We already know that ,,self regulation'' doesn't work. It made sense to me that when I was working at Google I didn't talk bad about the company that I was getting my paycheck from.
Alphabet is still a great company, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't need checks and balances from outside.
why would he want to be in a union when he is a top earner compared to great majority of people in the same country? and aside from a relative freedom of speech he works in very favourable conditions with a lot of perks and a generous severance package if he gets fired? working at google is the very definition of privilege.
Heaven help him, though, if he says anything critical of the union. Tire slashing and other forms of intimidation routinely made newspaper headlines in UAW territory in the era before the Big 3 automakers collapsed. At least dismissal doesn't involve people following you to your home.
It isn't businesses that make US unions look bad, they did it to themselves.
If Google (perish the thought) decided to pull some shady reviewing stunts and make your work life so intolerable that you felt your only option was to force the issue and threaten to resign - being part of a union could have helped with that.
HR is a bunch of people who represent the company's interests in negotiations and transactions. Unions are the same thing for employees.
We've been told, repeatedly, that unions are socialist organisations that want to destroy capitalisim and bankrupt employers. This isn't true.
> union when he is a top earner compared to great majority of people in the same country
Why does that make creating a union/engineer council less desirable? It seems good to have a democratically elected representative of Google engineers who can talk to management, even if those engineers don't feel like negotiating on wage stuff, they still have a real avenue to air concerns.
There are important things to address at Google, like not having enough sitting toilets for men (there's 3 times as much for women even though there are much less women in the office where I was working) that an union may help with, but that's different from the product PR.
My first inclination was just to move on but you didn’t post on a throwaway so I will take the bait.
Why do you think the toilet issue you described is a problem that needs to be fixed? My experience in every corner of life in America to date has been separated bathrooms by sex and the men’s restroom containing far fewer sitting toilets. We all know this is because women sit for both natural duties and men, generally in the US at least, only sit for one. This is so basic I assume it’s not what you are talking about but please correct me if not so we can engage on that front.
What I assume you mean is Google is 90% male and 10% female (no idea what it really is) and yet the bathrooms are 50% male and 50% female. You specifically mention sitting toilets which is what I am having trouble understanding the relevance of.
Are men regularly forced to stand in line instead of being able to walk right in and go? If so that sounds like a facilities growth issue and not a sex imbalance issue. You could propose turning some female restrooms into male but generally restrooms are placed far enough apart from one another that there would have to be 0 females in the area serviced by those restrooms for that to work. The presence of even one would require facilities assigned to females or mixed gender restrooms (a different argument I fully support).
That leaves your only other option as I see it for the female restrooms to be smaller than the male restrooms which is just ridiculous. No one would build the building with that hopefully temporary imbalance in mind and you can’t just repurpose half a bathroom as long as the sexes are being separated.
> Why do you think the toilet issue you described is a problem that needs to be fixed?
Because this way Google was effectively paying me loads of money to just go through 7 floors of bathrooms to find an empty one when I needed to use it. It's a waste of corporate resources to use a human resource's time like this. At the end the solution for me was just using the disabled toilet, as we didn't have disabled people on the floor at all.
One solution would be to just build more sitting toilets instead of the standing ones, as those ones weren't used as much. But on 1 floor there were 2 bathrooms for women and 2 for men, so yes, repurposing some would have helped.
It‘s mind boggling that one needs to explain this (especially in a community like hn).
Seems like literacy in basic economic principles was replaced by feelings in many people
Of course it’s a growth issue, Google can’t easily afford the prime real estate with the current housing prices. Load balancing is just a temporary measure that can be done.
Google tear down meeting rooms to have more space for cranking more people in the same office.
Luckily I was working there in the good old days mostly.
Are you seriously arguing that one of the largest and most profitable megacorps in the world can't afford enough toilets, so we'ce gotta take a toilet away from female employees?
Profits aside, we do not consider stopping cramming people in an office, or hiring in a more agfordable location? What happened to common sence and self respect?
This the literally shittiest, most submissive argument I've come across. If it weren't a civilised forum, i would've colled it bootlicking
I’m in favor of a more modern arrangement, where all restrooms are for a single person and can be used by anybody. It works well no matter what the gender ratio of the workforce is. Eventually we will all wonder why the heck we did it the old way.
Some floors of certain buildings have that arrangement, but because single occupancy restrooms take up more floor space, there tend to be fewer of those, so the capacity might not work out as well as imagined.
Personally I find it more helpful to adjust my biological clock to avoid doing my business at the same time as everyone else.
I mean, when you have to go, you have to go.
If you have to travel to an entirely different floor to find an open shitter, that makes for a poor experience.
Still blows my mind there are people who don’t understand how some folks are older, have conditions like IBS or are disabled, and that that number can be way, way more than 100’. It can even be a multiple building thing on a bad day.
I used to work at the Google San Francisco office, back when there was just one SFO office. IIRC the office was 5-7 floors with one “bathroom” per floor. I remember having walked up and down the entire building to search for a toilet, eventually giving up to go use the one at Starbucks.
Certainly not employee mistreatment all things relative. But it made me stop and think how much Google values engineer time, and how I feel in terms of productivity.
Still blows my mind that companies paying people >300k a year would make them waste so much of the time they are paying for finding and waiting for toilets.
Google offices are hilariously so badly organized for such an “enlightened“ company - my guess there is no obvious metric to track and “own”, so it falls through the crack.
Most of the time, believe it or not, details like toilets are outside Google's control, let alone unions'. I heard so many stories when I was in the NY office, like facilities not being allowed to do anything about the big gaps along the stall doors in the tenth floor bathrooms until they bought the building for $2B and everything was torn down. Or the two years it took to get approval to place the stupid logos on the outside. They weren't even lighted, which would have definitely added extra years. Every month it was a different person's turn at the city to reject the application, often for something that had been okay the previous time. There's hell, and then there's the NYC DOB.
The bathroom situation stank (pun not intended), but frankly there are other hills to die on.
In my opinion, this is different: Google is hiring research scientists and telling them that Google would like to pay for their research. When hired, Googled told these people that they would be free to conduct research in their field without this kind of censorship. Now they are being censored, this is a new policy.
In my opinion, this is very different from a typical employee "talking bad" about their employer.
"Google’s new review procedure asks that researchers consult with legal, policy and public relations teams before pursuing topics such as face and sentiment analysis and categorizations of race, gender or political affiliation, according to internal webpages explaining the policy."
Any researcher who thought they could publish research about 'race and gender' and not have it reviewed by a corporate sponsor is incredibly naive.
It's an extensively sensitive subject and particularly in a field with such vague and 'subject to interpretation' results, the sponsor corp. is going to want to have a look. Considerably more so if the research is about the institution itself.
There was a specific case recently where the researcher criticized Google for something, but Google asked the researcher to include truthful information about the changes the company has already made to the system in question wherein it's been improved etc. This is a perfectly fair request by the sponsor, I think.
It's also naive for us to consider that what people chose to research, how they approach it, the results they are looking for isn't somehow altered by the researchers own biases. In fact, it's hugely arrogant for researchers to believe that they have some special access to the truth in this regard.
Perhaps researchers who accepted these positions with Google were naive. That is certainly possible but it can't be argued: Google hired these people under the pretense of letting them do their research free of censorship and, now that they work for Google, this censorship is being imposed.
I'm not sure what the rest of this comment is alluding to... The posted article from Reuters doesn't mention race and gender, the article implies these researchers focus on AI and ML.
In regards to the "specific case", I would have to guess at what that case might be. Were I to guess, it seems like I'd be guessing wrong as this assertion seems to lack grounding in fact.
Naive or not, peer review is in place and part of it's purpose is to keep the biases of researchers in place. History has proven that this is far from infallible, but it's the process we have today and the process Google agreed to when it hired these researchers.
Here is my theory: these researchers were not naive and they knew the deal, they could work on their research as long as the topics were not too sensitive and as long as the results did now harm Google's image too badly.
So what likely happened (imho) was either a miscommunication, or they got results they did not expect.
Either they did not realize which topics are too sensitive to touch, or they believed they'd get different results and did not.
I cannot entertain the idea that they signed up with Google believing truly they could have full scholastic freedom. I am pretty sure it is even covered in elementary ethics classes that such a scenario is itself questionable.
They probably felt that they had 'scholastic freedom' and they generally do.
But if your job is 'AI Research' and you publish a piece about how much electricity Google uses to 'train models' ... well, you can expect scrutiny.
In this case, the researcher was simply asked to hold the paper until more information was included about the fact that Google has actually improved certain paramaters quite a lot since the time the data was referenced in the report.
This is extremely fair from Google.
If the research was purely concerning some AI results, even how they could be unjust - fine. But as soon as your research specifically includes the sponsor, then it's perfectly fair for the sponsor to add more information.
It's not censorship, in that case, it's frankly the opposite.
The 'miscommunication' here is a kind of naive thinking by researchers who probably have never had normal jobs, who have never worn a 'company hat' and may not have any internalized understanding for communications.
For many researchers - money comes from magical taxpayer funds, and the 'Uni Model' is the only model they understand and some might think that's how the world ought to be.
If Google was giving people cancer due to the tar in their products, the researchers were discovering this - and Google was trying to suppress this, then you'd have a serious problem.
This is not Marlborough/Cargill/Exxon, it's Google and it's an entirely different situation.
The 'hammers' used by the social justice fronts from the 1960s just don't work anymore, because we have made progress and nothing is obvious.
It will also continue to ramp up even more as growth dries up. The internet can only get so big, especially on a quarterly basis, and these companies are already very big. They're public and pressure to grow is huge.
It's going to be a rough ride throughout the next decade.
You may well be right that this is Google’s current thinking, but it doesn’t look like a winning strategy to me. Once more, they are on the defensive trying to offer flailing justifications for an opportunistic initial move. Even if you don’t care about the ethics, or are on their side, I think you’d have to question their execution.
Oh, I don't think these are post hoc justifications. Much more likely Gebru was intentionally forced out - I wouldn't be surprised if Google leadership basically said "she's a loose cannon - move her out in the next 6 months" and there was just no good way.
No. More like, researchers can do as they please, but if they're going to attack Google or be negative about something related to Google, then there's going to be a review and words will have be chosen carefully. There's a big difference.
+ "Google’s new review procedure asks that researchers consult with legal, policy and public relations teams before pursuing topics such as face and sentiment analysis and categorizations of race, gender or political affiliation, according to internal webpages explaining the policy."
+ "A senior Google manager reviewing a study on content recommendation technology shortly before publication this summer told authors to 'take great care to strike a positive tone,' according to internal correspondence read to Reuters."
+ surprisingly, there's not much else in the article beyond those two sentences
Edit: as commenters noted, there is more in the article. I apologize for not being clear that the last bullet is just MY OPINION. That is, for me the rest is not as meaningful as some consider it. I guess, if you care deeply on the subject, you'll want to read the article and decide for yourself.
fwiw I agree with the parent comment. This article, especially the ludicrous attempt to tie in the Gebru stuff, is super weak and absent of any details or anything substantial.
I don’t see anything in the article that suggests Google suppresses unfavorable research or censors authors whatsoever. Instead it sounds like a lot of whining and complaining from exceedingly privileged researchers who want some version of tenure to apply within for-profit companies and seem too immature to accept that legal and compliance functions within a large corporation very differently than in academia.
Why did you find the mention of Timnit Gebru ludicrous? The issues are closely related. In fact, I was _expecting_ the article to mention it.
Google tells Researcher 1 to re-word things in X way for Y reason.
Google tells Timnit Gebru to re-word things in X way for Y reason.
The X and Y are the same.
Based on the rest of your response, I believe you are having trouble reading the article in an objective manner. You say that it sounds like whining to you. That’s because you already think it is. You came into the article with this viewpoint about academics in corporations already established. This is why I also found your comment hilarious. You already think Timnit is a whiny researcher. You say this article is about whiny researchers. Yet it’s _ludicrous_ to mention Timnit in this article?
Also, Jeff Dean lied in his email. Maybe that’s why you’re confused about the Timnit situation. I’m assuming you don’t work at Google.
You appear to be mistaken on nearly all the facts about the Gebru situation. Given this it seems clear we would draw very different conclusions. Anyone claiming Jeff Dean lied must be so disconnected from the actual facts and so prejudiced to blame Google and view Gebru’s actions as acceptable that their opinion amounts to nothing but partisan gainsaying.
To be clear, it’s ok to disagree with Jeff Dean or to dispute his charitability in accepting Gebru’s ultimatum-based resignation, but to claim he publicly lied is beyond the pale.
I'm a Google employee who, I think most would claim is generally on Google's side of things.
He lied. There are falsehoods that he knew (or had a responsibility to know) were false in a public statement he put his name on. They've been repeatedly corrected both by other employees and by data.
