empted it by accepting her resignation.

The narrative around her being “fired” is completely false and is a lie that needs to be stopped in its track.

So do you honestly believe that if Gebru were to interview at another company and they performed a background check asking why her last position was terminated if she put "voluntary" it would come back with no problems?

Do you likewise honestly think that if she applied for unemployment services in the US should we be denied because of willful termination from her last job?

Everyone I know who has been fired, when it's reported to the company, the phrasing is always "Person X and the company have come to a mutual agreement", but in my experience it's never really mutual.

I've known many coworkers that threaten to quit over issues, but it still depends on them making that choice formally. Otherwise they are fired.

Well, its like HR. The Ethics group is there to shield the company, not the customer. Apparently she didn't understand that.

Maybe we live in completely different worldviews, but an academic on an Ethical AI team’s primary obligation should be academic honest and integrity.

If the truth damages the company, then that is the company’s fault, not the academic’s fault.

Google claims to be a place where academics can do research. Censoring a critical paper goes against that. I’m not a fan of Timnit, but in this case she is right to make a stink. It’s not like her job was to write ad copy.

Is "having standards for what Google pursues for publications" really censorship? I think we'd need additional evidence to say so. If this isn't the first paper Google has stopped when an internal anonymous reviewer gives the red light, it sounds like they're just following their own process for quality control. Maybe the debate should be whether it is the best process for quality control.

Wouldn't the honourable thing be to first try to change how Google behaves and only if unsuccessful resign? Why is the assumption that employees shouldn't even try to influence the direction of their company? Why is doing so considered a tantrum?

There is a huge difference between skillfully navigating the internal politics and procedures of a company vs issuing demands based on flimsy evidence/feelings and threatening to take your toys and go home if you don’t get your way (and then throwing a social media tantrum when they call your bluff and accept your resignation).

Sure, and maybe they misjudged their power and overplayed their hand, but why is it that the law is the only guidance for management while employees are held up to a higher standard? If management can do anything as long as it's legal, so can the workers.

A corporation is not obligated to keep you employed nor should they be outside of a legal contract. I’d prefer it stays that way because I don’t want to be compelled to work for anyone or have them be compelled to hire me. They’re two sides of the same coin.

They are two sides of the same coin, but the law in some countries recognises that the employer has more power, and so favours the worker and makes it harder for the employer to terminate an employee without making it harder for the employee to quit.

Making it harder to fire someone makes it harder to hire them in the first place. This hurts everyone because it reduces the number of available positions by increasing the cost of hiring. Give too much power to the employees and you wind up with corrupt unions that effectively have a cartel over entire areas of the economy. It’s just layers of red tape and misery for everyone. Getting fired isn’ta problem if you can easily get a new job. It becomes a problem when nobody wants to hire because they can never get rid of you or they have to deal with a crooked union. Having high barriers to firing people also makes the fact that you got fired a giant stain on your resume instead of a fairly normal occurrence that could be due to a no fault reason.

Such systems are sensitive to multiple variable, and it's not true that all values except from the current ones lead to a worse result, or, at least, we have no reason to believe that's true. What we do know is that over the past several decades the US, and other Western countries, and especially in the past two, have conducted a massive redistribution of wealth away from workers.

Huh, last time it was contractor treatment issue. Make a show of protest and then get back to desk at work. I wish these world leading AI ethics researchers show some ethical spine and at least go on strike if not resign until management come to talking table and meet their partial and full demands.

> first try to change how Google behaves

By, say, attempting to publish papers and have internal discussions about it?

I don't have all the facts here and neither, I believe, do you, and we don't know what recourses have been tried. My point is just that I find strange the view that the company is entitled to do anything as long as it's legal while employees aren't, and are expected to either leave or stay and shut up.

I think we're entirely in agreement on this. I would say that in all jobs, it's more honorable to first try to change the company rather than quit silently, but if your job description encompasses "ethics" or "compliance", it's pretty much a dereliction of duty to quit without even trying to change policies one finds wrong.

The "honorable thing to do" would be to let them window-shop until they find someone willing to rubberstamp whatever they want?

