Yea there is something uniquely activist academic about all these complaints you see surfacing nowadays.
As though millenials are landing in industry now and they're surprised their employers are companies selling products and not activist organizations.
And you're right it's even funnier when the people complaining are urbane academics from elite institutions outraged that they don't unquestionable authority to enact policy.
Like stigmatizing advocates of free expression, a general embrace of safety-ism, scream invectives until the bureaucracy buckles tactics, etc.
However, you really should read https://abc.xyz/investor/founders-letters/2004-ipo-letter/
Anyone who recalls this letter should be able to muster sympathy for those who have joined Google with an activist mindset. Google is supposed to be different. Google is supposed to be for people who want to make the world better. Sure, maybe it's all just so much branding, but this is how Google (and by extension many Googlers) styles itself. This news is more evidence that Google is really bad at living up to that image - as idealistic/lofty/unrealistic as it may be - where it counts.
And any way, Timnit isn't toxic. She is upset with the status quo of equity among genders and ethnic groups in her field, and she is fighting to improve it. This is naturally unwelcome - and perhaps comes off as combative - to anyone who is satisfied with the status quo, but I would not call it toxic.
Did you see Jeff Dean's email they just added to the article? Not surprisingly, she is doing the same thing. The reviewers are not agreeing with her and she is shocked how someone dares to reject her paper. She starts making demands to reveal who that was and sends an email to the Women AI list like it's some racist attack against her because she is a woman and black researcher. That's a toxic behavior of a very arrogant researcher. She clearly expects to get some preferential treatment because she is a big shot researcher or she just thinks she is smarter than everyone else. The irony.
Where I come from, behavior like this is interpreted as - at worst - iconoclastic when exhibit by white, male leaders. I have found that it is rewarded more often than not when it happens in places I have worked at in the past.
Also, just read some of her Twitter mentions - the fanboy harassment is real.
The sad part is that social media, like always, focus on her race rather than the details. Here's an example tweet from Jeremy Howard, a known researcher (114K followers) from fast.ai:
"Whatever else you think of Google, you gotta admit their crisis PR response is staggeringly incompetent.
The day they were found to have illegally spied on and terminated activists - they picked that day to fire their top AI ethics expert (a black woman)."
He completely ignores the most important thing - why she got fired. He calls Google PR incompetent because they fired a famous black woman researcher after what happened. You see, people expect that Google would check their employees' skin color and gender before they decide to fire them. The content is not important.
When I view Gebru's Twitter argument with Lecun throug the above lens, it is pretty obvious to me that she is behaving in a toxic manner.
In that fracas, she emphasizes emotional appeals and "you just need to listen to us" and "I'm so sick of this". She also takes a page from the AOC school of argument where you (the rhetorician) play the meta-game where you judge who is allowed to participate in discourse (hint: everyone who disagrees with me is excluded!). It's a useful trick, for once you have purified the field your arguments will easily win.
Lecun later offered an olive branch and apology, but, true to form, Gebru doesn't offer any hint of awareness that she also may be responsible for the toxic devolution of the conversation. She personally blamed Lecun for her getting trolled, whilst failing to acknowledge that he was also being trolled by her supporters.
Later, and separately, when Google calls her on her resignation bluff, she employs the "call out" tactic, where she accuses Jeff Dean of personally firing her in an obvious attempt to shame him. This whole affair reeks of a PR play (and thus, not acting in good faith). That, to me, is highly toxic.
Critical theory is useful for the purpose of study and quantification of different social bias, norms, tends, values, or whatever other social aspect you want to slice up. The problem is when people use those divisions to identify themselves. It forces people to identify with a certain group, when in reality the divisions are often not nearly as clear cut as they are defined. But over time people are pressured socially into moving closer to how their group is defined, and what may have once been a false dichotomy becomes a self fulfilling prophesy of sorts; where the social interactions are entirely defined by "my tribe" vs "their tribe". My tribe is all good, theirs is all bad, therefor we are justified in treating everybody in their tribe as less than human. Even is cases where there is very real injustice and evil taking place, allowing oneself to be defined by these groups does nothing to resolve the problem. It only serves to shore up divisions and conflict between groups, making it worse.