Specifically, he at least lied about a 2 week requirement for paper reviews in the internal publication approval process. While that's listed as a further requirement, they don't "normally" require two weeks.
(I wouldn't, for example call the resignation statements lies. Those were unintentional falsehoods)
I doubt we will come to any common ground here. If you think that Timnit Gebru did not resign, it’s probably not possible for us to convince each other of anything, given that I view that as a core, irrefutable fact bolstered by tons of corroborating accounts. The idea that whether it was or wasn’t a resignation (it irrefutably was) can even be called into question whatsoever is completely incompatible with the facts. That attempt to subvert reality was retrofitted onto the situation later, once the consequences of her inappropriate actions had set in for Gebru.
I'll just point out that Google itself has backed off on statements that she resigned. Sundar's email (the most recent public comms) limit itself to describing it as "her departure", and my understanding of California law is that her "departure" would be classified as a dismissal, not a resignation, though ultimately this depends on very particular specifics that aren't public, such as when her last paydate was, however what I've seen seems to suggest that it would lean towards dismissal. [0]
For what its worth, I don't think "threatening to resign" is the same as resignation. Much as I don't think "threatening to shoot someone" is attempted homicide.
That comment from Sundar bolsters the fact she resigned. People were raking him over the coals to reverse the earlier claims of resignation to say she was fired, and seeing the CEO refuse to do that is pretty huge evidence of how secure the legal team must feel that calling it a resignation is completely correct and needs no retraction or correction.
I don't see how the CEO refusing to continue to say she resigned bolsters the claim she resigned.
> calling it a resignation is completely correct and needs no retraction or correction.
Alternatively: publicly calling it a firing is essentially an admission of guilt. That's the one thing Google's lawyers would insist Google cannot do.
Presumably neither one of us are the experts on EEOC and employment litigation strategies. So instead I'm going to take the statements at face value. And at face value: Google is no longer willing to state that Dr.Gebru resigned. Anything else is spin.
It’s disgusting that you literally have two Google employees providing you the truth and you just keep saying “No, you must be mistaken.” I have eyes, I can read. I have a brain that functions very well. A lie is a lie is a lie. And even if lawyers some how manage to button this up, it’s still a lie in the court of public opinion...
EDIT: Sorry, I understand that you don’t have as much information as us and you’re just going off based on tweets and stuff. But come on. It’s insulting to be lied to like that. I hope you can understand that feeling at least.
Yes, he literally lied by omission. Internally, there’s an entire data analysis available for viewing. We have literally asked senior leadership why his email does not align with facts and we have not gotten a response. Internally, you can also read the exact feedback that Timnit’s paper received. Like I said, I’m assuming you don’t work at Google because even if you didn’t like Timnit and just think she’s a whiny researcher, there’s no way possible that you could say that Jeff Dean didn’t lie.
Besides the 2 week thing, he also misrepresented the “list of demands” to make it seem like it was worse than it actually was. So much so that I’m even surprised he was allowed to publish the email publicly.
I can’t imagine a single lawyer looked at his email, honestly.
Hypothetical but likely scenario below.
Jeff Dean: “Oh, you say she made a list of demands. Ok, let me put that in the email. Oh, you said there’s this 2 week deadline that she didn’t follow. Ok, let me put that in the email. What else do you want me to add?”
I believe the question you should be asking is _who_ told him these things. Please guess.
"Subsequent correspondence from a researcher to reviewers shows authors “updated to remove all references to Google products.” A draft seen by Reuters had mentioned Google-owned YouTube"
or this:
"""A draft reviewed by Reuters included “concerns” that this technology can promote “disinformation, discriminatory or otherwise unfair results” and “insufficient diversity of content,” as well as lead to “political polarization.”
The final publication instead says the systems can promote “accurate information, fairness, and diversity of content.”"""
or this:
"A paper this month on AI for understanding a foreign language softened a reference to how the Google Translate product was making mistakes following a request from company reviewers, a source said"
or this:
"A draft described how such disclosures could infringe copyrights or violate European privacy law, a person familiar with the matter said. Following company reviews, authors removed the legal risks, and Google published the paper"
Seems like there's a lot more than "two sentences".
Hah, reminds me of this literature teacher I had in school. She asked us to write a report on the positive aspects of Hamlet. I remember sitting at home and thinking "Well... It could have been worse - more people could have died, that's positive thinking, right?"
Everybody knows that. You can think it's a bad thing for a private company to do bad things, even if they're free to. Stating a fact isn't an argument.
I think the comment flies more in the wierd way Google is treated by the media when other corpos aren't.
E.g. noone is batting an eye when Apple chooses cherry-picked based datapoints for their performance comparisons or when Stanfords research department spins a paper to get them more funding.
For Google we keep getting this streams of "Google is acting like any other corporation, OH GODS". It's... wierd.
I dont know if a case where Apple hired ethicists and then fired them for their research? Admittedly apple also doses all their employees with NDAs up the wazoo so we simply can’t know these things.
But then nobody should call whatever they are publishing "paper". Because if you "research" with a PR-directive, it is literally not science. If they want to "research" like a corporation, kick them out of Google Scholar and scientific discourse, right now, please.
Propaganda disguised as research has historically been a source of immense harm to the public good, and identifying it is a crucial step to reversing that harm.
Consider the historical parallel to the tobacco industry’s research departments. And asbestos. And lead. And talc. And etc. The researchers found that the products were harmful, but their results were squelched. “Do no harm,” indeed.
Algorithmic biases and their application to human systems are a very interesting, and important topic. And yes, they can be unfair to already disadvantaged people
But I think the discussion too easily devolves into the craziest humanities self-pleasing circles. Then they are surprised they get push back? Of course Google also share their side of the blame when they think just creating an "ethics commission" with a rubber stamp solves their issue
That's an actually good question. AI is supposed to be fed with real-live data, after all it has to be something usable in the real-world.
Now, you feed AI with crime data, looking at statistics such AI will suspect people having black color of the skin to be criminals more often than people with white skin. Is that ok? Is it ok to say that if some person happens to have black skin there is a bigger chance that it is criminal?
In statistical terms the answer is yes, but if we deal with an actual person, we should treat it as a unique person and the matter of the skin color should not matter.
Before II World War there were scientific studies in Germany that showed that in some big cities districts there are more rats. Accidentally or not, it turned out that those are districts with large Jewish population. So Nazis took those statistical results to prove that Jews are dirty, spread diseases, etc. Was that science, even though it was peer reviewed and published? Rather not (in the first place they didn't even bother to check if people living there were rich, poor, etc.).
History knows many "scientific researches" by the ones like Eugen Fisher, dr. Mengele, that were performed in a scientific way, but they were lacking something very important and non-trivial: ethics.
Now the problem is that ethics needs to have some source, it does not grow on a tree. For ages Christianity was a source of ethics in Europe (less in US, that's why you could have slavery in modern times there), currently Christianity is almost gone in Europe, the question is were to seek the source of ethics.
> Now the problem is that ethics needs to have some source, it does not grow on a tree. For ages Christianity was a source of ethics in Europe (less in US, that's why you could have slavery in modern times there), currently Christianity is almost gone in Europe, the question is were to seek the source of ethics.
Europe had philosophers long before it had Christianity.
> For ages Christianity was a source of ethics in Europe (less in US, that's why you could have slavery in modern times there)
This is completely incoherent and ahistorical; the US was in many ways more Christian, or at least more intensely Christian and making it a key part of its politics, right from the Pilgrim Fathers to televangelists.
People gave pro-slavery speeches from pulpits in both the US and UK. There were some Christians against it, most notably the Quakers, but slavery and the alleged moral justifications for it were in no way incompatible with Christianity.
Even today, US churches tend to be ("voluntarily") segregated.
> For ages Christianity was a source of ethics in Europe
Two angels arrive in Sodom, and Lot shows them hospitality. However, the men of the city gathered around Lot's house and demanded that he give them the two guests so that they could rape them. In response to this, Lot offers the mob his two virgin daughters instead.
...
Lot's wife turns into a pillar of salt, but Lot and his daughters escape to Zoar, and end up living in a cave in the mountains. In Genesis 19:30–38 Lot's daughters got their father drunk, and over two consecutive nights had sex with him without his knowledge.
Sorry, were you somehow under the impression that the people of Sodom, Lot, and his daughters are being held up as models we should all be emulating?
I always find it a bit strange that people despise simplistic "Sunday-school" answers to life, but then when they read the Bible and find messy situations like the one described above, they say, "What kind messed up story is this?" Real life is sometimes messed up. A book that skipped over the messed up stuff would be pretty useless.
If you read the old testament, it's brutal and often barbaric. It's written in bronze age and relfects life of the time. To argue that it reflects morals or 'messed up' situatuons we'd consider in civilised society is to be delusional.
So first of all, I think you're failing to acknowledge the brutal barbarism of our time. The Killing Fields? The Cultural Revolution? Stalin? The Tuskegee Syphilis Study? They told that story about Lot specifically because it was not the norm, but was the kind of thing that could actually happen.
Secondly, the claim was that Christianity -- that is, the teaching of Jesus -- has affected European ideas about morality. Lot is further away from Jesus than Jesus is from us.
I think the person you responded to has an inaccurate view of the history of slavery in Europe. But only someone who has never experienced a different culture could say that Christianity has had no effect on the moral ideas of the West.
That is my whole argument - the times were barbaric, both the old testament and to some degree the new testament largely capture that, so you should not be going round claiming they brought morality to the world / west. I am nor arguing it had to effect, I am arguing it's not like we'd all be a moral vacuum without it.
I am very surprised you are claiming the old testament is somehow not part of Christianity or should now be considered- am I misunderstanding you? I am not a religious scholar, but that's not a view my local priest would support.
Also I fail to see how bringing up Stalin is relevant, you can't even find a communist these days that thinks he was morally upright.
Not actually. Statistics from a larger population "cannot" be used to predict outcomes from a smaller subset or individual from the population. ("cannot" in the sense that you get nonsensical results if you do). See e.g. the ecological fallacy.
Can you show me five philosophy graduate turned AI researcher who thinks if statements are racist? If AI research teams are "full of" them, as you say, it should be trivial to find such people.
Do you have an example of one of these ‘philosophy graduates’ you’re describing?
The only person I’m closely aware of here is Timnit Gebru. She has a bachelors and masters in Electrical Engineering as well as a PhD. If you’re describing her and her ilk as ‘philosophy graduates’ because they have PhDs, I think you’re vastly mischaracterizing their education.
Not sure why this is getting downvotes. When people say things like that, they’re usually racist and misogynistic. His comment was flagged for a reason.
An absurd and highly inappropriate comment. You’re the first to bring up race. There is absolutely no reason to infer that parent has any issue with race or sex whatsoever.
It’s called a dog whistle. You don’t have to specifically mention race or gender in order to imply something about it. It’s not inappropriate. I didn’t flag his comment. Someone else did. It should have been flagged and rightfully was.
I think your points would come across better if you didn’t use such extreme words (absurd, highly inappropriate, absolutely). It’s your opinion, not a fact.
I also find it funny that _my_ comment is highly inappropriate but the actual comment that was flagged is not? Why do you think that? I’m assuming you didn’t get a chance to read it, which begs the question, “Why did you feel the need to champion this cause?”
Again, why are you championing the writer of a flagged comment? Like I said, I didn’t flag the comment. So clearly other people agree with me and saw what I saw. Sorry if that’s hard for you to swallow.
Also, ruslanbogan’s comment did mention race which confirms for me that you didn’t even read it. It accused the researchers of being racist towards if statements. (Please tell me you find that more absurd than what I wrote lol.) Again, why are you championing this cause when you’re clearly wrong?
Also, ruslanbogan’s comment did mention race which confirms for me that you didn’t even read it. It accused the researchers of being racist towards if statements. (Please tell me you find that more absurd than what I wrote lol.) Again, why are you championing this cause when you’re _clearly_ wrong? I’m using an extreme word on purpose.
You are supposed to assume good faith about other posters though. And philosophy is (as far as I know) yet another male-dominated major so I don't get what you mean.
Personally I think the flagged poster was just ranting about technophobia among machine learning bias researchers.
I’ve read enough of HN comments over the years and been in the industry even longer to know not to assume good faith. Sorry. Like I said, someone else flagged the comment, not me.
As a simple example when Kobe Bryant died there were numerous comments on the post saying “Why is this here? This shouldn’t be on Hacker News.” (Even though he was an angel investor). Yet when some random (to me) soccer player died a couple of weeks ago, I didn’t see a single “This doesn’t belong on Hacker News” comment. I looked for them. I also looked up the soccer player to find anything he did remotely related to HN. There was none.
It’s ok to accept that racist and sexist people exist, even on sites like Hacker News. After all, this is just Reddit, right?
