I think this is actually the better link to be discussing, rather than the twitter threads shared before.
The most relevant parts (in terms of back story) should be this:
> A week before you go out on vacation, you see a meeting pop up at 4:30pm PST on your calendar (this popped up at around 2pm). No one would tell you what the meeting was about in advance. Then in that meeting your manager’s manager tells you “it has been decided” that you need to retract this paper by next week, Nov. 27, the week when almost everyone would be out (and a date which has nothing to do with the conference process). You are not worth having any conversations about this, since you are not someone whose humanity (let alone expertise recognized by journalists, governments, scientists, civic organizations such as the electronic frontiers foundation etc) is acknowledged or valued in this company.
> Then, you ask for more information. What specific feedback exists? Who is it coming from? Why now? Why not before? Can you go back and forth with anyone? Can you understand what exactly is problematic and what can be changed?
> And you are told after a while, that your manager can read you a privileged and confidential document and you’re not supposed to even know who contributed to this document, who wrote this feedback, what process was followed or anything. You write a detailed document discussing whatever pieces of feedback you can find, asking for questions and clarifications, and it is completely ignored. And you’re met with, once again, an order to retract the paper with no engagement whatsoever.
Pure speculation, but it's gotta be criticizing Google, right? What else could they _possibly_ have been so concerned about that they were willing to fire the researcher over it?
And, when reading it, I want to remember the backstory - that (if we can believe her story) Google went to unreasonable lengths to try to block the paper.
Maybe someone could post it here when it's published?
It’s more relevant, but probably doesn’t tell the whole story considering she very heavily hints that she gave them a list of demands or she would resign, and Google just accepted her resignation.
"Timnit responded with an email requiring that a number of conditions be met in order for her to continue working at Google, including revealing the identities of every person who Megan and I had spoken to and consulted as part of the review of the paper and the exact feedback. Timnit wrote that if we didn’t meet these demands, she would leave Google and work on an end date."
We don't know the full list of demands, but Jeff Dean shared one demand that people may find unreasonable. Other demands may have been much more reasonable, but those weren't shared.
Considering she says she made a list of issues she'd like fixed and that she'd discuss it when she came back from PTO without ever mentioning resignation and that was answered with a "we accept your resignation" passed on to her reports, I believe she has legal representation.
The financial implications of her resigning vs her being fired are probably significant.
In Google's place I'd probably negotiate an agreement with a non-disparagement clause. She'd be compensated and everyone would save face.
And we'd never be discussing this. She could take other research roles and advance the state of AI in peace.
"feedback" here seems to refer to feedback on the scientific paper that is being retracted, not personal performance feedback or anything like that. When I red this first, wasn't immediately clear what this was about.
But the feedback itself wasn't shared with her. That part doesn't make sense unless management didn't want her to see it, and why would that be the case?
Because (a) by the rules of engagement, management is not required to share original feedback, and (b) the original feedback could be used to identify the sources. In this case, there might have been a real risk to the sources given the individual in question is known to mobilize internal and external forces like Twitter mobs to personally attack people and bully them into submission.
I think this argument would stand on its own without the very specific claims about the person in question, which are a little strong unless you have personal information.
I'm well aware of that. But this was not a (submission) peer review situation. From everything I've seen (not a complete picture of course) this was a process entirely separate from the peer review process of the conference she was submitting to. That still makes it a situation where her paper was apparently reviewed (and possibly by peers) but it certainly doesn't have the same semantics in which anonymity is warranted/guaranteed.
I'm not sure we know exactly what kind of review it is. I think it also depends what she signed up for, explicitly or implicitly. What were the expectations around freedom to publish?
It is a review that every paper submitted to a conference or a journal from Google has to go through. In fact I believe one has to do that prior to even submitting the paper to external peer review. That at least was the interpretation every researcher I knew at Google was operating under.
She has a history of attacking people through social media. If I were reviewing her paper, I would certainly not want to be known to her, especially if I were critical of it. The possibility of retaliation from her is very real and she often uses her considerable twitter following to do exactly that. I believe she thinks she's doing the right thing, but from a disinterested party's perspective she seems like a bully.
> behavior that is inconsistent with the expectations of a Google manager.
Maybe my remark is down to earth but, she literally told her group to stop working. I do not know of any company where this is an acceptable behavior for a manager. Besides the disagreements, it sounds to me that was the action that caused Google to pull the trigger.
Also from Dean's email it is pretty clear there are a number of new products down the pipe based on AI. At one point top management decided the company should stop denigrating its own products.
in the email shown,she told a listserv called "Women and Allies" to stop writing docs that are an attempt to better the situation in terms of diversity, equity, inclusion as writing those docs are like pissing in the wind in her opinion
Quoting Jeff Dean's email about this (as published in https://www.platformer.news/p/the-withering-email-that-got-a...) " I also feel badly that hundreds of you received an email just this week from Timnit telling you to stop work on critical DEI programs. Please don’t. I understand the frustration about the pace of progress, but we have important work ahead and we need to keep at it." implies that at least Google does interpret her email as her telling people to stop work on certain issues.
She was fired for damaging Google's reputation. In her email, she carelessly demanded names of those who reported her, that can be interpreted as extortion, and Jeff didn't miss the opportunity to call her out. Her offer to resign was another mistake: she would be fired anyways, but for a different reason and with more paperwork. Now if she takes this to a court, she would have to tell the judge what she needed the names for.
Yes she was. Even the letter communicating to her the termination of employment made it fairly explicit that she was being terminated on terms different than what Google interpreted her resignation to be, due to the internal mail.
It's clear that for external PR purposes Google wants to maintain the story that it was merely accepting her resignation, but while clearly worded with the intent that an incomplete reading would support the narrative, the letter to her fairly directly (and unusually for a case where they viewed themselves as accepting a resignation) mad explicit that employment was being terminated, immediately, based on separate grounds from the supposed resignation.
On the other hand, I guess making it explicit that she was being fired for public internal complaints about a culture of discrimination is one way (like, the worst way possible, but one way) of making the case that what happened to Damore wasn't discrimination against white men, but just what they do to any internal criticism of Google culture.
The email from Jeff Dean in the article describes one of them - to ubmask all of the anonymous feedback provided on her paper and list everyone who was consulted on the decision to prevent publication.
Corporations and their managers care only about making money and maintaining good vibes to produce a positive business environment. Only unions engaging in strikes and outside pressure can force them to change materially. All these internal committees and such are just PR.
By the way, that part about unions and strikes also applies to the joined at the hip government as well.
> Unions have historically been some of the most racist and discriminatory organizations in the USA.
The USA has been pretty racist in discriminatory, and I think it's disingenuous to single out unions for that history. I mean, who instituted Jim Crow and profited from slavery? White voters, government officials, and private enterprise. Unions were definitely not leading that.
Private enterprise was usually castigated for not being racist enough. Economics was the 'dismal science' because it didn't support racism, segregation, and slavery.
> Private enterprise was usually castigated for not being racist enough. Economics was the 'dismal science' because it didn't support racism, segregation, and slavery.
I had slavery in mind with the private enterprise comment.
But it's not like businesses are actually run by perfectly rational automatons according to textbook economics. They're run by owners and managers who can be just as racist as the surrounding community, and who can very well prioritize prejudice over a little more profit.
Don't forget that creating arbitrary hierarchies among workers is good for business by creating divisions among the working class, which keeps them from banding together effectively against the ownership class.
That history is not entirely correct. Typically private enterprise has been against segregation: Think about it, it is pretty expensive to have to maintain two sets of facilities for society. The montgomery bus company was AGAINST segregation when the laws forcing bus segregation were passed. Barry Goldwater donated a ton of money in the early days first NAACP chapter in Arizona in part because segregating his department store would be expensive for operations.
As for Unions, think about it, their major threat is cheap labor from abroad, so the way that they have historically been discriminatory has been in lobbying for anti-immigration and immigration quota (don't know if they still do that as much).
>...Typically private enterprise has been against segregation
Unclear why you were downvoted. Another example of this was Plessy v. Ferguson where the railroad worked with a civil rights group to bring the case:
>...On June 7, 1892, Plessy bought a first-class ticket at the Press Street Depot and boarded a "Whites Only" car of the East Louisiana Railroad in New Orleans, Louisiana, bound for Covington, Louisiana.[11] The railroad company, which had opposed the law on the grounds that it would require the purchase of more railcars, had been previously informed of Plessy's racial lineage, and the intent to challenge the law.
That's a crazy idea. There are sometimes unions that have racist members, and sometimes unions that are no good, but anyone paying attention to history has seen that unions are what fight for progressive change - material change that improves the lives of workers, who have always been multi-racial. Often they tackle racist structural problems. For example, in the Sanitation Workers' strike.
This is so unhelpful and dumb. The US has historically been one of the most racist and discriminatory organizations in North America. Does that mean we shouldn’t engage the US? Does that mean the US can’t be less racist? Does that mean the US isn’t a tool we can try to use to make the world a better place?
Unions provide countervailing power to corporate power. Racist people are racist. Sometimes these can overlap.
Unions historically in America have been massive front organizations for mobsters and mafia. Check out the Teamsters - there are many many other examples.
Does that make them racist? Of course not. But they have absolutely been discriminatory.
Sure some of them have, but their foundational democratic and working class structure makes it possible for them to have a progressive effect on society. By contrast, the corporations that they are in conflict with supported the Nazis and planned a coup against FDR because their foundational interests in a regimented, nationalist, power hungry, and elitist society were aligned.
1. Union busting since the New Deal era resulted in one of the most oppressed working classes in the world. Hence, low union enrollment.
2. FDR saved capitalism. I'm not his biggest fan. I'm a socialist.
3. Serious money was offered during the business plot. It didn't come to fruition, but the danger was real. Corporations are the real power in America.
Working class are people that have to sell their labour to get income; capitalist class are those that live off capital income. (Dividends, rent, etc)
If someone is employed in a government organization, like the CDC or a secretary of the white house, and they don't have capital income then they are working class.
Gentle reminder about FDR: During the run up to the Holocaust he blocked most Jewish immigration to the US and forced Japanese Americans into concentration camps.
The Business Plot (according to your link) was a cocktail napkin farce by a sad person.
Cash-only and cash-intensive businesses are an incredibly easy and common vehicle for money laundering. The less customer information involved, the more effective. Such businesses are incredibly widespread and vital to organized crime, and their ease of operation in this manner is baked into their DNA.
> The US has historically been one of the most racist and discriminatory organizations in North America.
That seems like a very US-lib centric POV where the US is a cartoonish evil-dooer.
In my experience Mexico is pretty much just as bad, even more so in different ways too - classism, racism, anti-indigenous sentiment, Malinchismo, rampant feminicide, etc.
You have a point, but the key difference is the US is able to export its product worldwide using the military and corporations. I don't think Mexico has the same level of power.
My point is that these countries aren’t cosmic forces. We’re all humans that instantiate the same fundamental prejudices, instincts, biases, etc. wherever you find us.
I totally agree with that point. The cartoonish depiction was intentional, in response to the cartoonish depiction of unions. The statement is defensible in the sense that I left it wiggly: “one of the most racist orgs” is kinda vague. I’m past my “US out of North America!” Phase, and all generally irritated with one dimensional interpretations of the world, though I could still play a radical leftist on TV
I would partly agree. We're all in a single global system of social organization and it's hard to see outside that (capitalist realism). Often these divisions are sown intentionally by the upper classes. I don't want to say humans aren't shitty, but I don't think they fundamentally have to be. I think they respond to their material conditions and an appropriate kind of social organization and material support can reduce the bad stuff a lot.
> This is so unhelpful and dumb. The US has historically been one of the most racist and discriminatory organizations in North America. Does that mean we shouldn’t engage the US? Does that mean the US can’t be less racist? Does that mean the US isn’t a tool we can try to use to make the world a better place?
I'm not sure this makes much sense. "Racism" (I'm guessing you mean things like slavery or de jure discrimination) were practiced concurrently in the US and elsewhere in North America, not to mention many other countries. The US was one of the first countries to have major movements to end slavery (Britain was the first global power to do so, and they preceded the US). I think it would be most accurate to say that the US has historically been both among the most racist and least racist countries, just depending on how
you measure.
> Unions provide countervailing power to corporate power. Racist people are racist. Sometimes these can overlap.
Unions, on the other hand... Unions are a monopoly on labor. Monopolies reduce the amount of a good they supply and drive up prices. This means unions depend on certain people leaving the labor market that a union has captured. When a bunch of unions formed in the late 19th century and early 20th centuries, which people did the unions choose to exclude? More or less across the board, they excluded women, immigrants and black people. This was extra convenient, as members of those groups would typically work voluntarily for less pay, so the unions had double incentives to get rid of them. Many early Progressives were quite proud of this and other policies like a minimum wage forcing "inferior" groups to have to work harder to catch up to the white man.
The question we should be asking is why unions, minimum wage, hours restrictions, etc. were useful in eliminating "undesirables" from the labor force 100 years ago but help these same groups today.
For the former, I'd recommend chapter three of Thomas Sowell's Black Rednecks & White Liberals, about the history of slavery.[1]
For the latter, I'd recommend Illiberal Reformers, about the Progressive Era and its devotees.[2] Later Progressives were responsible for the school-to-prison pipeline and militarized police.[3] The Progressive Era has a wide array of interesting literature, including the writings of many of its early exponents (since they tended to be writers or academics).
Compare unions to corporations and I think unions come out ahead on that front. Any large American unions who directly worked with Nazi Germany like IBM did, for instance?
That is irrelevant. Pointing out that unions have effected negative changes or engaged in discrimination internally in the past is not an argument against the idea that they're necessary to force positive change.
"Unions have historically been some of the most racist and discriminatory organizations in the USA."
You're telling much less than half the story, and taking the latter half of the twentieth century in isolation without considering what came before.
U.S. unions with communist and socialist leadership were universally anti-racist in word and very often in deed. Employers often interfered with employee choice of leadership to the benefit of conservative, racist, union leaders as opposed to leftists with anti-racist commitments.
In one of the most flagrant violations of the First Amendment in U.S. history, the Taft-Hartley Act[1] criminalized membership in all manner of left-wing political organization. With the cooperation of union leaders ready to sell out their membership, many of the strongest voices for integration were purged.
Employers and union officials alike had relationships ranging from extortion to open cooperation with organized crime. The relationship between the Hoffa Sr's Teamsters and the mafia was complex, and notorious in part because it was so exceptional.
I think worker cooperatives could also be a pressure for material change industry wide, and specifically in the tech industry I suspect that's more attainable than for workers of many other industries.
> And you are told after a while, that your manager can read you a privileged and confidential document and you’re not supposed to even know who contributed to this document, who wrote this feedback, what process was followed or anything
Interesting. Having been on the receiving end of a (later proven to be bogus) HR complaint, this is exactly how it was handled. I was forced to respond to allegations where neither the allegations nor source were ever shared with me.
That's how it is supposed to work. If you complain to HR about your manager how can they reveal your identity when your manager controls your performance review and compensation?
Which doesn't seem to be what was happening here though, or at least there's no indication to that effect.
At the same time, the narrative that someone above her in the management hierarchy decided to pull her research seems more plausible. In that case, I would tend to "Privacy for the Weak, Transparency for the Powerful." What you describe is the former, but this would seem to be a case of the latter.
It's really hard to tell from this message what really happened. Why isn't it plausible that the paper in question was somehow upsetting to one of the dozens of people to whom the author circulated it? It reads to me like this person rejects the very idea that any criticism of their paper could possibly be legitimate.
First, for this to be a valid case of HR protecting someone who needs protecting, these complaints would have to come from someone who Gebru was managing and therefore have leverage on. I don't know the specifics, but it would stand to reason that she did manage some people, so that possibility can't be excluded for sure.