Didn't they push back on the publication because the paper was lacking in certain regards? IIRC it failed to take into account relevant recent papers, for example. Which probably could have been fixed if they didn't submit as late as they did.

The paper was submitted on time, other papers at Google were submitted for review after they were released. By Jeff Dean's own admission the paper was approved for release.

The demand for retraction was initially given while refusing to state what the reason(s) for the demand were. Only after the meeting where they demanded she retract the paper did they belatedly agree to read her the feedback that they stated as the reason. They wouldn't even let her read it first hand.

Ultimately it seems like Google could have plainly stated their issues with the paper from the start, and that said issues were not so serious that they merited a demand for retraction.

There are a number of things that just don't add up. Even if you take it at face value that Gebru's ultimatum demands were unreasonable, there are several problems with how the situation got to that point in the first place.

Excerpt from Jeff Dean's email:

> Timnit co-authored a paper with four fellow Googlers as well as some external collaborators that needed to go through our review process (as is the case with all externally submitted papers). We’ve approved dozens of papers that Timnit and/or the other Googlers have authored and then published, but as you know, papers often require changes during the internal review process (or are even deemed unsuitable for submission). Unfortunately, this particular paper was only shared with a day’s notice before its deadline — we require two weeks for this sort of review — and then instead of awaiting reviewer feedback, it was approved for submission and submitted.

> A cross functional team then reviewed the paper as part of our regular process and the authors were informed that it didn’t meet our bar for publication and were given feedback about why. It ignored too much relevant research — for example, it talked about the environmental impact of large models, but disregarded subsequent research showing much greater efficiencies. Similarly, it raised concerns about bias in language models, but didn’t take into account recent research to mitigate these issues. We acknowledge that the authors were extremely disappointed with the decision that Megan and I ultimately made, especially as they’d already submitted the paper.

I'm curious: why is ignoring too much relevant research not a good reason to demand retraction? Isn't this one of the most common embarrassing mistakes that inexperienced researchers tend to make? I can fully understand if Google does not want to associate itself with work that might be viewed by the wider research community as shoddy.

> I'm curious: why is ignoring too much relevant research not a good reason to demand retraction? Isn't this one of the most common embarrassing mistakes that inexperienced researchers tend to make? I can fully understand if Google does not want to associate itself with work that might be viewed by the wider research community as shoddy.

For starters if the academic content of the paper were shoddy, that is what peer review is for. Secondly, if it was really about the paper lacking some new context, why did Google demand retraction while refusing to share why? That's what doesn't make sense.

It seems like there's some missing context in the situation because on the surface Google's actions don't line up with their stated reasoning.

Notice how in Jeff Dean's email he made no reference to the fact that they refused to share the reasons for the retraction with Gebru in that first meeting. He also skipped over where Gebru asked for the reasoning and a manager read it to her rather than letting her read for herself.

I just don't understand the secrecy and cageyness if the only problem with the paper was some academic omissions.

That claim by Jeff Dean has been more or less debunked. The real reason that Google demanded the paper not be published is that it is critical of models underlying the company’s fundamental business - the whole message from Jeff Dean is very misleading and states a bunch of other, unrelated things as the “real reason”.

It would be very helpful to point to sources for the claim that Jeff Dean's explanation is debunked, rather than just claiming it has been.

The timing of the submission for review, and the deadline for submission to publication seems like a simple factual statement that should be easily demonstrated as true or false.

Several Google employees said it wasn't the regular process.[1][2]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25309488

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25309379

AI is far more energy efficient than creating the incalcuable number of human programmers required to directly program the same solutions. Writing NLP code with non-ML methods, to the same level of quality, would be essentially impossible without an operation on the scale of warfare.

Even with the efficiency benefits that it already has, we all know ML still stands to be further optimized, and a lot of people are working on it.

Comparing the exponential increase of "intelligence" of computers versus our own, computers will be as smart as humans with similar energy efficiency in around 50 years, and they require no cars, food, etc. It will be hard to criticize the efficiency of ML when it is already moreso than our biological selves, but it will be done, and we will be wholly outsmarted.

Debunked by whom?

