So I've been wondering about these positions like those mentioned in the article, people whose sole job is to prevent bias, fight discrimination and what not. Whether they be ML researchers or corporate diversity officer. What happens to these people when full equality is achieved?
Like let's imagine tomorrow everyone she'd all of their sexist and racist and other ist tendencies both conscious and unconscious. Wouldn't these people be out of a job, and as we continue to be a more and more equal society won't these positions have less and less work Todo? Because if they are doing their job they should be solving the very problem they were brought in to counter.
Is it inevitable that these positions will end up continuing to try to justify greater and greater outrage over small and small incidents? What is the future for these positions and the cottage industry that has sprung up around inclusion and diversity?
I mean, most of the actual work-work Gebru did was investigating to see if a bias existed in certain things. As we do more things or as those things change, that testing will have to be expanded or at least repeated.
An ethical review is like QA, you never really "finish" it unless you stop developing altogether.
She's a PhD researcher, not some kind of equality police, so presumably if the world suddenly became perfectly just overnight, she'd continue doing research but in a different area. I imagine all the AI biases that she is known for would still exist in this perfect world, the impacts would just be less disparate.
But this seems sort of like overengineering? I'm not sure we're at any substantial risk of the world suddenly becoming fair, so it seems odd to spend time worrying about what might happen if we run out problems to solve.
> What happens to these people when full equality is achieved?
Thank you, I needed a laugh this morning. Humans are going to be humans, and will always find ways to treat each other in inventively bad ways.
If you are trying to say that these positions should not exist... I disagree. The study of ethics and the profession is not a new thing or a "cottage industry".
Of course people in these positions are sometimes going to attract outrage and cause conflict - if they didn't, I'd suspect they were just there to "rubber stamp" whatever the companies were doing - yep, all good here, sure, we're doing x, y and z thing that people criticize us for, but our ethics committee says we're all good, so you can all put down your pitchforks and go home now.
It's their job to be a thorn in the side of authority. Sometimes it's justified, sometimes not, there's always room for interpretation and disagreement, some of these people are good at their jobs and some are not - but dismissing the entire thing as "fake outrage to promote their jobs" doesn't seem right.
> What happens to these people when full equality is achieved?
What happens to a software engineer when full feature completeness and bug-free-ness is achieved? What happens to a police employee when zero crime is achieved? What happens to a builder when all the buildings that ever need to be built are built?
Even if you get to the point where you can say "there are no problems at all!" (doubtful, except maybe in tiny startups or similar), adding "and there will never be any more and we never have to do anything ever again" is hopelessly naive.
Are you suggesting full-equality, like zero-crime, is something that doesn't exist? Or that our notion of what equality is evolves? These are different things, e.g. like the difference between the policing of laws, and changes in the law itself.
For the former, then accept a threshold, "reasonable level of equality" such that differences are within the norms of individual diversity. Then equality is achieved.
Or focus on "equality of opportunity" which is much simpler to gauge, as it only requires that opportunity be similar e.g. a person covered by fire insurance, whose house burnt down; had the same insurance "opportunity" as someone covered by the same policy whose house didn't burn down - same opportunity, if different outcomes.
It's clear that some I&D initiatives exist because of pre-existing issues. At the very least, some of it depends on the notion of "race", and that isn't guaranteed to exist forever.
> Are you suggesting full-equality, like zero-crime, is something that doesn't exist? Or that our notion of what equality is evolves?
Both, to an extent. Avoiding problems in a large company is presumably a constant uphill struggle, and certainly society's view on it does evolve (often quite rapidly; I personally went from strictly speaking being outlawed before 1993 to having employment protections in 2000 to being allowed to marry in 2015, for instance).
> as it only requires that opportunity be similar
Even if you restrict it to that, it remains a huge problem for employers. To take the most basic example, there have been _endless_ studies showing that blinding resume review by removing names etc substantially changes outcomes in the very first stage of hiring (by impacting who gets called in for interview).
"What happens to a software engineer when full feature completeness and bug-free-ness is achieved?"
Try working in the games industry all the way to the end of the project and find out for yourself. Your work doesn't even need to be "bug free" but "good enough."
And I've been wondering what happens to all the HN posters once every sensible comment has been written. Will they become repetitive? Will they start posting absolutely inane comments? Will they all congregate, post one last comment and celebrate a job well done?