But from the last paragraph it seems that she did actually try to address the points raised:
> You write a detailed document discussing whatever pieces of feedback you can find, asking for questions and clarifications, and it is completely ignored.
I wasn't there, but simply not addressing counter points doesn't fare well in the public's (read: my) eyes.
I don't think modern HR policy really works like that. If one person complains to their HRBP that the speech or actions of another person at the company makes them feel personally attacked, derogated, or establishes a hostile work environment then the company will be forced to take that matter to the second person. HR isn't looking to setup an Oxford debate between persons A and B. They are required to resolve the hostile work environment allegation, else person A has an actionable complaint against the company.
Sure but HR wouldn't share the feedback on her paper and give her an opportunity to update it. Instead they demanded that she retract the paper.
How is it fair or standard to make someone retract a paper because of anonymous and secret criticisms that the researcher isn't even given a chance to address?
That's just how HR works. It's there to protect the business. They get a complaint and a bunch of HR people and lawyers decide what needs to happen, and then they make it happen. It's not a debating society.
Actually, to be fair, anonymous referee reports are absolutely standard in academia, and they may be standard part of Google practice in this field - and if so that might be good practice. Waiving anonymity could compromise the integrity of the intellectual process.
I could maybe understand the anonymity, but I don't see why the substance of the feedback that let to the whole paper getting retracted was kept secret at first. At least give the paper's authors an opportunity to update the paper.
The reasons Jeff Dean cited in his email for the retraction sound like things that could've been fixable.
That scenario still wouldn't be close to what the anonymity of the HR process supposedly exists for. Unless the research paper in question contained a footnote "oh, and BTW, <xy> is stupid".
>> Imagine this: You’ve sent a paper for feedback to 30+ researchers, you’re awaiting feedback from PR & Policy who you gave a heads up before you even wrote the work saying “we’re thinking of doing this”, ... haven’t heard from PR & Policy besides them asking you for updates (in 2 months).
Based on that I assume that the author was soliciting guidance from PR & Policy but didn't receive any. Someone higher up isn't doing their job effectively.
Oh, I agree, I just found it interesting that the AI Researcher's case was treated the same way. It makes me wonder if the issue was really feedback about the paper and not some other HR complaint.
>That's how it is supposed to work.
The thing that sucked about it was that it was impossible to defend myself. I only found out details after the fact because the complaint was anonymously filed on behalf of a co-worker and it was the co-worker that later came to me to explain.
If the complaint is about academic research in a research institute, then there needs to be a different process. It's typically a fairly conservative idea, in fact (see: Chicago Principles [1]).
This is not a research institute, it's a division in a for profit global corporation.
I'm frankly disgusted that people who call themselves researchers of the humanities go work in this sort of obvious PR stunt of an "institute".
If you're hired by a private company to do academic work, it may often be reasonable to expect academic norms to apply. I'm not sure why you're disgusted by the idea that people might take jobs at Google, who do quite serious work around AI.
I don’t think it is disgusting to expect that, but it most certainly is naive. There are a set of norms, but they are industrial-research norms, not academic norms and they overlap but are not the same
I agree that it is a perfectly reasonable expectation to have, however there is no notion of a tenure in a private company. To me that is a pretty fundamental distinction (with far reaching consequences) that people often overlook.
How, exactly, is it supposed to work? If you are asked to respond to allegations, yet those allegations are not shared with you, what are they actually asking you to do?
"Retract the paper" not an allegation though. It is a demand / conclusion of a decision process. It doesn't allow any response/defense, and you're right, they don't seem to have been vague about not wanting any of that.
Something fishy about submitting paper with 1 day notice before its deadline when internal review process takes 2 weeks - she must have known the drill as she published dosens of papers before at G. Approval sounds like somebody's mistake maybe, not awaiting for review feedback for submission and submitting - feels strange. Especially when followed by threat of leaving company if identities of people consulted in review process is not revealed, at the same time being involved in litigation against G while on G's payroll etc.
It's like you have good Silicon Valley espisode just from that, I'm not sure if I buy total innocence here.
Sorry, I was talking about the commenter you were responding to above, who described being asked to respond to allegations without being told what those were.
She is accused of being an abuser. I think we've seen enough fake accusations of various kinds of abuse (i.e. crimes without proof, one person's word vs another's) in the past few years to know better.
There's no evidence that she was accused of abuse. How do you abuse people in an academic paper, anyway? Seems much more likely that someone higher up didn't like what she might have implied in the paper in that it might have clashed with company policy somehow.
EDIT: a bit more info from the NYTimes:
"In an interview with The Times, Dr. Gebru said her exasperation stemmed from the company’s treatment of a research paper she had written with six other researchers, four of them at Google. The paper, also reviewed by The Times, pinpointed flaws in a new breed of language technology, including a system built by Google that underpins the company’s search engine."
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/03/technology/google-researc...
I remember that I read somewhere (maybe here on HN) years ago that HR is like the secret police of police states. Nobody willingfully talks to them, except their bosses. The dynamics of this incident, the secrecy, the lack of care about people, enforce that metaphor.
I wonder what People Ops is, something more about logistics maybe. Still paid by the company, so it can't be on the side of employees.
> This is the exact email I received from Megan who reports to Jeff
> Who I can't imagine would do this without consulting and clearing with him of course
"This is the exact email I received from Megan who reports to Jeff. Who I can't imagine would do this without consulting and clearing with him of course."
I am sure Jeff Dean was made aware of the situation given the PR impact. But it is a stretch to say that Jeff Dean personally decided to fire her against her manager's wishes.
Speaking as someone who is a senior manager/director, my experience is dismissals of high-profile employees usually have a ton of complexity under the hood, and whatever information is publicly available is often the tip of the iceberg. Out of respect for the folks involved, the full details of the lead-up to the dismissal are almost never released even internally in the company. This information asymmetry makes it relatively easy for a sufficiently vocal dismissed party to control the public narrative even if their internal behavior at the company was extraordinarily problematic.
These dismissal decisions are not made lightly and I would wager there was a long history of events leading up to this. You usually only see the straw that broke the camel's back.
This also sounds like an opportunity for an awesome person to spread their wings now they're out from under what sounds like a pretty oppressive system
She claims to be a leading researcher in the field, but has she written any significant papers or research of note?
Her biggest accomplishment seems to be driving Yann LeCunn off Twitter with angry accusations. She tried to continue her power trip at a workplace but her boss called her bluff.
This is a great firing for Google. She won’t be missed.
The first paper listed there has over 1000 citations in 2 years. That’s influence and impact.
Just because you don’t know of her work doesn’t mean that her work has not had an impact and that she’s not well known in her research community. She definitely is.
I’ve read the papers. The ones where she is a (1,2,3)ary author are all glorified rants - well worded, but offering no actionable feedback or new methods.
Your comment betrays your inherent bias, and frankly, it is not a good look.
Everything you've said here is not only falsifiable, but straight up false.
It appears you didn't even try to challenge your own beliefs before spraying them out into the public sphere. You aren't representing yourself in a decent light.
I’m sorry you feel that way. But Timnit is an internet bully with an army of Twitter minions, with the stones to write a ridiculous “How To Apologize” document she tweets at researchers she doesn’t like. I maintain this is an excellent firing if there was such a thing.
If I understand the document correctly, she wants HR to be biased against hiring "privileged" people (I think that means white, possibly male too, not sure) and wants to get politicians to force the company to report to create pressure for the same.
a. Yes, but you can post 'women and minorities encouraged' job ads. b. No.
People invested in identity politics are, by their own admission, interested in outcomes. In this world view, the legal system is a tool for achieving the desired outcomes. The same set of rules can be illegal if it rejects certain identities in a context, and at the same time legal if it promotes those identities in
a different context. 'Heads I win, tails you lose', but dead serious.
A thread discussing the pervasive 'women and minorities encouraged' mindset is in western academia:
>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 think if you threaten to sue your employer, the employer isn't too much at fault and just covering their own neck when you later threaten to resign and they take you up on that offer.
Yeah, that Lecun argument was a really bad first impression of her from me. I guess she found out life isn't Twitter and you can't just go around telling everyone they are bad and wrong without consequences.
Rude, maybe but not very. Dismissal, yes. The belief that AI should learn reality as it exists and not some ideologically purified version of it is a completely rational one, and dismissing the "work" of those so-called "ethicists" is no more problematic than dismissing the "work" of the Chinese censors who purify the Chinese internet. Indeed being dismissive of that work is to be praised, as it shouldn't exist at all.
Well, read any AI bias paper. Facts about reality these models capture and which are considered problematic include stuff like "doctors are more often men and nurses are more often women" or "most people on the internet are white" or "most stuff on the internet is written in English". Basically the internet is mostly built by westerners and any facet of that gets classed as "bias" rather than being what it is: the truth.
Even trivial facts like in English "men chuckle, women giggle" has been used as examples of bias. That's not bias though, that's just how the English language works.
I'd even go one step further and bet that her whole career plan is ML activism. If you scan the email, all the key words are in there. Textbook agitprop.
I feel sorry for the next company that will hire her.
What politically uncomfortable regularities are those? Please name the specific uncomfortable true facts about reality that you think these models are capturing.
Well, reading the thread, it's pretty clear that she was correct. There is a second step of metaoptimization which incentives the researchers to encode algorithms to produce algorithms that more easily bias along a certain way. And she is correct that benchmarking models against biased datasets can lead researchers to bias for architectures that are in turn more likely to have a certain bias.
I'm sure LeCun knows this too. It's a fact that has been known for almost 40 years now, that for a given generalization system multiple bias modes are are possible, and of course the process of optimizing architectures against a biased benchmark will change the learning bias of the model. It's not just datasets that are biased, generalization systems are necessarily biased too.
As for the last line, I don't know that it should be expected for employers to fire employees pursuing recourse against sexual harassment.
I'm sure we can agree that the tone wasn't good, but she does have a point in saying that it's not possible to reduce the bias to datasets used to train the final model.
TBH it doesn’t matter if she is right or wrong. Her tone and angry writing is pretty harsh.
The Twitter replies read a lot like her Google message thing. She’s got a lot of good things to say but needs to work on the delivery.
I think she’s playing the victim and race card a lot more than she should. She’s got all the ammo she needs to make her arguments without the angry victim tone.
I agree that her tone is not good, indeed. It's true that this is a big problem on Twitter especially. I still think it is an interesting and under-discussed point, though.
It's why natural language is so hard. People like ethnographers and other people who spend their continuous feeling time understanding this are owed a lot of gratitude (like us, who benefit from unicode). Tone is just another way to encode a basic unit within a language (how a basic unitary 'meme' is converted to a 'lexeme', 'morpheme', etc is very interesting, but has been part of an ancient ontology/metaontology war for all communications systems), and language is just a tool for two human beings to communicate and share ideas. just look at the variance of toneless between English, the gamut of into-european Langs, and tonal languages like Chinese. Heck, in the Universe in a Single Atom, the Dali Llama talks about how Buddhism and other Indic culture spread across the himilayas (it took a lot of sheer luck and kinematics). Sanskrit unlike Tibetan had a lot of prosody (aka distributed word-meaning state), but the English equivalent to things like "affect" and "effect" were culture shocks. Tibetan had little words to encode affect-like words outside of mental states. So little "counting" was ever done.
Have you considered that there are many other people with the same thing to say, who are saying it with the respectful tone you demand, and are being just as politely and quietly ignored?
Yes but I’m not a prominent AI Ethics Academic with ties to 2 of the best colleges in the country, Stanford and MIT. Who also had a very good job at one of the most sought after companies in the world, Google.
When she speaks people listen. Nobody listens to wil421.
I think the simplest thing to be said about messaging and tone is this:
If your goal is to say things to convince people to change their behavior, it makes sense to spend some time thinking about how your message and its tone will be perceived, since that has a big impact on how people receive and process the message.
Based on a long career of watching people trying to convince the others, attacking people is typically a failing strategy. Instead, learn how to message in a way that is non confrontational, and most importantly, make it clear what is your opinion, versus fact.
Well, she didn't get ignored. Instead, she got fired. If that was her goal, then she succeeded. If it wasn't, maybe she should have taken a different approach.
Just as an FYI, LeCun has not actually quit Twitter, he still posts stuff on there. For those curious I wrote up a more detailed summary of the episode (https://thegradient.pub/pulse-lessons/). TLDR, imho he was a bit unthoughtful in how he communicated with a more junior researcher, and got some respectful flack from it from various people, it was not that big a deal. But of course you can make up your own mind on that.
In any case, Timnit Gebru (this particular AI researcher) has been recognized as having done some pretty important work in AI ethics. Sounds like this whole thing is messy, but thought I'd mention that for more context.
Timnit: “I’m sick of this framing. Tired of it. Many people have tried to explain, many scholars. Listen to us. You can’t just reduce harms caused by ML to dataset bias. Even amidst of world wide protests people don’t hear our voices and try to learn from us, they assume they’re experts in everything. Let us lead her and you follow. Just listen. And learn from scholars like @ruha9 [Ruha Benjamin, Associate Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University]"
I don't like engaging this kind of discussion but have to call out the "I'm so tired" bit every time I see it.
Her point is more than that. I think that she was trying to say that ML systems have an inherent bias that is independent of their data.
This is a consequence of the fact that it's not possible to do generalization, and thus learning, without bias to begin with. What an AI researcher does when deciding which architecture is essentially tuning the bias in the generalization system in order to produce better results, which is not in and of itself bad, and is indeed unavoidable.
By bias, I mean really anything that means that the function g() is used over the function h(). In practice this can be anything from the seed for the random values, to the choice of activation function, to the architecture of the network, and so on.
If the architectures are selected for their performance on dataset y, then it is possible that even when trained on dataset x, they retain some of the bias of dataset y, because their generalization bias, which is architectural, was tuned for dataset y. This is, admittedly, a theoretical result, and it's not clear that it applies in every case, but it is a solid point.
For that reason the point that benchmarking against non-biased datasets is important was made, and thus that there is more to bias than the final dataset used for training during deployment. Therefore, it's not only a responsibility of the engineering community, but also of the scientific community.
Interestingly enough, this is true of all learning systems, including humans, and is a proof of why it's impossible to be completely unbiased in really anything.
Eh. I think there's some legitimate concern that AI isn't fair to marginalized groups for a variety of reasons.
Dataset bias is only one way this occurs, though. Even if you include more colored faces, you still may be taking pictures with a camera that doesn't capture as much contrast. Or even if you retrain, you may have chosen model structure to optimize behavior in a biased dataset. Or... if you're considering the cost of misidentification by a facial recognition system used by, say, police, you need to be sure that you take a perspective that applies to society as a whole and not to your own interactions with police.
It's perfectly reasonable to say "AI is worsening the experience of minorities in various ways" and to differ with responses that assume with slight additional care in curating datasets that the problem will be completely solved.
One of the huge questions is : who takes responsibility for the issues with the black box learning systems ?
In France, since you have to be able to explain in plain words the algorithm that was used to help to make an administrative decision, it indirectly makes these black box learning systems illegal.
(And yet they probably already have been used by the police?)
Now, the naive response is that the engineer that implemented a system should take responsibility for any harm done by the system - and I guess that if these engineers could lose their license to use a computer and face jail time, they might also start to put pressure upstream on researchers to provide better systems ?
I'm not sure I understood your comment correctly, so I'll apologize in advance if I misunderstood.
That statement is contained in a paper I linked that dates from 1980. I'm pretty sure it's factually correct, because I'm trying to make nothing but a demonstration that an idée reçue, that ML systems are only based due to their data, is incorrect.
There's really no cloaked message behind it, and I'm not sure why one would think there is (hence the disclaimer). I think it's a pretty uncharitable interpretation.
> That statement is contained in a paper I linked that dates from 1980. I'm pretty sure it's factually correct, because I'm trying to make nothing but a demonstration that an idée reçue, that ML systems are only based due to their data, is incorrect.