It is unfortunate that the admonition to "love your neighbour as yourself" is no longer held with high regard.
43 You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ 44 But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, 45 that you may be children of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. 46 If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? 47 And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? 48 Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.
I really enjoyed this deck of hers, which I found as a result of reading this thread:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rcG8KVmjRUWWNSg-R6cTBlAScP9...
"So if you would like to change things, I suggest focusing on leadership accountability and thinking through what types of pressures can also be applied from the outside. For instance, I believe that the Congressional Black Caucus..."
Skipping parts of the chain of command to deal with grievances is usually a toxic behaviour. Trying to skip the entire corporation and going straight to the government counts too, IMO. This woman has opportunities, abilities and successes that most of us can only dream of and she's using that to try and make Google a vehicle for political goals not quite articulated here (this email is obviously not written for public consumption, it is light on specific details apart from her thinking there are insufficient women hired). I can see the complaint against her, she's already got an advantage in life and now she's using her access at Google to try and strengthen her hand and weaken that of her coworkers.
Not if you've already attempted to escalate up the normal chain of command. In such cases it's often considered morally required.
In the email Jeff writes that the paper she wanted to submit conference review system did not meet Google's internal review standards.
To me this looks really fishy! I did not read her work, but Google has conflict of interest in publishing this paper? If the paper is so out of date as Jeff writes, it will get rejected in conference review system. Reviewers are known for being brutal..
Perhaps she's right to call out BS here, probably not the way she did.
From the Jeff Dean email it seems like the "cross-functional team" (read: includes people who are focused on company's bottom line, not the subject matter of the paper) wanted some sort of "fair balance" when discussing AI. He cites some examples.
Does this mean if we review papers on AI from Google employees that Google has approved for publication in the past, we will consistently find this balanced view.
Is this now posted somewhere publicly?
I feel like most of this conversation is pretty speculative until the commentariat (self included) can read it!
EDIT: duh
https://syncedreview.com/2020/06/30/yann-lecun-quits-twitter...
".. I'd like to ask everyone to please stop attacking each other via Twitter or other means. In particular, I'd like everyone to please stop attacking @timnitGebru and everyone who has been critical of my posts. Conflicts, verbal or otherwise, are hurtful and counter-productive... " -- https://twitter.com/ylecun/status/1277372578231996424?s=20
Yann later tweeted again to explain what he meant in the context of deep learning models without hand engineered features, but people ignored him and still replied he was wrong.
It looks like they were accusing Yann of all the systemic biases of society... common.
Is there a paper showing that the Transformers based models are "biased" no matter the dataset ?
Granted, because the process she described is anonymous and opaque by design, it could have happened to other people at the company and only they, HR, and the people requesting/ordering the retraction would know about it. At the same time, if that's the case, then Google needs to stop that, because it looks really bad, especially when it involves a minority researcher who published a paper on how certain models Google uses may have some degree of discriminatory bias built into them.
Imagine this: You’ve sent a paper for feedback to 30+ researchers, you’re awaiting feedback from PR & Policy who you gave a heads up before you even wrote the work saying “we’re thinking of doing this”, working on a revision plan figuring out how to address different feedback from people, haven’t heard from PR & Policy besides them asking you for updates (in 2 months). A week before you go out on vacation, you see a meeting pop up at 4:30pm PST on your calendar (this popped up at around 2pm). No one would tell you what the meeting was about in advance. Then in that meeting your manager’s manager tells you “it has been decided” that you need to retract this paper by next week, Nov. 27, the week when almost everyone would be out (and a date which has nothing to do with the conference process). You are not worth having any conversations about this, since you are not someone whose humanity (let alone expertise recognized by journalists, governments, scientists, civic organizations such as the electronic frontiers foundation etc) is acknowledged or valued in this company.
Then, you ask for more information. What specific feedback exists? Who is it coming from? Why now? Why not before? Can you go back and forth with anyone? Can you understand what exactly is problematic and what can be changed?