I'm not sure this is the best argument against these types of jobs. Food used to be completely unregulated and potentially unsafe, but there are still jobs regulating food safety. It's basically a solved problem, but it still requires lots of people in the public and private sectors who's jobs focus on food safety. Same story with cars, same with medicine. You could imagine a world where bias becomes a mostly solved problem but still requires a lot of people to work on it.
It is, or isn't solved depending on how the problem is stated.
The problem of food policing is solved, not the problem of food needing to be policed. In reality, places are constantly shut down for violations. The deterrent only deters people serving food unsafely, it doesn't kill the motivation - people motivated to serve unsafe food still exist, they just choose not to (or are prevented from doing so).
When police arrest a criminal, we say they did their job - we don't say they failed their job b/c the criminal existed in the first place. Sure, good policing deters criminality, but it's not really the only goal. the true eradication of motivation to commit crime are usually totally different social factor that has nothing to do with the police. In a similar vein, it's not really the fire departments job to prevent fires.
The real question is: is bias the same kind of thing. On that basis I'd ask "what kind of bias" - that is, does D&I coverany kind of human bias, or is it more specific. If you are talking about historical generation biases, for example, that might vary based on societal attitudes in general.
> What happens to these people when full equality is achieved?
The bubonic plague still kills a few people every year in the United States. Worldwide, cases number in the thousands. Granted, biases and discrimination aren't proper diseases, but they come close given they spread with misinformation.
Isn't an expectation that we can 100% eliminate all that ills us irrational? Doesn't that make this question you ask a leading one?
A panacea for the human condition is not a thing. Suffering exists because of impermanence and will continue to do so through at least next week. That's not to say it's not worth fighting for, but I think any expectation that it can be "eliminated" puts us on the wrong footing for improving things over time.
At the least, it blind us to other truths which may be more evident, such as corporate greed and misuse of the technology we all carry around in our pockets now.
> Is it inevitable that these positions will end up continuing to try to justify greater and greater outrage over small and small incidents?
No it's not inevitable. To think it is implies everyone doing these jobs is acting in bad faith or will be corrupted by something unspecified and act in bad faith.
That assumes AI and technology in general will stagnate and never change or grow or create new previously unforeseen technologies. Unless that occurs the job of analysing the ethical and sociological impacts of technology will continue to be relevant.
For Gebru individually, she has a PhD from Stanford's AI Lab and is accomplished in the field outside of ethics. If the utopia you're describing some how occurred in her lifetime she'd have no trouble finding another job.
Like let's imagine tomorrow everyone she'd all of their sexist and racist and other ist tendencies both conscious and unconscious. Wouldn't these people be out of a job, and as we continue to be a more and more equal society won't these positions have less and less work Todo? Because if they are doing their job they should be solving the very problem they were brought in to counter.
If that was my job, I'd be over the moon that I was successfully making myself redundant. I'd happily find myself a different career, proud that I made a dent in a worthwhile and difficult problem, and fulfillment is much harder to come by than money.
I think that worry is like worrying what infosec engineers will do when full security is achieved, or whether Tesla's Full Self Driving team will be laid off once Full Self Driving has been accomplished.
Do we think that a problem persists even when it has become less frequent? Levari et al. show experimentally that when the “signal” a person is searching for becomes rare, the person naturally responds by broadening his or her definition of the signal—and therefore continues to find it even when it is not there. From low-level perception of color to higher-level judgments of ethics, there is a robust tendency for perceptual and judgmental standards to “creep” when they ought not to.
> ...as a result would be accepting Gebru’s resignation—but that it would be effective immediately, rather than at a future date.
Yeah it seems foolhardy to threaten to leave if you're not ready to leave. That's the issue with playing hardball - you may get smacked in the face with the ball.
I disagree. If my employee sends out a group email listing demands that must be met in order for them to stay with the company, unless those demands are incredibly reasonable, I'm firing them on the spot.
What's the point in keeping someone that disgruntled around? They can only make things worse.