That's reasonable. I may have taken the initial text in the wrong context. Thanks for clarifying.
> Even amidst of world wide protests people don’t hear our voices and try to learn from us, they assume they’re experts in everything. Let us lead her and you follow. Just listen. And learn from scholars like @ruha9 We even brought her to your house, your conference.
It strikes me as very unprofessional, and frankly I believe her anti-white bias shone through in that instance.
I think there is a bit of a double standard here. I try in general to be as charitable to both sides of an agreement possible. If your standard for uncharitability is such that the linked tweet is a proof of racism, I don't understand why one would take a tweet claiming against overwhelming evidence at face value.
Personally, I don't think either indicate racism. I see the link you tweeted as an excessively abrasive response at a dismissive and reductive understanding of an issue, bias in learning system, despite research old and new. At the same time, I see LeCun's dismissal as a genuinely held position in error.
To see the first as racist but the second as okay seems to be a case of being much more charitable to one side than the other, though I understand how it may look this way.
Whatever dude. You people are delusional. Stop bending over backwards to defend dumb ideas. To do so otherwise opens you up to mockery and ridicule of your otherwise substantive thoughts.
It's "commonly accepted" in that it is a well-known possibility and, therefore, something that practitioners should check for before publishing, using, or selling their models, yes.
It's not "commonly accepted" in the sense of throwing one's hands up, saying "there's just no way we could find enough pictures of black people for our AI to no longer confuse them with Apes" and move on.
I don’t think that for a person who lives in a world where AI shops routinely sell software that discriminate against minorities, not just in ways that are explained by poorly thought out datasets, saying you’re “so tired” is at all wrong. This is the exact research that Timnit is an expert on, and these are systems that have real world consequences for minorities. It’s easy for people who are not minorities to say you should always a be polite but frankly I think she’s being extremely polite here given all of the circumstances.
I bet there is research showing how racism and discrimination literally tires out the people subjected to it. And now you have people saying they're not allowed to express that.
Nobody said it was disallowed. The grandparent said he called it out as a lazy rhetorical move. It's certainly true that oppression can be tiring (does that point need research?) It may equally be true that some people overclaim on the extent of their oppression, and the mental health harms they are suffering from it, and even make a profession of doing so.
I find it strange to take issue with the "I'm so tired" line. It would seem to be entirely appropriate for circumstances where you see an argument that you have replied to many times but that completely ignores your reply. It also just doesn't strike me as particularly hostile or profane. Quitting twitter and making a show of it strikes me as a far more emotional reaction, but nobody here seems to take any issue with that?
In this case, the issue is that "it's the dataset" is attacking a straw man: nobody is accusing ML practitioners to be explicit racists actively conspiring for their models to be racially biased. Everyone understands that it is (often) a result of the underlying dataset.
But, the argument goes, understanding the genesis of such bias isn't enough to excuse it. At least not when those models are put to actual use in, say, law-enforcement contexts. Or credit agencies, or hiring decisions, or really anything.
If your dog happened to bite any red-haired kid it came across, it doesn't matter that you think red-haired kids are just as good as others, or that the dog was once mistreated by a red-haired kid. You're not going to allow the dog to get near any red-haired kids. And if you do, you'll face charges of at least negligence when some red-haired kid gets mauled.
To tie this back to AI, it would mean that as long as your models produce racially biased results, they simply aren't ready for deployment or publication. Go find better data until your work is no longer liable to inflict harm on anybody.
That's the standard for all other industries: if your car is shown to reliably kill pedestrians below a certain height in crash tests, you go back to the drawing board. Adding a sticker "don't operate car in the vicinity of children" isn't enough.
You can disagree with that reasoning (although you'd be wrong). What you can't do, as a leader in AI, is to pretend to have never heard of it, or that it is so obviously wrong that it warrants no reply whatsoever.
> have to call out the "I'm so tired" bit every time I see it.
Yeah GP is modeling exactly the behavior they're railing against. Claiming that something is wrong without any practical insights for how that thing might be better.
Many other rhetorical moves have a lot of politics to muddle through / implicit assumptions that can be disavowed in bad faith, etc. I don't like to engage in that kind of discussion at all.
But the "I'm so tired" bit is both condescending (and it takes... something... to condescend to Yan LeCunn) and evasive. The end result is authoritarian -- look man, this is decided and settled, you haven't kept up.
Calling this out is interesting because it evidences on the contrary that the discussion isn't settled at all, and that she's unable or unwilling to frame it in a convivial manner that's conducive to progress.
> Many other rhetorical moves have a lot of politics to muddle through / implicit assumptions that can be disavowed in bad faith, etc. I don't like to engage in that kind of discussion at all.
But isn’t what you described so vague and subjective, that you can apply it to pretty much anything?
IMHO it’s more honest to say “I sit out of conversations I don’t like”, which is an entirely fair and understandable decision to make :).
Yann was (actively or unintentionally) refusing to participate in the same conversation. His response was the "facts don't care about feelings" one. It's not wrong but it is a thought terminating cliche.
It is. Yann also seems blissfully unaware of how sampling bias issues have always been dealt with (eg the Heckman correction model) in traditional statistics, where “getting more data” is not an option.
The comment by the first John in the comment of the article here [https://syncedreview.com/2020/06/30/yann-lecun-quits-twitter...] adds a lot of insight too (starting with "As I understand, the social and structural problems are that AI learns the social and structural biases that are already present.").
> To tie this back to AI, it would mean that as long as your models produce racially biased results, they simply aren't ready for deployment or publication. Go find better data until your work is no longer liable to inflict harm on anybody.
Well, the disagreement is about publication. Yann LeCun himself said that "The consequences of bias are considerably more dire in a deployed product than in an academic paper."[1]
Why would it be wrong to publish research based on biased data?
What Yann said about data bias is a fact. He wasn’t dismissing your concerns nor distracting from it. A lot of people tried to extrapolate what Yann meant, but from the way I see it, if more people learn about the cause of this racial bias, the more people will be inclined to use fairer and diverse datasets in their future ML research.
The point is that she has an expectation of Yann to go further than just stating a fact.
I assume she thinks that Yann has enough intellectual capacity to improve situation of biased ML but doesnt execute. Further, my guess is that the reason why he doesnt execute is not transparent to her, hence frustrating.
This is probably the core of the conflict there - there are researchers that aim to remove technical bias from technical systems and expect to stop there, not going into social issues of how the systems will be applied, as they consider that (e.g. solving the biases in the society) as a separate issue.
Dr. Gebru, among others, expects and insists that they do go beyond that and try to get involved in the social consequences of tech. They refuse, ergo conflict.
> The point is that she has an expectation of Yann to go further than just stating a fact.
Yann was talking about a specific model, she was talking about ML & society on a grand scale. Can't we talk about specific things now? Why did he have to apologize for it?
My feeling is that Timnit is using people, she guilt trips, humiliates them online, makes a big fuss and it's all to whip up support in her crusades. She wants to win the public opinion by any means, so she needs famous opponents to pile on, such as Yann and Dean (who have universal admiration in the field). She's always playing the victim. I find this kind of behavior toxic, it degrades dialogue.
"It's December" is also a fact. He chose to mention a different one. Why, if not as an explanation / excuse for the model's behaviour?
Every practitioner already knows that these models behave according to the data they are trained on. The general public has no use for this explanation because they aren't the one deciding on the training data. So the only practical purpose is to offer some superficial causal mechanism that sounds like an explanation to that public, presented as an unchanging fact of nature, and distract from the equally true fact a biased model is only published or used iff it is trained on biased data and someone decides to go ahead and publish/use it nonetheless.
You're making a fallacy here, forcing the issue into black and white - if you mention first 'dataset bias', it must mean you 'offer some superficial causal mechanism that sounds like an explanation to that public'
It's not the message, it's the tone. There's a big difference between offering constructive criticism and being a condescending prick.
> You can disagree with that reasoning (although you'd be wrong). What you can't do, as a leader in AI, is to pretend to have never heard of it, or that it is so obviously wrong that it warrants no reply whatsoever.
There's a third option. You can just decide to not engage with the condescending prick at all.
We have one of those at work. His area of responsibility is a very cross functional one, and while it is important, he have a great deal of difficulty getting people to participate. Because participation usually means getting told you're an idiot. Loudly, forcefully, and with more words.
That seems to be the case here, only substituting "idiot" out for "racist".
Tiredness is probably coming from trying to educate people on Twitter, you can't do that because tomorrow a fresh batch will come and you have to start over.
Yeah, it sort of implies that, yes, you're angry about something, but actually have no constructive advice or solutions, other than to accuse someone of being a bad person or even a racist.
The "I'm so tired" bit is similar to the "I'm not here to teach you" bit. Maybe someone can't teach you because they actually have nothing to teach.
No, "I'm so tired" means that it's an argument they have replied to before. She has written dozens of research papers, some of which probably contained arguments other than repetition of "you're a racist and a bad person".
You of course know about this, or would now about this considering she is called an "AI researcher at Google" in the title of this tread. So the only lazy and un-constructive criticism is to assume she has not made any arguments beyond your one-line caricature of what you believe her to be.
> “I think that now a lot of people have understood that we need to have more diverse datasets, but unfortunately I felt like that’s kind of where the understanding has stopped. It’s like ‘let’s diversify our datasets. And that’s kind of ethics and fairness, right?’ But you can’t ignore social and structural problems.“
This seems to be saying that Yann LeCun should actually be addressing social and structural problems, rather that just applying neural networks to data sets.
IMHO she is saying it’s reasonable to believe that social and systemic issues have an impact on creating ML models (as the teams designing, building, and deploying said models are members of society) in ways in addition to the data sets.
I don’t know what the right answer is but plenty of institutions come up with ways they attempt to deal with systemic biases. For example, blind auditions for positions in orchestras (you only hear the person auditioning, you can’t see them). Used to not be a thing. Now it is.
Point being that when people are motivated they are able to come up with stuff.
I think the point was reciting the (true!) 'biased datasets create biased models' argument at best avoids, and at worst actively undermines those bigger questions.
Someone in another thread on this had IMO a great comment[1] summarizing the sentiment:
> If you are going to say "Well, garbage-in, garbage-out!", why do you keep putting the racist garbage in?
Yes it should if the networks he builds have an actual impact on real people because of their social/systemic/institutional status. If he doesn't want to do it, he shouldn't be working on networks that have this kind of impact.
What if you're a nuclear engineer that just wanna make the hot bit go hotter, and don't want to care about the nasty habit that radiation has of killing people?
Women and people of color are often silenced using the tactic you just employed -- ignoring the substance of a message and dismissing all concerns because the "tone" doesn't seem "appropriate" to you.
Honestly, I am not even sure _how_ they would fix the system(s) they complain most about? Assume Yann is wrong and Timnit is right, what is the proposal for fixing the bias that somehow is inherent in the system?
She says 'let us lead and you follow' -- sure...where? What are we concretely doing about the "in-built bias" problem?
The quality of the "argument" here is F--. Basically, it's, "nothing you say matters, only what we say matters." Phrases like "just listen" are essentially, "you will respect my authority!"
> 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
Self entitlement or she forgot she was just an employee, and not some sort of independent tribal leader fighting google from the inside.
> I think if you threaten to sue your employer, the employer isn't too much at fault and just covering their own neck when you later threaten to resign and they take you up on that offer.
It's not clear to me here what you're advocating for -- a lawsuit wouldn't be raised by such an intelligent and virtuous individual unless there was some clear wrongdoing. Are you saying that you think workers shouldn't sue their employers if their employers are breaking the law?
Jeff Dean, Head of Google AI has responded (original article has been updated.) claiming the following:
>Timnit responded with an email requiring that a number of conditions be met in order for her to continue working at Google, including revealing the identities of every person who Megan and I had spoken to and consulted as part of the review of the paper and the exact feedback. Timnit wrote that if we didn’t meet these demands, she would leave Google and work on an end date. We accept and respect her decision to resign from Google.
This isn't the email that she sent with conditions she wanted met. Apparently she said she would resign if those conditions were not met, and the response to that email is that she was fired.
Yeah, I immediately started humming along with Johnny Paycheck.
Imagine being a senior researcher at the peak of your career, working for 6 months to a year on a paper, submitting it to a top tier conference, getting accepted, then getting the pointy haired boss do-what-I-said-peasant treatment.
This seems like such a self-defeating move? You are already paying "Ethics in AI" researchers purely to whitewash your always expanding inscrutable data gathering and mining efforts, what do you care what they write on some internal listserv. It's all just regulatory cover. Pretend you are the leading force on researching this, never implement any of it.
"withering email" == "anger-fueled message sent by a manager to a large group that asks readers to ignore company policy and start arguments with other leaders"
I don't see where "ethical AI researcher" comes into play here. Instead, I see a leader at a company unprofessionally sending messages to a large listserv and is later fired.
What's misleading about the title? You have your own way of characterizing the email, and so does the publication. Them not agreeing with you isn't the same as misleading you.
In general, if I hear "withering e-mail" without context, I imagine an e-mail sent between two parties (or at most, a handful) where one party is cutting down the other directly. When I hear that an employee was fired for a "withering e-mail", I immediately think of retaliation.
In this case, "e-mail" is almost inconsequential. This "e-mail" was a broadcast to hundreds of people who were not in any way involved with the subject matter. It was "withering" in the sense that it cut someone down, but the person/company it cut down wasn't even in the TO field.
Words matter. I now notice that the post title is changed to the much more neutral "AI researcher Timnit Gebru resigns from Google".
Can we be more careful with our language? Saying "X silenced a minority/woman" or whatever is not saying that "X silenced a minority/woman because they are a minority/woman".
It isn't really clear with your first quote if one thinks that silencing people generally is okay, but not minorities/women, or if silencing anyone is never okay, or if the minority/woman was silenced merely for their demographic status.
It's an abbreviation for any/all/some of those things being more important/interesting than what most of discussion here is about (whether letter/firing is appropriate)
I don't think "fired" is the right choice of words -- she gave an ultimatum offering to resign, and they accepted her resignation. Is accepting a resignation the same as firing someone?
> Thanks for making your conditions clear. We cannot agree to #1 and #2 as you are requesting. We respect your decision to leave Google as a result, and we are accepting your resignation.
One of them is in the updated article with Jeff Dean's response:
> Timnit responded with an email requiring that a number of conditions be met in order for her to continue working at Google, including revealing the identities of every person who Megan and I had spoken to and consulted as part of the review of the paper and the exact feedback.
I recently re-read Noah Smith's essay "Leaders Who Act Like Outsiders Invite Trouble" https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-03-03/leader.... It's not directly on point, but one concept is: "This extraordinary trend of rank-and-file members challenging the leaders of their organizations goes beyond simple populism. There may be no word for this trend in the English language. But there is one in Japanese: gekokujo." And later, "The real danger of gekokujo, however, comes from the establishment’s response to the threat. Eventually, party bosses, executives and other powerful figures may get tired of being pushed around."
Institutions are being pushed by the Twitter mob, and by the Twitter mob mentality, even when the person is formally within the institution. And I think we're learning, or going to have to re-learn, things like "Why did companies traditionally encourage people to leave politics and religion at the door?" and "What's the acceptable level of discourse within the institution, before you're not a part of it any more?"
More like coup d'état, or an underdog victory. Author doesn't seem to be using it right, since this would be an actual shift in power, rather than a failed insurgency (as in OP).
Gekokujō doesn't refer to Japanese corporate culture at all, but rather the attempted coups and going rogue by junior officers in the Japanese military of the 1920s and 1930s (for example, conquering Manchuria against orders of the senior officers).
I've seen gekokujo in many places as a manager. There's often a desire among employees to require the world to adjust to how they think it should work instead of following process. This isn't always bad, of course, because process isn't always perfect. However, their success or failure tend to correlate to their perceived value. Simply put, you have to be a diva in order to act like a diva. I think the last puppeteer for Kermit is a great example[1].
