Having someone that is known to speak their mind in such a team does lend it more credibility. But you also can't complain if they then speak their mind about things you would like them to shut up about.
Does it also require a certain intellectual integrity to do properly?
Because claiming that you were "immediately fired" online, then later having to "clarify" that you actually submitted your resignation because some demands weren't met sounds pretty dishonest to me.
As a result, we are accepting your resignation immediately, effective today.
https://twitter.com/timnitGebru/status/1334364732480958467
Looks like Timnit Gebru made an ultimatum and offered her resignation if the terms of the ultimatum were not met. Google accepted her resignation and chose to have it effective immediately (as is often the case when you resign and a company feels like it would not be beneficial to have a longer departure period).
It's not like I'm taking only the words of others. I'm reading what Gebru herself chose to put out there.
That is the language used when firing someone for their behavior.
However, we have context. We know that an ultimatum including a resignation threat was given.
Accepting that resignation and making the termination of their employment relationship immediate with some extra "Yeah, this is for the best" language doesn't mean that she was fired.
If you only want to consider the limited context of ignoring that she submitted a resignation ultimatum, aren't you just cherry picking?
[1] https://cuiab.ca.gov/board/precedentdecisions/docs/pb39.pdf
It's the same things everyone else has been saying for years (global warming bad, also don't build a racist speech reproducer), and Google wanted her to reference their efforts to mitigate those things in addition to repeating yet again that they can happen. Self-serving? Sure, but not really censorship and honestly would make the paper better to include analysis of mitigations.
If those references to recent developments were the real issue, it seems very odd that Google responded that way.
From the type of things people are saying on r/machinelearning about what she was like to work with, it's not hard to imagine what those reasons might have been.
You have a really funny world-view where compelled speech doesn't fall in the censorship bucket.
What Google wants to say to the world is "hey, you should totally trust us, we have the best ethical AI people in the field looking over our shoulder!" But now Google can't say that, because the world knows that their experts aren't completely free to exercise judgement or state their opinions. That may only be true to a limited extent, but the damage to Google is larger: mostly because we don't know how limited it is.
Insofar as your employer feels free to add marketing fluff to your presentations, that's because your value to the company is not predicated on your being an independent voice who provides a check on management.
Although it’s fun to assume bad faith when it comes to every action by every company, she was not supposed to be an independent critic to launder evil. She was supposed to work in cooperation with them to make a high quality product. They don’t want to create something that causes suffering. Even if you don’t buy that their motivation was pure, doing so would obviously be bad for business. What good is a product that only works for white people?
Instead of adding perspective and cooperatively furthering a unified goal, she was divisive and created dysfunction.
She was in an incredibly privileged position to do good and shape the future of some civilization-changing technologies. Instead of shaping a better future, she threw hand grenades and stuck wrenches in gears. Now not only does the future of their tech lack her perspective, but they are unlikely to engage with anyone who even smells like they could be a bad-faith activist.
I didn't mean to imply that the ethical AI team is empty PR. What I'm saying is that the obvious corporate justification for an (expensive!) AI ethics team is to reassure regulators and customers that Google's AI techniques will follow best ethical practices. Obviously the best way for Google to achieve that goal is to hire a bunch of really strong researchers, and then incorporate their recommendations into Google's products. And of course, to have those researchers publish their findings so that the world can see that a standard is being followed.
But the flipside can also be true, and damaging the credibility of your ethical AI team comes at a cost. It would not surprise me if some observers have come to negative conclusions about the independence of Google's researchers, which means those people are more likely to mistrust Google's products in the future. The irony is that even if Google has the very best intentions, they might now find it harder to convince people of this. This does meaningful harm to Google, and nothing Google's gotten out of this mess has been worth that cost.
> I’m always amazed at how people can continue to do thing after thing like this and then turn around and ask me for some sort of extra DEI work or input. This happened to me last year. I was in the middle of a potential lawsuit for which Kat Herller and I hired feminist lawyers who threatened to sue Google (which is when they backed off--before that Google lawyers were prepared to throw us under the bus and our leaders were following as instructed) and the next day I get some random “impact award.” Pure gaslighting.
I find her totally out of line and disagree with her politics but I have to give her that in some sense she is quite brave. Most people would never consider tweeting out something like this because they'd be afraid of getting fired immediately and also suffering a reputational damage that would make applying for future jobs difficult. But she doesn't seem to be fazed by this.
IMHO she's an unethical ethicist, rude, and presumptuous at best. She has no idea what kind of depredations may have gone on in the lives of people she calls "privileged". I look like a typical fat white bald businessguy. I have been thrown into jail unjustly, raped, beaten, kicked out of schools and shunned from my social group for things I didn't do and would never do, rejected by multiple girlfriends' families because I was not in the right minority group, and more.