I'm not sure what did or did happen in this case, but I've reviewed enough papers and seen enough of my own reviewed that I know "failed to take into account relevant recent papers" is one of many ways a reviewer who wants to shoot a paper down for BS reasons can use.

To be clear, reading that reason in a negative review can mean at least two things, and I'm not judging which of the two happened here:

1. The paper did fail to take into account the results in some highly relevant and widely cited papers. (I've rejected papers claiming new results myself before now with "this problem was in fact already solved by X, published in Y".)

2. The paper was fine, but it didn't cite every paper published recently on the topic ever, and someone used that to shoot it down for whatever BS reason. Matt Might calls these reviewers snipers: http://matt.might.net/articles/peer-fortress/

According to current and former Google employees on various machine learning forums, Google does not do an academic review on their employee’s papers. That is the job of the journal reviewers. Google usually just checks whether any proprietary IP has accidentally made it in. For them to claim anything different is comically dishonest.

Not true, see christian's tweet. It's also obvious that a paper like this one will receive more scrutiny than a technical one.

Even if the internal reviews aren't anonymous, if you send your manager a letter demanding something or you're leaving, they're probably not going to give you it regardless.

What was the topic of the paper?

I don't think anyone would claim corporations are democracies, but the view that the corporation is its CEO and/or its shareholders isn't so obvious, either. There are clearly cultural differences here (e.g. see the situation in Germany [1]), but I don't think that the American view of what a corporation is and who it serves is necessarily the only reasonable one.

I don't know any more details on this matter than those in the article, but I don't see why you assume that if employees -- well paid or otherwise -- make demands of management then it must be them who are toxic, or, indeed, that anyone is.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codetermination_in_Germany

As a German who has tested the labor laws himself: behaviour such as that displayed would absolutely be grounds for getting fired without the notice period ("fristlose Kündigung") here. And it's actually pretty hard to legally fire people.

The reason is "Verlust des Vertrauensverhältnisses", i.e. loss of trust. You start making demands coupled with threats, and public ones at that, you are no longer an employee.

But if employees are well-represented on the board then such actions might not be necessary in the first place. In this case, they might have determined that they have no other recourse to change the company's behaviour.

Both firing them or dealing with them are expressions of management's political power, and making their demands public is an expression of the political power of those employees, and it's up to both sides to figure out what result is best for them, a result that will likely be determined by the relative political power of the sides. I see no moral prerogative that says that management's exertion of political power is good, but workers' is bad.

No, they are expression of the fact that employees are employed and paid by the company to work for the company.

You can agitate against companies all you want, it's a free country. But you can't expect to be paid by them while you do it.

Not sure what "morality" has to do with it.

EDIT (Since parent added the bit about boards): No, having employee representatives on the board changes nothing about this. The board is legally (and ethically) obligated to work for the benefit of the company.

> the fact that employees are employed and paid by the company to work for the company.

The view that the company is separate from the employees and they don't get a say in its direction is a construct of many years of political action. It's not some natural law; it's a political result reached through activism. Anyone is free to try and get a different result, and each side will judge how much power they have in this case, and try to use it to best achieve the outcome they want.

> The board is legally (and ethically) obligated to work for the benefit of the company.

But the board also decides what working for the benefit of the company means. Some person or persons must have decided that letting that manager go is better for the company than keeping her. If others were involved in the decision, they might have decided differently.

> [..] is a construct

It is the way companies are currently constructed, pretty much everywhere. Even when you have strong employee representation, in which case that influence is via the employee representatives on the board, not via employees just doing whatever the hell they want.

Once again, if you want to agitate against the company, you are free to do this. Just don't expect the company to employe you.

> But the board also decides what working for the benefit of the company means.

Not without limits. Boards are answerable to shareholders, and may be held liable if they act against the interests of shareholders. But even then it is the board that decides this, not random employee X. As an employee, you are in a chain of command (tends to also be in your contract, which you entered into voluntarily). And once again, you are free to not abide by that contract, but don't expect to be employed by that company.

Basically, what you are talking about are vastly hypothetical constructs that have little to do with how companies actually work.

> Even when you have strong employee representation, in which case that influence is via the employee representatives on the board, not via employees just doing whatever the hell they want.