No idea if that's happened here, but as a manager I know what I'd do if an employee -- any employee -- told me to to meet their demands or they would quit.
Maybe I'm missing something here, but isn't individuality a good thing, in general?
I'm not applying this to Gebru vs Google, as in this specific case, we don't have enough evidence to know what exactly happened.
While I don't like the Twitter mob per se, the idea that a person within an institution cannot publicly criticize the institution is ridiculous. Rank-and-file members should be able to challenge the leaders. The employers can already fire employees for almost any arbitrary reason. Don't like the way a subordinate talks about you? Fire the person.
Colleges promote (or should promote) independent thinking. Independent thinking makes it necessary that employees might disagree with the employer. Is that good for the efficiency of the company? Hard to say. But to say the society must cultivate a culture of obeisance such that people can work for companies better is upside-down. Companies should be built to favor independent thinkers.
I agree with your point that companies should provide more room for individualism, but there have to be some kind of boundaries and recognition that you are part of a team.
It seems like more and more that emboldened employees don't think there is any limit to what they should be able to say/do in a company context, which is a huge problem. If you want individualism to that degree, you need to be in business for yourself. If you take a job at a company, you're implicitly conceding some of that individualism.
> And I think we're learning, or going to have to re-learn, things like "Why did companies traditionally encourage people to leave politics and religion at the door?" and "What's the acceptable level of discourse within the institution, before you're not a part of it any more?"
And yet, decades ago, when labour had real power and unions were a force in the economy, we had no problems with labour driving change within organizations.
I think what we're seeing now is what happens when individuals are disenfranchised from the political process and labour has no way to organize to drive broader change: individuals, frustrated with their lack of power, speak out and there is retaliation. And where there is a lack of organization, this anger has no focus and what you see is a chaotic lashing out.
I think the same is true of populism in general: when you render individuals powerless you prime them to be welcoming to the populist who promises to fight for them.
Is that an excuse for either Gebru or Google's behaviour, here, specifically? I have no idea. None of us have enough of the details to really understand what happened.
But the idea that labour shouldn't challenge leadership, or that the public in general shouldn't challenge the establishment, is a product of decades of union busting and concentration of power in the political class that we shouldn't accept just because it's become the status quo.
> However, we believe the end of your employment should happen faster than your email reflects because certain aspects of the email you sent last night to non-management employees in the brain group reflect behavior that is inconsistent with the expectations of a Google manager.
> As a result, we are accepting your resignation immediately, effective today. We will send your final paycheck to your address in Workday. When you return from your vacation, PeopleOps will reach out to you to coordinate the return of Google devices and assets.
This third part they make "the resignation" the same as firing the person in practice. No way to plan a coordinated rampdown, transition and handover of projects and responsibilities. Just an unconditional goodbye, don't come to work again.
No, this is more like giving two weeks' notice and then being asked to leave the building immediately. It's not pleasant but it also isn't the same as being fired. Google called her bluff here.
Without the specific wording of the original email, I don't think that you can draw this conclusion.
I'll note also that this is rather unusual practice for Google. There are a number of people, far more critical of Google, who have resigned, and who have been able to rampdown for 2+ weeks.
The posted email specifically says something about behavior not expected of her position. So it seems possible if you are critical, but fulfill your obligations, they would accept your 2 weeks resignation.
Is there an example you have, even self-reported, of a person who was merely critical of Google and was not given a rampdown? Or someone who was critical and did not fulfill their job obligations, and was given a rampdown?
The email clearly states: "certain aspects of the email you sent last night to non-management employees in the brain group reflect behavior that is inconsistent with the expectations of a Google manager"
> No, which is my point.
No, that is the opposite of your point. You said that people critical of Google have been given a rampdown, so it is unusual for her to not be given a rampdown. My point was that there may be other reasons for her not being given a rampdown - that being exactly what was in the email shared about her not behaving as a manager. If you think that she was fired solely for being critical and not given a rampdown, then there should be other examples of people being fired without a rampdown for merely being critical.
Yes, and having read the email, I will reiterate my assertion that it is "certainly not obvious" what behavior is being characterized as "inconsistent with the expectations of a Google manager". Repeating the vague justification message is not a response to criticism of the vague justification message. The email she was fired for (it's quoted in this thread) does not contain any content that I find to be fireable.
> No, that is the opposite of your point.
No, it's exactly my point. The vague justification is not borne out by any evidence.
I think you're misunderstanding the purpose of the email from google management. Presumably it wasn't to lay out a case so that the email could be leaked and twitter could understand their rationale. It was just telling her the reason they are not letting her take her last 2 weeks. She still gets paid, she just can't come into the office. I don't understand why you think that email should be convincing evidence to you, an outsider who has absolutely zero to do with the employment contract between Timnit and Google. Surely, Timnit and relevant parties at Google have more context than you or I do.
> The vague justification is not borne out by any evidence.
She said, "If you can't meet these conditions, I will resign effective <XY date>." Google said, "We can't meet these conditions, we accept your resignation and move it to <much earlier date>."
People will have to find the source document, which to the best of my knowledge is not public (note, not the message to Women and Allies), read it, and then reach their own conclusions.
I stand by my characterization. She characterizes it herself thusly:
"I said here are the conditions. If you can meet them great I’ll take my name off this paper, if not then I can work on a last date."
I think this is a major source of confusion in this whole conversation. There is clearly a follow up conversation between Timnit and some manager(s) (the name Megan is mentioned) in which this ultimatum was proffered.
I think this isn't nearly so bad as forcing an early termination of two weeks notice.
I had a job pretty recently, was senior tech and was eager to please, which ended up meaning having to take the hard/after hours calls no one else wanted to handle. It also meant I eventually became the only on-call tech for over 4 months straight. This in turn meant I knew the most about all of our accounts, knew the most about their systems, scheduling for jobs as well as subcontractors, I handled it all, right down to installing the CCTV systems at our new location, single handedly.
When I decided I'd had enough of being taken advantage of and being lied to, I gave my two weeks notice.
They assumed I was going to work for a competitor (I wasn't I was taking some much needed personal time), and they fired me on the spot. While walking me out they also informed me that since they had my resignation letter if I tried to claim unemployment they would use it to claim I had resigned. I didn't care as I wasn't in need of unemployment I was just even happier now about leaving. They were rude, talked down to me and belittled me all the way out.
2 hours after I left the calls began 'how do we' 'how does this' 'this job's permits' 'how do we log into'. I politely told them to fuck off. They even went so far as to have other workers call/text me asking the same questions ver batim.
I will never again give 2 weeks notice unless I have in writing they must give me 2 weeks notice upon release for any reason other than something illegal.
This person offered an ultimatum and their employer made a choice. I just don't think its as bad as early termination of 2 weeks notice.
Did you get paid for those 2 weeks? If not then I would say you got fired.
After those 2 weeks, if the employer still wants help/answers then they should expect to pay a very very expensive hourly rate. :D
As an employer, it makes a lot of sense to accelerate someone out the door that has given notice. That said, you still want them on the hook to answer questions so you should send them home but pay them for those 2 weeks (or however long).
The usual practice is to give 2 weeks notice, you get escorted out immediately, and you get paid for those 2 weeks. It's technically not early termination as you're still getting paid.
There's no reason to be rude, talk down, belittle, however.
I've read this a lot, but in the four jobs I left i was never escorted out the door when I gave my notice. Maybe it depends on the role, but I've always stayed out my 2-4 week notice period and spent the time wrapping up my tasks, writing documentation, doing exit interviews, etc.
Having conditions is often part of a negotiation. Maybe they offered to resign in that email, but Timnit Gebru does not say she did in the linked twitter as far as I can tell.
Unless she formally offer to resign it seems like her management jumped the gun.
I read that, not clear without reading the email whether it was a formal offer to resign.
If an employee tells their boss they have a plan to offer a resignation on x day or do not get y or are considering it they can fire the employee before then, but I assume they can not push around the day they offer a resignation.
An employer not wanting to keep an employee who might soon resign is understandable of course.
I am sure it can get fiddly on what counts as a formal offer to resign and that courts make calls one way or another based on ambiguous language.
Without the email though it's not clear to me. For better or worse it comes across as Timnit Gebru bosses were eager to shoo her out the door though.
This isn’t having a beer with your buddies and spitballing plans. If you email your employer saying give me this or I resign, the employer can accept your resignation simply by saying no to your conditions. It’s grade school logic. They called her bluff and that’s why she’s salty about it. She signaled her intention to resign and due to her behavior with her reports, Google doesn’t want more of that on her way out so she got cut loose immediately.
It's possible to not have the intent and still word something as a clear cut formal offer to resign however. With out the email it is not possible to tell where this falls.
Email from Google here[0] and corroboration from Jeff Dean here[1]:
"Timnit responded with an email requiring that a number of conditions be met in order for her to continue working at Google, including revealing the identities of every person who Megan and I had spoken to and consulted as part of the review of the paper and the exact feedback. Timnit wrote that if we didn’t meet these demands, she would leave Google and work on an end date. We accept and respect her decision to resign from Google."
> Which is exactly why she has refrained from releasing it throughout this whole drama: plausible deniability.
I do not think there is evidence for that. It is normal to remove employee access to email if they are leaving so it is unlikely Timnit would have access to the email to share.
The employer can't modify the specifics of the resignation by "moving it up", since that's not what the conditional resignation offered. They can fire her, sure, but they can't call it "resignation". You can't "resign" someone, but you can ask for their immediate resignation. If it's not voluntary, it's firing.
> The employer can't modify the specifics of the resignation
You say this, yet I have seen it done many times.
Of course not being a lawyer of any sort, I don't know. Is there a reference for your claim?
Jeff's email is in line with what I have seen done elsewhere, and given the high profile of the incident, I'd be shocked if legal hadn't been consulted on the wording.
Wife says to her programmer husband, "Go to the store and buy a loaf of bread. If they have eggs, buy a dozen."
Husband returns with 12 loaves of bread.
Most software engineers can read the above joke, and laugh at themselves, then go ahead and upvote your comment not realizing that it is EXACTLY THE SAME THING.
Employee: "This is extremely important to me. If you can't address what is important to me, then I can't work here anymore"
Google: "OK, thanks for your resignation".
This is not okay. Google is "technically correct" - but it is appalling behavior that should make every Googler shake with discomfort.
Employees are people. People can get dissatisfied. Frustrated. Angry. Sure, you can say companies don't owe anything to anyone because there is at-will employment.
But the reality is unless we want to live in a dystopia, people should be allowed to voice concerns and anger and frustrations, and not be fired for making things uncomfortable or inconvenient.
The joke is a pretty good one, but what's the supposed parallel with the scenario at hand? There is a meaningful interpretation of "buy a dozen" that the wife intended to convey but the programmer fails to notice (because he lacks common-sense knowledge about typical purchase volumes of different items and/or is blinded by the parallelism of "buy a... if <condition>, buy a..."). What is the meaningful common-sense interpretation of "I can't work here anymore" (was that even the literal wording?) that Timnit intended and Google failed to recognise?
If you are instead just saying that Google should have let it slide because it was just an emotional outburst ("anger and frustrations") and not meant to be taken seriously, well, in what context can we hold adults to their word at all? Email is written communication, not an offhand verbal remark uttered in a tense meeting in anger. You should be able to see what you are about to send while typing it, and have ample opportunity to look over it again before you press that "Send" button. If your ability to review your words has atrophied, perhaps under the influence of social media which encourages "unfiltered" stream-of-consciousness venting, then this ought to be on you, simply because it is doubtful that society can function without some possibility of making binding statements and we do not have anything more commitmental than email widely deployed (and operable at the pace of the modern workplace) in work-from-home times.
> What is the meaningful common-sense interpretation of "I can't work here anymore" (was that even the literal wording?) that Timnit intended and Google failed to recognise?
That something completely UNACCEPTABLE is happening, and needs to be addressed.
Unacceptable to her. Fine, she is entitled to that opinion. She is not entitled to everybody sharing that opinion. If there is no common ground, the involved parties should part ways. Which she expressed. And the other side followed through. Which she now is upset about.
If she really wanted to achieve change within the system she'd have needed to not express it this way. There are people on both sides of the table. One can talk to people and find common ground. But that is rare to work if you start with a threat.
You can't post like this to HN, regardless of how someone else is or you feel they are. Personal attacks are particularly not allowed and you've posted more than one of them. Beyond that, your comments have been almost all flamebait and/or unsubstantive and/or nasty, so I'm going to ban this account. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. Here they are: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Note that we want thoughtful, curious conversation here, and when the topic happens to be a divisive one, comments need to become more thoughtful, not less.
Sorry, one can't go make a black-or-white threat and then expect people to not take it at face value. She literally wrote "if you don't do this-and-that then I can't work here anymore". If people then act on that then she can't go complain that they did. It's not a meaningful defense to claim well employees are just people. She should not say such a thing if she does not mean it. Words and actions have consequences.
Even pull the victim card, blast it all over social media. Sorry, that's a major disservice to everybody _actually_ being dehumanized. She's just dissatisfied with her employer and wants to make the biggest possible splash now.
I'm pretty sure if you resign you're still entitled to access the employers' health plan via COBRA? (Distinct issue from whether, as part of a severance package, the company agrees to pay for some/all of it)
I tend to agree, but the following paragraphs suggest that had she not resigned she might have found herself on the wrong end of some sort of disciplinary process:
> However, we believe the end of your employment should happen faster than your email reflects because certain aspects of the email you sent last night to non-management employees in the brain group reflect behavior that is inconsistent with the expectations of a Google manager.
> As a result, we are accepting your resignation immediately, effective today. We will send your final paycheck to your address in Workday. When you return from your vacation, PeopleOps will reach out to you to coordinate the return of Google devices and assets.
Her resignation certainly gave Google an easy out of all that hassle, but would I call this a firing? Perhaps not.
If you're the employer you have to figure that if somebody's pissed off enough to (i) sue you whilst employed by you, (ii) write that kind of message to others working in their function or group, and (iii) now they've delivered an ultimatum you're unable or unwilling to meet, they're only going to cause more trouble if you make them work their notice period.
If it were me in her boss's position I'd have got her out the door as fast as possible.
Accepting a resignation means Google doesn't have to pay unemployment benefits. But ultimately, it was their choice to let her go. And the immediateness of the decision and revocation of all access smells like how you treat an employee you're firing.
Title here is misleading (probably deliberate). The email that got this person “fired” was one that allegedly contained an ultimatum and a threat to resign. The employer then called her bluff and accepted her resignation with immediate effect.
Very hard to take that at face value. This is the email that management took as somehow being beyond what an employee at google can do. The title is quite correct IMHO.
If you accuse unnamed co-workers of not only ignoring your expertise and of micro- and macro-aggressions, but also of dehumanizing you, yeah, someone is going to have an uncomfortable work environment.
I suspect reality is somewhere between our two accounts, where one describes this as a purely deadline-related problem and the other describes months of effort to seek feedback via various channels and moving goalposts for what types of review were expected.
Their paper was accepted by the conference's peer review system. Google, not researchers in the community, wanted it retracted. The only logical explanation is that it was good science that did not put Google is a positive light.
I don't think the paper has been accepted, because the conference itself has not made decisions on the papers. This article [1] says that the paper was submitted to "ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency", which sends paper decisions (accept or reject) next week [2]. Of course, it might be accepted at that time, but that doesn't seem to be decided yet.
What's your experience with corporate internal processes been? Mine has been that they often exhibit an extreme disinterest in the judgment of external parties that are not part of the internal process. Whether or not the external group accepts the paper was likely irrelevant to what would be internally seen as a breach of process.
Generally "It worked out, everything's fine" is not a line that flies.
A manager with every reason to cover his ass is claiming that.