I don't necessarily disagree with your point regarding letting a disgruntled employee go (and do agree with both grandparent that mentioning resignation was a dangerous negotiating tactic and parent that this seems like Google attempting to quickly revoke an unhappy employee's access to internal information that could paint them in a bad light) I do think its important to note that the email documenting her demands was only sent to her managers and wasn't a group email. Based on the responses to her tweets about this her team was blindsided by her being let go.
Also important to the discussion is that her managers (and thus Google) appear to be framing this as "accepting her resignation" as opposed to firing her (tying into GP's point) which likely has consequences with regard to separation benefits and lets Google frame this as not being their decision (or at least would be if it weren't for Twitter/articles like this).
It seems like Gebru did things correctly with regard to reporting her unhappiness to her management team but made the mistake of mentioning possible resignation in response to a lack of change which Google jumped on as a method to protect themselves by immediately removing a possibly disgruntled employee in a way that allows them to avoid the downsides of firing her (that simple description alone not meant to imply any judgment).
Its a rather murky situation to untangle though when combined with Google's firing of employees participating in organization and other events over the last few years giving the general impression of Google "becoming evil" I does seem like the bad PR this will cause means Google's handling of the situation was a bad choice.
It’s pretty common to handle employee departures this way. I wouldn’t call it “firing” - the employee says they will quit, the company is just deciding the date the quitting happens. Usually it happens when the manager thinks the employee will be disruptive at work during the last couple weeks or so. I can’t speak to this specific situation - perhaps a Google manager is making a poor decision in this case - but in general this is motivated by considerations internal to the company and the team the employee is on, so you can’t really tell from the outside whether it’s a good idea or not.
I can't speak for California law, but where I live (which has a very generous wrongful termination regime), an employee resignation ultimatum (i.e., "if you don't agree to X, I will resign") is one of the classic employee blunders. It's not even really "hardball" for an employer to run with it, since being able to characterize it as a resignation rather than a termination is one of the few things that can dramatically affect what they may have to pay out.
Yeah, California is pretty similar. A related point that comes up a lot is that if you give notice that you are quitting effective on date X, your employer is entitled to say, ok we accept your resignation but it’s effective immediately, or some earlier date. Sometimes an employee will have a quitting plan that is like, they will do x y z while still at the company and then quit after a drawn out period of several months, and the manager would prefer to just move on.
Aside from the tiring and asinine cliché that is "virtue signalling" (i. e. faulting someone for something universally considered to be "good"), your notion seems to be self-contradictory?
I'd also like to point out that this event itself contradicts your talking point about "it all being virtue signalling", since the person in question was indeed willing to risk quite a bit.
What is your interpretation of "virtue signalling"? To me it is the balance that remains when you take all displays of virtue and subtract each genuinely virtuous act. That it is the domain of posers and try hards, and that there's actually nothing good about it.
- The accusation tends to be entirely unproven, or even wrong in rather obvious ways. To stay with the example here: despite this particular incident, there are many laudable contributions to social causes that Google has supported over the years.
- The idea that professing some sort of belief which one acknowledges as "good" is nonetheless somehow "bad" when not accompanied by action just doesn't make much sense. It is still PR for the good cause. When it's convincing, people will act on it.
Example: Apple has been making lots of noise, for years, on issues such as environmentalism or privacy. They have been accused of "virtue signalling", or "greenwashing", etc. I don't think those accusations are valid, but in any case, even if they have been the most cynical liars, their statements will have the effect of setting expectations for them and their industry peers. They will attract talent that believes in these ideas, and, over time, will turn them into reality.
- The term "virtue signalling" is used exclusively by the political right. Are we to believe they have any actual interest in, say, increased diversity, and are concerned about "virtue signalling" because it is somehow damaging to their cause? No... that doesn't make much sense, does it? Instead, it's used by these people because their real opinion just cannot be openly stated in polite company any longer. So it's rather convenient to come up with a concept that uses the generally agreed-upon "goodness" of your opponent's stated believes against them.
This would be a good conversation in person, this format just is going to take too long to resolve.
I just want to gently suggest one thing:
>Instead, it's used by these people because their real opinion just cannot be openly stated in polite company any longer.
This accusation (X because Y) also tends to be generally unproven. I do it at times but I think it's a trick we play on ourselves to neatly package a person up into a 'they' who's who's opinion or position is immaterial. Once they are in that box of irrevocably flawed zombies, why bother listening to them at all? None of their positions have any fundamental merit, nothing they say is worth considering and if they are inconvenienced or put out by anything I say or do whatsoever, fuck them truly. They are the inconsiderables.
