As noted in her pinned tweet (https://twitter.com/mmitchell_ai/status/1357819673455202304), she was locked out of Google's system after sending an email supporting Timnit Gebru. (EDIT: and allegations of systems abuse; see child comment)
That's only if you take Google's PR at face value. Also, no where in the article nor in Google's statement do they claim that Meg Mitchell did anything "illegal". I haven't seen any details about the allegedly extracted files, so I think there's more to the story.
There have been countless Googlers who came out to support Gebru. Did Google fire all of them? Or maybe Margaret's support was particularly outspoken, but I doubt it.
Its google says vs she says - honestly i take neither at face value, but i'd expect repercussions if i started download/sharing internal files en masse.
Well I guess it is easier to sweep hard problems under the rug than have a dialog with unsatisfied employees.
This is one of those times where people are going to intentionally conflate Google's legit right to terminate employment with what is best for the long term culture of the company.
I think if you have more that 3 employees you can't have a dialogue on every issue with all of them. You have to just decide and accept that X% of people won't like the decision and leave. So you minimise X while maximising profit.
For people who are familiar with this, I have a question. How does research in an industrial lab vs. a university work, insofar as independence is concerned? In a university, aside from well-defined ethics guidelines for conducting research (e.g., involving animal or human subjects), staff are generally free to publish the findings of their research at any venue they see fit. Many are tenured professors, so they also have the added guarantee of tenure, which makes them unfireable save for clear violations of policies such as sexual harassment.
How do these things work at industrial labs, such as those of Google and Microsoft?
I hope you are using hyperbole here. Google employs hundreds of researchers who are free to publish their work as far as I can tell (plenty of seminal systems, AI, economics -- auction mechanisms and such, and other papers are testament to this fact). There appear to be some exceptions to this that are causing a furore.
Anyone interested in working in a research position should care a great deal that their management hierarchy is separate from their research hierarchy, and that the organization supports researchers working across teams. That will reduce the impact of personality conflicts and assholes.
I know that some places feel that the people managers have to be the technical experts but I would strongly advise against working in such a place.
MSR has a very free research culture. People there are technically fireable by normal means, but Microsoft chooses not to terminate employment for "outside-of-work" engagements, or for the subject of their research. Some very critical papers of Microsoft's AI approach were published under the MSR header. Not all of the findings were put into place, and Aether has the unenviable job of balancing ethical behavior with potential profits. But their ethicists are leaving because they're shouting themselves hoarse into the void, not because they're being asked to change their results.
You are talking about the Google ethicists who are leaving, right?
Also, can you clarify what you mean by 'shouting themselves into the void'? Are they being denied venues to publish their research, thereby rendering their shouting inaudible, or did you mean something else?
I have a lot more respect for MS and MSR than I used to. I grew up, and I learned more about both. Nowhere is perfect but, in a different context of the US attempts to define extraterritorial control on data held by European hosted services, MS was the company which stood up to the department of state. Google and the others folded.
I am not sure I necessarily buy your comparison. Do you have any records where the employees have done something similar, e.g., giving ultimatums to manager, sending inflammatory emails to a large group of employees, leaking internal documents to outsiders, in MSR, but didn't get fired?
> In a university, aside from well-defined ethics guidelines for conducting research (e.g., involving animal or human subjects), staff are generally free to publish the findings of their research at any venue they see fit.
I'm not sure what university were you at where that was true - academia is horribly political (in many ways more than corporations in some ways less) and until you get tenure your job is to put up and shut up. Your career is dependant on good recommendation letters and goodwill of quality advisors.
Attacking your organization, supervisor or lab will end your career faster than Google cancels products.
Even after you gain tenure, you're still dependant on external funding to keep your research going and employ postdocs and other researchers. That funding disappears really quickly if you decide to start an assault against your organization or people paying you. Like these Googlers did.
>Your career is dependant on good recommendation letters and goodwill of quality advisors
life pro tip: for any paper with more than 2 authors, the last author is the most senior and did the least amount of work (if any). i leave it to you to conjecture about quid pro quo.
All of what you said is true, but the meaning of tenure is that you are paid a salary by the university and get to keep your job. That's a very generous protection and it's offered to encourage free discussion and exchange of ideas, which is what the University is all about. There are professors who choose to ditch research and make teaching their calling, even at research universities.
Universities are not very well-run when compared to your average fortune 500 corporation, and there is a lot of skullduggery that goes on inside of academic departments, particularly those that do not receive a whole lot of research funding, such as the humanities. The path to tenure is brutal and is full of pitfalls (in fact many positions are explicitly not tenure-track; there are many, many adjunct positions where folks are paid a pittance and forced to sign very unfair contracts that must be renewed periodically). Even with all that being said, academics do enjoy a degree of freedom that those in the corporate world can only dream of.
"Our security systems automatically lock an employee’s corporate account when they detect that the account is at risk of compromise due to credential problems or when an automated rule involving the handling of sensitive data has been triggered. In this instance, yesterday our systems detected that an account had exfiltrated thousands of files and shared them with multiple external accounts. We explained this to the employee earlier today. We are actively investigating this matter as part of standard procedures to gather additional details.”
A company with 100 000 people will have to quite a number of staff, literally daily, for all sorts of things, it doesn't remotely imply anything about the overall relationship between staff and management.
Even when CNN, MSNBC, Business Insider 'team up' to overrepresent an issue because 'some number of Google employees walked out for some reason' - it really doesn't help tell the story of 'relations' because it's hard to fathom what the rest of the 99% of Google staff think.