Her email, sent before that claim was made, suggests that wasn't even remotely the case - and it's entirely possible to think "she seems like an ass" and "this smells like bullshit" are both true.
> contained an ultimatum and a threat to resign. The employer then called her bluff and accepted her resignation
A threat to resign isn't the same thing as resigning. And it seems you don't think so, either, since you characterize her threat as a bluff. It can't be both a bluff and a resignation.
The original post was updated with more information.
Timnit responded with an email requiring that a number of conditions be met in order for her to continue working at Google, including revealing the identities of every person who Megan and I had spoken to and consulted as part of the review of the paper and the exact feedback. Timnit wrote that if we didn’t meet these demands, she would leave Google and work on an end date. We accept and respect her decision to resign from Google.
I would say that describes a conditional resignation, and the fact that she called this “being fired” indicates she didn’t really plan to resign (ie. she was bluffing).
It’s a strange reaction though. “I’m resigning.” “OK, that’s your prerogative, bye.” “Wait! I didn’t mean NOW! How can you fire me like this?!” Then make a big deal about being fired on social media. Seems to me that someone who genuinely was ready to resign would have just quietly walked away, even if they imagined it ending less abruptly. Can’t know for sure, obviously.
Y'all are alleging that it was phrased as an ultimatum. I'm not so sure that's the case. Proposing an option of resigning is not the same thing as "I will definitely resign".
"Chooses not to" is so disingenuous it's hard to take you seriously.
She cannot and will not expose that information without inviting all sorts of litigation. This is not a case where she can just "choose" to release that information.
Gebru wrote a research paper and circulated it for feedback. Google managers said "retract the paper because we say so." Gebru responded with "I'd rather resign (and also you suck)."
Google "accepted" the resignation (i.e. fired her).
"I said here are the conditions. If you can meet them great I’ll take my name off this paper, if not then I can work on a last date. Then she sent an email to my direct reports saying she has accepted my resignation. So that is google for you folks. You saw it happen right here."
I was able to discern this, but it doesn't explain why they wanted her to retract the paper. The contents of the paper and why they want her to retract it are key to the story, otherwise it's he-said-she-said.
Then you try to engage in a conversation about how this is not acceptable and people start doing the opposite of any sort of self reflection—trying to find scapegoats to blame.
The message was clear, stop! The paper rubbed someone the wrong way. Go rewrite it on your own without any references to Google and publish it. I've been in tech for a long time. In nearly every org turnover was minimal on the engineering side of the house versus sales who dropped like flies every quarter. The only people who were ever laid off were those who routinely rocked the boat. Getting some sense of that here.
This is a very frustrating email, only because there seems to be a very significant issue at the heart of it — a research paper that is allegedly being suppressed by Google management for some reason -- and this email largely seems to omit that in favor of unrelated disagreements with management and “process”. It’s like trying to find an astronomical body that only shows up through its gravitational impact on other bodies: a lot of chaff, with something very heavy and unseen in the center.
Wow. Outside of the issues discussed, this email was not what I would expect from senior manager. The language is all over the place. It is rambling. It is not unintelligible, but is far from an easy read. It seems like something dictated into a machine rather than something composed on a keyboard. If you are not confident in your use of language but still want to go out in a blaze of glory, make sure someone QCs your final speech.
>Do you know what happened since? Silencing in the most fundamental way possible.
"Silencing in the most fundamental way" to me means physically clapping your hand over someone's mouth or murdering them, neither of which I believe she actually meant. This email would have greatly benefited from peer review.
I would have just down-voted this, but I hate it when people do that to me rather than actually respond.
In this case, I'm not going to respond in much detail, other than to note that there are 30+ years of writings about affirmative action which get deeply into this issue. Your summary of it is misleading and incomplete.
Having a diverse workforce is very valuable. The paradigm shifts that can come from voices of different backgrounds are invaluable. Can those growing up under racism be considered a skill? seems like a bit of a stretch to me, but it can definitely benefit the employer.
Since you can't actually calculate someone's skill, all you can do is hire on an attempted measurement of skill. And if you find reasons to think that your measurement of skill has inaccuracies, you'd probably be better off taking that into account when evaluating a candidate.
Ok, but how do you do that? It was easy in classical music; they just started doing auditions behind a curtain, without any verbal Q&A, and suddenly a field that used to be dominated by men became pretty much 50/50, and all the people who said that men were better at the highest echelons of musical achievement had to shut up.
But tech companies want to talk to the humans they're hiring, so race and gender are (almost) always available as information inputs during the hiring process. There's no equivalent to the curtain to remove the possibility of bias, so you need to look at alternate methods. Setting hiring targets is one way to do it. If you're going to complain that the targets are unfair, you can't just say "Well shucks, guess we have to stick with the system that produces massively unequal outcomes." You've gotta propose a system that's less unfair than the status quo.
>There's no equivalent to the curtain to remove the possibility of bias
Other companies have tried. Names and vitals deleted from resumes before any people involved in the hiring process see them, remote interviews conducted over IM or with voice masking. That's one benefit I see with the much-maligned leetcode-style interviews, is that your identity is completely isolated from the process until the very end.
There are some fairly easy steps you can take that other, more-diverse organizations have taken. First, you have to get rid of your referral pipeline, because hiring people your employees already know is the opposite of diversity. Second, instead of recruiting from organizations you've already heard of, like Stanford where this person came from, you park a full-time recruiter at institutions with practical diversity, like Houston, Georgia, UNLV, CUNY. Finally, you go for diversity of thought, by hiring philosophers and carpenters instead of CS grads. I know for a fact that were I to hire into my AI Ethics department, the last person I would recruit would be a Stanford AI researcher. I'd go directly to the philosophy department.
> But tech companies want to talk to the humans they're hiring, so race and gender are (almost) always available as information inputs during the hiring process.
This is actually kind of funny to me, because in the open source world plenty of people have extremely productive working relationships without ever seeing or hearing each other, and in many cases without even knowing what country the other person lives in, how old they are, or what their legal name is.
So while there are definitely arguments that face to face communication is "higher bandwidth" or has other advantages, it doesn't seem out of the question to me that the hiring process could be "blinded" to a similar extent to orchestra auditions, without any significant reduction in hiring accuracy.
(Ok, maybe not quite the same extent; language fluency and style of speech are still significant signals even if everything is done over text)
There's no reason you can't do an interview over text-chat instead of in person -- hell, with most of us working remote for the foreseeable future, that's how the majority of on-the-job communication will happen anyway.
"It was easy in classical music; they just started doing auditions behind a curtain, without any verbal Q&A, and suddenly a field that used to be dominated by men became pretty much 50/50"
Be careful here, the wind has changed and blind auditions are now problematic.
That's a good point; the original experiment is a good story that for many was proof that prejudice exists, but it doesn't mean blind screening is a panacea.
> Be careful here, the wind has changed and blind auditions are now problematic.
The argument made in the article you cite is ludicrous, blind auditions cannot possibly hurt diversity. If there is a problem when blind auditions are used in hiring for professional orchestras, the problem is elsewhere in the pipeline, and the way to fix it isn't replacing blind auditions, its fixing issue further up the pipeline.
There may be a pro-diversity case for using something other than current skill as a factor at other stages of the pipeline which are intended as, in whole or in part, educational and where current skill is being used not as a measure of current professional competence, but as a proxy for potential. But even there that's largely a poor substitute for identifying and addressing the factors producing a skewed pool.
1. I think few companies are out there "hiring by race or gender". At most companies I know, affirmative action means hiring by skill, but making sure at least XX% of the hiring pool are women, black, etc. This really just means your resume is more likely to get seen and maybe you're more likely to get a first round, but not that "you're being hired by race or gender".
2. You could argue this is still unfair (although as previously stated, you're still hiring people who earned it based on skill). Unfortunately not doing anything would me more unfair, specifically by stagnating things in the problematic state they are now [1].
In the macro-historical context, white Americans brought African slaves to their country, and actively deprived of wealth and knowledge, right? That was a societal, conscious commitment to push these people down.
Now that they're free but seriously lacking wealth and behind on knowledge too, they're expected just create that wealth and knowledge themselves. Thanks to "unfair" institutions like public education, this is going to happen regardless, but very slowly unless there's a societal, conscious commitment to push these people up.
[1]: Having a huge chunk of your society be alienated not only socially but also economically leads to conflict, could worsen the gap instead of improving it, weakens social and cultural ties, etc.
Do you think the predominance of men in tech is "hiring by skill alone" and that it just happens there are almost no skilled women?
Do you think it's possible that you can "hire by skill alone" and given two equally skilled people - one man, one woman - always hire the man, and that you could hire some equally skilled women if you randomised or removed whatever male-bias exists in your hiring?
Do you think it's possible that there are equally skilled men and women available to employers to hire, but that employers have built frat-boy workplaces where only men are interested in working, and cultures that drive away skilled women?
Do you think "hire by skill alone" means always hiring the most expensive people - like buying jewellery by value alone? What if a company can't afford to staff with all the maximally skilled people, but can get 80% of the skills for 50% of the money?
What about hiring people who can be trained or skilled up, and training them?
What about teams, where the collective skills can be greater than the sum of their parts, but maybe not if all the parts are identical?
Er, if this is unrelated, why are you commenting something that you must be aware is certain to stir up unproductive, culture-war-y discussion? Anyone who's been within 10 feet of hiring responsibilities knows you can't even think about race and gender when considering a candidate.
Right, you can’t even consider it, just mandate that race and gender factor into the candidates interviewed for every open position, make the diversity of your workforce a performance goal for executives and report the racial and gender makeup of your workforce in quarterly company updates. But no, can’t take it into consideration when hiring, of course not.
Diversity initiatives are like a graduated social tax. As a passably straight white man I can afford to pay more than an LGBTQ person of color. Just like I can pay more in income taxes than people in different financial situations.
It doesn't bother me if an applicant pool is made a bit bigger for marginalized people than myself, because I do not struggle to fall into any applicant pool whatsoever and have not for most of my adult life. Be it for employment, education, or housing.
Where conversations can get annoying is when I feel demonized because inequity exists independent of my individual actions. But I can live with someone bitching on Twitter because I'm not afraid of the police or telling potential employers I have a kid on the way.
What I don't like living with is the inability of others like myself in my own caste who would dismiss reality on reductionist notions "hiring by race or gender is inherently racist" without critical thought. Ignoring lack of diversity tacitly supports inequity and is itself racist or bigoted, by virtue of doing less than nothing to correct it.
"As a passably straight white man I can afford to pay more than an LGBTQ person of color."
How is this true? What if someone is a broke straight white man with three kids and someone else LGBTQ person of color is a young childless heir of fortune? How is the first person possibly privileged in comparison with the second one?
Looking from Europe, America seems to be very determined to recast its very obvious class problem as a race (or even gender) problem, even if it means introducing disadvantages based on immutable characteristics AGAIN. Two wrongs do not make a right and this farce will bite you again in the future, just like slavery and old style racism did.
I mean if you compare a rich person to a poor person yes the rich person is going to come out ahead in most social metrics but we're not speaking of wealth inequality, but social divides outside of it.
That said, in the United States, non-white men were systemically marginalized and prevented from participation in society to the same degree. There are numerous examples of this over the last four centuries, but they did not decrease in fervor until about a generation ago. For many reasons, our class divide is correlated to our racial divide. That doesn't mean we don't need to fix both, just that the there are two problems to fix there.
Looking from America, it's hard not to be frustrated at Europeans on their high horses talking about class versus racial divide. Is it so hard to recognize that we have different social problems, and a different history? And that things we talk about might be colored one way, because race, gender, and sexual orientation impact real people on a daily basis? Do you reject the idea that bigotry exists independent of class and it's something we need to work on?
"Looking from America, it's hard not to be frustrated at Europeans on their high horses talking about class versus racial divide."
That is the Internet - Americans commenting on Europe, Europeans on Islam, Muslims on Israel, Israelis on India, Indians on China etc. The distance may make you wrong, but it also may make you notice more general outlines of the forest you are commenting upon, while the locals see only individual trees.
Theoretically, complex societies should be able to fix multiple problems at once. In practice, it is very easy for one topic to exhaust ALL the oxygen in public debate.
2020 was all about race and other immutable characteristics in America. Among all that, class problems such as enormous healthcare bills that destroy lives every day, are basically forgotten.
Of course that there are many facets of bigotry out there. But: would you rather be a black upper middle class than a white unemployed person without good marketable skills?
These days, I would say that the answer is very different from the KKK days.
There are still absolutely situations where I'd prefer to be the first person over the second. For example, when interacting with a police officer, or when visiting certain towns. Or when attempting to get medical care (there's strong evidence to suggest that physicians are worse at treating black patients, and are prone to ignoring complaints from women, independent of class).
While class problems do, absolutely, exist in the US, race problems also exist.
In America, class isn't just about how much money you have. It's also about what accent you speak with, where you went to school, and very obviously what you look like. Many people who aren't necessarily familiar with how this works have an idea that money is all that matters, and that e.g. a black woman has the same opportunity as anyone else to attend the right schools and speak with the right accent and then get a high paying job at Google, and thereby enter the highest level of the professional class. But of course, you can see in this very thread many examples of how someone who has done all of these things can be considered to not have earned the right to speak out or have academic disputes with prominent people.
The first problem is you’re making the issue worse, not better. It feels good to some white men to publicly announce that they are unworthy of anything positive in their life, but if anything is reductionist, it’s that. Trying to justify racism to combat disproportionate representation (which is not an indication of racism or bias whatsoever, and we know this) is the type of evil behavior (not to mention mental gymnastics) that have no place in a society that has made so much progress. Also, your usage of “caste” is highly inappropriate.
She seems very passionate about makeing the world a better place. The only downside to this sort of drive is that it doesn't always align with everyone else's vision of a better world. I don't think she and Google were on the same page and perhaps both parties will be much happier going their separate ways.
> She seems very passionate about makeing the world a better place.
Some of the worst people in history who committed the worst atrocities were very passionate about making the world a better place, at least as they defined “better”.
But I would guess that if you added up all the contributions of the people most passionate for making the world a better place, the bad far outweighs the good.
Agreed, I'm simply stating that she is clearly very motivated to propagate her world view and that it doesn't align with her employer. I am making no comment on the validity or morality of either her position or Googles position.
> You are not worth having any conversations about this, since you are not someone whose humanity (let alone expertise recognized by journalists, governments, scientists, civic organizations such as the electronic frontiers foundation etc) is acknowledged or valued in this company...I understand that the only things that mean anything at Google are levels, I’ve seen how my expertise has been completely dismissed. But now there’s an additional layer saying any privileged person can decide that they don’t want your paper out with zero conversation.
This conclusion seems so non sequitur to the argument. There is literally nothing in the previous argument to suggest that any of this was motivated by anything other than a disagreement with the report. The argument presented by the researcher is conjecture. Coupled with the fact that she threatened to sue her employer and they kept her for a year? Any reasonable employer would see that her employment is a liability and dismiss her prior to a year.
In the world of business, there is no jewel too precious to discard.
> I had stopped writing here as you may know, after all the micro and macro aggressions and harassments I received after posting my stories here (and then of course it started being moderated).
That's all I need to know about why she was fired. I'm glad Google despite all the stuff they've done before knows when someone has gone off the SJW deep end.
924 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 507 ms ] threadThe most relevant parts (in terms of back story) should be this:
> A week before you go out on vacation, you see a meeting pop up at 4:30pm PST on your calendar (this popped up at around 2pm). No one would tell you what the meeting was about in advance. Then in that meeting your manager’s manager tells you “it has been decided” that you need to retract this paper by next week, Nov. 27, the week when almost everyone would be out (and a date which has nothing to do with the conference process). You are not worth having any conversations about this, since you are not someone whose humanity (let alone expertise recognized by journalists, governments, scientists, civic organizations such as the electronic frontiers foundation etc) is acknowledged or valued in this company.