To unpack some of this, you must understand what VS is, and why it's bad.
The idea is that by signalling virtue for something you don't really care about (or care about less that you imply) you are: misrepresenting your character, and reaping the benefit of untrue positive assumptions, and by extension, building illegitimate trust/reputation.
Per the phrase "when a metric becomes a benchmark, it ceases to be a useful metric", if corps or individuals benefit from certain virtuous signal, it ceases to be an useful metric of virtue.
> despite this particular incident, there are many laudable contributions to social causes that Google has supported over the years
Did Google derive any positive benefit from those contributions aside from the benefit to the cause itself? e.g. positive reputation. It is precisely that which results in accusations of VS: Even immoral corps benefit from social-cause PR, and the difference is in the details. e.g. you judge a person not by how they treat their friends (or boss), but by how they treat their waiter.
> The idea that professing some sort of belief which one acknowledges as "good" is nonetheless somehow "bad"
This is an oversimplification. Giving to charity is good, even if done for ingenuine reasons, but a corp should not be considered generally virtuous in that case i.e. no virtue beyond that contribution should be assumed. Chemotherapy has a devastating affect on the body, yet utilised to treat cancer; It is "good" because the overall context is considered, having cancer is still bad. The world is more nuanced than everything fitting into two categories, free of context.
> It is still PR for the good cause. When it's convincing, people will act on it.
I agree, Virtue-signally may still have its benefits. That doesn't change what it is though. I think you need to look at the context to decide whether it matters or not.
> even if they have been the most cynical liars, their statements will have the effect of setting expectations for them and their industry peers
It might, but it could also lead to the precedent whereby corps make hollow statements that they don't need to live up to. The precedent is that "unlimited" (as in broadband, storage) doesn't actually mean unlimited, so why can't "environmentally-friendly" be expected to mean little?
> Are we to believe they have any actual interest in, say, increased diversity
But they don't have to, unless they are accusing someone/thing of VS to imply their own virtue. If I don't believe you care about X, I don't need to care about X myself to make that accusation. There are, however, cases where it does matter, but again it depends on context, and why people think it relevant to make that accusation. The opinion I seek to counter, however Is that a persons true motivations are either always, or never relevant; or that they can always be known.
> Instead, it's used by these people because their real opinion just cannot be openly stated in polite company any longer
I could just as well make the same paranoid argument: "people who complain about the phrase 'virtue-signalling' do so because they are virtue signallers themselves with more sinister motivations that they cannot state upfront, or in 'polite company'"
This is just an unsupported bad-faith interpretation of your political opposites. How do you know what the motivations of the "political right" are? There are plenty accusative phrases used mostly by the political left - are those invalid by the same reasoning?
> I'd also like to point out that this event itself contradicts your talking point about "it all being virtue signalling", since the person in question was indeed willing to risk quite a bit.
I think the parent is talking about Google, not the person Google fired. For Big corporations like Google, Apple, Disney, AT&T,... "wokeness" is a fad like Grunge, Emo, or Punk and they want to bank on it for good PR.
> At some point you can be "too woke" even for Silicon Valley.
Seems like wokeness there is only discussed as parody or sarcasm. If HN comments were your only source of info you might be inclined to think it’s on the far side of echo chamber and on the road to cesspool. I’m reminded of the phrase, “you have zero chill”, but “chill” is not the deficit.
This is fairly uncomplicated... there are always going to be growing pains as society progresses and changes, and so understanding and dealing with that fact is always going to be part of the process. That does not mean that anyone is necessarily acting in bad faith, it only means that they may lack the tools and perspective to behave in a more equitable manner. So yeah, these jobs are not going away.
It's too bad the reporter wasn't able to get some details about her requests. I'm kind of curious to find out what was unacceptable to the great and powerful Google.
From her Twitter a week ago:
“Nothing like a bunch of privileged White men trying to squash research by marginalized communities for marginalized communities by ordering them to STOP with ZERO conversation. The amount of disrespect is incredible. Every time I think about it my blood starts boiling again.”
And making it clear that it’s about Google: “Where I'm currently working.”