That said, anything that makes Google a less effective organization I support.
Funny how they co-announced monetary incentives around "diversity and inclusion", I expect nothing less from a giant evil ad company. A bunch of handwavy idpol stuff with the giant elephants in the room seems to be the status quo.
Releasing even a single internal document without permission is cause for firing, and possible legal action. I can't even fathom this being up for debate.
Sarbanes Oxley provides protections for reporting accounting fraud against shareholders to the US government. Not for leaking docs to private citizens.
> Releasing even a single internal document without permission is cause for firing, and possible legal action. I can't even fathom this being up for debate.
I was referring to "releasing", in general, as it was written in the comment. Obviously the protection is very conditional on how exactly it is done.
how would this system detect sharing with external accounts? sounds like they put some words together to make it sound like it’s all standardized and automated and not result of human actions
All outgoing email is being scanned for sensitive information in plain text or attachments. This is standard practice in every corporation and something you are being warned about when being on-boarded as a new-joiner.
why would she email it from her corp account to various accounts instead of emailing it to her personal account or just uploading it directly to some personal drive account
> an account had exfiltrated thousands of files and shared them with multiple external accounts
I'm just questioning why she would email to multiple external accounts directly from her corp email instead of saving to 1 personal account and then sharing from there, undetectable, many times. And yes, they would still have detected the 1 email but I'm questioning the accuracy of this explanation; sounds partly made up to make it sound more serious.
Multiple external accounts could mean her lawyer's account and her own. Or 2 lawyers' accounts. The latter would help show she didn't distribute the files to anyone else.
> sounds like they put some words together to make it sound like it’s all standardized and automated and not result of human actions
Part of my job is administering a system for detecting unauthorized sharing, exporting, or printing. It has thresholds and a rules-based engine for specifying what behavior should trigger alerts. Google's system is probably custom but there are definitely products on the market for this sort of thing.
Bret Weinstein was fired from Evergreen for not participating in a no-white-people-on-campus day (and he was also subject to credible death threats, requiring police escorts when present on campus)
And then we have the epidemic of academic mobbing, where colleagues engage in herding behavior that focus their rage on one of their colleagues in a type of modern equivalent of Monsters on Maple Street. It is estimated that 12 percent of those mobbed end up committing suicide. https://www.universityaffairs.ca/opinion/in-my-opinion/acade...
There are many, many things that will get you fired or subject to attack in the modern university, and I don't see any reason to view academia as a place that provides more intellectual freedom than private industry. Indeed, it is often the epicenter of cancel culture and petty utopian dictators.
Not withstanding what you say, how do you counter this with related responses to your parent comment which note corporate research is legally bound and ownership vests strongly in IP law and not your research your brain.
My counter is what foolinaround also said in reply to my post. Intellectual freedom is a question of culture, not of any legal or financial apparatus. There was enormous intellectual freedom at the for-profit Bell Labs. There was enormous intellectual freedom in the publicly owned Berkeley in the 70s-80s.
The culture present in the organization will determine whether you need to always be on the guard from saying the wrong thing that might destroy your career or whether you are free to challenge incumbent ideas/viewpoints/theories.
Personnel is policy. The legal charter of an organization is far down the list of factors that determine how much freedom you have -- the mindset of your peers and of the leadership in the organization matters much, much more.
The evidence to me, late stage career (I was in government, and uni research and then latterly in systems and networks in the uni system, latterly outside in the NFP internet public governance space), is we're off the rails both inside academia and in private industry research. Neither feel like fully open minds.
considering that there are no market forces at play in the universities, it is almost guaranteed that intellectual freedom is much lesser due to the very polarizing, take no prisoners approach currently in place.
Dissent is not being tolerated, when in former times, it even used to be welcome.
> A settlement was reached in September 2017 in which Weinstein and Heying resigned and received $250,000 each, after having sought $3.8 million in damages.
He resigned as part of a settlement when he sued them. The university paid to get rid of him.
The videos show him getting mobbed by students, the University offered no protection for him. When told that students were going "car to car" looking for them, the University told police not to get involved.
The Evergreen example is incorrect, Bret Weinstein was not fired from Evergreen. He sued the college and resigned as part of a settlement in which he and his wife received a combined $500,000 payout.
This is one of the things that really annoys me about the anti cancel-culture warriors.
I get it, there has been some excess, some poor decisions made, but the hyperbolic, bad faith, and often dishonest framing they often use makes me really suspect of basically anything they say.
In MOST states in the US your boss can fire you for NO REASON at all. Or ANY reason save a few federally protected reasons like race/gender etc. That's "at-will" employment.
Anyone who tells you this is the same as the protections tenured profs have is a liar or complete moron.
Your description of Bret Weinstein and Evergreen is substantially inaccurate, perhaps because you read Bret Weinstein's dishonest description of it (linked below).
There was no "no-white-people-on-campus" day. There was an optional off-campus field trip for a seminar aimed at people living with a white perspective.
Bret Weinstein was not fired. He resigned with $500K severance as part of a settlement agreement arising from his lawsuit against the school for failing to protect him from students who verbally harassed him.
Sure, the student organized event asked that white participants who supported this misguided movement stay off campus. Sure, that's a pretty dumb thing to ask of anyone and Bret Weinstein has no obligation to adhere to it, and furthermore adhering to it is pretty dumb...
But that's not the college's doing nor is it the college's responsibility.