> Then, you ask for more information. What specific feedback exists? Who is it coming from? Why now? Why not before? Can you go back and forth with anyone? Can you understand what exactly is problematic and what can be changed?
> And you are told after a while, that your manager can read you a privileged and confidential document and you’re not supposed to even know who contributed to this document, who wrote this feedback, what process was followed or anything. You write a detailed document discussing whatever pieces of feedback you can find, asking for questions and clarifications, and it is completely ignored. And you’re met with, once again, an order to retract the paper with no engagement whatsoever.
Gonna have to wait and see I guess.
Maybe someone could post it here when it's published?
We don't know the full list of demands, but Jeff Dean shared one demand that people may find unreasonable. Other demands may have been much more reasonable, but those weren't shared.
Timnit is far from silent. She could share them if she wanted to. She appears to think that that would hurt rather than help her.
The financial implications of her resigning vs her being fired are probably significant.
In Google's place I'd probably negotiate an agreement with a non-disparagement clause. She'd be compensated and everyone would save face.
And we'd never be discussing this. She could take other research roles and advance the state of AI in peace.
People with logical mindframe leaders are required for such tasks not emotional twitter whining sjw.
As such, I find it really quite baffling that someone would be unwilling to share that scientific feedback with her, or who raised it.
I remembered your comment here, so I came back to post this, for what it's worth.
I'm still not entirely sure what to think.
I guess I'm not woke enough to comprehend these people.
Maybe my remark is down to earth but, she literally told her group to stop working. I do not know of any company where this is an acceptable behavior for a manager. Besides the disagreements, it sounds to me that was the action that caused Google to pull the trigger.
Also from Dean's email it is pretty clear there are a number of new products down the pipe based on AI. At one point top management decided the company should stop denigrating its own products.
Where did you read that?
in the email shown,she told a listserv called "Women and Allies" to stop writing docs that are an attempt to better the situation in terms of diversity, equity, inclusion as writing those docs are like pissing in the wind in her opinion
Yes she was. Even the letter communicating to her the termination of employment made it fairly explicit that she was being terminated on terms different than what Google interpreted her resignation to be, due to the internal mail.
It's clear that for external PR purposes Google wants to maintain the story that it was merely accepting her resignation, but while clearly worded with the intent that an incomplete reading would support the narrative, the letter to her fairly directly (and unusually for a case where they viewed themselves as accepting a resignation) mad explicit that employment was being terminated, immediately, based on separate grounds from the supposed resignation.
On the other hand, I guess making it explicit that she was being fired for public internal complaints about a culture of discrimination is one way (like, the worst way possible, but one way) of making the case that what happened to Damore wasn't discrimination against white men, but just what they do to any internal criticism of Google culture.
By the way, that part about unions and strikes also applies to the joined at the hip government as well.
The USA has been pretty racist in discriminatory, and I think it's disingenuous to single out unions for that history. I mean, who instituted Jim Crow and profited from slavery? White voters, government officials, and private enterprise. Unions were definitely not leading that.
I had slavery in mind with the private enterprise comment.
But it's not like businesses are actually run by perfectly rational automatons according to textbook economics. They're run by owners and managers who can be just as racist as the surrounding community, and who can very well prioritize prejudice over a little more profit.
As for Unions, think about it, their major threat is cheap labor from abroad, so the way that they have historically been discriminatory has been in lobbying for anti-immigration and immigration quota (don't know if they still do that as much).
Unclear why you were downvoted. Another example of this was Plessy v. Ferguson where the railroad worked with a civil rights group to bring the case:
>...On June 7, 1892, Plessy bought a first-class ticket at the Press Street Depot and boarded a "Whites Only" car of the East Louisiana Railroad in New Orleans, Louisiana, bound for Covington, Louisiana.[11] The railroad company, which had opposed the law on the grounds that it would require the purchase of more railcars, had been previously informed of Plessy's racial lineage, and the intent to challenge the law.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plessy_v._Ferguson
https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/memphis-sani...
Unions provide countervailing power to corporate power. Racist people are racist. Sometimes these can overlap.
Does that make them racist? Of course not. But they have absolutely been discriminatory.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Brotherhood_of_T...
https://newspunch.com/american-companies-nazi-germany/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot
EDIT: to respond to comments below:
1. Union busting since the New Deal era resulted in one of the most oppressed working classes in the world. Hence, low union enrollment.
2. FDR saved capitalism. I'm not his biggest fan. I'm a socialist.
3. Serious money was offered during the business plot. It didn't come to fruition, but the danger was real. Corporations are the real power in America.
There's nothing working class about that.
If someone is employed in a government organization, like the CDC or a secretary of the white house, and they don't have capital income then they are working class.
The Business Plot (according to your link) was a cocktail napkin farce by a sad person.
All sorts of legitimate and useful things get used illegitimately.
Despite this, they too serve a useful function.
That seems like a very US-lib centric POV where the US is a cartoonish evil-dooer.
In my experience Mexico is pretty much just as bad, even more so in different ways too - classism, racism, anti-indigenous sentiment, Malinchismo, rampant feminicide, etc.
My point is that these countries aren’t cosmic forces. We’re all humans that instantiate the same fundamental prejudices, instincts, biases, etc. wherever you find us.
I'm not sure this makes much sense. "Racism" (I'm guessing you mean things like slavery or de jure discrimination) were practiced concurrently in the US and elsewhere in North America, not to mention many other countries. The US was one of the first countries to have major movements to end slavery (Britain was the first global power to do so, and they preceded the US). I think it would be most accurate to say that the US has historically been both among the most racist and least racist countries, just depending on how you measure.
> Unions provide countervailing power to corporate power. Racist people are racist. Sometimes these can overlap.
Unions, on the other hand... Unions are a monopoly on labor. Monopolies reduce the amount of a good they supply and drive up prices. This means unions depend on certain people leaving the labor market that a union has captured. When a bunch of unions formed in the late 19th century and early 20th centuries, which people did the unions choose to exclude? More or less across the board, they excluded women, immigrants and black people. This was extra convenient, as members of those groups would typically work voluntarily for less pay, so the unions had double incentives to get rid of them. Many early Progressives were quite proud of this and other policies like a minimum wage forcing "inferior" groups to have to work harder to catch up to the white man.
The question we should be asking is why unions, minimum wage, hours restrictions, etc. were useful in eliminating "undesirables" from the labor force 100 years ago but help these same groups today.
For the former, I'd recommend chapter three of Thomas Sowell's Black Rednecks & White Liberals, about the history of slavery.[1]
For the latter, I'd recommend Illiberal Reformers, about the Progressive Era and its devotees.[2] Later Progressives were responsible for the school-to-prison pipeline and militarized police.[3] The Progressive Era has a wide array of interesting literature, including the writings of many of its early exponents (since they tended to be writers or academics).
[1]https://www.amazon.com/Black-Rednecks-Liberals-Thomas-Sowell...
[2] https://www.amazon.com/Illiberal-Reformers-Eugenics-Economic...
[3]https://reason.com/2017/01/21/no-way-out/
You're telling much less than half the story, and taking the latter half of the twentieth century in isolation without considering what came before.
U.S. unions with communist and socialist leadership were universally anti-racist in word and very often in deed. Employers often interfered with employee choice of leadership to the benefit of conservative, racist, union leaders as opposed to leftists with anti-racist commitments.
In one of the most flagrant violations of the First Amendment in U.S. history, the Taft-Hartley Act[1] criminalized membership in all manner of left-wing political organization. With the cooperation of union leaders ready to sell out their membership, many of the strongest voices for integration were purged.
Employers and union officials alike had relationships ranging from extortion to open cooperation with organized crime. The relationship between the Hoffa Sr's Teamsters and the mafia was complex, and notorious in part because it was so exceptional.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taft%E2%80%93Hartley_Act#Anti-...
Interesting. Having been on the receiving end of a (later proven to be bogus) HR complaint, this is exactly how it was handled. I was forced to respond to allegations where neither the allegations nor source were ever shared with me.
At the same time, the narrative that someone above her in the management hierarchy decided to pull her research seems more plausible. In that case, I would tend to "Privacy for the Weak, Transparency for the Powerful." What you describe is the former, but this would seem to be a case of the latter.
First, for this to be a valid case of HR protecting someone who needs protecting, these complaints would have to come from someone who Gebru was managing and therefore have leverage on. I don't know the specifics, but it would stand to reason that she did manage some people, so that possibility can't be excluded for sure.
But from the last paragraph it seems that she did actually try to address the points raised:
> You write a detailed document discussing whatever pieces of feedback you can find, asking for questions and clarifications, and it is completely ignored.
I wasn't there, but simply not addressing counter points doesn't fare well in the public's (read: my) eyes.
How is it fair or standard to make someone retract a paper because of anonymous and secret criticisms that the researcher isn't even given a chance to address?
The reasons Jeff Dean cited in his email for the retraction sound like things that could've been fixable.
Based on that I assume that the author was soliciting guidance from PR & Policy but didn't receive any. Someone higher up isn't doing their job effectively.
>That's how it is supposed to work. The thing that sucked about it was that it was impossible to defend myself. I only found out details after the fact because the complaint was anonymously filed on behalf of a co-worker and it was the co-worker that later came to me to explain.
[1] https://provost.uchicago.edu/sites/default/files/documents/r...
How, exactly, is it supposed to work? If you are asked to respond to allegations, yet those allegations are not shared with you, what are they actually asking you to do?
It's like you have good Silicon Valley espisode just from that, I'm not sure if I buy total innocence here.
Are you sure? Even primary school bullying is better, at least you can see the abuser.
EDIT: a bit more info from the NYTimes: "In an interview with The Times, Dr. Gebru said her exasperation stemmed from the company’s treatment of a research paper she had written with six other researchers, four of them at Google. The paper, also reviewed by The Times, pinpointed flaws in a new breed of language technology, including a system built by Google that underpins the company’s search engine." https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/03/technology/google-researc...
my original comment was only targeted at the treatment of the (accused) abusers by the corporate HR, nothing with any specific person
I wonder what People Ops is, something more about logistics maybe. Still paid by the company, so it can't be on the side of employees.
Fortunately, said person accidentally admitted to doing it, after changing their story a few times, and was summarily fired.
> This is the exact email I received from Megan who reports to Jeff > Who I can't imagine would do this without consulting and clearing with him of course
"This is the exact email I received from Megan who reports to Jeff. Who I can't imagine would do this without consulting and clearing with him of course."
I am sure Jeff Dean was made aware of the situation given the PR impact. But it is a stretch to say that Jeff Dean personally decided to fire her against her manager's wishes.
Allegations like that need evidence.
These dismissal decisions are not made lightly and I would wager there was a long history of events leading up to this. You usually only see the straw that broke the camel's back.
This also sounds like an opportunity for an awesome person to spread their wings now they're out from under what sounds like a pretty oppressive system
Her biggest accomplishment seems to be driving Yann LeCunn off Twitter with angry accusations. She tried to continue her power trip at a workplace but her boss called her bluff.
This is a great firing for Google. She won’t be missed.
The first paper listed there has over 1000 citations in 2 years. That’s influence and impact.
Just because you don’t know of her work doesn’t mean that her work has not had an impact and that she’s not well known in her research community. She definitely is.
Everything you've said here is not only falsifiable, but straight up false.
It appears you didn't even try to challenge your own beliefs before spraying them out into the public sphere. You aren't representing yourself in a decent light.
If someone would link this to me, I'll interpret it as extremely dismissing. A declaration of war.
Umm, among the other issues with your post, Yann LeCunn last tweeted 12 hours ago...
https://twitter.com/ylecun/status/1334409408537825282
("she turned me into a Newt!")
People invested in identity politics are, by their own admission, interested in outcomes. In this world view, the legal system is a tool for achieving the desired outcomes. The same set of rules can be illegal if it rejects certain identities in a context, and at the same time legal if it promotes those identities in a different context. 'Heads I win, tails you lose', but dead serious.
A thread discussing the pervasive 'women and minorities encouraged' mindset is in western academia:
https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/95011/is-it-con...
>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 think if you threaten to sue your employer, the employer isn't too much at fault and just covering their own neck when you later threaten to resign and they take you up on that offer.
“Let’s generate fake data with GANs to prevent our AI from discovering politically uncomfortable regularities!”
It’s ugly work but someone has to do it, right?
Even trivial facts like in English "men chuckle, women giggle" has been used as examples of bias. That's not bias though, that's just how the English language works.
For example:
https://ai.googleblog.com/2020/04/a-scalable-approach-to-red...
Edit: I've now read the rest of the thread and the above is no longer true.
Indeed.
I'd even go one step further and bet that her whole career plan is ML activism. If you scan the email, all the key words are in there. Textbook agitprop.
I feel sorry for the next company that will hire her.
I wish this were true.
I'm sure LeCun knows this too. It's a fact that has been known for almost 40 years now, that for a given generalization system multiple bias modes are are possible, and of course the process of optimizing architectures against a biased benchmark will change the learning bias of the model. It's not just datasets that are biased, generalization systems are necessarily biased too.
As for the last line, I don't know that it should be expected for employers to fire employees pursuing recourse against sexual harassment.
I'm sure we can agree that the tone wasn't good, but she does have a point in saying that it's not possible to reduce the bias to datasets used to train the final model.
The paper : http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~tom/pubs/NeedForBias_1980.pdf
The Twitter replies read a lot like her Google message thing. She’s got a lot of good things to say but needs to work on the delivery.
I think she’s playing the victim and race card a lot more than she should. She’s got all the ammo she needs to make her arguments without the angry victim tone.
When she speaks people listen. Nobody listens to wil421.
Your majesty.
Based on a long career of watching people trying to convince the others, attacking people is typically a failing strategy. Instead, learn how to message in a way that is non confrontational, and most importantly, make it clear what is your opinion, versus fact.
In any case, Timnit Gebru (this particular AI researcher) has been recognized as having done some pretty important work in AI ethics. Sounds like this whole thing is messy, but thought I'd mention that for more context.
Yann: “ML systems are biased when data is biased"
Timnit: “I’m sick of this framing. Tired of it. Many people have tried to explain, many scholars. Listen to us. You can’t just reduce harms caused by ML to dataset bias. Even amidst of world wide protests people don’t hear our voices and try to learn from us, they assume they’re experts in everything. Let us lead her and you follow. Just listen. And learn from scholars like @ruha9 [Ruha Benjamin, Associate Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University]"
I don't like engaging this kind of discussion but have to call out the "I'm so tired" bit every time I see it.
This is a consequence of the fact that it's not possible to do generalization, and thus learning, without bias to begin with. What an AI researcher does when deciding which architecture is essentially tuning the bias in the generalization system in order to produce better results, which is not in and of itself bad, and is indeed unavoidable.
By bias, I mean really anything that means that the function g() is used over the function h(). In practice this can be anything from the seed for the random values, to the choice of activation function, to the architecture of the network, and so on.
If the architectures are selected for their performance on dataset y, then it is possible that even when trained on dataset x, they retain some of the bias of dataset y, because their generalization bias, which is architectural, was tuned for dataset y. This is, admittedly, a theoretical result, and it's not clear that it applies in every case, but it is a solid point.
For that reason the point that benchmarking against non-biased datasets is important was made, and thus that there is more to bias than the final dataset used for training during deployment. Therefore, it's not only a responsibility of the engineering community, but also of the scientific community.
I've posted it somewhere here already, but here's a nice paper that explains the point that there is more to bias than simply the dataset : http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~tom/pubs/NeedForBias_1980.pdf
Interestingly enough, this is true of all learning systems, including humans, and is a proof of why it's impossible to be completely unbiased in really anything.
In general I take these types of tropes to be cloaked (politically correct) way of saying "fuck x group".