She has no idea what's gone on in their lives. They on the other hand appear to be treating her with as much public kindness as she is dishing out hatred (publicly).
Identity politics means individuality-less politics, where individuals are seen as mere parts of a group, or symbols for the common suffering of the group, and not by themselves. You hurt one you hurt the whole group, is the way they are thinking.
We have seen this recently in the Timnit vs Yann LeCun and Pedro vs Anima scandals, even the allies of wokes would be accused of being racist the moment they dared express a slightly more nuanced opinion. You have to approve the lead woke and not add anything or you're instantly the enemy.
When I hear someone talking about "gaslighting" it significantly lowers my inclination to take them seriously.
However, the paper trail that has been published publicly does not suggest she has been fired because of these messages.
You literally hired this person to the e-brake on your AI program and then fire them when they tell you it's time to stop.
I'm not saying I agree or disagree with this particular firing, but there's a very good reason for the company to employ someone who publicly disagrees with the way a particular department is being run or a decision they've made.
Candidly: this would be another example of why unions exist. Just because you publicly disagree with the company doesn't mean they should have carte blanche to fire you.
Because owning a company doesn't necessarily mean owning people working for it.
Ask yourself the same question about the government, why should your government be expected to keep you as citizen if you criticize their dirty laundry in public.
I (partially) own the government (in theory, if it's a democracy). I don't own the company that I work for.
I can easily choose which company I want to work for, switching countries is something much harder.
A government that does not like what I say can do all sorts of horrible things, jail me, confiscate property and event kill me. Companies generally do not have that power.
And yes, we fire the government all the time. We pay them, and if we don’t like their performance, they’re out. If they start publicly trashing us, they’re out even faster. This is why mayors have to appear meek and apologetic, instead of calling the voters a bunch of fools. Like when half of the population felt like Hillary called them a basket of deplorables, for example. Not many want to hire that person.
> A Black woman can't survive around here doing any type of research let alone research thats designed to make those in the majority uncomfortable. And guess who can apparently unilaterally order you to do things without even thinking you're someone they should converse with. (https://twitter.com/timnitGebru/status/1331757629996109824)
> [The VPs in her org] are very useful for gaslighting and marginalizing Black women to eternity. They're very useful for blocking any upstream work that needs to be done to change the status quo. (https://twitter.com/timnitGebru/status/1331772727615602690)
https://twitter.com/JeffDean/status/1278571537776271360
The whole interaction is so cringey and screams toxicity.
You can surely say that the overlap in a Ghanan and a Sami person's ancestry is quite small regarding recent millennia. But I don't see well defined groups at all. The reason it seems so in the US is because of the huge Western European (German/British) immigration early on and the large population of descendants of West African slaves. These two are sharply distinguishable (discounting for intermixing effects) but there are no "well defined groups" such as "black" and "white" when looking at it globally, not just in America. They are linked continuously via North/East Africans/Arabs/Turks and Mediterraneans.
Advice to not interpret any genetic data in a divisive manner here: http://www.ask-force.org/web/Golden-Rice/Yudell-Taking-Race-...
It's kind of like asking if Obama is really African American/Black. Races aren't sharply divided, it's a social grouping thing based on history, culture, etc.
Obama has clear facial features of a black person. This woman does not have them. She even looks like she got a perm just to look more black.
Let’s agree to disagree ;)
Race isn't straightforward.
She's not “black” nor was that claimed; she’s “Black”. The first is a common adjective that never really applies to humans except very loosely, the second is a racial identity group formed by and defined largely through oppression by European and (in US usage; usage and identity elsewhere has evolved through different local forces and experiences) later European-descended American bigots, that has only loose correlation to complexion, ultimately starting with the division of humanity (by people in the last of these groups) fairly arbitrarily into the three broad racial groups of Caucasoid, Negroid, and Mongoloid, which later evolved into White, Black, and the last split into Asian and Native American.
You must be deep inside some cultural bubble not to see how hilarious this sounds.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Luschan%27s_chromatic_scal...
It wasn't necessarily meant as an insult. Perhaps in America it's clear she's black, in countries with more North African and Middle Eastern immigration, it may not be.
The geographic distance from Eritrea to West Africa is the same as to Denmark (like 5000 km) and the terrain isn't easy to traverse. If someone imagines all black people "must" look the typical West African way (Ghana, Ivory Coast etc), they may be legit confused when seeing someone from the other side of the continent. The reason that both are considered black is social.
Edit: for example, when seeing her photo she reminded me of the Syrian-Hungarian reporter Hesna Al Ghaoui: https://hesna.hu/gallery#media So precisely what skin tone qualifies you as black is hard to say. Somewhere between Al Ghaoui and Gebru I guess: https://c.files.bbci.co.uk/B817/production/_115872174_gettyi...