I realise that the corporatisation of universities and increasing monoculture/groupthink is eroding many of the protections offered to even tenured professors, but that's a different discussion. Do you have anything specific about the topic to add?
> Bret Weinstein was fired from Evergreen for not participating in a no-white-people-on-campus day
Interpretation 1:
There was a "no-white-people-on-campus day" at a university, a professor named Bret Weinstein-- a white person-- was on the campus that day (either in defiance or without foreknowledge of the event), and was consequently fired for being white while on campus.
Interpretation 2:
There was a "no-white-people-on-campus day" at a university where white people were singled out to attend some off-campus event (whether mandatory or optional), Bret Weinstein-- a white professor-- did not attend this off-campus event (whether in defiance or accidentally, whether going on campus, or not), and consequently the university fired Bret Weinstein for his action of not attending an event targeted exclusively at white people.
Interpretation 3:
You are leaving some crucial detail that explains what actually happened.
If #3 isn't the case I'll eat my hat. If it is, you should consider the possibility that some kind of anti-academic axe-grinding is keeping you from writing as clearly as you could about historical events.
Interpretation 2 is closest to correct. There was a "day of absence", and in 2017, whites were "invited" to leave the campus for the day's activities. Weinstein protested this in a letter, which led to protests of a violent nature to the point that he had to hold classes off-campus. Weinstein sued over the fact that he had to hold the event off-campus rather than the University maintaining an academic setting in which he could teach. He also needed a police escort on campus. He contended that this represented a hostile work environment.
She gave a talk at my school once, she was invited by my then advisor. This was in 2017 right after she left MSR. We had a brief change, and even back then you can tell she’s not into kowtowing to the patriarchy. It’s quite hard for ambitious women in compsci, they have to walk a tight edge between firm and “motherly”. Men have no such constraints.
——————————————
Clarification: I’m speaking about women researchers in an academic setting in general. And hoping to lend a bit of detail on this researcher as a person.
Reading their comment I don’t see that specific claim being made. The comment discussed different treatment with regards to personality, but doesn’t relate that to this firing directly.
I've worked with many women at FANG companies and I wouldn't describe any of them as even somewhat motherly (though I have noticed "firm"). I think Dr. Gebru was fired because she cast Google in a bad light with some rather dubious arguments in a paper she wanted to publish and when she was asked to not publish her research she she sent an unprofessional email to a wide audience.
I don't know why this person was fired, but looking over the email/document she posted on her twitter it looks like she is asserting that her employers are racists and sexist on little evidence. Why would you, or she, expect to be permitted to slander the company this way and still keep her job? Although I don't know if she published this document before or after her termination, so it may, or may not have been a factor.
Gebru wasn't fired because she "cast Google in a bad light", she gave an ultimatum to her boss threatening to resign if they don't disclose names of all reviewers who criticized her work AND blasted group emails calling for sabotage
Her research does cast Google in a bad light. She writes about how language models (like Google's BERT which influences somewhere between 10% and 100% of searches) are environmentally unfriendly and encode hegemonic language making them subtly racist and sexist. Her solutions are to use smaller language models and more curated data sets, which are probably not palatable for Google.
Dr. Gebru was told the paper shouldn't be published with Google's name and some of the feedback on it that she received had to do with the paper not mentioning how Google was combating or leading on the problems with language models that she called out. In other words, if her paper had made Google look good, they probably would've been okay with her publishing it. Given that her paper made Google look bad, they wanted her to change it or not publish it. When she got that feedback she sent her intemperate email (in which she included her ultimatum to resign) and was terminated shortly after.
I think it's debatable, given that she did offer an ultimatum, whether she was fired or resigned - but I know she prefers the former and I think that's at least a coherent way to describe what happened (Google accepted one side of her ultimatum by firing her).
>In other words, if her paper had made Google look good
A more charitable assumption might be that they wanted her paper to address feedback from the reviewers in lieu of being published as is. The feedback that she was presenting a biased interpretation by leaving unmentioned the existing work being done to combat bias in the models.
I have heard that academic departments literally bend over backwards to cultivate women as professors and extend every possible advantage to them in order to promote them. This is from a classmate who did her PhD and is now a tenure-track professor at a prominent school. I know for a fact that she was also the recipients of various scholarships, grants etc. while she was in school, many of which she attributed to being a woman in the field.
Your statement that "it's hard for women in CompSci" rings false to me. I think women do face higher barriers in many corporate settings that have been mostly male-dominated, but my personal observations about women in CompSci academia lead me to believe that women are treated better vis-a-vis their counterparts in other university departments, and also in other male-dominated industries.
+1 to this. On my very first day of my very first CS class in college over 10 years ago, a guest speaker came in to beg to take girls to an all expenses paid conference about women in CS. I was never afforded a similar opportunity.
Yeha I’ve noticed structural programs that help women, especially at the undergrad level. And the grad level (where people mentioned operated) it’s highly advisor/manager dependent. At the academy, each PI run their own independent fiefdom so some can be very abusive across the board. This is where being a minority makes it worse because it’s more difficult to form commodory with those around you. These are all first hand accounts and observations I’m reporting. So both can be true: favored at the institutional level but still lagging at the personal level.
Having been through grad school I can assure you it’s tough no matter your gender. In fact, women stand a higher chance of getting more financial assistance for their studies because of the structural support for women that continues at the graduate level. Also, in my experience, men tended to have much more conflicts with their advisors and left the graduate program in larger numbers than women (perhaps even proportionally, men walked out more). Ironically, my women colleagues in grad school complained much more about interpersonal conflict with their female professors and research group members than the men. On the personal front, it seems to me that it’s neither here nor there: it’s so subjective that it’s practically impossible to see any pattern whatsoever.