But then you have a recourse that might not be available where this is not the case. Even in your telling of it, we have a company that does whatever the hell it wants and employees doing whatever the hell they want, and I see no reason to hold employees to a higher standard than we hold the company.

> Once again, if you want to agitate against the company, you are free to do this. Just don't expect the company to employe you.

Sure, but that is a question of power and tactics. The company could sack you, and it could also suffer negative PR as a result. Both sides use whichever power they have to their advantage. You could argue that what the employees are doing is not smart and that they might be overplaying their hand, but not that what they're doing is wrong.

> Not without limits. Boards are answerable to shareholders, and may be held liable if they act against the interests of shareholders.

Yes, but even the interests of shareholders are a result of political action.

> But even then it is the board that decides this, not random employee X.

But whether or not employees are on the board is itself a result of political action. In the US, they're not (as a result of political activism), but anyone is free to take any political action to change that.

> As an employee, you are in a chain of command (tends to also be in your contract, which you entered into voluntarily).

But as long as you're not breaking the law, you're allowed to take whatever action you please, including one that risks termination. The company might well be within its rights to sack you, but that has a cost so they might not do it. Corporations do such things all the time, sometimes choosing to risk litigation, and I see no reason why workers couldn't or shouldn't. Each side uses whatever power they have to their advantage.

> we have a company that does whatever the hell it wants and employees doing whatever the hell they want,

False equivalence. The company is employing (and paying) the employee, not the other way around. This is not a symmetric relationship. This is the thing you seem to have a hard time with.

And no, the company can't do whatever the hell they want either, they are bound by the contract and the appropriate laws. Which at least one of my employers found out to their detriment (they tried to do something illegal and unethical to me and I didn't let them. Lawyers got involved, it ended very nicely for me)

However, had I done what these Googlers have done, I wouldn't have stood a chance, and my lawyer would have just thrown up his hands and exclaimed "you did WHAT??!?"

> any action you please, including one that risks termination.

Absolutely. But if you risk termination, don't be surprised (and cry foul) if you are terminated.

This really isn't that hard.

> This is not a symmetric relationship. This is the thing you seem to have a hard time with.

Of course this isn't a symmetric relationship, but its nature, and even its legal nature, isn't ordained by nature, but is a result of political activism, and differs over time and place. Whatever that relationship is now in the US, it is clearly something that is as temporary as it's always been, and everyone constantly aims to change it. Google's executive and board are much bigger political activists than this group of employees, but they all seek to change the power balance.

> don't be surprised (and cry foul) if you are terminated.

You might not be surprised but crying foul is legitimate. Google does it all the time when it doesn't like various laws and tries to put political pressure to have them changed.

> [asymmetry] isn't ordained by nature

Not by "nature", but the asymmetry is fundamental to the relationship: one entity provides a service the other pays for it.

Now the specific consequences of that fundamental asymmetry can be changed by political activism, but not the fundamental asymmetry itself. Unless you are going to start paying companies to employ you, whatever that actually means.

> Whatever that relationship is now in the US,

As I explained, the behaviour discussed would just as much get you fired in my native Germany, which is one of the most employee-friendly places around. So unlike what you are trying to imply, that this is a very specific point in the spectrum of possible relationships, it pretty much spans that entire spectrum.

> crying foul is legitimate

Nope, except for in the most legalistic sense: sure you can cry foul. Just don't be surprised if people aren't sympathetic and instead laugh at you. So basically crying foul will not be effective in those circumstances.

If you threaten to quit as a bluff in order to get your demands met, don't be surprised if the other party calls your bluff [and in many sense they have to call your bluff. If you don't understand that...well try to figure it out].

If it wasn't a bluff, then why are you complaining?

> Google does it all the time

How does Google doing something legitimise it?!? They deserve all the scorn they get when they do it.

Where did she make demand coupled with threats? In her own words, she announced that she'd like to discuss an end date for her employment if she wouldn't be given the chance to fix the paper up for publication. This would very much fly in Germany. Her other email to the public list telling people to stop doing what they are doing might not, but then in Germany you'd have the Betriebsrat and the union stepping in and giving validation to such a firing (or not).