Maybe his comment was just so wacky that it made me think this. Is there an article or something that references researchers thinking if statements are racist? Is this like an in-joke at a certain company? I just don’t get it.
What I do get is that lots of people will go out of their way to defend the writer of a _flagged_ comment.
I knew what you were referring to. I simply don’t agree. Just like when I _know_ someone didn’t read the article, I will call them out on it. It really is ok. To be honest, I find it sort of lame whenever someone says “The guidelines say you’re not supposed to do that.” This isn’t elementary school.
I think these sort of rules actually do a disservice to intellectual dialogue and aren’t working as intended.
Why should I pretend that someone said something that they didn’t? Why should I pretend that someone read the article when it’s easily provable that they didn’t?
Again, I didn’t flag the comment. It’s not just me who refused to give OP the benefit of the doubt. Maybe our reaction _is_ the strongest plausible interpretation.
For example, I understand what you said about philosophy being a male-dominated field. But the article referenced _2_ female researchers by name. This is why there are other comments on this post complaining about the researchers being _whiny_.
For example, Timnit Gebru, who does a lot of work in Ethical AI related to sexism and racism, was mentioned briefly. This is why some guy with the username “koreanguy” called Timnit racist and basically said he hates her guts. This is why OP ruslanbogan made some very wacky comment about if statements and racism. He mentioned race first, not me. (He also hasn’t elaborated fully on what he meant, but still has time to downvote me for some reason. He can easily say “No, I actually meant this. My bad.” It’s so simple, really.)
Earlier, you mentioned technophobia. Take a moment and think about what are some of the biggest fears currently being researched related to Ethical AI. You guessed it: are machine learning algorithms doing more harm than good when it comes to the intersection of race and gender.
ruslanbogan’s comment was flagged for a reason. When people make weird/wacky jokes about racism, it usually means that they’re racist. It’s a shame that you’re assuming good faith in him but not me.
Here are a few links related to facial recognition:
It must have been the other sexist and racist people that downvoted my reply to “koreanguy”. His comments about Timnit were violently aggressive and disgusting. He doesn’t even know Timnit yet has so much hatred for her that he basically wants to kill her? She wrote a few tweets. She’s not Hitler. Again, someone _else_ flagged his comment as they rightfully should have. Yet I get downvoted for calling out bad behavior. I hate that I have to work with people like you everyday. HN is almost as bad as the Blind app.
Timnit Gebru is just another racist, who uses her race card when she can't do her job. there are many like her in all types of jobs when things do not go well for them they bring out the racism card.
> Google prohibits retaliation against any worker here at Google who reports or participates in an investigation of a possible violation of our Code, policies, or the law. If you believe you are being retaliated against, please contact Ethics & Compliance.
Well, it is safe to say this is hot garbage then.
I would love Google to remove all the self entitled BS from this statement, so they can act as an everyday faceless big company which is anyway what it is doing, not some moral beacon for the mass to look up to.
The statement exists only to generate traffic for the news outlet for spinning.
But they don’t emphasize it or mention it officially during orientation. It was only mentioned during one of the smaller tech trainings facilitated by a longtime Googler. To paraphrase their words, “I’m not sure why we don’t say this anymore.”
So the statement that it’s really not a slogan anymore is quite true from my experience.
It had multiple mentions (like a dozen or so). They left only one at the end. We can argue about semantics and it not being "technically removed" but the point is they broke the "Don't be evil" spirit of the company, and that was their intention.
It's clear from many events following that one that the company is no longer interested in developing a culture of "ethical employees". They just want cheerleaders now to keep increasing those quarterly results, no matter the cost.
I say all of this with the sadness of a former "Google evangelist." The old Google is gone, and Sundar Pichai being named CEO put the last nail in its coffin.
Though they did replace it with the motto "do the right thing". Which to me is even more scary, as it means that Google decided to stop being a neutral entity within the boundaries of not causing harm, and decided to become a political actor that is committed on advancing its own idea of "right". What if (as it happens) my idea of what is right doesn't match that of a 1.7 trillion company that controls much of the information flow worldwide and provides most of the services I use in my daily life?
Obviously your comment will be downvoted to oblivion without our friends here in the HN audience explaining why, but I have precisely the same experience.
Please can we stop repeating this at every opportunity? I'm sure everyone has heard it a million times. Whatever truth and insight it once conveyed has rather faded away.
"The erudite Faust is highly successful yet dissatisfied with his life, which leads him to make a pact with the Devil at a crossroads, exchanging his soul for unlimited knowledge and worldly [power]."
tl;dr - if we don't create it, control it, and make sure everyone knows about it, someone else is going to make all those decisions for you. Its coming regardless
These are not equivalent comparisons to me. Tobacco was always harmful, inhaling smoke in general is just bad, and the others could be through improper use but safe otherwise. Let alone all of what you mentioned will not have the impact AI will
AI's potential is equally good and equally bad and any of the bad is purely because someone or some group employs it that way.
The real danger of AI isn't the obvious tinpot dictators using it drive war but in politicians and government officials hiding behind the term as an excuse for their bad decisions. The more you demand of your government to give you stuff or services the more likely you will be subject to this tech
I say this each time the subject of AI abuse, facial recognition or similar comes up.
This is not something that cancel culture will stop. Nothing is going to stop it from coming. So the best alternative to the technically and morally (hate using that word) driven people is to hit it head on from all directions. This means working to make sure it does what it is supposed to do but also that everyone knows what it really cannot do, working the legal end to insure there are laws and consequences for employing the technology incorrectly, and through the information end in keeping the public fully aware of who is using, how they use it, and how to legally protect yourself from it.
It seems to be an unfortunate reality of doing research for anything other than the sake of research.
My physics teacher worked for some kind of government air pollution modelling group in the past, and effectively said that they would often be told "Here's the result, find us data to make it work".
Wasn’t the requirement to add a mention of the things google has done to improve the situation, rather than a squelching?
It’s like if an asbestos company did a bunch of research on healthy insulators, then found that the original products were in fact harmful. Before publishing it, the bosses demand mention of the prior work towards healthy insulators.
Public institutions tend to observe the same policies, even when there's no direct commercial interest.
For example, if you join a Math department and start publishing papers that cast the department's research interests in a negative light, that's often a good way to get fired.
I mean, seriously, go ask just about any professor of any topic at any university if their field is undervalued or overvalued. They'll almost universally tell you that their field is undervalued, underappreciated, and more important than people think. They deserve more funding, and you should definitely consider majoring in their field.
General proposition may be true, but how can a math publication place the department interests in a negative light? Like "Doesn't matter how hard we try, there are always undecidable facts in our own system"? :p
I still have faith in the research done by hard science research teams.
> how can a math publication place the department interests in a negative light?
With Math, the sensitive topic is utility. Math departments would tend to be upset by someone pushing papers that, say, call attention to the lack of social benefit relative to other fields of research that taxpayers could be funding instead.
I guess a researcher could also spin a narrative about mathematicians' contributions to cryptography, examining the negative consequences enabled by stuff like Bitcoin.
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> I still have faith in the research done by hard science research teams.
That gets kinda complicated.
I mean, hard-science teams often rely on their expertise, as it's their unique source of value: if the area that they excel in is shown to be sub-optimal, admitting it would mean losing their current career path (and often taking a significant tumble down-the-ladder after transitioning).
So hard-science teams are often largely academically honest in what they do publish, though they're often biased toward casting what they do in a positive light.
For a common example, have you ever met an older computer tech who insists on using a legacy, obsoleted technology because it's what they know best? A lot of academics basically do the same thing.
My understanding is that the Google is pressuring it's employees (who are research scientists) to refrain from publishing papers that Google management believes casts a negative light on a Google product. It's not theoretical, researchers are quoted in the article and papers have been altered.
I find it difficult to come up with an analogy from a public institution. What is the product the math department would be pressuring it's members to protect?
Sure, each department in a university believes it's work important. That doesn't seem even remotely similar to me as this issue with Google.
Sorry, I'm having trouble following this comment. In a public institution (as well as at Google) research papers are subject to peer review before publication. Now Google is adding _another review process_ after peer review, I don't believe this is something that would happen at a public university.
Do you have an example of a public university censoring research papers that passed peer review because that university believed the paper cast "an innacurate negative light"... on what, exactly?
The tone of parent comment was "Google should tolerate research that's critical of Google", which I'm sympathetic to.
My rejoinder was that if it's inaccurately critical of Google, like hyping carbon impact without mentioning a decades-long carbon mitigation program, I get a lot more sympathetic to Google's position. Why should they pay someone to spread falsehoods about them?
The "mitigation" in question is buying carbon offsets (I mean there are improvements in DC efficiency also, but those only do so much, and language models ballooning 100x isn't going to be fixed with 10 or 50% efficiency improvements). For the moment "carbon neutrality" is only achieved through the purchase of energy offsets.
That doesn't mitigate. It offsets. Don't get me wrong, still better than nothing, but its not a mitigation.
I'm having trouble getting a clear perspective on what's going on. So many of the descriptions are vague and based on apparently informal descriptions, leaving much to the reader's imagination.
> It's not theoretical, researchers are quoted in the article and papers have been altered.
In grad school, PhD students' advisors typically insist on various revisions before publishing a paper, as publications reflect on the advisor and their institution. So there's nothing even slightly weird about Google having the same interest in revising the papers pushed by its researchers.
Unless there IS something weird about what Google's doing? But if so, what is it?
When an graduate school advisor provides feedback on a paper, the goal is to improve the quality of the paper. The peer review process also has the same goal in mind: produce a better paper.
According to this Reuters article, Google's new process happens after peer review and Google's other processes have completed.
"The “sensitive topics” process adds a round of scrutiny to Google’s standard review of papers for pitfalls such as disclosing of trade secrets, eight current and former employees said."
Instead of publishing the paper, Google will now review the paper with an eye to negative impact the paper may have on existing Google product (or lobbying efforts, etc.) Google isn't doing this to improve the quality of the paper, they are doing it to protect their business interests.
"For some projects, Google officials have intervened in later stages. A senior Google manager reviewing a study on content recommendation technology shortly before publication this summer told authors to “take great care to strike a positive tone,” according to internal correspondence read to Reuters."
I think this is very different from the advising process in graduate school.
Preventing people from disclosing trade secrets seem fair to me. Preventing valid research simply because it may negatively impact business strikes me as less reasonable.
"Four staff researchers, including senior scientist Margaret Mitchell, said they believe Google is starting to interfere with crucial studies of potential technology harms."
> I think this is very different from the advising process in graduate school.
All of that sounds normal to me. Including filtering out trade-secrets, which is completely normal when working with trade-secrets in grad school too. Additionally, it's completely normal to filter out intellectual property you might plan to patent; confidential information; proprietary industrial information; information protected by law; dangerous findings (e.g., hackers often omit details of an exploit until the relevant vendor has had time to fix); and a few other categories.
Maintaining a positive, constructive tone is also completely normal. For example, failed experiments are typically described as progressive steps toward an ultimate success; unforeseen problems are discoveries; and major issues are seen as research challenges to be overcome. Or, ya know, stuff like that.
I mean, is that all this story's about? Because if that's it, then it seems like nothing substantial. But if that's the case, why is this in the news?
What is the product the math department would be pressuring it's members to protect?
I’m not sure about math, but in physics it would be string theory which has been a dead end and has mostly served as a welfare program for boomer scientists
> I find it difficult to come up with an analogy from a public institution. What is the product the math department would be pressuring it's members to protect?
couldn't the exact thing that happened at Google happened at a university? For example one researcher could publish a paper criticizing the methods that other researchers in the department have developed because of their carbon impact.
I think it's fair to say that there are internal pressures not to do that - - such a professor would have a hard time thriving in the department if they are attacking the methods of their colleagues.
Mathematicians are pretty open about the fact that their field is unimportant and their research funding is coasting off of winning WWII with Enigma codebreaking.
The only reason they deserve money is that they teach mandatory calculus to uninterested non-mathematicians.
>They'll almost universally tell you that their field is undervalued, underappreciated
This is most likely due to an availability bias. They have concrete examples in their own sphere but not near as much detail about competing domains. This leads to the mistaken assumption that their own field more important than it possibly would be if viewed in the overarching context
This sounds like the typical false equivocation about "all media being lies" when somebody brings up the danger of outright, constant propaganda like OANN.
Just because bias is impossible to avoid, does not mean that all bias is the same.
The goal isn't outright elimination of bias (which is completely impossible), its ensuring incentives that are aligned so bias doesn't become a self-reinforcing feedback loop.
IMHO, a scientist capable of striking any tone in their work, positive or negative, is doing marketing / PR work rather than science.
There's nothing wrong with that. Just like any other member of society, a scientist may want to contribute to a (for-profit or non-profit) organization of their choice, be it for material or spiritual rewards. However, I think it's important not to get science and marketing confused.