She was fired for violating company confidentiality, anything she says otherwise about her gender, race, culture, etc is just a deflection, but it’s probably coming.
Do you think society at large really benefits from employers doing things this way?
If you were in the ethics department of a company, unpacked deep seated entrenched breach of social norms and were blocked from talking about it but still believed in ethics, what would you do?
I am unsure I would be prepared to do what she and Timbru did but that's a long way from the implied cynicism and also frankly abject legalistic kow-towing implicitly in your statement.
"Yea, that whistle blower had it coming, they signed the same contract i did" is pretty sad. Its not this case, sure, but its in the room, alongside sacking union organisers, refusing to approve talks, private illegal nonpoaching deals with Apple, paying your founder millions to cover up their sexualising the workforce,
> If you were in the ethics department of a company, unpacked deep seated entrenched breach of social norms and were blocked from talking about it but still believed in ethics, what would you do?
Whatever you do, just don't try to engage in things that go against the rules of employment (and quite possibly are illegal) like downloading and send confidential documents to third-parties.
Sure, simply said its obvious. Now, idieate into the circumstance. Can you find no path to "i better make sure can prove my side of the story factually" as a thought process?
There is disagreeing with your employer and then flagrantly breaking rules and confidentiality and comparing the two like you are doing here is disingenuous.
No, its not disingenuous. It has to be thought about, sure. I think by the time you're archiving company secrets outside the firewall you mentally left some time ago. What led you there? Is that maybe the interest for me? I don't think she wound up there for entirely base reasons, maybe that's what I'm thinking. Most strict legal compliance answers aren't "wrong" but boy, they feel limited. Hard to change things when it's down to contact terms. Why have smart people, paid to critique if you want to wind up submarining their work?
i feel you generally on this issue, but that last question is easy to answer. a lot of these aren't out of the goodness of our hearts type things but are more CYA if needed, kind of like white collar crime training. "well, we did the best we could - we even had an ethical AI team." also is a nice recruiting bullet.
now, we don't know if this joint was one of those "haha, yeah, we'll get back to ya" things in management's eyes from the start, but it sure looked like its leadership either was not informed or intended to make it actually matter. praise ought to be given there, as this industry seems largely morally bankrupt. however - and i'm not intending to be super negative here - she may have known that her and G weren't gonna work out, and this was just the most spectacular way to set sail.
As a manager someone can disagree with me all they want, whatever i honestly don't care speak your mind. But the moment they start breaking company rules it starts to get into a problematic space, depending on the rule it can mean their judgement can't be trusted anymore and they will have to be let go. Some company rules are to meet legal requirements, and breaking legally required rules is an entirely different ballgame as your opening the company up to lawsuits and legal repercussions. Just because your smart and paid to critique doesn't mean you get to break the law, even if you, I, and the company disagree with it.
As a manager you have structural obligations it would be impossible to ignore. I believe Mitchell will fail to argue illegal termination in law. I am sure google will have a mixed outcome here, some aspects (reinforcement of hr expectations and contract compliance obligations will be net beneficial for everyone) and some (confirmation of how strongly there is a gap between Google's posture, post "dont be evil" and the actual reality) less so.
I've met and worked with a small, couple of handfuls of google people, men and women, all amazingly skilled. Meredith Whittaker was one of them and I think her termination was unnecessary. I do think less of Google as a consequence.
I would agree, when you consciously step over the legal, you accepted the coming dismissal. Entitlement is a label. I think she knows cause exists. She "left" long before and her anger reflects the construction of events which led there. I doubt she really feels entitled, beyond the expectations of respect and recognition somebody in her pay grades would normally expect.
There's room for discussion, certainly. If I hired an accountant to keep me on the straight and narrow and I expensed a dinner I'm not supposed to, I wouldn't want him to go running to Twitter and be like "Hey, everyone! Rene expensed a dinner with this guy abroad! That's a violation of the FCPA! He's a violator, guys! Heeeeeee's a violator!"
Like, if he did that, I'd be pretty incensed honestly. I'd expect him to tell me "Dude, you can't go around taking these guys out to dinner. That's like a bribery violation and shit, homie".
If he had to keep warning me, I could see him feeling that his professional ethics are being called into question, and then I'd expect him to either:
* quit and maybe blow the whistle
* stay and blow the whistle and then I'm gonna retaliate within my legal ability
> There's room for discussion, certainly. If I hired an accountant to keep me on the straight and narrow and I expensed a dinner I'm not supposed to, I wouldn't want him to go running to Twitter
Or emailing your expense report to who knows whom.
Only if the disagreeing was in relation to ethical AI.
As far as I know, she's made this about perceived sexism, racism, and personally attacking hermanagers for failing to step up regarding various topics NOT related to AI ethics. There hasn't been much discussion about actual AI ethics, at least not on her behalf.
Unpacked, uncovered, documented, found. Deep seated, ingrained, established, systematic, breach non aligned, wrong, social societal, norms expectations laws, behaviours,
Please. Don't be that person. What did you think it meant? What specifically. Was without meaning. Not what do you disagree with: to even pose the question, you have to be literate and capable of reading. At this point your question is actually a statement. In other channels I'd say it more bluntly.
