The mandate of the department is ethics. Ethics is not agnostic to one's personal convictions, unlike code. People assume that because someone got fired, they "lost". Another viewpoint is that they retained their ethical integrity at great personal cost - doing so is precisely their actual job.

I’ve seen this bait and switch a couple of times now, but there’s not really any reason to expect a researcher working in an Ethics Research team to only do ethical things, in the same way that you wouldn’t expect someone working on a Truth Team to only do true things. The nominal mandate over her team does not extend as if a veneer to all of her personal actions. It’s just a name.

Her team was very specifically engaged in culture war, and wanted to wield Google’s clout in that war. Google disagreed. That disagreement led to her co-lead refusing to withdraw and edit a paper, so that co-lead was terminated. This really shouldn’t have escalated as much as it did, but it happened, tough shit. Meg was understandably upset about this, but then [appears to have] made the unforced error of sending internal documents to external accounts, and thus was canned.

Companies generally need to be able to trust that you aren’t going to violate their security policies, even when you’re upset about and disagree with their decisions. That’s why she was fired. Every other goddamn thing about this is an irritating optics war between the people that want to use this as ammunition in a crusade to prove that Google doesn’t care about ethics-and-also-minorities [which is manifestly not the case], versus the people that are legally obligated to never say anything publicly about internal matters.

It’s shitty and tiresome, but it has nothing to do with ethics.

This sounds like the most honest account of the situation from all the sources I've read about it, thanks for summarizing in such a succinct way.

I don't disagree with your frustrations. It is hard for anyone to be accused, including the Google management, of being insensitive when you are acting out of good intentions yet getting lumped with blatant racists. Perhaps there was security violations as well with these documents leaking.

But can't there be an ombudsman mechanism within Google to settle such acrimony before it spills over into the larger public domain? Perhaps there is such a mechanism, I don't know about it. An outright firing seems very high-handed, and this is what dismays people.

Yes, ethics is agnostic to one's personal convictions when it is your job. Same as how defense lawyers leave their personal sense of justice out of their jobs. Same as how sports referees don't let their childhood fandom of a particular team affect their calls. Same as how actors will be physically intimate with people the opposite of the sexual preference.

Imagine if the person in charge of AI Ethics converted to a fundamentalist Christian sect. Their ethics changed and now they think LGBT people should be discriminated against explicitly. Nobody supporting Margaret Mitchell would be defending this new convert's application of the personal ethics in their job. That proves this is merely a convenient argument on their part, not a principled one.

not sure if you understand this or not, but google is a massive global company dealing with sensitive personal data which makes its work inherently political. They are not manufacturing bolts...

The "Coinbase model" (are they the first?) to be explicit about "no politics in the workplace" as an official policy is great.

But that model isn't winning right now, if anything it seems that political agendas are encompassing more and more spaces.

The real solution is if your company isn't really completely ethical, don't hire ethics researchers. Can the whole division. Simple business choice.

You figure the whole department should quit?