Dataset bias is only one way this occurs, though. Even if you include more colored faces, you still may be taking pictures with a camera that doesn't capture as much contrast. Or even if you retrain, you may have chosen model structure to optimize behavior in a biased dataset. Or... if you're considering the cost of misidentification by a facial recognition system used by, say, police, you need to be sure that you take a perspective that applies to society as a whole and not to your own interactions with police.
It's perfectly reasonable to say "AI is worsening the experience of minorities in various ways" and to differ with responses that assume with slight additional care in curating datasets that the problem will be completely solved.
In France, since you have to be able to explain in plain words the algorithm that was used to help to make an administrative decision, it indirectly makes these black box learning systems illegal.
(And yet they probably already have been used by the police?)
Now, the naive response is that the engineer that implemented a system should take responsibility for any harm done by the system - and I guess that if these engineers could lose their license to use a computer and face jail time, they might also start to put pressure upstream on researchers to provide better systems ?
That statement is contained in a paper I linked that dates from 1980. I'm pretty sure it's factually correct, because I'm trying to make nothing but a demonstration that an idée reçue, that ML systems are only based due to their data, is incorrect.
There's really no cloaked message behind it, and I'm not sure why one would think there is (hence the disclaimer). I think it's a pretty uncharitable interpretation.
That's reasonable. I may have taken the initial text in the wrong context. Thanks for clarifying.
To expand on my prior comment of "Fuck x group", perhaps the tone of prior tweets by Timnit Gebru short-cut me mentally, namely this one: https://twitter.com/timnitGebru/status/1274809418475950080
> Even amidst of world wide protests people don’t hear our voices and try to learn from us, they assume they’re experts in everything. Let us lead her and you follow. Just listen. And learn from scholars like @ruha9 We even brought her to your house, your conference.
It strikes me as very unprofessional, and frankly I believe her anti-white bias shone through in that instance.
Racism is racism, even for "good" purposes.
Personally, I don't think either indicate racism. I see the link you tweeted as an excessively abrasive response at a dismissive and reductive understanding of an issue, bias in learning system, despite research old and new. At the same time, I see LeCun's dismissal as a genuinely held position in error.
To see the first as racist but the second as okay seems to be a case of being much more charitable to one side than the other, though I understand how it may look this way.
It's not "commonly accepted" in the sense of throwing one's hands up, saying "there's just no way we could find enough pictures of black people for our AI to no longer confuse them with Apes" and move on.
“I’m not sad. I’m not sorry. I’m angry. And I’m tired”
In this case, the issue is that "it's the dataset" is attacking a straw man: nobody is accusing ML practitioners to be explicit racists actively conspiring for their models to be racially biased. Everyone understands that it is (often) a result of the underlying dataset.
But, the argument goes, understanding the genesis of such bias isn't enough to excuse it. At least not when those models are put to actual use in, say, law-enforcement contexts. Or credit agencies, or hiring decisions, or really anything.
If your dog happened to bite any red-haired kid it came across, it doesn't matter that you think red-haired kids are just as good as others, or that the dog was once mistreated by a red-haired kid. You're not going to allow the dog to get near any red-haired kids. And if you do, you'll face charges of at least negligence when some red-haired kid gets mauled.
To tie this back to AI, it would mean that as long as your models produce racially biased results, they simply aren't ready for deployment or publication. Go find better data until your work is no longer liable to inflict harm on anybody.
That's the standard for all other industries: if your car is shown to reliably kill pedestrians below a certain height in crash tests, you go back to the drawing board. Adding a sticker "don't operate car in the vicinity of children" isn't enough.
You can disagree with that reasoning (although you'd be wrong). What you can't do, as a leader in AI, is to pretend to have never heard of it, or that it is so obviously wrong that it warrants no reply whatsoever.
> have to call out the "I'm so tired" bit every time I see it.
so... I guess you're tired of it?
Yeah GP is modeling exactly the behavior they're railing against. Claiming that something is wrong without any practical insights for how that thing might be better.
I'm not.
Many other rhetorical moves have a lot of politics to muddle through / implicit assumptions that can be disavowed in bad faith, etc. I don't like to engage in that kind of discussion at all.
But the "I'm so tired" bit is both condescending (and it takes... something... to condescend to Yan LeCunn) and evasive. The end result is authoritarian -- look man, this is decided and settled, you haven't kept up.
Calling this out is interesting because it evidences on the contrary that the discussion isn't settled at all, and that she's unable or unwilling to frame it in a convivial manner that's conducive to progress.
I sit out of conversations I'm tired about.
But isn’t what you described so vague and subjective, that you can apply it to pretty much anything?
IMHO it’s more honest to say “I sit out of conversations I don’t like”, which is an entirely fair and understandable decision to make :).
Well, the disagreement is about publication. Yann LeCun himself said that "The consequences of bias are considerably more dire in a deployed product than in an academic paper."[1]
Why would it be wrong to publish research based on biased data?
[1] https://twitter.com/ylecun/status/1274790777516961792
I assume she thinks that Yann has enough intellectual capacity to improve situation of biased ML but doesnt execute. Further, my guess is that the reason why he doesnt execute is not transparent to her, hence frustrating.
Isn’t Gebru an “AI researcher”, after all?
Dr. Gebru, among others, expects and insists that they do go beyond that and try to get involved in the social consequences of tech. They refuse, ergo conflict.
Yann has no obligation to do so on Twitter, and shouldn't be called out by coworkers publicly regarding that decision, in my opinion.
Yann was talking about a specific model, she was talking about ML & society on a grand scale. Can't we talk about specific things now? Why did he have to apologize for it?
My feeling is that Timnit is using people, she guilt trips, humiliates them online, makes a big fuss and it's all to whip up support in her crusades. She wants to win the public opinion by any means, so she needs famous opponents to pile on, such as Yann and Dean (who have universal admiration in the field). She's always playing the victim. I find this kind of behavior toxic, it degrades dialogue.
Every practitioner already knows that these models behave according to the data they are trained on. The general public has no use for this explanation because they aren't the one deciding on the training data. So the only practical purpose is to offer some superficial causal mechanism that sounds like an explanation to that public, presented as an unchanging fact of nature, and distract from the equally true fact a biased model is only published or used iff it is trained on biased data and someone decides to go ahead and publish/use it nonetheless.
> You can disagree with that reasoning (although you'd be wrong). What you can't do, as a leader in AI, is to pretend to have never heard of it, or that it is so obviously wrong that it warrants no reply whatsoever.
There's a third option. You can just decide to not engage with the condescending prick at all.
We have one of those at work. His area of responsibility is a very cross functional one, and while it is important, he have a great deal of difficulty getting people to participate. Because participation usually means getting told you're an idiot. Loudly, forcefully, and with more words.
That seems to be the case here, only substituting "idiot" out for "racist".
Am I saying something controversial or micro-aggressive here? So be it.
I have the distinct impression that what they want is for discussions to become personal. Don't let them get to you.
Tiredness is probably coming from trying to educate people on Twitter, you can't do that because tomorrow a fresh batch will come and you have to start over.
Yeah, it sort of implies that, yes, you're angry about something, but actually have no constructive advice or solutions, other than to accuse someone of being a bad person or even a racist.
The "I'm so tired" bit is similar to the "I'm not here to teach you" bit. Maybe someone can't teach you because they actually have nothing to teach.
You of course know about this, or would now about this considering she is called an "AI researcher at Google" in the title of this tread. So the only lazy and un-constructive criticism is to assume she has not made any arguments beyond your one-line caricature of what you believe her to be.
> “I think that now a lot of people have understood that we need to have more diverse datasets, but unfortunately I felt like that’s kind of where the understanding has stopped. It’s like ‘let’s diversify our datasets. And that’s kind of ethics and fairness, right?’ But you can’t ignore social and structural problems.“
This seems to be saying that Yann LeCun should actually be addressing social and structural problems, rather that just applying neural networks to data sets.
https://syncedreview.com/2020/06/30/yann-lecun-quits-twitter...
I don’t know what the right answer is but plenty of institutions come up with ways they attempt to deal with systemic biases. For example, blind auditions for positions in orchestras (you only hear the person auditioning, you can’t see them). Used to not be a thing. Now it is.
Point being that when people are motivated they are able to come up with stuff.
Someone in another thread on this had IMO a great comment[1] summarizing the sentiment:
> If you are going to say "Well, garbage-in, garbage-out!", why do you keep putting the racist garbage in?
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25286446
It's a collection of images uploaded by random flickr users with permissive licenses.
https://github.com/NVlabs/ffhq-dataset
What if you're a nuclear engineer that just wanna make the hot bit go hotter, and don't want to care about the nasty habit that radiation has of killing people?
If you’re confused as to whom Lecun is, google also “lecun arxiv”.
She says 'let us lead and you follow' -- sure...where? What are we concretely doing about the "in-built bias" problem?
Self entitlement or she forgot she was just an employee, and not some sort of independent tribal leader fighting google from the inside.
It's not clear to me here what you're advocating for -- a lawsuit wouldn't be raised by such an intelligent and virtuous individual unless there was some clear wrongdoing. Are you saying that you think workers shouldn't sue their employers if their employers are breaking the law?
>Timnit responded with an email requiring that a number of conditions be met in order for her to continue working at Google, including revealing the identities of every person who Megan and I had spoken to and consulted as part of the review of the paper and the exact feedback. Timnit wrote that if we didn’t meet these demands, she would leave Google and work on an end date. We accept and respect her decision to resign from Google.
Maybe she's more mature than me, but they're probably not going to end up being super relevant.
Imagine being a senior researcher at the peak of your career, working for 6 months to a year on a paper, submitting it to a top tier conference, getting accepted, then getting the pointy haired boss do-what-I-said-peasant treatment.
Big nope.
"withering email" == "anger-fueled message sent by a manager to a large group that asks readers to ignore company policy and start arguments with other leaders"
I don't see where "ethical AI researcher" comes into play here. Instead, I see a leader at a company unprofessionally sending messages to a large listserv and is later fired.
What am I missing?
In general, if I hear "withering e-mail" without context, I imagine an e-mail sent between two parties (or at most, a handful) where one party is cutting down the other directly. When I hear that an employee was fired for a "withering e-mail", I immediately think of retaliation.
In this case, "e-mail" is almost inconsequential. This "e-mail" was a broadcast to hundreds of people who were not in any way involved with the subject matter. It was "withering" in the sense that it cut someone down, but the person/company it cut down wasn't even in the TO field.
Words matter. I now notice that the post title is changed to the much more neutral "AI researcher Timnit Gebru resigns from Google".
"Google silences minorities/women/AI researchers" is way more interesting/important than "Google/AI researcher did/didn't misbehave."
It isn't really clear with your first quote if one thinks that silencing people generally is okay, but not minorities/women, or if silencing anyone is never okay, or if the minority/woman was silenced merely for their demographic status.
She wasn't fired. She said she'd resign if they didn't meet her conditions, so the accepted her resignation. She's being disingenuous.
> Thanks for making your conditions clear. We cannot agree to #1 and #2 as you are requesting. We respect your decision to leave Google as a result, and we are accepting your resignation.
https://twitter.com/timnitGebru/status/1334364734418726912
> Timnit responded with an email requiring that a number of conditions be met in order for her to continue working at Google, including revealing the identities of every person who Megan and I had spoken to and consulted as part of the review of the paper and the exact feedback.
Institutions are being pushed by the Twitter mob, and by the Twitter mob mentality, even when the person is formally within the institution. And I think we're learning, or going to have to re-learn, things like "Why did companies traditionally encourage people to leave politics and religion at the door?" and "What's the acceptable level of discourse within the institution, before you're not a part of it any more?"
Colleges are inculcating an environment and culture that may not be good for working in large groups. One recent example of these challenges: https://quillette.com/2020/12/01/race-and-social-panic-at-ha....
Isn't the word "mutiny"?
No idea if that's happened here, but as a manager I know what I'd do if an employee -- any employee -- told me to to meet their demands or they would quit.
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/pop-culture/tv/muppets-studio-says-k...
I'm not applying this to Gebru vs Google, as in this specific case, we don't have enough evidence to know what exactly happened.
While I don't like the Twitter mob per se, the idea that a person within an institution cannot publicly criticize the institution is ridiculous. Rank-and-file members should be able to challenge the leaders. The employers can already fire employees for almost any arbitrary reason. Don't like the way a subordinate talks about you? Fire the person.
Colleges promote (or should promote) independent thinking. Independent thinking makes it necessary that employees might disagree with the employer. Is that good for the efficiency of the company? Hard to say. But to say the society must cultivate a culture of obeisance such that people can work for companies better is upside-down. Companies should be built to favor independent thinkers.
It seems like more and more that emboldened employees don't think there is any limit to what they should be able to say/do in a company context, which is a huge problem. If you want individualism to that degree, you need to be in business for yourself. If you take a job at a company, you're implicitly conceding some of that individualism.
And yet, decades ago, when labour had real power and unions were a force in the economy, we had no problems with labour driving change within organizations.
I think what we're seeing now is what happens when individuals are disenfranchised from the political process and labour has no way to organize to drive broader change: individuals, frustrated with their lack of power, speak out and there is retaliation. And where there is a lack of organization, this anger has no focus and what you see is a chaotic lashing out.
I think the same is true of populism in general: when you render individuals powerless you prime them to be welcoming to the populist who promises to fight for them.
Is that an excuse for either Gebru or Google's behaviour, here, specifically? I have no idea. None of us have enough of the details to really understand what happened.
But the idea that labour shouldn't challenge leadership, or that the public in general shouldn't challenge the establishment, is a product of decades of union busting and concentration of power in the political class that we shouldn't accept just because it's become the status quo.
> However, we believe the end of your employment should happen faster than your email reflects because certain aspects of the email you sent last night to non-management employees in the brain group reflect behavior that is inconsistent with the expectations of a Google manager.
> As a result, we are accepting your resignation immediately, effective today. We will send your final paycheck to your address in Workday. When you return from your vacation, PeopleOps will reach out to you to coordinate the return of Google devices and assets.
This third part they make "the resignation" the same as firing the person in practice. No way to plan a coordinated rampdown, transition and handover of projects and responsibilities. Just an unconditional goodbye, don't come to work again.
I'll note also that this is rather unusual practice for Google. There are a number of people, far more critical of Google, who have resigned, and who have been able to rampdown for 2+ weeks.
Is there an example you have, even self-reported, of a person who was merely critical of Google and was not given a rampdown? Or someone who was critical and did not fulfill their job obligations, and was given a rampdown?
Yes, and its unclear what this behavior was.
> Is there an example you have, even self-reported, of a person who was merely critical of Google and was not given a rampdown?
No, which is my point. This is unusual behavior on the part of Google, because it's not explained (and certainly not obvious) what the failure was.
The email clearly states: "certain aspects of the email you sent last night to non-management employees in the brain group reflect behavior that is inconsistent with the expectations of a Google manager"
> No, which is my point.
No, that is the opposite of your point. You said that people critical of Google have been given a rampdown, so it is unusual for her to not be given a rampdown. My point was that there may be other reasons for her not being given a rampdown - that being exactly what was in the email shared about her not behaving as a manager. If you think that she was fired solely for being critical and not given a rampdown, then there should be other examples of people being fired without a rampdown for merely being critical.
> No, that is the opposite of your point.
No, it's exactly my point. The vague justification is not borne out by any evidence.
> The vague justification is not borne out by any evidence.
...that's been leaked onto twitter.
She said she may set a date in the future for her resignation.
That is non-committal and non-specific. Your characterization is inaccurate.
I stand by my characterization. She characterizes it herself thusly:
"I said here are the conditions. If you can meet them great I’ll take my name off this paper, if not then I can work on a last date."
https://twitter.com/timnitGebru/status/1334341991795142667
...is both non-committal and non-specific. What are you seeing that everyone else is not?
Citation needed. Gebru could publish it — she's not exactly silent — but chooses not to.
It's perfectly reasonable to think that someone hiding something has something to hide.