So, I think a more precise title would be "Google told its scientists to strike a positive tone when they use academic papers as a marketing tool".
Any scientist writing prose will necessarily strike a tone. Unless they’re just publishing raw data, the way you use that data in your prose will lead to a different tone. I have read a good deal of historical and modern scientific papers and they all had different tones.
When I was young and (more) idealistic, my department chair pulled me aside after I’d been dogmatic about something and said “everything is political... The sooner you realize that, the better off you’ll be.”
It took 10 years for that to really sink in, but I knew that every paper has an angle well before that. There’s a position of inevitability about AI around Google, and, to an extent, I agree. Unlike tobacco, alcohol, firearms, cars, fuel, AI is applied mathematics. It’s virtually impossible to restrict functionally, requiring macro behavioral constraints on businesses and governments that are very difficult to enforce if you want to regulate it. Furthermore, ceding the technological lead and removing the business incentive likely has defense (read: offense) implications on the global stage.
Some things are going to be hard to explain. Some skin tones, hair styles, accents, pitches, timbres, writing styles, etc. may have more/less separable entropy, and that’s going to inevitably make models seem racist/sexist for some applications. However, we’re pretty far from those edges. Instead, our model biases have likely been driven by our datasets, drawn from our coworkers, family, and friends. In this industry, that’s currently a recipe for over sampling in some demographics and under sampling in others.
The thing is - I don't think the bias in AI is fixable. The way we fix it is to regulate (not self-regulate, Google, Apple, Facebook and other AI companies aren't trustworthy to do it right) where AI is allowed to be used and how much of a negative impact of a persons livelihood can it impact.
In other words, we need to use all the power we have to avoid "The computer said NO, you're homeless/jailed/poor forever now" scenarios.
Unfortunately a legal solution is weaker because it has to enumerate the precise conditions that are unacceptable. Do you ban the logistic function? Tanh? Statistics?
Actuarial tables have been a part of decision-making for a very long time and it's not possible to form a comprehensive legal statement of "all decisions must be made in good faith with respect to inherent biases and to the most rigorous epistemological standards".
Perhaps there are mechanisms around performance under external test, auditing, or safe harbor due to documented good-faith, but it is not possible to guarantee correctness for the full set from a subset.
Similarly, some approaches will plainly fail to perform well with subgroups of people due to sensing technologies. That may appear as model bias, but it's really a matter of physics and available entropy.
For the time being, mechanisms that use machine inference as an aid rather than a guide (leaving the judgment to the human in the loop) are probably the best we can hope for.
>Some things are going to be hard to explain. Some skin tones, hair styles, accents, pitches, timbres, writing styles, etc. may have more/less separable entropy, and that’s going to inevitably make models seem racist/sexist for some applications.
We all know that if you have garbage as an input the output can be anything. So a professional data scientist should do his job and analyze the data first , identify the problems and if it can't be clean go in the world and collect better data.
If you are a high paid professional you should understand that say for face recognition you should get a correct sample size, correct distributed (sorry I am not a professional so i don't know how they should do their job but I know that there are statistical tool that will measure things like this) , instead it seems developers use as input for their experiments some garbage data that they can get their hands on.
If all you are wanting to know is "will this work" it is way to onerous to focus on getting a perfect dataset. If it gets into a product though, that is really pretty bad, but it may be a consequence of their development lifecycle or any other org issue rather than a failure of this or that data scientist.
>If all you are wanting to know is "will this work" it is way to onerous to focus on getting a perfect dataset
If the definition of work is relaxed and equivalent to "is better then random and our marketing can sell it"
If you are a professional and you data implies that race predicts school grades and you say "it works" instead of "something is not right, let me check the financial status or house size/family size" then you are an impostor, you plug libraries with code from Stack Overflow until it works, doing the right job would give you better results and fix the bias. If you work for Google,Facebook or other giants I am sure there is not an excuse that we don't have the money to hire competent people and cleanup the data or gather correct data.
Think about it, because some person/company is incompetent you make life harder for millions of people, why we try to find excuses for not doing the correct thing, we need to demand that this AIs with big consequences are created using mathematically correct methods and when someone reports potential problems we need to stop excusing the guys that want to silence them because bad PR.
Not really sure if this is true in general. May be true of commercial entities, but I really hope this isn't true in general.
> Furthermore, ceding the technological lead and removing the business incentive likely has defense (read: offense) implications on the global stage.
Does it though? Uncovering faults and cracks of a system does exactly the opposite. Discouraging experts from looking for those faults may give the perception of lead, for a while, but is a dangerous mistake to make in the long run.
Interfering with experts by pulling them out of, say, academia by paying them more and turning them into your PR tools, I think, is detrimental to the advancement of technology. We may be losing a whole generation of scientists to AdTech when they could have been doing more worthwhile work elsewhere(which, by the way, is why we are here in the first place - someone toiled away at a university to come up with a genius idea to design an artificial perceptron).
As to your claim about whether these companies will play a pivotal role in paradigm shifting technology advancements like fundamental research has in the past remains yet to be seen.
I don't think that uncovering faults and cracks is a disincentive. Prohibiting use of machine learning techniques and technologies definitely reduces the addressible market, and, thus, profit incentive.
There are plenty of reasons to do research and make strides, but "big pot of gold at the end of the rainbow" is one we have to acknowledge the existence of.
As far as paper angle goes, sometimes the angle is "what we spent the last year doing is noteworthy enough to warrant publication".
Read every paper skeptically. Make it prove to you that it has the data, rigor, and reproducibility to support its claims.
Sure, politics is in everything down to the design of the armchair you are arguing from. That however doesn't fucking mean that all papers shall be considered equal?
Do you think you would be able to differentiate the value of a census statistics from a 2015 paper written by the state of Nevada from a 1930 census statistic paper from Nazi Germany? Excellent!
Because very obviously there is a line where science crosses into bullshit. Sure, the line is multidimensional, ever changing and very blurry. As you say, from finance to family everything factors in and there is no true objective way of doing science. That does not however mean we as humanity can get away with defeationist pseudo-enlightenment by just giving up every analysis of nuance or motive.
What Google is doing here is not in the territory of science anymore - you can and should argue that - and should be treated as such. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance, whataboutism won't cut it.
I’m saying that papers should be read with a default position of skepticism and consideration of the motivations of the authors (and they all have an angle). When I read an ML paper with authors from Google, I assume they have an angle. When I read an ML Ethics paper with authors from Google, that already went double. Now it’s triple.
So look at my argument differently. Every single scientific paper you read should be read as non-objective as a starting position. If it can overcome starting from that position with data, methodology, and reasoning, it’s a solid scientific paper.
Yet Redditor's and HN'ers treat Scientists as centuries ago people treated men of the cloth. Their word is not to be scrutinized. You wouldn't want to be outed as being critical of the Scientific Method would you? (the irony between those two sentences have been lost in the last 5 years)
When scientists write results sections and abstracts they strike a tone. They make an argument for why the raw data is meaningful. Scientists interpret data, which involves a layer of human analysis that is not objective but is attempting to find the correct language and narrative to describe the results of an objective, quantitative process. Outside of the methods and data sections, academic science writing absolutely has to strike a tone. And especially when you are seeking grants and career progression one of the tones you have to strike is to highlight the importance of the work.
Once in a science course in college, I had to present a paper to my class. I tried to present it "objectively" as you would describe it, avoid striking a tone or making judgements. My professor told my presentation was technically correct but failed to highlight the broad significance of the research, which comes from tone. Science writing requires selecting a tone of voice.
'is doing marketing / PR work rather than science.
There's nothing wrong with that'
I like how we learned nothing from decades of lies and billions of damages in big tabacco, asbestos, lead in petrol and climate change.
Whats next, can we tell aircraft safety inspectors to strike a positive tone and declare a damaged airframe flight worthy? How about rating some securities in a positive tone?
Scientific papers often have a "research implications" or "implications" section that generally is optimistic or pessimistic depending on the results. There's nothing wrong with this, so long as the implications are not steering the results.
It is at will research funded by google, the researcher makes it clear what their findings were, they want the original research paper to have its say based on results not spin.
If google wants specific outcomes from research, go to the marketing department instead of funding real research.
Many of the comments on this thread are expressing concern and (more or less) asking 'why does it work like this?' and (in some cases) 'it would be better if it didn't work like this."
2021 will be an interesting year and the feedback I got after my latest booklet / lit review aimed at Silicon Valley problems is just explosive: tightening regulation, legal actions, anti-monopolies concerted effort will ramp up dramatically at worldwide level.
My money-making idea from this is AI to detect sentences or fragments from your emails that could be taken out of context and made into embarrassing headlines if the email gets leaked.
The “sensitive topics” extra review seems completely fair and obviously necessary. Anyone acting like that amounts to censorship in a private company is totally off their rocker.
This article seems really weak, and of course there’s the obligatory attempt to tie it in with Timnit Gebru’s resignation and her very inappropriate behavior, even though for all of Google’s flaws, Google clearly and obviously did the right thing both to disapprove Gebru’s weak paper and accept her resignation based on her ultimatum.
Could you please back up your claim as to the paper's quality - do yoy have credentials and background that enable you to cast this judgement, or is this pedestrian?
I don't need credentials to read a paper which muses about current events.
You want to outsource your thinking to the credentialed? Go ahead but the rest of us don't have to. The paper is out there and it's quite easy to read, because it's not saying a whole lot.
It has leaked. Activism masquerading as science. Yes, people also call critical race theory and intersectional theory academic disciplines. They hold conferences, have titles and credentials, are professors, etc. So yes the paper is high quality for a certain niche.
It's not a technical paper for not a technical conference. It's a "raising awareness" paper on identity politics beating the same drum, without much novel insight or analysis or new data. But yes, it has 120 or 200 citations, a fact that was proudly highlighted by authors on Twitter to underline the scholarly quality.
Yes, gender seminars and whiteness workshops are also properly credentialed.
Theology is also a discipline but perhaps not the same as sciences.
I deal with this on a regular basis in the research world, there is what is a really toxic and dangerous bias towards constructing the positive, i.e., making things seem, appear, and even fabricate outcomes that will be affirming of desired outcomes or other group biases.
It is not research, let alone science when you are striking a positive tone, it’s fraud.
This is a really important point. Executive-land is all about image and framing, so I can totally see how execs think it's not a big deal to "just make the case" or frame things less negatively.
But while that's ok in a slide deck, it's _not_ ok in a research paper. Researchers aren't (shouldn't be) accountable to business outcomes, but rather the truth of what they argue.
Grant-land is very very often about image and framing. How often are grant administrators interested in pure research and let the chips fall where they may vs getting results that yield happy articles, then more grants?
There is a witch hunt against Google that is politically motivated happening now.
If Google is funding its own research, it should be able to look at whatever it wants. Why do we hold Google to a standard that most other companies are far worse at following?
The appropriate place for independent critical research is outside of the company itself.
Google is actually a pretty well intentioned entity to put out as much self critical research as it does.
This isn't relegated to science or management - we're seeing it all across society these days. Nuance is dead. If the message cannot be delivered in a 120 character tweet, and cannot self-gratify 50 million teenage viewers with only a superficial understanding of the topic, then it shouldn't be a public position at all. Of course, I'm slightly exaggerating.
But the consequence is very real - organizations, whether corporate or scientific, whether public or private have had to drop an iron curtain around their honest nuanced internal strategies in order to avoid the attention of the hyperbolic and outrage-fueled social media world.
> Researchers aren't (shouldn't be) accountable to business outcomes, but rather the truth of what they argue.
if a business funds research, they expect the funding to have a positive ROI. Therefore, the business will pressure research towards this, and thus, will inevitably make the research accountable for an outcome.
This is why fundamental research should be publicly funded, and publicly available.
That isn’t just true in the research world, it’s even worse in the corporate world. Something about human nature where naysayers don’t get much acceptance.
From what the article mentions, it looks like the sensitive subjects they worry about are those which can get a company burned at the stake on social media these days. It's not great, but it's un unsurprising effect of the current culture wars.
Or annoy the Chinese government, potentially make their self-driving cars project look less perfect, make it a bit too obvious how much location tracking Google is doing, make their home security integration plans not quite so shiny, and so forth. The actual list is very clearly not just about social media, if anything the majority is topics Google has a financial interest in that don't get that much attention on the big networks.
bit of slippery cliff you've tripped over there. From "strike a positive tone" to "fabricate outcomes" (data?). The latter is clearly fraud, and qualitatively different from the Google manager's suggestion.
> The manager added, “This doesn’t mean we should hide from the real challenges” posed by the software.