Someone asked you a question and you belittled them assuming worst intent. Please don't be THAT person. For one not everyone speaks english as a first language, two while i _think_ i understand what your getting at you picked a very obtuse way to phrase it and even i'm uncertain if i understand, three when speaking to a diverse audience from around the globe who probably are not aware of the language used when speaking about diversity you should default to simple clear explanations and language, not packing it all up into a dense phrase like that.
Google claimed to have higher regard for equity in the workplace and to correcting structural bias at all levels.
The AI ethics people were meeting structural process and behaviour around their own work, which i believe they felt fundamentally contradicts that.
They did not receive support to say it outside the company. Ultimately in at least one case, they probably broke their terms and conditions of employment and have been terminated.
Looking at it from the perspective of what people say they expect from the modern workplace, it wasn't a good alignment. People expect equity. They expect to be able to speak their mind. Within limits people can and do, but some staff have found the informal rules of what you can say about Google were not what they think they wanted.
Fired for cause, and at-will terms of employment are entirely normal. Nobody can seriously say Google broke the law, absent strong evidence. If you hire somebody to occupy a senior role, but constrain their ability to self assert, its a bit contradictory.
What do you think society at large wants, from the entities which now control the vast majority of our private state as individuals?
I’m sorry but as a native speaker your phrasing is awkward and a pain to parse. Unpack isn’t synonym for ‘uncover’ and the rest was equally clumsy. The “if the rules didn’t stop me I’d give you the finger, you imbecile” tact is a little ironic.
What is wrong with you? Why do you talk like that? It's like you take a normal sentence, then swap out some random words until it no longer makes sense.
No, its just how some people mangle English. I didn't go to Oxbridge, but a lot of my workmates in the eighties did and they sometimes wrote very strange sentence structure. An American instance: Prof Dave Mills (certainly in no sense a peer, since he's out of my league, but we did write on the same arpanet and pre great renaming Usenet lists. Also he didn't go to Oxbridge) says this of his own style of writing:
It is an open secret among my correspondents that I on occasion do twitch the English language in mail messages and published works. Paper referees have come to agreement on what they call millsspeak to refer to the subtilities with which I personalize my work. If you read my papers or my mail, you know my resonances. If not, you can calibrate my naughtimeter from children's books
Jon Crowcroft, who is a CS professor in Cambridge, but was a phd student in ucl-cs when I worked there in the eighties: http://paravirtualization.blogspot.com/ also, probably presumptuous to call him a peer: if he keeps going, he may be one both literally, and by appointment. Of the realm that is, not I.
Overall I think I miswrote above. Absent a time machine, it stands.
Obviously, this stuff irritates a lot of people. I apologise, but really at this stage I doubt I'm changing.
Btw, and please forgive me if this is a breach of privacy but HN comment history shows you've accumulated a 25 year deep curated unix command history file. If I had the forethought to have done the same (which btw, is a brilliant idea) it would be older than yours. It most definitely would not be better, and very possibly more narrow in focus. I suspect, the pretensions of written English aside, we're not that different.
What makes it hard for me to read is mainly the comma-placement, which is quite different from the verbal pauses you'd make when reading it, and break up rather than separate the logical parts. I found myself asking "what does it mean to point in rule?" Italics or quotes would have helped.
> Within the next year, let those of us in positions of privilege and power come to terms with the discomfort of being part of an unjust system
If you have this pinned to your Twitter (on 2/5) about your employer why are you still working there and not resigning? It took Google 14 days to fire her, which I suppose is the typical two weeks notice since that date.
Additionally, she can stage martyrdom in front of Twitter and vulture news media. If she quits and writes blog posts about her experience working at Google, she would no way get the same amount of attention she is getting now. This is called performative activism.
No qualms for Googlers getting a reality check. I don't get why people think they work at a liberal think-tank where no consequences exist for sharing opinions or confidential data about the company publicly. Had someone on my team decided to write a similar doc like the one Margaret published, I'd have fired them on the spot. Shut your mouth and move on if your ideology conflicts with your employer's.
Hiring an ethics in AI research team presupposes you want to have ethics in your AI. It's disappointing, but not surprising, to find they want a bunch of syncopants. Perhaps they shouldn't have bothered creating the department if they didn't want people working there to speak out.
You’d have to think there was some middle ground between investigating and adding ethical accountability to AI programs and exfiltrating thousands of sensitive files.
I was reading a book about dry stone bridges, and one of the bridges featured was built across a stream in a protected watershed. The builder said he was surprised the permit for it was approved, he told the client to expect it to be rejected. Talking to the government bureaucrats & scientists, he found out that they had to approve a permit every now and then. Not just because of political reasons, but strategic ones -- if they denied every permit, people would start ignoring and circumventing their department. By approving one every once in a while, they kept themselves in the loop as gatekeepers and prevented more harm than they would have by denying everything. His own bridge project was minimally harmful, and was the token approval so they could keep denying the real problem applications.
I feel like there's a lesson there for other gatekeepers trying to fight the good fight.
I think it was from "How To Build Dry-Stacked Stone Walls" by John Shaw-Rimmington, but I pick up nearly every book I see on the topic so I can't be sure.
In this context, it's very likely that you can translate "exfiltrating thousands of sensitive files" to "downloaded some of her emails", perhaps related to fear of retaliation
The point is that "exfiltrating thousands of sensitive files" can mean many things. It can mean, for example, downloading one's emails to have an independent record of them for fear of retaliation.
It can also mean stealing company IP to try and start a competitor.
Both may be equally forbidden by policy, but they're vastly different acts.