FTA: In later tweets, Gebru clarified that no one at Google explicitly told her that she was fired. Rather, she said Google would not meet a number of her conditions for returning and accepted her resignation immediately because it felt that her email reflected "behavior that is inconsistent with the expectations of a Google manager."
Google cut off her access and paid her through her notice period.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2020/12/17/947719354/ousted-black-google...
When companies like Google or IBM employee researchers, they're positioning themselves as supporting that model of inquiry, and the benefit for them is the credibility that comes from participation in scientific inquiry. Gebru attacking Google's AI practices actually lends Google credibility for disinterestedly supporting basic research and taking its results seriously.
A company that employs an ethicist and takes that ethicist's output seriously even when it challenges the company is a company that genuinely cares about the academic standard in that field. A company that hires an ethicist and then fires them when they point out the company's wrongdoing is sounding an alarm about their own unethical conduct.
The part I struggle to understand here is how Google could be so stupid. Who cares, from a commercial perspective, if an academic they employ drags them? Keeping Gebru on payroll was straightforwardly purchased ethical credibility; firing her is a PR disaster and an open statement that their ethics AI group is a propaganda unit rather than a genuine research entity. It would have been trivial, even beneficial, to air the academic dispute. They gained nothing by retracting her paper and then firing her.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-55281862
It's good to be critical and reflect on the company you're working for. There are bad cultures and attitudes in any big company, not just tech.
But if you're going to sprout your opinions publically about your (ex)-employer like that, sorry, but I wouldn't want her in my team. She sounds like too much of a headache to deal with. Her work must be truly extraordinary to warrent having that headache.
I'm pretty sure her work as an ethicist can be summarized as "Any application of AI/ML must be stopped until it is absolutely GUARANTEED that there won't be anything that could be deemed discriminatory by proponents of critical race/gender theory." Which is obviously an untenable position for a tech company.
I think she will be happy when we develop natural language understanding to the degree where we could implement an automatic critical theory censor, that would check for undesirable biases.
That sounds like more of a nightmare scenario than having to deal with this person... Its hard to even know where to begin with how something like this could go off the rails easily.
Actual racism is very rare in America. Prejudice is commonplace and has a lot more to do with the inherent tribalism of humanity than it does actual malice for someone's "race". And to take it even further, I think if people were honest, what they really dislike is cultural differences that vary dramatically from theirs.
To me this is just like trans issues... we'll never get anywhere significant with this stuff, because in order to come up with meaningful answers, you have to ask meaningful, hard questions. No one wants to ask these kinds of questions, because no one wants to have to deal with the answers that may come up, because that will also invite further study and further difficult, unpleasant conversations.
Yeah and your average software engineer is roses.
Difference is engineers positively impact the bottom line and society is less tolerant (empirically researched fact) of pushback from women or people of color.
For sure there may be complications on both sides of this issue but let’s not pretend that this shit isn’t real.
Critical to that credibility is actually having the same standards as Harvard with respect to allowing the researchers to publish what they will, whether or not they're the target. By appearing to fire Gebru because her paper was insufficiently pro-Google, they damaged their whole purpose of having an ethical AI group.
The demands of the group may seem childish or absurdly far-reaching, but if Google wants to rebuild their credibility here, this is the standard they have to hit. Otherwise, their own researchers have less credibility because their output will be viewed as "approved by Google management", not real research. This is critical if they need to say "our own AI ethicists say this is ok."
And I don't think anyone's disputing her desire to promote and encourage ethical implementations of AI technology. The crux of this issue is how you handle yourself, and it seems the more I read about how she handled these things, the more it seems like how children act.
"If I don't get my way, I'm quitting!"
Yeah, you get to sit atop your high horse and lord your morality over the rest of the mortals beneath you. You don't actually get to do shit, though, and you've actively lost the ability to control how this unfolds, at least at Google.
They're clearly unhappy, and so are many google employees. This clearly isn't just one person, this clearly is bigger than that.
> You'd be hard-pressed to find an ethical issue with how Edward Snowden handled the revelation of mass illegal spying on the American people.
What ethical issue is there with the revelation of problems in the ethical AI division of google? You just "don't like how they act." I've heard many people say the same of individuals on street corners...not a great look.
Their job is to build a bulwark for the company to guard it against negative press, and that will allow Google to create an AI that leverages all its data and currently existing infrastructure to increase shareholder value. They actually think their job is to prevent bad things from happening. Its not, and that's where the confusion is occurring. That confusion is turning into frustration, which in turn becomes anger.
You'll probably say something like, "Well that's a cynical viewpoint..."
Any company's "Ethics" committee/board is there to do that. Just like Human Resources is there to protect the company from you, not you from the company.