I am college-educated and live in a diverse urban city, yet when I saw Gebru's Medium photo I did not realize she was a Black woman. If a human has trouble with facial recognition, then A.I. definitely needs a lot more help and guidance.
This pattern sometimes happens in other businesses: Banks with a culture of yelling at the compliance department. "Independent" Auditors getting pressured to sign off on the books of a company, etc. The pushback is not always entirely unjustified — I've been annoyed myself at how much easier a legal department finds it to say "no" than "yes" — but it's often a warning sign.
> where she was technical co-lead of the company’s Ethical Artificial Intelligence Team
That’s not the title I would expect for someone hired as an ethicist. Not that I would expect them to have an ethicist for any reason other that sand a few rough edges down and to whitewash their efforts.
Oil companies can and do hire environmentalists and ecologists. That doesn’t stop them from getting huge, well-deserved fines for their fuckery. It just slows the rate down a bit. In fact a cynic would say that it’s just cover to delay having to stop what they’re doing (eg, legislation and policing makes them stop).
At some point you either become one of them or you quit, like Sandra B in Two Weeks Notice, but without the creepy stalker romcom elements.
From the perspective of the people at the top of Google that team almost certainly exists for whitewashing purposes. However corporations are made up of people and that perspective may not be shared by the folks that actually work for and with the team.
For fields like AI research that are largely industry focused these corporate labs become the major location continuing research that has a large impact is possible for academics post-PhD.
Those facts combined with Google's tendency to try to hire the best of the best means they very often end up hiring people with strong personalities, opinions, and industry influence that don't lend well to being subsumed by the machine resulting in situations like this.
The internet and social media making it possible for knowledge about events like this to penetrate beyond just those inside the specific industry has also made it much more possible for individuals to point out bad behaviour and stand up to corporations to some degree.
All that to say I think the historical example of environmentalists and ecologists working inside oil companies cannot be directly applied to this situation or other modern ones like it.
Google hires for intelligence. I haven't seen anything in my own experiences or self-reporting from others about selecting for wisdom.
You get what you measure, and discretion is the better part of valor. Knowing when a problem is too big for you to fix and choosing to be somewhere else would self-select out a lot of people they need most, and now you have a Market For Lemons, but with greater fools instead of lesser cars.
In the middle of the spectrum you have people like Gebru, who take huge risks, burning political capital for a cause or trying to bluff people you have no power over into changing things that are under their control, not yours. So they chopped her head off for tilting at a windmill, and now they've sent a message to the rest of the team. As farcical as it may have been before, it'll be twice as bad now. I expect some other people on that team have started putting out feelers, and we'll see a... brain-drain is not the right word here, but I don't know what to substitute. Hopefully you get my meaning.
Even if you take that as an axiom there is still the issue of results being biased (in the academic sense of deviation of expected value from a statistical estimate) related to gender and race. The ethical discussion of the impact of that bias doesn't really change beyond which side of the bias you consider receiving negative vs positive outcomes.
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 126 ms ] threadLike let's imagine tomorrow everyone she'd all of their sexist and racist and other ist tendencies both conscious and unconscious. Wouldn't these people be out of a job, and as we continue to be a more and more equal society won't these positions have less and less work Todo? Because if they are doing their job they should be solving the very problem they were brought in to counter.
Is it inevitable that these positions will end up continuing to try to justify greater and greater outrage over small and small incidents? What is the future for these positions and the cottage industry that has sprung up around inclusion and diversity?
An ethical review is like QA, you never really "finish" it unless you stop developing altogether.
"Something" and "It" here would be "full equality achieved".
(Not that I am expressing a view on whether "it" could be achieved, just a comment on human nature).
But this seems sort of like overengineering? I'm not sure we're at any substantial risk of the world suddenly becoming fair, so it seems odd to spend time worrying about what might happen if we run out problems to solve.
Thank you, I needed a laugh this morning. Humans are going to be humans, and will always find ways to treat each other in inventively bad ways.
If you are trying to say that these positions should not exist... I disagree. The study of ethics and the profession is not a new thing or a "cottage industry".
Of course people in these positions are sometimes going to attract outrage and cause conflict - if they didn't, I'd suspect they were just there to "rubber stamp" whatever the companies were doing - yep, all good here, sure, we're doing x, y and z thing that people criticize us for, but our ethics committee says we're all good, so you can all put down your pitchforks and go home now.