Everytime I see cases like activist employees getting fired for violating company policy, the sentiment seems to be the company is the bad guy. At what point it becomes the fault of the activist employee? At what point we can have an introspective look that are we enabling toxic behavior of people suffering from Messiah Complex?
This is my personal anecdote. I had experienced working with an online activist co-worker. She was one of the people who are very popular online, but most of her co-workers hated her. She was extremely entitled, always bossed people (who are at the same level as her) around, did very little of her actual job because she was busy in more important online activism. She had a Messiah Complex, and we were all there just to support her in her worthy cause. That's why I am conflicted when I see activist employees getting fired.
Sure, there are "activist employees", and sometimes companies may be justified in thinking that some of these employees engage in soapboxing to an extent that it's detrimental to the goals of the company or a distraction from their actual jobs, as you say.
But if a company serially butts heads with people whose actual jobs ARE to hold said company accountable in some way, I find it suspicious.
If a company keeps firing accountants "because they kept yapping about GAAP", wouldn't that raise a red flag with you? Or if a company told their auditor's managers that they'd take their business elsewhere unless more reasonable auditing standards were applied — a practice only all too common in the lead up to financial scandals.
If a president keeps firing inspector generals because apparently they are all part of a Grand Conspiracy against America, wouldn't that be a bit suspicious?
So if Google serially fires AI ethicists, some HN commenters keep insisting that all of them must have been uniquely unreasonable and toxic people, but my money would be on Google having increasing issues with being held to certain ethical standards.
As an aside, paradoxically, it may not be a good sign either if such watchdogs stay at a company forever, appear to be perpetually content and grow highly prosperous. The reason why is left as an exercise to the reader.
So every company that has internal audits expects a bunch of syncopants? WTF?
Internal audits ranging from a technical issue that impacted clients to sexual harassments investigations are all handled privately and details are shared AFTER the issue is handled. And the details shared are filtered to avoid legal liabilities/bad PR.
An ethics team can certainly coexist with this, the same paper that caused this chain of events could have been shared internally, get a team on board to try to improve on those issues and later publish both the Parrots paper at FAccT and fixes simultaneously in a technical conference.
Still the whole thing is sad because the research they were conducting is impactful
> Had someone on my team decided to write a similar doc like the one Margaret published, I'd have fired them on the spot
I sometimes don't agree with decisions my (present and past) employers have made. But I'd never go to the media or public forums with those disagreements. If I thought it was so important that I had to do that, I'd resign first.
I strenuously avoid making any public comment about my current employer. (Even past employers, I may be a little more open, but I'm still careful about what I publicly say – don't want to violate any confidentiality obligations, and don't want to unnecessarily burn bridges in case I want to seek re-employment or other commercial relations with them in the future.)
If any of my employers (current or past) caught me downloading company documents/emails/etc in order to share them with the media or other external parties – I'd expect to be fired.
Would you please stop posting unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments, and especially personal attacks? You've done the latter more than once recently and we ban that sort of account.
Instead, if you'd please make your substantive points thoughtfully and without taking the thread further into flamewar hell, we'd be grateful.
I'm curious, what will Mitchell's and Gebru's career prospects be from now on? After badmouthing their employer publicly, sharing internal communication, I just don't see who in their right minds would hire them.
Many academic departments would certainly hire them - there are universities/departments who pretty much ignore such politics, and there are many universities/departments who would consider their stance as heroic and a bonus for hiring.
Which doc are you referring to? Could you link it?
Your last sentence has the implication that people should not attempt the change or challenge from within the corporate capitalist ideology of the big tech companies, which together make up a large portion of the entire technology industry and the US stock market. They should just concede and “move on”.
I’m kind of sympathetic to this view. Someone who joins a corporate law firm to “change things from within” is going to get a deserved skeptical smirk. It’s not just attempting to dismantle the master’s house with the master’s tools. It’s attempting the dismantling while standing next to the master inside his own house, asking him to pass the hammer.
Wut!? please tell me you followed the whole story and knows all facts. Jeff manages whole department, whereas this person was working in one team, "ethical ai". There are literally more than 20+ teams that answers Jeff. Each team got anywhere from 4-50 people.
I'm not interested in the details of this, but from a distance - people sure do make life difficult for themselves, bringing politics and their opinions and controversy into workplaces. It's always tech and academia, too - you'd think it'd be enough to get just paid shitloads of money for interesting knowledge work and save the drama for friends in the pub (or the bar, or whatever).
Well, maybe. But it's not like this sort of drama is unusual. Maybe you have to be outside looking in to see the absurdity (I'm not in Silicon Valley, or the US for that matter).
Lot's of people just chase the next incremental step up, compensation increase, etc. Their not even sociopaths, they just don't know how to find meaning in their lives in other ways.
I think I was not referring to arbitrary high paying jobs, but specifically the highest paying and possibly highest reach jobs, like ethical AI at the biggest tech company. The sociopath term may have seemed a little dramatic, but really, if you feel like there's more than just petty politics problems and you don't feel conflicted, that's concerning.
Also was flippantly disregarding the tech as sufficiently compelling to ignore what you feel is really damaging if such a thing exists. I personally would have a high bar for technical work being sufficiently interesting, and a medium bar for keeping quiet.
The immediate example I think of is that I'd have a hard time accepting FB money to write JS there, because of ultimately how they make money maybe or not respecting the ceo. Granted, I have no idea what it's like on the inside.