I had a job pretty recently, was senior tech and was eager to please, which ended up meaning having to take the hard/after hours calls no one else wanted to handle. It also meant I eventually became the only on-call tech for over 4 months straight. This in turn meant I knew the most about all of our accounts, knew the most about their systems, scheduling for jobs as well as subcontractors, I handled it all, right down to installing the CCTV systems at our new location, single handedly.
When I decided I'd had enough of being taken advantage of and being lied to, I gave my two weeks notice.
They assumed I was going to work for a competitor (I wasn't I was taking some much needed personal time), and they fired me on the spot. While walking me out they also informed me that since they had my resignation letter if I tried to claim unemployment they would use it to claim I had resigned. I didn't care as I wasn't in need of unemployment I was just even happier now about leaving. They were rude, talked down to me and belittled me all the way out.
2 hours after I left the calls began 'how do we' 'how does this' 'this job's permits' 'how do we log into'. I politely told them to fuck off. They even went so far as to have other workers call/text me asking the same questions ver batim.
I will never again give 2 weeks notice unless I have in writing they must give me 2 weeks notice upon release for any reason other than something illegal.
This person offered an ultimatum and their employer made a choice. I just don't think its as bad as early termination of 2 weeks notice.
After those 2 weeks, if the employer still wants help/answers then they should expect to pay a very very expensive hourly rate. :D
As an employer, it makes a lot of sense to accelerate someone out the door that has given notice. That said, you still want them on the hook to answer questions so you should send them home but pay them for those 2 weeks (or however long).
There's no reason to be rude, talk down, belittle, however.
Unless she formally offer to resign it seems like her management jumped the gun.
> I said here are the conditions. If you can meet them great I’ll take my name off this paper, if not then I can work on a last date.
To employers, that qualifies as a conditional resignation.
If an employee tells their boss they have a plan to offer a resignation on x day or do not get y or are considering it they can fire the employee before then, but I assume they can not push around the day they offer a resignation.
An employer not wanting to keep an employee who might soon resign is understandable of course.
I am sure it can get fiddly on what counts as a formal offer to resign and that courts make calls one way or another based on ambiguous language.
Without the email though it's not clear to me. For better or worse it comes across as Timnit Gebru bosses were eager to shoo her out the door though.
If it's that clear cut it's that clear cut. Without the email I can not tell.
Timnit Gebru said she "hadn't resigned" and "had asked for simple conditions". So according to her the intent to resign was not in her email.
https://twitter.com/timnitGebru/status/1334341991795142667
It's possible to not have the intent and still word something as a clear cut formal offer to resign however. With out the email it is not possible to tell where this falls.
"Timnit responded with an email requiring that a number of conditions be met in order for her to continue working at Google, including revealing the identities of every person who Megan and I had spoken to and consulted as part of the review of the paper and the exact feedback. Timnit wrote that if we didn’t meet these demands, she would leave Google and work on an end date. We accept and respect her decision to resign from Google."
[0] https://twitter.com/timnitGebru/status/1334364732480958467?s... [1] https://www.platformer.news/p/the-withering-email-that-got-a...
Then the language used by Timnit could analyzed and reasoned through to determine if it counts as a formal offer to resign or not.
I not jumping on any bandwagons without at least that or equivalent.
Which is exactly why she has refrained from releasing it throughout this whole drama: plausible deniability.
I do not think there is evidence for that. It is normal to remove employee access to email if they are leaving so it is unlikely Timnit would have access to the email to share.
Timnit says says she has been cut off from her corp account as well: https://twitter.com/timnitGebru/status/1334364734418726912
You say this, yet I have seen it done many times.
Of course not being a lawyer of any sort, I don't know. Is there a reference for your claim?
Jeff's email is in line with what I have seen done elsewhere, and given the high profile of the incident, I'd be shocked if legal hadn't been consulted on the wording.
Husband returns with 12 loaves of bread.
Most software engineers can read the above joke, and laugh at themselves, then go ahead and upvote your comment not realizing that it is EXACTLY THE SAME THING.
Employee: "This is extremely important to me. If you can't address what is important to me, then I can't work here anymore"
Google: "OK, thanks for your resignation".
This is not okay. Google is "technically correct" - but it is appalling behavior that should make every Googler shake with discomfort.
Employees are people. People can get dissatisfied. Frustrated. Angry. Sure, you can say companies don't owe anything to anyone because there is at-will employment.
But the reality is unless we want to live in a dystopia, people should be allowed to voice concerns and anger and frustrations, and not be fired for making things uncomfortable or inconvenient.
If you are instead just saying that Google should have let it slide because it was just an emotional outburst ("anger and frustrations") and not meant to be taken seriously, well, in what context can we hold adults to their word at all? Email is written communication, not an offhand verbal remark uttered in a tense meeting in anger. You should be able to see what you are about to send while typing it, and have ample opportunity to look over it again before you press that "Send" button. If your ability to review your words has atrophied, perhaps under the influence of social media which encourages "unfiltered" stream-of-consciousness venting, then this ought to be on you, simply because it is doubtful that society can function without some possibility of making binding statements and we do not have anything more commitmental than email widely deployed (and operable at the pace of the modern workplace) in work-from-home times.
That something completely UNACCEPTABLE is happening, and needs to be addressed.
If she really wanted to achieve change within the system she'd have needed to not express it this way. There are people on both sides of the table. One can talk to people and find common ground. But that is rare to work if you start with a threat.
From what I know about timnit from Twitter she is an emotional, unreasonable and maybe an sjw type character.
Even pull the victim card, blast it all over social media. Sorry, that's a major disservice to everybody _actually_ being dehumanized. She's just dissatisfied with her employer and wants to make the biggest possible splash now.
No. No COBRA benefits and usually no severance. Also the employee is not eligible for unemployment benefits.
> However, we believe the end of your employment should happen faster than your email reflects because certain aspects of the email you sent last night to non-management employees in the brain group reflect behavior that is inconsistent with the expectations of a Google manager.
> As a result, we are accepting your resignation immediately, effective today. We will send your final paycheck to your address in Workday. When you return from your vacation, PeopleOps will reach out to you to coordinate the return of Google devices and assets.
Her resignation certainly gave Google an easy out of all that hassle, but would I call this a firing? Perhaps not.
If you're the employer you have to figure that if somebody's pissed off enough to (i) sue you whilst employed by you, (ii) write that kind of message to others working in their function or group, and (iii) now they've delivered an ultimatum you're unable or unwilling to meet, they're only going to cause more trouble if you make them work their notice period.
If it were me in her boss's position I'd have got her out the door as fast as possible.
They set themselves up for failure regardless of the paper's content.
Source? The linked article says it was submitted but nothing about whether it was accepted. If it was accepted, is it available for public viewing?
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-03/google-s-...
[2] https://facctconference.org/2021/cfp.html
Generally "It worked out, everything's fine" is not a line that flies.
Her email, sent before that claim was made, suggests that wasn't even remotely the case - and it's entirely possible to think "she seems like an ass" and "this smells like bullshit" are both true.
A threat to resign isn't the same thing as resigning. And it seems you don't think so, either, since you characterize her threat as a bluff. It can't be both a bluff and a resignation.
Timnit responded with an email requiring that a number of conditions be met in order for her to continue working at Google, including revealing the identities of every person who Megan and I had spoken to and consulted as part of the review of the paper and the exact feedback. Timnit wrote that if we didn’t meet these demands, she would leave Google and work on an end date. We accept and respect her decision to resign from Google.
I would say that describes a conditional resignation, and the fact that she called this “being fired” indicates she didn’t really plan to resign (ie. she was bluffing).
The person who benefits from your doubt, _and_ could resolve your doubt, chooses not to.
She cannot and will not expose that information without inviting all sorts of litigation. This is not a case where she can just "choose" to release that information.
So, she might be choosing not to for this reason.
If I say "I demand X or else I resign", (I don't know if that was actually said) I think it's fair to consider that a conditional resignation.
And I've lost the link to the tweet.
>Do you know what happened since? Silencing in the most fundamental way possible.
"Silencing in the most fundamental way" to me means physically clapping your hand over someone's mouth or murdering them, neither of which I believe she actually meant. This email would have greatly benefited from peer review.
We should hire by skill alone whether the person is a Lesbian Black Female, or a White Male
Another argument is that it's necessary to be discriminatory in favour of minorities to level the playing field.
I share your opinion, but not everyone does.
In this case, I'm not going to respond in much detail, other than to note that there are 30+ years of writings about affirmative action which get deeply into this issue. Your summary of it is misleading and incomplete.
It's a hell of a lot easier for a white male to pick up those skills because of culture and society than it is for most other groups of people.
I think there's a lot that can be done to help minority groups succeed and I'm a little less concerned about what's "fair" to white males like me.
Since you can't actually calculate someone's skill, all you can do is hire on an attempted measurement of skill. And if you find reasons to think that your measurement of skill has inaccuracies, you'd probably be better off taking that into account when evaluating a candidate.
But tech companies want to talk to the humans they're hiring, so race and gender are (almost) always available as information inputs during the hiring process. There's no equivalent to the curtain to remove the possibility of bias, so you need to look at alternate methods. Setting hiring targets is one way to do it. If you're going to complain that the targets are unfair, you can't just say "Well shucks, guess we have to stick with the system that produces massively unequal outcomes." You've gotta propose a system that's less unfair than the status quo.
Other companies have tried. Names and vitals deleted from resumes before any people involved in the hiring process see them, remote interviews conducted over IM or with voice masking. That's one benefit I see with the much-maligned leetcode-style interviews, is that your identity is completely isolated from the process until the very end.
That's assuming people only know their clones.
This is actually kind of funny to me, because in the open source world plenty of people have extremely productive working relationships without ever seeing or hearing each other, and in many cases without even knowing what country the other person lives in, how old they are, or what their legal name is.
So while there are definitely arguments that face to face communication is "higher bandwidth" or has other advantages, it doesn't seem out of the question to me that the hiring process could be "blinded" to a similar extent to orchestra auditions, without any significant reduction in hiring accuracy.
(Ok, maybe not quite the same extent; language fluency and style of speech are still significant signals even if everything is done over text)
There's no reason you can't do an interview over text-chat instead of in person -- hell, with most of us working remote for the foreseeable future, that's how the majority of on-the-job communication will happen anyway.
Be careful here, the wind has changed and blind auditions are now problematic.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/16/arts/music/blind-audition...
The argument made in the article you cite is ludicrous, blind auditions cannot possibly hurt diversity. If there is a problem when blind auditions are used in hiring for professional orchestras, the problem is elsewhere in the pipeline, and the way to fix it isn't replacing blind auditions, its fixing issue further up the pipeline.
There may be a pro-diversity case for using something other than current skill as a factor at other stages of the pipeline which are intended as, in whole or in part, educational and where current skill is being used not as a measure of current professional competence, but as a proxy for potential. But even there that's largely a poor substitute for identifying and addressing the factors producing a skewed pool.
1. I think few companies are out there "hiring by race or gender". At most companies I know, affirmative action means hiring by skill, but making sure at least XX% of the hiring pool are women, black, etc. This really just means your resume is more likely to get seen and maybe you're more likely to get a first round, but not that "you're being hired by race or gender".
2. You could argue this is still unfair (although as previously stated, you're still hiring people who earned it based on skill). Unfortunately not doing anything would me more unfair, specifically by stagnating things in the problematic state they are now [1].
In the macro-historical context, white Americans brought African slaves to their country, and actively deprived of wealth and knowledge, right? That was a societal, conscious commitment to push these people down.
Now that they're free but seriously lacking wealth and behind on knowledge too, they're expected just create that wealth and knowledge themselves. Thanks to "unfair" institutions like public education, this is going to happen regardless, but very slowly unless there's a societal, conscious commitment to push these people up.
[1]: Having a huge chunk of your society be alienated not only socially but also economically leads to conflict, could worsen the gap instead of improving it, weakens social and cultural ties, etc.
Do you think it's possible that you can "hire by skill alone" and given two equally skilled people - one man, one woman - always hire the man, and that you could hire some equally skilled women if you randomised or removed whatever male-bias exists in your hiring?
Do you think it's possible that there are equally skilled men and women available to employers to hire, but that employers have built frat-boy workplaces where only men are interested in working, and cultures that drive away skilled women?
Do you think "hire by skill alone" means always hiring the most expensive people - like buying jewellery by value alone? What if a company can't afford to staff with all the maximally skilled people, but can get 80% of the skills for 50% of the money?
What about hiring people who can be trained or skilled up, and training them?
What about teams, where the collective skills can be greater than the sum of their parts, but maybe not if all the parts are identical?
It doesn't bother me if an applicant pool is made a bit bigger for marginalized people than myself, because I do not struggle to fall into any applicant pool whatsoever and have not for most of my adult life. Be it for employment, education, or housing.
Where conversations can get annoying is when I feel demonized because inequity exists independent of my individual actions. But I can live with someone bitching on Twitter because I'm not afraid of the police or telling potential employers I have a kid on the way.
What I don't like living with is the inability of others like myself in my own caste who would dismiss reality on reductionist notions "hiring by race or gender is inherently racist" without critical thought. Ignoring lack of diversity tacitly supports inequity and is itself racist or bigoted, by virtue of doing less than nothing to correct it.
How is this true? What if someone is a broke straight white man with three kids and someone else LGBTQ person of color is a young childless heir of fortune? How is the first person possibly privileged in comparison with the second one?
Looking from Europe, America seems to be very determined to recast its very obvious class problem as a race (or even gender) problem, even if it means introducing disadvantages based on immutable characteristics AGAIN. Two wrongs do not make a right and this farce will bite you again in the future, just like slavery and old style racism did.
That said, in the United States, non-white men were systemically marginalized and prevented from participation in society to the same degree. There are numerous examples of this over the last four centuries, but they did not decrease in fervor until about a generation ago. For many reasons, our class divide is correlated to our racial divide. That doesn't mean we don't need to fix both, just that the there are two problems to fix there.
Looking from America, it's hard not to be frustrated at Europeans on their high horses talking about class versus racial divide. Is it so hard to recognize that we have different social problems, and a different history? And that things we talk about might be colored one way, because race, gender, and sexual orientation impact real people on a daily basis? Do you reject the idea that bigotry exists independent of class and it's something we need to work on?
That is the Internet - Americans commenting on Europe, Europeans on Islam, Muslims on Israel, Israelis on India, Indians on China etc. The distance may make you wrong, but it also may make you notice more general outlines of the forest you are commenting upon, while the locals see only individual trees.
Theoretically, complex societies should be able to fix multiple problems at once. In practice, it is very easy for one topic to exhaust ALL the oxygen in public debate.
2020 was all about race and other immutable characteristics in America. Among all that, class problems such as enormous healthcare bills that destroy lives every day, are basically forgotten.
Of course that there are many facets of bigotry out there. But: would you rather be a black upper middle class than a white unemployed person without good marketable skills?
These days, I would say that the answer is very different from the KKK days.
While class problems do, absolutely, exist in the US, race problems also exist.
How fortunate for you. On the other hand, other people are hurt by the explicitly racist policies you endorse. You don’t speak for them.
> in my own caste
Why don’t you speak for yourself, instead of speaking for others and assuming they’re “in your caste”, whatever that means?
Some of the worst people in history who committed the worst atrocities were very passionate about making the world a better place, at least as they defined “better”.
This conclusion seems so non sequitur to the argument. There is literally nothing in the previous argument to suggest that any of this was motivated by anything other than a disagreement with the report. The argument presented by the researcher is conjecture. Coupled with the fact that she threatened to sue her employer and they kept her for a year? Any reasonable employer would see that her employment is a liability and dismiss her prior to a year.
In the world of business, there is no jewel too precious to discard.
That's all I need to know about why she was fired. I'm glad Google despite all the stuff they've done before knows when someone has gone off the SJW deep end.