It's their job to be a thorn in the side of authority. Sometimes it's justified, sometimes not, there's always room for interpretation and disagreement, some of these people are good at their jobs and some are not - but dismissing the entire thing as "fake outrage to promote their jobs" doesn't seem right.
What happens to a software engineer when full feature completeness and bug-free-ness is achieved? What happens to a police employee when zero crime is achieved? What happens to a builder when all the buildings that ever need to be built are built?
Even if you get to the point where you can say "there are no problems at all!" (doubtful, except maybe in tiny startups or similar), adding "and there will never be any more and we never have to do anything ever again" is hopelessly naive.
For the former, then accept a threshold, "reasonable level of equality" such that differences are within the norms of individual diversity. Then equality is achieved.
Or focus on "equality of opportunity" which is much simpler to gauge, as it only requires that opportunity be similar e.g. a person covered by fire insurance, whose house burnt down; had the same insurance "opportunity" as someone covered by the same policy whose house didn't burn down - same opportunity, if different outcomes.
It's clear that some I&D initiatives exist because of pre-existing issues. At the very least, some of it depends on the notion of "race", and that isn't guaranteed to exist forever.
Both, to an extent. Avoiding problems in a large company is presumably a constant uphill struggle, and certainly society's view on it does evolve (often quite rapidly; I personally went from strictly speaking being outlawed before 1993 to having employment protections in 2000 to being allowed to marry in 2015, for instance).
> as it only requires that opportunity be similar
Even if you restrict it to that, it remains a huge problem for employers. To take the most basic example, there have been _endless_ studies showing that blinding resume review by removing names etc substantially changes outcomes in the very first stage of hiring (by impacting who gets called in for interview).
Try working in the games industry all the way to the end of the project and find out for yourself. Your work doesn't even need to be "bug free" but "good enough."
It is, or isn't solved depending on how the problem is stated.
The problem of food policing is solved, not the problem of food needing to be policed. In reality, places are constantly shut down for violations. The deterrent only deters people serving food unsafely, it doesn't kill the motivation - people motivated to serve unsafe food still exist, they just choose not to (or are prevented from doing so).
When police arrest a criminal, we say they did their job - we don't say they failed their job b/c the criminal existed in the first place. Sure, good policing deters criminality, but it's not really the only goal. the true eradication of motivation to commit crime are usually totally different social factor that has nothing to do with the police. In a similar vein, it's not really the fire departments job to prevent fires.
The real question is: is bias the same kind of thing. On that basis I'd ask "what kind of bias" - that is, does D&I coverany kind of human bias, or is it more specific. If you are talking about historical generation biases, for example, that might vary based on societal attitudes in general.
The bubonic plague still kills a few people every year in the United States. Worldwide, cases number in the thousands. Granted, biases and discrimination aren't proper diseases, but they come close given they spread with misinformation.
Isn't an expectation that we can 100% eliminate all that ills us irrational? Doesn't that make this question you ask a leading one?
A panacea for the human condition is not a thing. Suffering exists because of impermanence and will continue to do so through at least next week. That's not to say it's not worth fighting for, but I think any expectation that it can be "eliminated" puts us on the wrong footing for improving things over time.
At the least, it blind us to other truths which may be more evident, such as corporate greed and misuse of the technology we all carry around in our pockets now.
Crime free can happen without laws.
This is true in a very literal sense.
You and your family probably have rules.
Very small communities don't even have police.
The larger the group the more need for laws to protect each other against ourselves.
No it's not inevitable. To think it is implies everyone doing these jobs is acting in bad faith or will be corrupted by something unspecified and act in bad faith.
For Gebru individually, she has a PhD from Stanford's AI Lab and is accomplished in the field outside of ethics. If the utopia you're describing some how occurred in her lifetime she'd have no trouble finding another job.
If that was my job, I'd be over the moon that I was successfully making myself redundant. I'd happily find myself a different career, proud that I made a dent in a worthwhile and difficult problem, and fulfillment is much harder to come by than money.