The only problem is that entirely too many Googlers think they're actually employed to make the world a better place. They're employed to create shareholder value. Sometimes making the world a better place will align with increasing shareholder value. Sometimes it won't.
Just because it's their "job" doesn't make it right or not worthy of whistleblowing.
If companies are doing bad things we want whistleblowers to tell us. I just don't understand your argument - "you can do bad things if it's your job." No. It doesn't work that way.
You can't do illegal things. Difference.
Either way if we didn't have whistleblowers for very bad things that weren't illegal, we would never make laws to make them as such.
Did he contact any of the number of Congressmen or Senators who are sympathetic to his concerns to see what could be done before committing treason?
Maybe the reason it isn't praised in this case isn't due to her being a woman of color but due to other differences in this case and those that are praised?
Perhaps we shouldn't just sweep it under the rug. It seems there is very real merit, this was not just a disgruntled employee. The subject matter is directly related to diversity - to remove race is to, again, cover up the systemic race issues we face as a society.
HN has a large audience with a broad range of opinions. In my opinion, Snowden and Manning are traitors and the latter should have been left in prison.
> Had a white male done this, it's hard not to think he'd be praised as a hero on here.
I'd be equally dismissive of any person who committed the following actions.
1. Griping about the racist reviewers of her paper on Twitter.
2. Sending an email to a internal list criticizing Google's behavior and telling people to stop working on diversity.
3. Demanding the names of reviewers and threatening to resign if they weren't provided.
Just like any large audience a hive mind exists. There are more posts in favor of Snowden/Assange on here than in favor of this google employee. In general, more come to their defense, than hers, despite doing similar things.
Those aren't why you're dismissive. You've made up your mind on her, and make those items "dismissive" to support your POV, because you can't actually prove one way or the other. Perhaps some of the reviewers are racist. We've seen in the past 4 years that racism is alive and well in this country.
I don't see a problem with sending an internal email to colleagues. Should everyone just fall in line and do everything asked ever and never want change?
If she is publicly publishing a paper, reviewers should publicly publish their reviews, especially if they're negative. At this point, if we don't know the reviewers, we can't tell if they're genuine reviews, or not.
These cases are completely different.
Snowden and Assange exposed a global surveillance network that many are opposed to. I think of Snowden as the Kim Philby of the 21st century but that's a different discussion.
Dr. Gebu disagreed with the peer reviews of a paper, threatened to resign, and Google accepted her resignation.
> Those aren't why you're dismissive. You've made up your mind on her, and make those items "dismissive" to support your POV, because you can't actually prove one way or the other. Perhaps some of the reviewers are racist. We've seen in the past 4 years that racism is alive and well in this country.
She may feel that her paper was rejected because the reviewers are racist; I think it's more likely that they disagreed with the quality of the work. There was probably an administrative screw-up with its submission, though.
Neither of us can prove anything. It's unlikely that all the facts will come out in any event; Google would settle the case if it went to court.
> I don't see a problem with sending an internal email to colleagues. Should everyone just fall in line and do everything asked ever and never want change?
Have you read the email (https://www.platformer.news/p/the-withering-email-that-got-a...) that she sent? Would you expect to keep your job if you sent a similar email at work? Diversity is the third rail of modern companies - criticize or discourage it and you're gone.
> If she is publicly publishing a paper, reviewers should publicly publish their reviews, especially if they're negative. At this point, if we don't know the reviewers, we can't tell if they're genuine reviews, or not.
Anonymous peer reviews are a standard practice in industry and academia. If you demand the names of reviewers and threaten to resign if they aren't provided then don't be surprised if your employment ends.
When you append, "Or I will leave" to a request and the company isn't interested in your request, you're resigning. You can dress it up in fancy language, but that's the bottom line.
Or did I miss something about this story?
[1] https://twitter.com/timnitGebru/status/1334364735446331392
An any rate, this seems to me to be an excellent case study in ultimatums. Namely, don't give one to someone more powerful than you.
She expected she would have to leave after her ultimatum. She was fired for a different email.
That's not toxic, that's anger. One angry incident, justified or not, does not make the case for firing a "toxic" employee.
1. Absolutely refusing to update her paper with feedback from a colleague - the whole purpose of the internal review
2. Demanding that Google reveal who gave her critical feedback - presumably to attack them in some way
3. Sending an e-mail to her superiors/colleagues, making ultimatums and threatening to leave if her demands were not met
4. Sending a message to a group at Google, telling them to abandon any attempts to help Google with diversity initiatives and instead start attacking their co-workers
5. Publicly blaming Google and saying that she was "fired" for an e-mail. She was relying on information assymetry, knowing that Google would be hesitant to respond fully to all allegations
What about the paper trail she left on Twitter?
That's not being professionally assertive.