If I ever plucked a single sentence out of a long post and called attention to it context-free, I could probably make whoever posted it look fairly bad. But, in the context of news articles, it becomes the headline? Was the context "Try to strike a positive tone...or else you're fired" - or "Try to strike a positive tone...you've shown that these problems are solvable"
It's important to draw a distinction between positive tonality and censoring negative results.
For example, the recent COVID-19 vaccines: they're commonly reported to be 95% effective and have some risk of side-effects. This can be reported factually, or spun in a positive or negative light. For example, a sensationalist might try to stir up interest by spinning a narrative that focuses on the vaccines being unreliable and dangerous, as proven by science that Big Pharma doesn't want you to know about!
And as we've seen, sensationalists can get cult followings. However bad their ploy may be for society overall, the sensationalist themself may stand to profit.
So as reprehensible as censoring legitimate scientific research would be, a directive to "strike a positive tone" sounds like it could be a very different, far more sensible thing.
> And as we've seen, sensationalists can get cult followings.
We're talking about published research papers, not people posting stuff on twitter. I have not seen anyone get a "cult following" from a research paper.
It's common for researchers to publish a journal article in a more academic tone, then use it as a basis for legitimacy in public venues.
This happens at both individual and institutional levels. Examples:
1.) At an individual level, someone might publish a study on a social issue that's important to them, adhering to relevant academic standards, then establish a popular identity as the author of that study. Afterwards they can comment on blogs, in media releases, on talk shows, etc., using the perceived credibility established through academic publication to pursue their personal goals.
2.) At an institutional level, someone might publish a study on some issue relevant to an industry, then use it in political lobbying related to that industry as well as popular press to build good-will. Many academics have industrial sponsors for this reason.
Well, I'd be fine with Google putting its thumb on the scale in terms of how researchers engage in public press conferences/media releases/talk shows, etc.
What we're discussing, however, is "striking a positive tone" in actual research papers.
> What we're discussing, however, is "striking a positive tone" in actual research papers.
Yeah.. that's what pretty much every academic does. Most talk up the merits of their work and the general importance of their field. The idea's to be constructive, always looking for avenues of improvement. For example, if you test a new medical treatment and it's not great, you don't trash it as a failure but rather focus on how it can be improved to get more positive results.
Though I'm starting to get the impression that you're reading "striking a positive tone" as meaning something other than what I'm seeing in those words. So to avoid talking past each other, what exactly are you seeing? And do you find it somehow problematic?
That's a good counterexample, although I'll note that Andrew Wakefield is referred to as the founder of the "science by press conference" phenomenon - so not really his research paper that was the single thing that attracted attention.
This. Google wants their cake + to eat it to by hiring the best in class Ph.D's with the allure of doing "academic research" but paid a big-tech salary.
Turns out it's mostly PR and buying yourself credibility at this point.
Honestly find it confusing how almost everyone from the outside could see that teams reason for existing was PR but the team itself seemed totally oblivious to the fact.
> When the result is predefined it's not research anymore, it's advertisement. Still calling it “research” is fraud.
Like, when you see someone who's an amazing software engineer with a great salary, and you know they spend a lot of time doing research. Then you suppose the research must be paying off. Over time, survival tends to equal truth.
For almost any paper I read, before I pick it up, I know there were statistically significant findings. Those results were not predefined. Instead they are part of the academic review process that filters out null results. That same process (depending on the field) also rewards novelty or all sorts of other things. It's very much a human process.
If Google did not want to fund research that conflicted with their bottom line, they could have avoided hiring researchers interested in that kind of work. Instead they hired these people and told them they would be free of censorship. Now that these people work there and depend on Google for their paycheck, Google is instituting this new policy. During a global pandemic.
Sounds like censorship to me: hire the people in the field who might publish research you disagree with, then pressure them from a position of power.
You're confusing the ideas with their presentation. Google never allowed someone to post a paper under their name saying ‘datacentres generate CO₂, that's evil and we should focus on smaller datacentres’, but that doesn't mean they didn't care about CO₂ production; clearly they did, since they're now carbon negative.
Same thing here. The researchers' jobs aren't to publically deface Google, they're to help direct Google down the right path.
I agree that Google may have been interested in hiring these researchers to help "direct Google down the right path". That seems reasonable to me.
I'm not seeing where I confuse "the ideas with their presentation" or where anyone talked about researchers "publicly defacing Google". The Reuters article is talking about ML and AI researchers who are now (recently) finding their research subject to a new review policy, above and beyond the typical peer review that they expected.
Google always had internal review processes. If your argument is not that the new review process is unreasonable, just that people were hired under the expectation that there would be none, then I get where you're coming from but it doesn't sound very likely to me.
> Google always had internal review processes. If your argument is not that the new review process is unreasonable, just that people were hired under the expectation that there would be none, then I get where you're coming from but it doesn't sound very likely to me.
Here is my steelman position: I think the objection is that the old internal review was reasonable, and while the argument can be made that the new one does not seem unreasonable to many people under the principle of "don't bite the hand that feeds you", it's reasonableness in a faux-academic setting is at least debatable, and in any case it is inarguable that the new one is more restrictive than the one that was in place when these researchers were hired.
So, at the very least, this seems like a unilateral bait-and-switch on Google's part. The company is now reneging on the representations made to prospective employees regarding their academic freedom.
In twitter culture, public defacing seems to be the primary way to help direct things go down the right path. Want to get google down the right path? Publicly call them out for not doing it already and get enough other people to do the same that there’s no option but to loudly comply.
The problem is that Google wanted to monetize AI via marketing itself to a higher share price and more panache (sell the sizzle). If AI were solely an internal tool at Google, none, or very few, of these ancillary problems would have presented themselves.
Or, they could have just labelled all these efforts with the less sexy and scary moniker of "machine learning".
Every specialty has taboos and learning what they are and how to avoid them is part of being successful with the job. As a physics graduate student I made an impassioned case to a high energy researcher that the money spent on high energy research was low yield and should be pushed to the biological sciences ... suffice it to say he did not take my points on their merits. Upton Sinclair’s famous “ It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” applies in the sciences.
Reminds me of an interview a cosmologist from my university gave to the CBC around the time the higgs boson was confirmed by the CERN. When asked about real world consequences of the discovery, he answered "None."
I mean Heinrich Hertz, who proved Maxwell's electromagnetic wave theory also said "It's of no use whatsoever[...] this is just an experiment that proves Maestro Maxwell was right—we just have these mysterious electromagnetic waves that we cannot see with the naked eye. But they are there." [1]
If you had asked Erwin Schrödinger how his wave equation could be commercialized he'd probably wouldn't have had any idea either. 100 years later it's the basis for most of our advanced computer technology. I predict the same thing will happen with the standard model, it's just that we can't see the applications yet because we're not technologically advanced enough.
This seems very different to me than hiring researchers doing work in fields that directly impact your business and telling them their work will not be censored. And then censoring them from a position of power, since you now provide their paycheck.
Keep mind that this is a new, recently instituted process. During the interview process when these researchers were hired, this policy did not exist. Perhaps they were naive to believe that such a policy wouldn't be instituted later but I think that's a different discussion.
The Reuters article says exactly the opposite. If you have documentation that this policy has been in place but ignored, I think that would have a big impact on this unfolding story, it definitely strike me as newsworthy.
The Reuters article clearly refers to this as a new change in policy and procedure.
"Google’s new review procedure asks that researchers consult with legal, policy and public relations teams before pursuing topics such as face and sentiment analysis and categorizations of race, gender or political affiliation, according to internal webpages explaining the policy."
"Studying Google services for biases is among the “sensitive topics” under the company’s new policy, according to an internal webpage. Among dozens of other “sensitive topics” listed were the oil industry, China, Iran, Israel, COVID-19, home security, insurance, location data, religion, self-driving vehicles, telecoms and systems that recommend or personalize web content."
To be clear, there was a review policy prior to the new one, but it's focus was rather different, the primary concern was on not revealing proprietary information. Which is a fairly reasonable restriction, though I would be interested to know what, if any, papers were asked to be withdrawn or retracted under the old policy.
I am a physicist, and I would say that, perhaps, you don't understand why we "waste" money on high energy physics. It's very similar to the reason why rich people buy useless status symbols, when they could instead buy useful things. It's essentially telling everyone, "I am so rich I don't care about money anymore and can afford to waste some of it on this useless thing".
In science, we as a society throw money at something like high energy physics, because we are telling ourselves, "We love knowledge so much, that we will throw it at high energy physics, which has little economic benefit to us" [1].
In other words, you can't prove that you love knowledge for its own sake, if you only invest in fields which have economic benefits. You have to invest in fields with no benefit, to prove to ourselves that we still care. That has deep and lasting philosophical impact on society.
[1] If you read grand funding agencies internal documents, you will learn that the primary economic benefit of fields like high energy physics is training people on hard problems, who will then go and apply those skills and raise the bar in other fields.
Your [1] should add that “additionally, there is a huge funding funnel that select companies can tap to without having to produce any results at all!” So funneling money to friends and special (dark) projects is also on the table, as a simple matter of what is “possible”.
How did you know, as a graduate student no less, that research money spent on high energy research was low yield compared to the biological sciences? I think that's a pretty bold and naive statement to make.
For example, research on quantum-mechanical light-matter interaction was considered not very practically relevant in the 80s and 90s. In the 2000s the results were picked up by the superconducting qubit research community and used to great effect to build a viable approach to quantum computing.
The outcome of research is inherently hard to predict, and telling people that their field of study is "low yield" because it's not the hot topic of the day seems quite naive and arrogant to me.
I’ll grant you the boldness, naïveté and arrogance of my 2006 self - he could be an insufferable a$$. But looking from the vantage point of 14 years on I think the statement is accurate and that researcher understood why. There was simply nothing on the horizon that remotely held as much promise as Alain Aspect’s and Serge Haroche’s quantum optics work.
Just because I was a graduate student does not automatically mean I was wrong.
The difference is that some of the biological research money ends up going to discoveries that dramatically improve the human condition, while quantum computers don't have any path to doing so yet (while conventional computers solve most of the important problems we have today).
Even biology has a pretty low dollar-to-discovery rate, though.
306 comments
[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 254 ms ] threadAlphabet is still a great company, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't need checks and balances from outside.
Have you ever been in a union workplace?
why would he want to be in a union when he is a top earner compared to great majority of people in the same country? and aside from a relative freedom of speech he works in very favourable conditions with a lot of perks and a generous severance package if he gets fired? working at google is the very definition of privilege.
It isn't businesses that make US unions look bad, they did it to themselves.
If Google (perish the thought) decided to pull some shady reviewing stunts and make your work life so intolerable that you felt your only option was to force the issue and threaten to resign - being part of a union could have helped with that.
HR is a bunch of people who represent the company's interests in negotiations and transactions. Unions are the same thing for employees.
We've been told, repeatedly, that unions are socialist organisations that want to destroy capitalisim and bankrupt employers. This isn't true.
Why does that make creating a union/engineer council less desirable? It seems good to have a democratically elected representative of Google engineers who can talk to management, even if those engineers don't feel like negotiating on wage stuff, they still have a real avenue to air concerns.
Didn't Google get busted fixing wages along with other tech companies?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
There are important things to address at Google, like not having enough sitting toilets for men (there's 3 times as much for women even though there are much less women in the office where I was working) that an union may help with, but that's different from the product PR.
Why do you think the toilet issue you described is a problem that needs to be fixed? My experience in every corner of life in America to date has been separated bathrooms by sex and the men’s restroom containing far fewer sitting toilets. We all know this is because women sit for both natural duties and men, generally in the US at least, only sit for one. This is so basic I assume it’s not what you are talking about but please correct me if not so we can engage on that front.
What I assume you mean is Google is 90% male and 10% female (no idea what it really is) and yet the bathrooms are 50% male and 50% female. You specifically mention sitting toilets which is what I am having trouble understanding the relevance of.
Are men regularly forced to stand in line instead of being able to walk right in and go? If so that sounds like a facilities growth issue and not a sex imbalance issue. You could propose turning some female restrooms into male but generally restrooms are placed far enough apart from one another that there would have to be 0 females in the area serviced by those restrooms for that to work. The presence of even one would require facilities assigned to females or mixed gender restrooms (a different argument I fully support).
That leaves your only other option as I see it for the female restrooms to be smaller than the male restrooms which is just ridiculous. No one would build the building with that hopefully temporary imbalance in mind and you can’t just repurpose half a bathroom as long as the sexes are being separated.
In the office I was in there where generally 1 sitting and 2 standing seats per male toilet.
The standing one are quick in / quick out and almost always free. But good luck finding vacant sitting spot after lunch.
Edit: female restrooms generally had 3 sitting spots, so same size.
Because this way Google was effectively paying me loads of money to just go through 7 floors of bathrooms to find an empty one when I needed to use it. It's a waste of corporate resources to use a human resource's time like this. At the end the solution for me was just using the disabled toilet, as we didn't have disabled people on the floor at all.