Do we think that a problem persists even when it has become less frequent? Levari et al. show experimentally that when the “signal” a person is searching for becomes rare, the person naturally responds by broadening his or her definition of the signal—and therefore continues to find it even when it is not there. From low-level perception of color to higher-level judgments of ethics, there is a robust tendency for perceptual and judgmental standards to “creep” when they ought not to.
Shady.
Yeah it seems foolhardy to threaten to leave if you're not ready to leave. That's the issue with playing hardball - you may get smacked in the face with the ball.
On the other hand, as an employer firing people this way is not very smart either. This brings a lot of attention and seems very vindictive.
Especially given the context, this reeks of fire her before she collects proof of <<insert whatever immoral thing google is doing now>> to me.
What's the point in keeping someone that disgruntled around? They can only make things worse.
Also important to the discussion is that her managers (and thus Google) appear to be framing this as "accepting her resignation" as opposed to firing her (tying into GP's point) which likely has consequences with regard to separation benefits and lets Google frame this as not being their decision (or at least would be if it weren't for Twitter/articles like this).
It seems like Gebru did things correctly with regard to reporting her unhappiness to her management team but made the mistake of mentioning possible resignation in response to a lack of change which Google jumped on as a method to protect themselves by immediately removing a possibly disgruntled employee in a way that allows them to avoid the downsides of firing her (that simple description alone not meant to imply any judgment).
Its a rather murky situation to untangle though when combined with Google's firing of employees participating in organization and other events over the last few years giving the general impression of Google "becoming evil" I does seem like the bad PR this will cause means Google's handling of the situation was a bad choice.
I'd also like to point out that this event itself contradicts your talking point about "it all being virtue signalling", since the person in question was indeed willing to risk quite a bit.
- The idea that professing some sort of belief which one acknowledges as "good" is nonetheless somehow "bad" when not accompanied by action just doesn't make much sense. It is still PR for the good cause. When it's convincing, people will act on it.
Example: Apple has been making lots of noise, for years, on issues such as environmentalism or privacy. They have been accused of "virtue signalling", or "greenwashing", etc. I don't think those accusations are valid, but in any case, even if they have been the most cynical liars, their statements will have the effect of setting expectations for them and their industry peers. They will attract talent that believes in these ideas, and, over time, will turn them into reality.
- The term "virtue signalling" is used exclusively by the political right. Are we to believe they have any actual interest in, say, increased diversity, and are concerned about "virtue signalling" because it is somehow damaging to their cause? No... that doesn't make much sense, does it? Instead, it's used by these people because their real opinion just cannot be openly stated in polite company any longer. So it's rather convenient to come up with a concept that uses the generally agreed-upon "goodness" of your opponent's stated believes against them.
I just want to gently suggest one thing:
>Instead, it's used by these people because their real opinion just cannot be openly stated in polite company any longer.
This accusation (X because Y) also tends to be generally unproven. I do it at times but I think it's a trick we play on ourselves to neatly package a person up into a 'they' who's who's opinion or position is immaterial. Once they are in that box of irrevocably flawed zombies, why bother listening to them at all? None of their positions have any fundamental merit, nothing they say is worth considering and if they are inconvenienced or put out by anything I say or do whatsoever, fuck them truly. They are the inconsiderables.
The idea is that by signalling virtue for something you don't really care about (or care about less that you imply) you are: misrepresenting your character, and reaping the benefit of untrue positive assumptions, and by extension, building illegitimate trust/reputation.
Per the phrase "when a metric becomes a benchmark, it ceases to be a useful metric", if corps or individuals benefit from certain virtuous signal, it ceases to be an useful metric of virtue.
> despite this particular incident, there are many laudable contributions to social causes that Google has supported over the years
Did Google derive any positive benefit from those contributions aside from the benefit to the cause itself? e.g. positive reputation. It is precisely that which results in accusations of VS: Even immoral corps benefit from social-cause PR, and the difference is in the details. e.g. you judge a person not by how they treat their friends (or boss), but by how they treat their waiter.
> The idea that professing some sort of belief which one acknowledges as "good" is nonetheless somehow "bad"
This is an oversimplification. Giving to charity is good, even if done for ingenuine reasons, but a corp should not be considered generally virtuous in that case i.e. no virtue beyond that contribution should be assumed. Chemotherapy has a devastating affect on the body, yet utilised to treat cancer; It is "good" because the overall context is considered, having cancer is still bad. The world is more nuanced than everything fitting into two categories, free of context.