I’m very vocal at work about all sorts of things. But to openly condemn your employer repeatedly on social media, steal data, then complain about the repercussions? How absurd. And this person is in charge of ethics for your company? I could not think of a more inappropriate position for such a person.
I’ve been wondering how sincere the Silicon Valley corporate mantra of Be yourself, Be authentic, be open to management really was.
There was so much idealism even on Hacker news. Nowadays I witness the strange contradiction of people bashing giant tech companies while mostly discussing how to found the next giant tech company.
A lot of us did genuinely believe it. However as the companies grew and became mega corps the realities of life in normal companies have slowly made themsleves felt.
It’s a bit like the Adam Curtis documentary hyper normalization. Where we all pretend that everything is still the same as before, but beneath the still free sushi ,massages and high compensation a lot has changed.
I'm probably not intelligent then. In the early 00's, I did think Google mostly believed in its mission to organize and act as a gateway for the world's information.
Yep, though I knew even at the time that most companies' mission statements were BS. Google seemed different. I think at some point they still actually were different, but also were themselves naive about what being successful and transforming into a large corporation would do to them.
Honestly, I think this attitude makes much more sense in the present era than it did before about ten years ago. There was a time when IMHO you weren't just naive for believing that Google was sincere about its "don't be evil" mantra. The current age really is one of cynicism.
Of course, in my mind that's a completely separate question from whether or not Google is being evil in this case. As far as that goes, I honestly really don't know the answer.
I suspect very few employees actually think that google is evil. The phrase was noteworthy at the time because it was so hyperbolic. It was only now when nuance has been thrown out the window that everything has to be black and white.
I hate that the HN audience put so much significance on google “abandoning” (it didn’t) this mantra. Anyone who actually understands depth in any topic knows that it’s not as simple as “don’t be evil”.
Like oh cool thanks man. Yeah now I know exactly what the right moral path is - just don’t be evil duh.
It adds no practical value to decision making other to serve as directional inspiration. But you’re not going to be sitting there trying to find the right balance of weights in search ranking in order to keep fairness and equity and just be like “right, don’t be evil”
For me at least, it really was sincere, but in retrospect I was terribly naive about the shared cultural context required to make it work. My idea of "be authentic, be yourself" just didn't include a lot of people who authentically disagree with me on what a good working environment is like.
For myself, I reconcile the tension by telling myself that giant tech companies are like invasive species - aggressive and bad for the environment in the short term, but also the only thing that can survive in a certain kind of environment.
The proper goal, as I see it, is to plan to build the next giant tech company and be willing to step on as many toes as necessary to make it happen... but to have an ideal in mind that goes beyond that 'growth at all costs' stage in which the company could actually increase the health of its ecosystem.
have an ideal in mind that goes beyond that 'growth at all costs' stage in which the company could actually increase the health of its ecosystem.
Ideal is right, because that is idealistic to the point of naivete. The second a company takes its eye off the ball and starts trying to better the world, its competitors swoop in and take over.
The right answer is for a society to create laws that ensure the behavior we want to see out of corporations. When that's not effective because corporations have undue influence on the legal system, then it's very clear and simple the problem you need to solve.
See, that looks to me like naivete about the behaviour of the regulatory apparatus.
Ultimately, a civilisation runs on both rules and tools, and while we clearly have opposite biases about where the low-hanging fruit are, I think we also both know it's not really true that there are zero improvements to be made in either realm. I'd be happy to share my scepticism about attempts to reform the 'rules' side of the equation if you like, but my own interest is in tools.
Some tools allow a few players to dominate a limited number of niches, others allow many players to thrive in many niches. If you're going to be a toolmaker, trying to gain dominance and then keep the environment static is actually a self-limiting strategy, Nothing in nature or history has proven able to do that. The only time one player can dominate a limited number of niches is when there are few niches to begin with. Successfully dominating a niche actually gives more opportunities to create niches adjacent to one's own. Amazon carving out a niche in e-commerce is what allows it to provide services to authors and vendors.
Wow, this is a good example of sounds-smart nonsense. Deepak Chopra style.
> The only time one player can dominate a limited number of niches is when there are few niches to begin with.
What?? What are you even saying? It's an entire world filled with niches. There's no sense in which niches are limited. How does it ever make sense to talk about "a limited number of niches"??
If that were true, people would still be buying pet supplies from Pets.com and books from Amazon.com. The fact everyone knows what is meant by 'FAANG' should demonstrate how few actual niches exist in the digital space.
Communication is difficult when worldviews are very different and you seem uninterested in meeting me halfway. I'd be happy to explore this area of dialogue further, but you'd need to agree to stop insulting me.
If that were true, people would still be buying pet supplies from Pets.com and books from Amazon.com
I don't understand. Amazon sells some very large percentage of every book sold in the world. What are you saying?
The fact everyone knows what is meant by 'FAANG' should demonstrate how few actual niches exist in the digital space.
What does this mean? A niche is a very specific market segment. The presence of extremely large players does not negate the presence of niches. Niches exist whether or not there companies taking advantage of them.
Communication is difficult, that's why words matter. I think you should choose your words more carefully and make sure you are double-checking that the things you are saying actually make sense.
Or they'll just conclude the whole thing was a waste and only caused negative publicity and hard feelings and have legal and PR and relevant stakeholders from any given project manage ethics going forward like normal BigCos do.
I don’t think it’s just for PR, I think any organisation that invests heavily into the development and use of ML/AI needs wants to keep a close eye on whether the outcomes are in line with positive humanistic values.