One solution would be to just build more sitting toilets instead of the standing ones, as those ones weren't used as much. But on 1 floor there were 2 bathrooms for women and 2 for men, so yes, repurposing some would have helped.
"If so that sounds like a facilities growth issue and not a sex imbalance issue"
To make this into a gender issue, you have to argue google can't afford toilets
Google tear down meeting rooms to have more space for cranking more people in the same office.
Luckily I was working there in the good old days mostly.
Profits aside, we do not consider stopping cramming people in an office, or hiring in a more agfordable location? What happened to common sence and self respect? This the literally shittiest, most submissive argument I've come across. If it weren't a civilised forum, i would've colled it bootlicking
Personally I find it more helpful to adjust my biological clock to avoid doing my business at the same time as everyone else.
Still blows my mind people who make >300k a year can't be bothered to walk 100ft to cut a shit.
Anyways COVID solved the issue I guess.
I went through the floor map one day counting desks & toilets, verifying we were above OSHA minimums.
Certainly not employee mistreatment all things relative. But it made me stop and think how much Google values engineer time, and how I feel in terms of productivity.
The bathroom situation stank (pun not intended), but frankly there are other hills to die on.
In my opinion, this is very different from a typical employee "talking bad" about their employer.
"Google’s new review procedure asks that researchers consult with legal, policy and public relations teams before pursuing topics such as face and sentiment analysis and categorizations of race, gender or political affiliation, according to internal webpages explaining the policy."
It's an extensively sensitive subject and particularly in a field with such vague and 'subject to interpretation' results, the sponsor corp. is going to want to have a look. Considerably more so if the research is about the institution itself.
There was a specific case recently where the researcher criticized Google for something, but Google asked the researcher to include truthful information about the changes the company has already made to the system in question wherein it's been improved etc. This is a perfectly fair request by the sponsor, I think.
It's also naive for us to consider that what people chose to research, how they approach it, the results they are looking for isn't somehow altered by the researchers own biases. In fact, it's hugely arrogant for researchers to believe that they have some special access to the truth in this regard.
I'm not sure what the rest of this comment is alluding to... The posted article from Reuters doesn't mention race and gender, the article implies these researchers focus on AI and ML.
In regards to the "specific case", I would have to guess at what that case might be. Were I to guess, it seems like I'd be guessing wrong as this assertion seems to lack grounding in fact.
Naive or not, peer review is in place and part of it's purpose is to keep the biases of researchers in place. History has proven that this is far from infallible, but it's the process we have today and the process Google agreed to when it hired these researchers.
I cannot entertain the idea that they signed up with Google believing truly they could have full scholastic freedom. I am pretty sure it is even covered in elementary ethics classes that such a scenario is itself questionable.
But if your job is 'AI Research' and you publish a piece about how much electricity Google uses to 'train models' ... well, you can expect scrutiny.
In this case, the researcher was simply asked to hold the paper until more information was included about the fact that Google has actually improved certain paramaters quite a lot since the time the data was referenced in the report.
This is extremely fair from Google.
If the research was purely concerning some AI results, even how they could be unjust - fine. But as soon as your research specifically includes the sponsor, then it's perfectly fair for the sponsor to add more information.
It's not censorship, in that case, it's frankly the opposite.
The 'miscommunication' here is a kind of naive thinking by researchers who probably have never had normal jobs, who have never worn a 'company hat' and may not have any internalized understanding for communications.
For many researchers - money comes from magical taxpayer funds, and the 'Uni Model' is the only model they understand and some might think that's how the world ought to be.
If Google was giving people cancer due to the tar in their products, the researchers were discovering this - and Google was trying to suppress this, then you'd have a serious problem.
This is not Marlborough/Cargill/Exxon, it's Google and it's an entirely different situation.
The 'hammers' used by the social justice fronts from the 1960s just don't work anymore, because we have made progress and nothing is obvious.
To those it pays, yes...
Previously, ethics was good PR; now, it’s a risk in antitrust cases. This will continue to ramp up.
It's going to be a rough ride throughout the next decade.
+ "Google’s new review procedure asks that researchers consult with legal, policy and public relations teams before pursuing topics such as face and sentiment analysis and categorizations of race, gender or political affiliation, according to internal webpages explaining the policy."
+ "A senior Google manager reviewing a study on content recommendation technology shortly before publication this summer told authors to 'take great care to strike a positive tone,' according to internal correspondence read to Reuters."
+ surprisingly, there's not much else in the article beyond those two sentences
Edit: as commenters noted, there is more in the article. I apologize for not being clear that the last bullet is just MY OPINION. That is, for me the rest is not as meaningful as some consider it. I guess, if you care deeply on the subject, you'll want to read the article and decide for yourself.
I don’t see anything in the article that suggests Google suppresses unfavorable research or censors authors whatsoever. Instead it sounds like a lot of whining and complaining from exceedingly privileged researchers who want some version of tenure to apply within for-profit companies and seem too immature to accept that legal and compliance functions within a large corporation very differently than in academia.
Google tells Researcher 1 to re-word things in X way for Y reason.
Google tells Timnit Gebru to re-word things in X way for Y reason.
The X and Y are the same.
Based on the rest of your response, I believe you are having trouble reading the article in an objective manner. You say that it sounds like whining to you. That’s because you already think it is. You came into the article with this viewpoint about academics in corporations already established. This is why I also found your comment hilarious. You already think Timnit is a whiny researcher. You say this article is about whiny researchers. Yet it’s _ludicrous_ to mention Timnit in this article?
Also, Jeff Dean lied in his email. Maybe that’s why you’re confused about the Timnit situation. I’m assuming you don’t work at Google.
To be clear, it’s ok to disagree with Jeff Dean or to dispute his charitability in accepting Gebru’s ultimatum-based resignation, but to claim he publicly lied is beyond the pale.
I wish he hadn't. I'm disappointed that he did. But I don't know how else to describe sharing statements one knows (or should know) to be false.
He lied. There are falsehoods that he knew (or had a responsibility to know) were false in a public statement he put his name on. They've been repeatedly corrected both by other employees and by data.
Specifically, he at least lied about a 2 week requirement for paper reviews in the internal publication approval process. While that's listed as a further requirement, they don't "normally" require two weeks.
(I wouldn't, for example call the resignation statements lies. Those were unintentional falsehoods)
For what its worth, I don't think "threatening to resign" is the same as resignation. Much as I don't think "threatening to shoot someone" is attempted homicide.
[0]: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/12/09/google-ceo-sundar-pichai-mem...
> calling it a resignation is completely correct and needs no retraction or correction.
Alternatively: publicly calling it a firing is essentially an admission of guilt. That's the one thing Google's lawyers would insist Google cannot do.
Presumably neither one of us are the experts on EEOC and employment litigation strategies. So instead I'm going to take the statements at face value. And at face value: Google is no longer willing to state that Dr.Gebru resigned. Anything else is spin.
I agree! He also refused to say she resigned. Fancy that!
The important thing to note is that one of these was a change in behavior and one was not.
EDIT: Sorry, I understand that you don’t have as much information as us and you’re just going off based on tweets and stuff. But come on. It’s insulting to be lied to like that. I hope you can understand that feeling at least.
Besides the 2 week thing, he also misrepresented the “list of demands” to make it seem like it was worse than it actually was. So much so that I’m even surprised he was allowed to publish the email publicly.
I can’t imagine a single lawyer looked at his email, honestly.
Hypothetical but likely scenario below.
Jeff Dean: “Oh, you say she made a list of demands. Ok, let me put that in the email. Oh, you said there’s this 2 week deadline that she didn’t follow. Ok, let me put that in the email. What else do you want me to add?”
I believe the question you should be asking is _who_ told him these things. Please guess.
"Subsequent correspondence from a researcher to reviewers shows authors “updated to remove all references to Google products.” A draft seen by Reuters had mentioned Google-owned YouTube"
or this:
"""A draft reviewed by Reuters included “concerns” that this technology can promote “disinformation, discriminatory or otherwise unfair results” and “insufficient diversity of content,” as well as lead to “political polarization.”
The final publication instead says the systems can promote “accurate information, fairness, and diversity of content.”"""
or this:
"A paper this month on AI for understanding a foreign language softened a reference to how the Google Translate product was making mistakes following a request from company reviewers, a source said"
or this:
"A draft described how such disclosures could infringe copyrights or violate European privacy law, a person familiar with the matter said. Following company reviews, authors removed the legal risks, and Google published the paper"
Seems like there's a lot more than "two sentences".
Spoiler Warning!
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern get what is probably their just desserts.
If that’s too uncertain given they may not have known the fate the King had in store for Hamlet, then Fortinbras.
Fortinbras is a pretty standup guy through it all and his closing lines provide the possibility of a better future.
It didn’t work in that movie, though. The AI still ended up being hostile even when the public embraced it.
Why are we xenophobic about AI self-awareness? idk
E.g. noone is batting an eye when Apple chooses cherry-picked based datapoints for their performance comparisons or when Stanfords research department spins a paper to get them more funding.
For Google we keep getting this streams of "Google is acting like any other corporation, OH GODS". It's... wierd.
But then nobody should call whatever they are publishing "paper". Because if you "research" with a PR-directive, it is literally not science. If they want to "research" like a corporation, kick them out of Google Scholar and scientific discourse, right now, please.
I'm not sure I understand. Are they worse or better?
But I think the discussion too easily devolves into the craziest humanities self-pleasing circles. Then they are surprised they get push back? Of course Google also share their side of the blame when they think just creating an "ethics commission" with a rubber stamp solves their issue
Now, you feed AI with crime data, looking at statistics such AI will suspect people having black color of the skin to be criminals more often than people with white skin. Is that ok? Is it ok to say that if some person happens to have black skin there is a bigger chance that it is criminal?
In statistical terms the answer is yes, but if we deal with an actual person, we should treat it as a unique person and the matter of the skin color should not matter.
Before II World War there were scientific studies in Germany that showed that in some big cities districts there are more rats. Accidentally or not, it turned out that those are districts with large Jewish population. So Nazis took those statistical results to prove that Jews are dirty, spread diseases, etc. Was that science, even though it was peer reviewed and published? Rather not (in the first place they didn't even bother to check if people living there were rich, poor, etc.).
History knows many "scientific researches" by the ones like Eugen Fisher, dr. Mengele, that were performed in a scientific way, but they were lacking something very important and non-trivial: ethics.
Now the problem is that ethics needs to have some source, it does not grow on a tree. For ages Christianity was a source of ethics in Europe (less in US, that's why you could have slavery in modern times there), currently Christianity is almost gone in Europe, the question is were to seek the source of ethics.
Europe had philosophers long before it had Christianity.
This is completely incoherent and ahistorical; the US was in many ways more Christian, or at least more intensely Christian and making it a key part of its politics, right from the Pilgrim Fathers to televangelists.
People gave pro-slavery speeches from pulpits in both the US and UK. There were some Christians against it, most notably the Quakers, but slavery and the alleged moral justifications for it were in no way incompatible with Christianity.
Even today, US churches tend to be ("voluntarily") segregated.
Two angels arrive in Sodom, and Lot shows them hospitality. However, the men of the city gathered around Lot's house and demanded that he give them the two guests so that they could rape them. In response to this, Lot offers the mob his two virgin daughters instead.
...
Lot's wife turns into a pillar of salt, but Lot and his daughters escape to Zoar, and end up living in a cave in the mountains. In Genesis 19:30–38 Lot's daughters got their father drunk, and over two consecutive nights had sex with him without his knowledge.
is this really in the bible cant believe what i am reading big LOL
I always find it a bit strange that people despise simplistic "Sunday-school" answers to life, but then when they read the Bible and find messy situations like the one described above, they say, "What kind messed up story is this?" Real life is sometimes messed up. A book that skipped over the messed up stuff would be pretty useless.
Secondly, the claim was that Christianity -- that is, the teaching of Jesus -- has affected European ideas about morality. Lot is further away from Jesus than Jesus is from us.
I think the person you responded to has an inaccurate view of the history of slavery in Europe. But only someone who has never experienced a different culture could say that Christianity has had no effect on the moral ideas of the West.
I am very surprised you are claiming the old testament is somehow not part of Christianity or should now be considered- am I misunderstanding you? I am not a religious scholar, but that's not a view my local priest would support.
Also I fail to see how bringing up Stalin is relevant, you can't even find a communist these days that thinks he was morally upright.
Not actually. Statistics from a larger population "cannot" be used to predict outcomes from a smaller subset or individual from the population. ("cannot" in the sense that you get nonsensical results if you do). See e.g. the ecological fallacy.
The only person I’m closely aware of here is Timnit Gebru. She has a bachelors and masters in Electrical Engineering as well as a PhD. If you’re describing her and her ilk as ‘philosophy graduates’ because they have PhDs, I think you’re vastly mischaracterizing their education.
