I think the subtle part might be "It was approved then", I read that somewhere too and it was not clear whether it was approved by google despite it not following the normal 2 week process or if it was talking about some other form of approval.

From Dean's email:

>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.

Not sure what to make of that - maybe that Gebru submitted the paper and then immediately clicked the "approve" button herself?

Most definitely not. I think that is a critical detail. You can be 100% sure if she clicked on Approve herself, Jeff would have either omitted that fact entirely or definitely explicitly mentioned it was a self-approval. Some other person clicked on Approve for sure and they are somehow not putting any responsibility on that person in this public narrative.

Yeah, I had a hard time making heads and tails of what that bit meant, exactly.

it is sort of a placeholder approval. The actual reviews may be done by a legal team, HR/PR, other researchers in the field etc.

Do you have actual information or just randomly speculating about the nature of that "approval" under a newly created anonymous HackerNews account?

A "placeholder approval" is also known as an "approval". If they didn't want to approve it, they shouldn't have done it.

what you refer to as "they" are two different entities.

If the company doesn't even have a clear indication who is authorized to approve things, that seems much more a Google problem.