Googles problem is that Timnit - who was hired to investigate the ethics of AI - refused to just retract a paper that might contain inconvenient statements about the ethics of AI and then refused to just roll over when fired. And they refuse to adress that, and can't just be open and transparent about it by e.g. sharing Timnits emails to prove she was making threats and being unreasonable, so some people are made and have opinions.

In Germany, this would start and end with the Betriebsrat either blocking the firing or approving it. This would provide due process, transparency and legitimacy in one go.

Q: >Where did she make demand coupled with threats?

A: >she announced that she'd like to discuss an end date for her employment [editor: threat] if she wouldn't be given the chance to fix the paper up for publication [editor: demand].

"I you don't do as I want, I will leave." "Fine, you can leave".

I can't imagine any company that would, or could, react in any other way in this situation.

The Betriebsrat would have absolutely nothing to do here, as the company is just complying with her request. And yeah, once you "discuss an end date for your employment", a "Freistellung" is a completely normal event.

Now in Germany that would result in payment continuing until the official end date. In the US things are different, but I don't have any information that this didn't happen (she just moaned about access to company systems, and that is normal in a "Freistellung").

That isn't a threat, that is announcing her terms. You can think they are in their own right to taker her up on it, but its not a threat.

Also, as far as I know for a "einseitige Freistellung" (one sided decision to no longer want her to work there) Google would have to show that she destroyed the relationship of trust with Google, by e.g. criminal acts or maybe using her position as a manager to undermine the companies overall direction, e.g. by her going to the public mailing list afterwards.

Announcing that she wants to leave if this can't be resolved would NOT qualify as this.

Secondarily, the level of management craft displayed by Google here has been awful. Both in hiring and creating such a situation, and in their inability to effectively defuse it.

Probably not a primary cause, but contributory.

I blame academia. Seems like most of these people spend years on degrees in critical theory, the whole time being coddled and told they are victims and never confronted or forced to argue with logic. Then when they leave the bubble of academia and get into the real world they expect the same treatment and the only thing they know how to do is play the victim card.

Even reading just your own, clearly biased, summary, it sounds like you are describing "worker solidarity".

People just shrug when "leadership" at a company fires people randomly, places bad managers on good teams, demands unwarranted apologies from workers and makes everyone obey arbitrary demands.

But when a group of employees try to take any of these powers into their own hands they are immediately written off as toxic.

Tech workers have been fooled into thinking that they are a respected and privileged type of labor. Anyone who has been in the industry long enough has already seen this degrade over the years. A decade ago engineers made much more decisions at companies, had some say in the quality of code and technical direction companies were in. Software devs are still paid well but are increasingly told to keep their heads down and focus on code, and zero consideration will be given to any technical concerns if they remotely impact some PMs quarterly goals.

As boot camps ship out more and more "good enough" engineers, and a "just ship it" mentality dominants, quality technical skills become less and less of an advantage.

Technical workers squandered their advantage by thinking that some how they really were better than everyone else, and that they would forever enjoy easy employment, high salaries, respect at work and comfortable working condition. In a few years I think most technical workers will see that in the long run Amazon's engineers and Amazon's warehouse employees become more and more a like.

Sadly, comments like this show most engineers will still rabidly support management rather than risk rocking the boat, deluded into believing it will extend their privilege in the marketplace just a bit longer.

You're raising an ethics concern. Strangely, no self-styled 'ethicist' lavishly employed by BigTech appears to be interested in such a topic. It's almost as if the answer to why BigTech hires a certain brand of loudmouth 'ethicists' is to DDOS the public space and keep questions about economic inequality levels that surpass even the Gilded Era from gaining any traction.

https://inequality.org/great-divide/america-2018-more-gilded...

That's quite the statement considering that there's lots of PoC, women, queer people, sexual abuse victims, etc who have been suffering through toxic work environments for ages. What makes this group "the most toxic group" you've ever heard of?

> She sent a letter that made a bunch of (IMO) outrageous demands

Is this letter public? Is there anyway we can see what those demands were?

Alternatively, anything that shows that you have indeed read the letter?

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