I think your points would come across better if you didn’t use such extreme words (absurd, highly inappropriate, absolutely). It’s your opinion, not a fact.
I also find it funny that _my_ comment is highly inappropriate but the actual comment that was flagged is not? Why do you think that? I’m assuming you didn’t get a chance to read it, which begs the question, “Why did you feel the need to champion this cause?”
Personally I think the flagged poster was just ranting about technophobia among machine learning bias researchers.
As a simple example when Kobe Bryant died there were numerous comments on the post saying “Why is this here? This shouldn’t be on Hacker News.” (Even though he was an angel investor). Yet when some random (to me) soccer player died a couple of weeks ago, I didn’t see a single “This doesn’t belong on Hacker News” comment. I looked for them. I also looked up the soccer player to find anything he did remotely related to HN. There was none.
It’s ok to accept that racist and sexist people exist, even on sites like Hacker News. After all, this is just Reddit, right?
Maybe his comment was just so wacky that it made me think this. Is there an article or something that references researchers thinking if statements are racist? Is this like an in-joke at a certain company? I just don’t get it.
What I do get is that lots of people will go out of their way to defend the writer of a _flagged_ comment.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
I think these sort of rules actually do a disservice to intellectual dialogue and aren’t working as intended.
Why should I pretend that someone said something that they didn’t? Why should I pretend that someone read the article when it’s easily provable that they didn’t?
Again, I didn’t flag the comment. It’s not just me who refused to give OP the benefit of the doubt. Maybe our reaction _is_ the strongest plausible interpretation.
For example, I understand what you said about philosophy being a male-dominated field. But the article referenced _2_ female researchers by name. This is why there are other comments on this post complaining about the researchers being _whiny_.
For example, Timnit Gebru, who does a lot of work in Ethical AI related to sexism and racism, was mentioned briefly. This is why some guy with the username “koreanguy” called Timnit racist and basically said he hates her guts. This is why OP ruslanbogan made some very wacky comment about if statements and racism. He mentioned race first, not me. (He also hasn’t elaborated fully on what he meant, but still has time to downvote me for some reason. He can easily say “No, I actually meant this. My bad.” It’s so simple, really.)
Earlier, you mentioned technophobia. Take a moment and think about what are some of the biggest fears currently being researched related to Ethical AI. You guessed it: are machine learning algorithms doing more harm than good when it comes to the intersection of race and gender.
ruslanbogan’s comment was flagged for a reason. When people make weird/wacky jokes about racism, it usually means that they’re racist. It’s a shame that you’re assuming good faith in him but not me.
Here are a few links related to facial recognition:
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.washingtonpost.com/technolo...
https://www.google.com/amp/s/venturebeat.com/2020/09/24/in-f...
(And no, I’m not one of those users that hates amp pages. I’m glad there’s not a rule banning them :D)
((Jesus, I went from 26 points down to 15. Am I wrong about something? Or are there just more sexist/racist guys on HN than you thought unishark?))
It must have been the other sexist and racist people that downvoted my reply to “koreanguy”. His comments about Timnit were violently aggressive and disgusting. He doesn’t even know Timnit yet has so much hatred for her that he basically wants to kill her? She wrote a few tweets. She’s not Hitler. Again, someone _else_ flagged his comment as they rightfully should have. Yet I get downvoted for calling out bad behavior. I hate that I have to work with people like you everyday. HN is almost as bad as the Blind app.
BTW you still didn’t explain yourself.
What were you referring to or what did you mean when you mentioned if statements and racists?
i am sick of the bs
The phrase was only moved from the introduction to the conclusion of the code of conduct, never removed.
> Google prohibits retaliation against any worker here at Google who reports or participates in an investigation of a possible violation of our Code, policies, or the law. If you believe you are being retaliated against, please contact Ethics & Compliance.
Well, it is safe to say this is hot garbage then.
I would love Google to remove all the self entitled BS from this statement, so they can act as an everyday faceless big company which is anyway what it is doing, not some moral beacon for the mass to look up to.
The statement exists only to generate traffic for the news outlet for spinning.
So the statement that it’s really not a slogan anymore is quite true from my experience.
It's clear from many events following that one that the company is no longer interested in developing a culture of "ethical employees". They just want cheerleaders now to keep increasing those quarterly results, no matter the cost.
I say all of this with the sadness of a former "Google evangelist." The old Google is gone, and Sundar Pichai being named CEO put the last nail in its coffin.
"The erudite Faust is highly successful yet dissatisfied with his life, which leads him to make a pact with the Devil at a crossroads, exchanging his soul for unlimited knowledge and worldly [power]."
These are not equivalent comparisons to me. Tobacco was always harmful, inhaling smoke in general is just bad, and the others could be through improper use but safe otherwise. Let alone all of what you mentioned will not have the impact AI will
AI's potential is equally good and equally bad and any of the bad is purely because someone or some group employs it that way.
The real danger of AI isn't the obvious tinpot dictators using it drive war but in politicians and government officials hiding behind the term as an excuse for their bad decisions. The more you demand of your government to give you stuff or services the more likely you will be subject to this tech
I say this each time the subject of AI abuse, facial recognition or similar comes up.
This is not something that cancel culture will stop. Nothing is going to stop it from coming. So the best alternative to the technically and morally (hate using that word) driven people is to hit it head on from all directions. This means working to make sure it does what it is supposed to do but also that everyone knows what it really cannot do, working the legal end to insure there are laws and consequences for employing the technology incorrectly, and through the information end in keeping the public fully aware of who is using, how they use it, and how to legally protect yourself from it.
Well, yes, and in this case that someone appears to be Google, which is why people are complaining about them making AI decisions.
My physics teacher worked for some kind of government air pollution modelling group in the past, and effectively said that they would often be told "Here's the result, find us data to make it work".
- Sir Humphrey
It’s like if an asbestos company did a bunch of research on healthy insulators, then found that the original products were in fact harmful. Before publishing it, the bosses demand mention of the prior work towards healthy insulators.
For example, if you join a Math department and start publishing papers that cast the department's research interests in a negative light, that's often a good way to get fired.
I mean, seriously, go ask just about any professor of any topic at any university if their field is undervalued or overvalued. They'll almost universally tell you that their field is undervalued, underappreciated, and more important than people think. They deserve more funding, and you should definitely consider majoring in their field.
I still have faith in the research done by hard science research teams.
With Math, the sensitive topic is utility. Math departments would tend to be upset by someone pushing papers that, say, call attention to the lack of social benefit relative to other fields of research that taxpayers could be funding instead.
I guess a researcher could also spin a narrative about mathematicians' contributions to cryptography, examining the negative consequences enabled by stuff like Bitcoin.
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> I still have faith in the research done by hard science research teams.
That gets kinda complicated.
I mean, hard-science teams often rely on their expertise, as it's their unique source of value: if the area that they excel in is shown to be sub-optimal, admitting it would mean losing their current career path (and often taking a significant tumble down-the-ladder after transitioning).
So hard-science teams are often largely academically honest in what they do publish, though they're often biased toward casting what they do in a positive light.
For a common example, have you ever met an older computer tech who insists on using a legacy, obsoleted technology because it's what they know best? A lot of academics basically do the same thing.
I find it difficult to come up with an analogy from a public institution. What is the product the math department would be pressuring it's members to protect?
Sure, each department in a university believes it's work important. That doesn't seem even remotely similar to me as this issue with Google.
The Gebru paper makes a lot of hay about carbon impact, but Google's put a ton of effort into mitigating that, they've been carbon neutral on paper since 2007: https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/sustainability/our-...
Do you have an example of a public university censoring research papers that passed peer review because that university believed the paper cast "an innacurate negative light"... on what, exactly?
My rejoinder was that if it's inaccurately critical of Google, like hyping carbon impact without mentioning a decades-long carbon mitigation program, I get a lot more sympathetic to Google's position. Why should they pay someone to spread falsehoods about them?
I don't really care about the process minutiae.
"Large language models can have an outsized carbon emissions impact, but not Google's, those are carbon neutral".
If you're going to bring carbon emissions into it, mentioning current mitigations as well seems relevant unless you're writing an op/ed piece.
The "mitigation" in question is buying carbon offsets (I mean there are improvements in DC efficiency also, but those only do so much, and language models ballooning 100x isn't going to be fixed with 10 or 50% efficiency improvements). For the moment "carbon neutrality" is only achieved through the purchase of energy offsets.
That doesn't mitigate. It offsets. Don't get me wrong, still better than nothing, but its not a mitigation.
* this generation of language models leaning into transfer learning reducing the total number of training runs for different applications
* TPUs being more power efficient than GPUs (the numbers they used in the paper were based on GPUs)
* other energy-centric stuff that's not just offsets, efficiency like you mention in addition to sourcing from renewable
> It's not theoretical, researchers are quoted in the article and papers have been altered.
In grad school, PhD students' advisors typically insist on various revisions before publishing a paper, as publications reflect on the advisor and their institution. So there's nothing even slightly weird about Google having the same interest in revising the papers pushed by its researchers.
Unless there IS something weird about what Google's doing? But if so, what is it?
According to this Reuters article, Google's new process happens after peer review and Google's other processes have completed.
"The “sensitive topics” process adds a round of scrutiny to Google’s standard review of papers for pitfalls such as disclosing of trade secrets, eight current and former employees said."
Instead of publishing the paper, Google will now review the paper with an eye to negative impact the paper may have on existing Google product (or lobbying efforts, etc.) Google isn't doing this to improve the quality of the paper, they are doing it to protect their business interests.
"For some projects, Google officials have intervened in later stages. A senior Google manager reviewing a study on content recommendation technology shortly before publication this summer told authors to “take great care to strike a positive tone,” according to internal correspondence read to Reuters."
I think this is very different from the advising process in graduate school.
Preventing people from disclosing trade secrets seem fair to me. Preventing valid research simply because it may negatively impact business strikes me as less reasonable.
"Four staff researchers, including senior scientist Margaret Mitchell, said they believe Google is starting to interfere with crucial studies of potential technology harms."
All of that sounds normal to me. Including filtering out trade-secrets, which is completely normal when working with trade-secrets in grad school too. Additionally, it's completely normal to filter out intellectual property you might plan to patent; confidential information; proprietary industrial information; information protected by law; dangerous findings (e.g., hackers often omit details of an exploit until the relevant vendor has had time to fix); and a few other categories.
Maintaining a positive, constructive tone is also completely normal. For example, failed experiments are typically described as progressive steps toward an ultimate success; unforeseen problems are discoveries; and major issues are seen as research challenges to be overcome. Or, ya know, stuff like that.
I mean, is that all this story's about? Because if that's it, then it seems like nothing substantial. But if that's the case, why is this in the news?
I’m not sure about math, but in physics it would be string theory which has been a dead end and has mostly served as a welfare program for boomer scientists
couldn't the exact thing that happened at Google happened at a university? For example one researcher could publish a paper criticizing the methods that other researchers in the department have developed because of their carbon impact.
I think it's fair to say that there are internal pressures not to do that - - such a professor would have a hard time thriving in the department if they are attacking the methods of their colleagues.
This is most likely due to an availability bias. They have concrete examples in their own sphere but not near as much detail about competing domains. This leads to the mistaken assumption that their own field more important than it possibly would be if viewed in the overarching context
Just because bias is impossible to avoid, does not mean that all bias is the same.
The goal isn't outright elimination of bias (which is completely impossible), its ensuring incentives that are aligned so bias doesn't become a self-reinforcing feedback loop.
There's nothing wrong with that. Just like any other member of society, a scientist may want to contribute to a (for-profit or non-profit) organization of their choice, be it for material or spiritual rewards. However, I think it's important not to get science and marketing confused.
So, I think a more precise title would be "Google told its scientists to strike a positive tone when they use academic papers as a marketing tool".
It took 10 years for that to really sink in, but I knew that every paper has an angle well before that. There’s a position of inevitability about AI around Google, and, to an extent, I agree. Unlike tobacco, alcohol, firearms, cars, fuel, AI is applied mathematics. It’s virtually impossible to restrict functionally, requiring macro behavioral constraints on businesses and governments that are very difficult to enforce if you want to regulate it. Furthermore, ceding the technological lead and removing the business incentive likely has defense (read: offense) implications on the global stage.
Some things are going to be hard to explain. Some skin tones, hair styles, accents, pitches, timbres, writing styles, etc. may have more/less separable entropy, and that’s going to inevitably make models seem racist/sexist for some applications. However, we’re pretty far from those edges. Instead, our model biases have likely been driven by our datasets, drawn from our coworkers, family, and friends. In this industry, that’s currently a recipe for over sampling in some demographics and under sampling in others.