And you are told after a while, that your manager can read you a privileged and confidential document and you’re not supposed to even know who contributed to this document, who wrote this feedback, what process was followed or anything. You write a detailed document discussing whatever pieces of feedback you can find, asking for questions and clarifications, and it is completely ignored. And you’re met with, once again, an order to retract the paper with no engagement whatsoever.
Jeff Dean's response about mitigations being made to minimize the issues she highlighted could be justified too, but again, because the process she described is opaque, no one external to the process has any idea about the merits of the arguments raised.
"Does that sound like a standard procedure to you or does it just happen to people like me who are constantly dehumanized"
She is not happy with the process and she is taking it personal. She was hired as a lead researcher and manages a big group and project. She has the nerve to say she is constantly dehumanized? 99% of Google employees would want to be in her position.
Google is a big company with many good but also bad processes and policies (I never worked there). Instead of trying to make change she starts wars. Her thing with Lecun was exactly the same. The funny thing she said she hired a feminist lawyer to sue Google a year before! She still kept her job after that. What company does that? She is lucky she had an employer like Google.
I think she feels marginalized because the process she's going through is dehumanizing, especially given the topic she wrote about (bias in AI frameworks).
It's possible that 99% of Google employees would want to be in her position, but I think that's a bit high. I imagine even fewer would to be there after going through what she goes through, especially racism, which sucks.
I can see how you would think she's confrontational. I think she is to some degree, but I don't think it's unfounded.
She's a minority, and as such, has to deal with all of the explicit and systemic racism that's present in the US. She believes that there are intrinsic characteristics associated with the AI models used at Google that perpetuate the racism she has experienced. She was able to write a paper about the defects she believes were present in those models, which apparently passed whatever initial review processes are present at Google. Not long after that, someone at Google didn't like her paper and, through HR, used a "review" process, which isn't really a review process because there's no mechanism for her to discuss/debate anything with the reviewers, to effectively order her retract the paper under the guise of an anonymous review.
In effect, Google may be perpetuating racism indirectly via problems with their AI models, and directly by silencing her work via a process that sounds like a peer review, but is really just a way for someone to anonymously order her to retract her work.
I'd be angry too if my work implicitly supported frameworks that discriminated against me, and when I submitted valid criticism of those frameworks, my work ordered me to retract it under the guise of some anonymous review process.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2018/10/25/tech...
“ Google could have fired Mr. Rubin and paid him little to nothing on the way out. Instead, the company handed him a $90 million exit package, paid in installments of about $2 million a month for four years, said two people with knowledge of the terms.”
Let’s assume that’s true. What is worse behavior? Obviously his. Yet he gets paid.
It’s not an apples to apples comparison but if google was to say to anyone, “goodbye and don’t let the door hit you on the way out”, shouldn’t it be this guy and the other dudes mentioned in the article?
And IMHO the fact that they didn’t is a great example of systemic sexism in action. So it’s not unreasonable to wonder if similar forces played a role in this situation.
It’s not surprising that companies function like this but that doesn’t make it right, and, it doesn’t mean that (even though change is slow) it isn’t possible to change norms.
We don’t know the full details; Googles firing of her may be valid.
But to be as dismissive of her being a representative of marginalized groups, and facing prejudice (conscious or unconscious) herself, is wrong. IMHO.
I read her email. You know what's crazy about it? she is talking about Google silencing marginalized voices. She keeps referring to herself as a marginalized voice in the research community! She has a PhD from Stanford, working at one the best places in the world for AI researchers, and she gets more attention than almost any other researcher I know of (she earned it of course). Wake up woman. You're a privileged researcher! If I were making the comments she made to Lecun, no one would even bother to listen, yet alone Lecun actually respond and eventually leave twitter because of that. Give me a break. There's not even one sentence in her email about what is actually the content of her paper that is so controversial. It's just a rant about nothing. Welcome to the real world, companies have policies and once you join them you lose your freedom to do whatever the heck you want. You can go back to academia but no one would pay you what you've been making at Google Research.