> It is still PR for the good cause. When it's convincing, people will act on it.
I agree, Virtue-signally may still have its benefits. That doesn't change what it is though. I think you need to look at the context to decide whether it matters or not.
> even if they have been the most cynical liars, their statements will have the effect of setting expectations for them and their industry peers
It might, but it could also lead to the precedent whereby corps make hollow statements that they don't need to live up to. The precedent is that "unlimited" (as in broadband, storage) doesn't actually mean unlimited, so why can't "environmentally-friendly" be expected to mean little?
> Are we to believe they have any actual interest in, say, increased diversity
But they don't have to, unless they are accusing someone/thing of VS to imply their own virtue. If I don't believe you care about X, I don't need to care about X myself to make that accusation. There are, however, cases where it does matter, but again it depends on context, and why people think it relevant to make that accusation. The opinion I seek to counter, however Is that a persons true motivations are either always, or never relevant; or that they can always be known.
> Instead, it's used by these people because their real opinion just cannot be openly stated in polite company any longer
I could just as well make the same paranoid argument: "people who complain about the phrase 'virtue-signalling' do so because they are virtue signallers themselves with more sinister motivations that they cannot state upfront, or in 'polite company'"
This is just an unsupported bad-faith interpretation of your political opposites. How do you know what the motivations of the "political right" are? There are plenty accusative phrases used mostly by the political left - are those invalid by the same reasoning?
I think the parent is talking about Google, not the person Google fired. For Big corporations like Google, Apple, Disney, AT&T,... "wokeness" is a fad like Grunge, Emo, or Punk and they want to bank on it for good PR.
Seems like wokeness there is only discussed as parody or sarcasm. If HN comments were your only source of info you might be inclined to think it’s on the far side of echo chamber and on the road to cesspool. I’m reminded of the phrase, “you have zero chill”, but “chill” is not the deficit.
And making it clear that it’s about Google: “Where I'm currently working.”
Surprised she wasn’t fired then.
Consider for instance the exit of Walter Shaub from the Trump Administration.
https://www.npr.org/2017/07/06/535781749/ethics-office-direc...
That’s not the title I would expect for someone hired as an ethicist. Not that I would expect them to have an ethicist for any reason other that sand a few rough edges down and to whitewash their efforts.
Oil companies can and do hire environmentalists and ecologists. That doesn’t stop them from getting huge, well-deserved fines for their fuckery. It just slows the rate down a bit. In fact a cynic would say that it’s just cover to delay having to stop what they’re doing (eg, legislation and policing makes them stop).
At some point you either become one of them or you quit, like Sandra B in Two Weeks Notice, but without the creepy stalker romcom elements.
For fields like AI research that are largely industry focused these corporate labs become the major location continuing research that has a large impact is possible for academics post-PhD.
Those facts combined with Google's tendency to try to hire the best of the best means they very often end up hiring people with strong personalities, opinions, and industry influence that don't lend well to being subsumed by the machine resulting in situations like this.
The internet and social media making it possible for knowledge about events like this to penetrate beyond just those inside the specific industry has also made it much more possible for individuals to point out bad behaviour and stand up to corporations to some degree.
All that to say I think the historical example of environmentalists and ecologists working inside oil companies cannot be directly applied to this situation or other modern ones like it.
You get what you measure, and discretion is the better part of valor. Knowing when a problem is too big for you to fix and choosing to be somewhere else would self-select out a lot of people they need most, and now you have a Market For Lemons, but with greater fools instead of lesser cars.
In the middle of the spectrum you have people like Gebru, who take huge risks, burning political capital for a cause or trying to bluff people you have no power over into changing things that are under their control, not yours. So they chopped her head off for tilting at a windmill, and now they've sent a message to the rest of the team. As farcical as it may have been before, it'll be twice as bad now. I expect some other people on that team have started putting out feelers, and we'll see a... brain-drain is not the right word here, but I don't know what to substitute. Hopefully you get my meaning.
I wonder why is this considered a bad thing.
I mean, if you oppose video surveillance, you should be happy if the leading spying systems are bad at identifying you.
[0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60nLTtjdiFc&feature=emb_logo