In other words, we need to use all the power we have to avoid "The computer said NO, you're homeless/jailed/poor forever now" scenarios.
Actuarial tables have been a part of decision-making for a very long time and it's not possible to form a comprehensive legal statement of "all decisions must be made in good faith with respect to inherent biases and to the most rigorous epistemological standards".
Here's the proof: http://www.cs.utep.edu/vladik/2006/tr06-29.pdf
Perhaps there are mechanisms around performance under external test, auditing, or safe harbor due to documented good-faith, but it is not possible to guarantee correctness for the full set from a subset.
Similarly, some approaches will plainly fail to perform well with subgroups of people due to sensing technologies. That may appear as model bias, but it's really a matter of physics and available entropy.
For the time being, mechanisms that use machine inference as an aid rather than a guide (leaving the judgment to the human in the loop) are probably the best we can hope for.
We all know that if you have garbage as an input the output can be anything. So a professional data scientist should do his job and analyze the data first , identify the problems and if it can't be clean go in the world and collect better data.
If you are a high paid professional you should understand that say for face recognition you should get a correct sample size, correct distributed (sorry I am not a professional so i don't know how they should do their job but I know that there are statistical tool that will measure things like this) , instead it seems developers use as input for their experiments some garbage data that they can get their hands on.
If the definition of work is relaxed and equivalent to "is better then random and our marketing can sell it"
If you are a professional and you data implies that race predicts school grades and you say "it works" instead of "something is not right, let me check the financial status or house size/family size" then you are an impostor, you plug libraries with code from Stack Overflow until it works, doing the right job would give you better results and fix the bias. If you work for Google,Facebook or other giants I am sure there is not an excuse that we don't have the money to hire competent people and cleanup the data or gather correct data.
Think about it, because some person/company is incompetent you make life harder for millions of people, why we try to find excuses for not doing the correct thing, we need to demand that this AIs with big consequences are created using mathematically correct methods and when someone reports potential problems we need to stop excusing the guys that want to silence them because bad PR.
Not really sure if this is true in general. May be true of commercial entities, but I really hope this isn't true in general.
> Furthermore, ceding the technological lead and removing the business incentive likely has defense (read: offense) implications on the global stage.
Does it though? Uncovering faults and cracks of a system does exactly the opposite. Discouraging experts from looking for those faults may give the perception of lead, for a while, but is a dangerous mistake to make in the long run.
Interfering with experts by pulling them out of, say, academia by paying them more and turning them into your PR tools, I think, is detrimental to the advancement of technology. We may be losing a whole generation of scientists to AdTech when they could have been doing more worthwhile work elsewhere(which, by the way, is why we are here in the first place - someone toiled away at a university to come up with a genius idea to design an artificial perceptron).
As to your claim about whether these companies will play a pivotal role in paradigm shifting technology advancements like fundamental research has in the past remains yet to be seen.
There are plenty of reasons to do research and make strides, but "big pot of gold at the end of the rainbow" is one we have to acknowledge the existence of.
As far as paper angle goes, sometimes the angle is "what we spent the last year doing is noteworthy enough to warrant publication".
Read every paper skeptically. Make it prove to you that it has the data, rigor, and reproducibility to support its claims.
Sure, politics is in everything down to the design of the armchair you are arguing from. That however doesn't fucking mean that all papers shall be considered equal?
Do you think you would be able to differentiate the value of a census statistics from a 2015 paper written by the state of Nevada from a 1930 census statistic paper from Nazi Germany? Excellent!
Because very obviously there is a line where science crosses into bullshit. Sure, the line is multidimensional, ever changing and very blurry. As you say, from finance to family everything factors in and there is no true objective way of doing science. That does not however mean we as humanity can get away with defeationist pseudo-enlightenment by just giving up every analysis of nuance or motive.
What Google is doing here is not in the territory of science anymore - you can and should argue that - and should be treated as such. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance, whataboutism won't cut it.
Edit: grammar
Minor point, but there was no Nazi Germany in 1930. They gained control of the government in 1932-1933.
So look at my argument differently. Every single scientific paper you read should be read as non-objective as a starting position. If it can overcome starting from that position with data, methodology, and reasoning, it’s a solid scientific paper.
Once in a science course in college, I had to present a paper to my class. I tried to present it "objectively" as you would describe it, avoid striking a tone or making judgements. My professor told my presentation was technically correct but failed to highlight the broad significance of the research, which comes from tone. Science writing requires selecting a tone of voice.
I like how we learned nothing from decades of lies and billions of damages in big tabacco, asbestos, lead in petrol and climate change.
Whats next, can we tell aircraft safety inspectors to strike a positive tone and declare a damaged airframe flight worthy? How about rating some securities in a positive tone?
Lets call it what it is, corruption
If you want independence, goes to academia instead (though it is not easy to obtain it either)
If google wants specific outcomes from research, go to the marketing department instead of funding real research.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma
Many of the comments on this thread are expressing concern and (more or less) asking 'why does it work like this?' and (in some cases) 'it would be better if it didn't work like this."
so, all of this opinion piece is based on hearsay?
from a highly politicized topic with a lot of disinformation being thrown around from both side, it's hardly sufficient.
but apparently you all happy enough to live in a post factual society where journalist have no longer to validate sources' claims, so be it
My money-making idea from this is AI to detect sentences or fragments from your emails that could be taken out of context and made into embarrassing headlines if the email gets leaked.
This article seems really weak, and of course there’s the obligatory attempt to tie it in with Timnit Gebru’s resignation and her very inappropriate behavior, even though for all of Google’s flaws, Google clearly and obviously did the right thing both to disapprove Gebru’s weak paper and accept her resignation based on her ultimatum.
Could you please back up your claim as to the paper's quality - do yoy have credentials and background that enable you to cast this judgement, or is this pedestrian?
You want to outsource your thinking to the credentialed? Go ahead but the rest of us don't have to. The paper is out there and it's quite easy to read, because it's not saying a whole lot.
It's not a technical paper for not a technical conference. It's a "raising awareness" paper on identity politics beating the same drum, without much novel insight or analysis or new data. But yes, it has 120 or 200 citations, a fact that was proudly highlighted by authors on Twitter to underline the scholarly quality.
Yes, gender seminars and whiteness workshops are also properly credentialed.
Theology is also a discipline but perhaps not the same as sciences.
Quality is indeed relative.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25314824
It is not research, let alone science when you are striking a positive tone, it’s fraud.
But while that's ok in a slide deck, it's _not_ ok in a research paper. Researchers aren't (shouldn't be) accountable to business outcomes, but rather the truth of what they argue.
It's tough to see this play out real time.
If Google is funding its own research, it should be able to look at whatever it wants. Why do we hold Google to a standard that most other companies are far worse at following?
The appropriate place for independent critical research is outside of the company itself.
Google is actually a pretty well intentioned entity to put out as much self critical research as it does.
This isn't relegated to science or management - we're seeing it all across society these days. Nuance is dead. If the message cannot be delivered in a 120 character tweet, and cannot self-gratify 50 million teenage viewers with only a superficial understanding of the topic, then it shouldn't be a public position at all. Of course, I'm slightly exaggerating.
But the consequence is very real - organizations, whether corporate or scientific, whether public or private have had to drop an iron curtain around their honest nuanced internal strategies in order to avoid the attention of the hyperbolic and outrage-fueled social media world.
if a business funds research, they expect the funding to have a positive ROI. Therefore, the business will pressure research towards this, and thus, will inevitably make the research accountable for an outcome.
This is why fundamental research should be publicly funded, and publicly available.
If I ever plucked a single sentence out of a long post and called attention to it context-free, I could probably make whoever posted it look fairly bad. But, in the context of news articles, it becomes the headline? Was the context "Try to strike a positive tone...or else you're fired" - or "Try to strike a positive tone...you've shown that these problems are solvable"
For example, the recent COVID-19 vaccines: they're commonly reported to be 95% effective and have some risk of side-effects. This can be reported factually, or spun in a positive or negative light. For example, a sensationalist might try to stir up interest by spinning a narrative that focuses on the vaccines being unreliable and dangerous, as proven by science that Big Pharma doesn't want you to know about!
And as we've seen, sensationalists can get cult followings. However bad their ploy may be for society overall, the sensationalist themself may stand to profit.
So as reprehensible as censoring legitimate scientific research would be, a directive to "strike a positive tone" sounds like it could be a very different, far more sensible thing.
We're talking about published research papers, not people posting stuff on twitter. I have not seen anyone get a "cult following" from a research paper.
This happens at both individual and institutional levels. Examples:
1.) At an individual level, someone might publish a study on a social issue that's important to them, adhering to relevant academic standards, then establish a popular identity as the author of that study. Afterwards they can comment on blogs, in media releases, on talk shows, etc., using the perceived credibility established through academic publication to pursue their personal goals.
2.) At an institutional level, someone might publish a study on some issue relevant to an industry, then use it in political lobbying related to that industry as well as popular press to build good-will. Many academics have industrial sponsors for this reason.
What we're discussing, however, is "striking a positive tone" in actual research papers.
Yeah.. that's what pretty much every academic does. Most talk up the merits of their work and the general importance of their field. The idea's to be constructive, always looking for avenues of improvement. For example, if you test a new medical treatment and it's not great, you don't trash it as a failure but rather focus on how it can be improved to get more positive results.
Though I'm starting to get the impression that you're reading "striking a positive tone" as meaning something other than what I'm seeing in those words. So to avoid talking past each other, what exactly are you seeing? And do you find it somehow problematic?
Turns out it's mostly PR and buying yourself credibility at this point.
Like, when you see someone who's an amazing software engineer with a great salary, and you know they spend a lot of time doing research. Then you suppose the research must be paying off. Over time, survival tends to equal truth.
Sounds like censorship to me: hire the people in the field who might publish research you disagree with, then pressure them from a position of power.
Same thing here. The researchers' jobs aren't to publically deface Google, they're to help direct Google down the right path.
I'm not seeing where I confuse "the ideas with their presentation" or where anyone talked about researchers "publicly defacing Google". The Reuters article is talking about ML and AI researchers who are now (recently) finding their research subject to a new review policy, above and beyond the typical peer review that they expected.
It's a bit different from the right path
Here is my steelman position: I think the objection is that the old internal review was reasonable, and while the argument can be made that the new one does not seem unreasonable to many people under the principle of "don't bite the hand that feeds you", it's reasonableness in a faux-academic setting is at least debatable, and in any case it is inarguable that the new one is more restrictive than the one that was in place when these researchers were hired.
So, at the very least, this seems like a unilateral bait-and-switch on Google's part. The company is now reneging on the representations made to prospective employees regarding their academic freedom.
"I have altered the deal; pray I do not alter it any further.": https://youtu.be/WpE_xMRiCLE
Of course they never really said it for simple legal reasons, when you sign the employment contract you actually agree to a lot of censorship.
Or, they could have just labelled all these efforts with the less sexy and scary moniker of "machine learning".
How wrong he was.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinrich_Hertz
Keep mind that this is a new, recently instituted process. During the interview process when these researchers were hired, this policy did not exist. Perhaps they were naive to believe that such a policy wouldn't be instituted later but I think that's a different discussion.
Of course, they also hired unhinged woke employees so it’s no surprised they’re reaping the seeds they sowed
The Reuters article clearly refers to this as a new change in policy and procedure.
"Google’s new review procedure asks that researchers consult with legal, policy and public relations teams before pursuing topics such as face and sentiment analysis and categorizations of race, gender or political affiliation, according to internal webpages explaining the policy."
"Studying Google services for biases is among the “sensitive topics” under the company’s new policy, according to an internal webpage. Among dozens of other “sensitive topics” listed were the oil industry, China, Iran, Israel, COVID-19, home security, insurance, location data, religion, self-driving vehicles, telecoms and systems that recommend or personalize web content."
In science, we as a society throw money at something like high energy physics, because we are telling ourselves, "We love knowledge so much, that we will throw it at high energy physics, which has little economic benefit to us" [1].
In other words, you can't prove that you love knowledge for its own sake, if you only invest in fields which have economic benefits. You have to invest in fields with no benefit, to prove to ourselves that we still care. That has deep and lasting philosophical impact on society.
[1] If you read grand funding agencies internal documents, you will learn that the primary economic benefit of fields like high energy physics is training people on hard problems, who will then go and apply those skills and raise the bar in other fields.
For example, research on quantum-mechanical light-matter interaction was considered not very practically relevant in the 80s and 90s. In the 2000s the results were picked up by the superconducting qubit research community and used to great effect to build a viable approach to quantum computing.
The outcome of research is inherently hard to predict, and telling people that their field of study is "low yield" because it's not the hot topic of the day seems quite naive and arrogant to me.
Just because I was a graduate student does not automatically mean I was wrong.
Even biology has a pretty low dollar-to-discovery rate, though.