I agree that people should try to be kind and charitable to each other, and this conversation didn't show that.
That said, I think we also have to be cognizant of the way "civility" is not objective/neutral, often relies on codifying the norms of a dominant majority, and also preserves the status quo.
It might not have been very "civil" for instance when Google employees walked out of the office, but I also don't think it was "civil" when Google paid $90 million to someone fired for sexual harassment.
Sometimes big problems can't be met just with civil discourse, it's why many of us still voted for Biden (for instance) even after he told Trump to "shut up."
If they had fired him under more favorable circumstances his payout would have been significantly higher.
I don't understand your point of view here. If I sell something to someone else, I'm not expecting to get more payout for it fifteen years down the line unless some kind of residual was explicitly negotiated in the original sale agreement. Acquisitions would never happen at all if the acquiring company was on the hook for unbounded amounts of money decades later just because they made it successful. This point of view seems very un-businesslike. Andy Rubin was not owed that $90M, it shouldn't have been paid to him, and Google has admitted to its mistake and will not be paying out in similar cases going forward.
2. It doesn't matter what their deal was. It matters what public perception is. I'm talking entirely about public perception.
Regardless of what their deal was, Google has to send a signal that _impacts future deals_. If the general developer public thinks that Android was acquired for too little, then we will all be reluctant to sell our projects to Google. That's the whole point.
It has nothing to do with him thinking Google treated him fairly. It has to do with whether we think we could keep a company going long enough to make more money than his payout on _our_ work.
Google needs to make more Android-like deals in the future.
> If the general developer public thinks that Android was acquired for too little, then we will all be reluctant to sell our projects to Google. That's the whole point.
I'm still not understanding the point here. If you agree to sell your company for price $X, it doesn't matter who you're selling to; you've sold for that amount. If you think you should get more than $X, then don't sell to Google, or anyone else for that matter, for only $X. If you want less up front but more money over time as part of an incentive structure, then negotiate for that as part of the acquisition (which Andy Rubin did do and was paid out for). All of this is independent from a severance payout fully 15 years after the acquisition.
I think you'd be hardpressed to find a founder that wouldn't sell to Google for what they consider the right price if he didn't get $90M. Do you think any football players don't want to play for the Patriots, because Aaron Hernandez wasn't supported by them? People get that all bets are off with criminally poor behavior.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/25/technology/google-sexual-... https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/25/18023364/google-andy-rub...
Also, take a step back and consider how there was a worldwide walkout of 10k+ employees. That wouldn't have happened if Google's hands were tied here and they had been contractually forced to pay that money out to Andy Rubin. The outrage was because they knew about his misconduct and yet still chose to let him "retire" and give him a big amount of extra money, rather than firing him and giving him the $0 he was legally entitled to.
In settling on terms favorable to two of the men, Google protected its own interests. The company avoided messy and costly legal fights, and kept them from working for rivals as part of the separation agreements.
Real life isn't a melodrama. I suspect there's plenty of nuance here.
> If someone walks away with 8-digit sums, there were contracts involved
The NYT article is pretty unequivocal that that is false, even if you want to pull out quotes talking about different issues.
> paying them millions of dollars as they departed, even though it had no legal obligation to do so.
They had no legal obligation to pay the severance.
If you want to discuss a different reason to pay $90 million to someone fired for sexual harassment, fine.
But your original comment was unequivocally wrong, let's just recognize that.
In this case, the norm in question was respectful argumentation grounded in empirical evidence. Why does it matter that that norm belongs to a dominant majority?
It matters
a. if the norm is actually universally applied - I find that this norm of respectful argumentation is not universally applied.
Remember: this is a twitter argument entirely unrelated to what Timnit is under discussion for now. Elon Musk and Linus have had unrelated arguments where they engaged in very offensive argumentation (calling their opponents pedophiles, telling them to kill themselves) without any evidence, yet I rarely see these issues brought up on unrelated issues about them. But for Timnit, it's a scarlet letter she has to bear.
b. I think we substantially underestimate how frustrating it might be to be a scientist of color where people are constantly discounting your expertise (because, yes, Timnit is an expert.) I'm sure seeing that same sentiment for the ith+1 time can evoke strong emotions and we are not necessarily seeing the context.
Regardless, maybe not an incredible look for Timnit but not super huge in the context of a large body of work.
That's how woke Twitter works: you define the group of people who are allowed to speak as only you and your allies. You pursue the meta-argument whenever someone not in your group attempts to speak.
Aggressive, sure, but also seems:
a. reasonable for AI ethics experts to "lead" in issues surrounding AI ethics
b. not the cardinal sin of discussion that it appears to be viewed as here.
You'll see people here defending Linus or Elon Musk for saying objectively way worse stuff than this.
Somehow Timnit is defined by this discussion, but Elon isn't defined by calling a rescue diver a pedophile with no evidence or Linus telling someone to kill themselves.
> the expert in your field and you have work for this person, who controls your career and compensation
Must be harder when your CEO boss has a tendency to call domain experts pedophiles, yet I see Musk praised frequently here.
Your description above sounds like gatekeeping to me - not saying that is the researcher’s intent - but it doesn’t seem to make for good science
If you work in an area that is written off, you need a strong advocate, and from everything I've seen, she was that strong advocate both for herself and for those who reported to her.
She says talking down to an actual expert in ML who gave an opinion on ML
I can see how this would get frustrating fast if your opinion is held among many Google engineers.
To use an example that comes up: do we solve the ethical qualms of a system that predicts incarceration rate based on facial structure by getting a better dataset? Is it even ethical to attain such a "better" dataset, what does "better" even mean in the context?
A: Training data is a cause of this bias
B: But not the only cause
A: True
A: Training data is a cause of this bias
B: I am so sick of this. You are not permitted to speak.
A: I am deleting my Twitter account.> You are not permitted to speak.
I really don't think this is a fair reading of her tweet. I don't see any way to read her actual tweet claiming Yann can't speak at all on the subject. I do see a plea to engage more with domain experts (which to reiterate: my understanding is that Yann has a history of ignoring on the subject)
But if you change to a different topic like privacy then these same people really get all of this nuance that they completely seem to miss here...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23739076
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18000698
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18083859
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16508921
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8415603
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2372096
I think the threads in articles specifically about Linus are better comparisons to this, rather than articles about computing that involve him. But, hey, folk like Torvalds and Gebru both really rub me the wrong way, so it's reasonable that I might be selectively remembering threads where HN said I'm right and that he's an asshole (and I did a lazy googling of "linus torvalds asshole site:news.ycombinator.com" which is biased too), so who knows.
Also, to quote LeCunn: “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… Farewell everyone.”
Maybe Yann LeCun was wrong, the way she conveyed the message disregarding any knowledge he might have on this was definitely not civil.
She could have chosen a different way to address the complaints here, not by getting overtly confrontational. Maybe the review group got it wrong, maybe they were right. But that is not how you handle disputes.