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Comment by marricks | Hacker News Reader

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Controvery of what? Did you read Gebru's paper? For instance, her calculation of carbon footprint of training BERT assumes that companies will train BERT 24x7. Gebru is a disgrace to the community because she always, I mean literally always, attacks her critics by motives. You think bias is a data problem? You're a bigot (See her dispute with LeCun). You disagree with my assessment on an ML model? You are white male oppressor (her attacking a Google's SVP).

Gebru is not a researcher. She is a modern-age Trofim Lysenko, who politicizes everything and weaponizes political correctness.

And yeah, she deserves to be fired. Many times.

Crazy that her boss and people she mentored all loved her. It’s almost like the system screwed her and she’s rightly angry at it.

I get it, easier to type cast her as an angry black woman though!

Ok but the lack of underrepresented minorities in the field and the important role people like Gebru played in extending the political and status of minorities is ok to extinguish? We need more than just white male / Chinese male / Indian male monoculture “STEM lords”. This is already recognized in fields like medicine, where minorities treating minorities results in better outcomes and the greater push to open positions of status to minorities.

> important role people like Gebru played in extending the political and status of minorities is ok to extinguish?

No, she didn't. Attacking everyone for baseless motives and identities is the worst kind of activism. She alienated people by attacking them without basis. She disdained those who truly fought for the fairness and justice of every race. She left a bad taste in people who truly cared about progress. Yes, it's totally worth "extinguishing" her role, as her role is nothing but a political charade.

As for under-repented minorities, do you even know the Chinese Exclusion Act? Do you know how large the pipeline of the STEM students in different races and why there was a gap? Do you know why the median GPA of the high school students in the inner city was 0.5X out of 4? Why was that? The questions can fill a book. Yeah, activism is easy, as long as you have the right skin and shameless attitude. Solving real problems is hard.

Take a look at this lecture about the history of slavery and racism in the US then [1]. This will provide an answer many of your questions. Dismissing a prominent PoC’s position for being outspoken and critical of existing unfairness really demonstrates who is maintaining political power here. Do you really think that centuries of unfairness and trauma that still is perpetuated today will be swept under the rug by your fantasy of “equivalent” treatment? Equity is about Justice which is fundamentally about ethics. So tell me why are you so rooted and uncomfortable with confronting historical injustice?

1: https://youtu.be/BGjSday7f_8

>Ok but the lack of underrepresented minorities in the field and the important role people like Gebru played in extending the political and status of minorities is ok to extinguish?

Yes it's okay to extinguish it if hiring underrepresented minorities means hiring bad actors like her who contribute nothing of value. Scientific truth is scientific truth; if you hire people for the color of their skin or their sexuality instead of their ability to produce truth, you slow the progress of science and make the world worse for everyone.

This seems like a pretty bad faith argument that illustrates exactly the point the parent comment was making. Firing Gebru for insubordination is not "extinguishing" anything, it's getting rid of an employee that was actively taking pot shots at the company in her paper and somehow equated getting fired with anti-minority bias. In practice, Google is already much more tolerant of activism than the average tech company and she was unable to play by the corporate rules.

I personally believe that racial or diversity quotas are even more racist or sexist. We should expect minorities to develop their own culture of intellectual excellence. After all, they are no longer children. Giving them a shortcut is a form of insult. Providing someone an advantage based on their race or sex at the expense of someone else who is more qualified due to their race or sex is nonsensical. Companies may fail as a result of such practices. Ultimately, what truly matters is how innovative and efficient a company is.

Yes, uplifting minorities is great, but anyone should be accountable equally when it comes to workplace conduct

That's a very simplified version of the story, but I would say that Dean greatly reduced his stature when he defended Megan Kacholia for her abrupt termination of Timnit. Note that Timnit was verbally abusive to Jeff's reports, anybody who worked there could see what she was posting to internal group discussions, so her time at Google was limited, but most managers would say that she should had at least been put on a pip and given 6 months.

Dean has since cited the paper in a subsequent paper (which tears apart the Stochastic Parrots paper).

Google has since fired other folks on her team and was in crisis mode to protect Dean. Like, I’m not really going to give them the benefit of the doubt on this.

When people brought Dean up Timnit came up as something to consider, it’s interesting to see how all anyone has to say in these threads is reverence towards him. People should try to see the whole picture.

Timnit and the other ex-ML ethics crowd who got fired from Google seem like some of the most ignorant people around. I don't defend Dean reflexively, it just seems like he is on the right side of the issue. For example, here is Emma Strubell accusing Dean of creating a "toxic workplace culture" after he and David Patterson had to refute her paper in print.

https://twitter.com/strubell/status/1634164078691098625?lang...

The thing is if David Patterson and Jeff Dean think your numbers for the energy cost of machine learning might be wrong, then you are probably wrong. These ML meta-researchers are not practitioners and appear to have no idea what they are talking about. Keeping a person like Timnit or Strubell on staff seems like it costs more than its worth.

> Timnit and the other ex-ML ethics crowd

Timnit is ex-Google, but very much not ex-ML ethics (fouded Distributed AI Research Institute focussed on the field in late 2021). Very much also true of Margaret Mitchell, who has been at Hugging Face since 2021.

Being somewhat involved in one bad thing doesn’t justify cancelling someone.

To my knowledge Dean was essentially doing post-hoc damage control for what one of the middle managers in his org did. Even if they did want Timnit gone (as others mention, you are getting only one side of the story in media) they did it in a bad way, for sure. At the same time I don’t think one botched firing diminishes decades of achievements from a legitimately kind person.

> Also not surprised at the immediate down votes for questioning Googles new AI lead!

That's because you are wrong to pretend he did anything wrong by firing T.G. And also, because you added this weird lie/mudslinging/whatever on top of it:

> while she was on vacation

Or maybe it's just not perceived as controversial?

Her boss told her to do something, she refused and got sacked.

Wiki doesn't seem to give detail into the situation, nor the paper in question

These safety people guarantee a useless product that never does unsafe things. ChatGPT proved that you can have a product do unsafe things and still be useful if you put a disclaimer on it. Overall, as a user, I couldn't give a damn if things are unsafe by the definition of this style of ethicist. They were a ZIRP and my life is better for their absence.

She appears to be a symbol for everything that went wrong at Google. These are the kind of problems that arise when life is too easy, just before the downfall. In other words, decadence. How else can one explain that Google's AI research was dethroned by OpenAI?

Yeah, Dean's fault is hiring such people in the first place. If you hire an activist, you get activism. And if you hire someone whose livelihood depends on finding more problems, well, they will scream more problems, one way or another. Otherwise, why would state U of Mich got one DEI officer per three staff members?

A lot of people, especially on hacker news, feel disdain for researchers of ethics, bias and fairness, as they are perceived as both holding technology back and profiting from advances in it (that they can then analyse and criticize).

I don't think you're necessarily wrong in your assesment about HN and AI enthusiasts, but also in this case I think it's more accurate to talk about a Twitter agitator and race-baiter [1], rather than a "researcher of ethics, bias and fairness".

[1] https://twitter.com/timnitGebru/status/1651055495271137280?s...

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