I don’t know how these ethics professionals added value to Google. I _do_ know that repeatedly belittling your CEO and employer on a public forum might win you lots of virtue signalling points but not be constructive for the company paying you a salary.
No, they just hired the wrong people. They employed political activists instead of real professionals which was initially great for PR. Not the best long term decision they've made.
> Mitchell has been locked out of the corporate email since last month after what a source says was her effort to search corporate correspondence for evidence to back up Gebru's claim of discrimination and harassment
It sounds like she dredged through her email, and sent emails she found to an ex-employee. That's probably going to get you fired.
It seems to me like there is no possible situation where searching (dredged is a weirdly loaded word) through ones own email is a fire able offense. In fact, the idea that one can be fired for reading ones own work email strikes me as kind of absurd and unworkable.
Perhaps there are things one can do with the emails you found that are fireable, that’s beyond my (lack of) legal expertise, but searching? That doesn’t seem right.
It seems like she was passing stuff on outside of Google, but then we don't really know the details of those activities to know if it was an inappropriate action.
I assume that there are exceptions. Off the top of my head I believe whistleblowing would be a legally protected use of corporate emails. Maybe there are others, I’m not a lawyer. But I definitely accept that in general sharing work emails without authorization is a fireable offense.
Honestly this whole thing strikes me as something more legally complex than engineers can analyze. I for one want to hear an actual expert weigh in on this, once enough facts are known. Anything else has too high a risk of foolish things being said.
It's pretty important to get this story straight: She moved files when she wasn't supposed to. This seems like a pretty standard firing. People are already claiming on twitter that Google is assaulting ethical AI, and I just don't see it.
Google did not immediately comment on those claims. Its statement said of Mitchell: “We confirmed that there were multiple violations of our code of conduct, as well as of our security policies, which included the exfiltration of confidential business-sensitive documents and private data of other employees.”
Not just exfiltration but sharing outside the organization, as per news articles about it.
There's no story here, this is an obvious outcome.
Edit: to add that the more interesting question is whether they should sue her. If they don't, that may be the contextually-appropriate version of letting her off the hook easy (to live up to their culture or for morale or for optics or whatever reason).
You always have to be careful with people who do bad things for "good" reasons (ie the difference between Sci-Hub and reselling pirated papers for a profit).
You want a gulf of difference between the punishment for nefarious activity and the punishment for well-intended-but-unlawful activity.
She is an authority on Ethics, being listed on the ICLR conference as part of the Ethics Review Committee:
> Margaret Mitchell, Google Research and Machine Intelligence
But I do think they can miss her, since there are already 8 people responsible for Ethics and Diversity, with 11 responsible for the actual organization of the conference.
Maybe they can update https://iclr.cc/ to reflect the fact that she is not representing Google anymore?
This is so pretentious. Ethics is a branch of philosophy and even religion with deep debates raging from 4000 years ago and no end in sight. Hundreds of specialists have been going at it in multi-decades efforts and yet any of their opinions must not carry more weight than the average citizen's. Mitchell has a BS in Linguistics an MS in computational linguistics and a PhD in CS. Her fist paper about something even tangentially related to ethics is from 2015.
Philosophers have already identified the problem. There is no universal standard of morality or ethics.
The core of ethics derives from evolution. Societies with certain sets of cooperative and competitive values destroy, dominate, and expand. Mutations are constantly happening and some of those ethics can lead to the self-destruction of a culture, while some make a culture even more dominant. Some are neutral and just background noise and have no substantial impact on the society.
In the grand scheme of things the only thing that matters for morals and ethics is whether the culture that embodies those ethics can survive against pressure from other cultures.
Some ethics have been selected into the genome as they provide superior fitness of individuals.
The idea that we should pursue equal outcomes is a mutation. In general it has been shown to destroy a culture (socialism) when competing with more capitalistic cultures. The victim type culture is likely to be much weaker than one where people constantly compete to rise to the pinnacle of power and wealth.
Ultimately power and wealth drive innovation; and innovation, especially of weapons, drives domination. There are other types of domination, such as media, food, language, etc.
Good luck trying to find a consensus in philosophy, specially in such a contentious field like ethics. There isnt, for myriad of reasons, from the banal (PhD theses, and tenure decisions depend on "new approaches"), to the historical(there are several 'schools' in ethics, with their subdivisions), to the sociological (society in general does not grant to professional philosophers the monopoly on deciding what is wrong or right)
If she didn't do it and they don't have good reason to believe she did, then she could and should easily win a large lawsuit against them, since they have publicly accused her of illegal activity. That is a hugely more risky move than just saying that someone underperformed or was let go for other reasons, and knowing how heavily pre-lawyered everything that Google does is, I highly doubt they would publicize something like that without having evidence to back it up.
Maybe I'm wrong, but afaik she has yet to deny doing exactly what they've claimed. My guess is that in her mind she was doing something totally reasonable by trying to dig up old emails that she remembered that she thought would help her friend's case against Google, and feels that even if that's against the letter of her agreements with the company it should be morally okay. Which is fine as a moral argument, but you're still gonna get fired.
"Maybe I'm wrong, but afaik she has yet to deny doing exactly what they've claimed."
That seems like the natural thing to do if you feel like you may already be in the process of being fired. I assume a lawyer would advise you to be quiet about it, right?
> If she didn't do it and they don't have good reason to believe she did, then she could and should easily win a large lawsuit against them, since they have publicly accused her of illegal activity.
Despite the popular refrain of “truth is an absolute defense” in the context of defamation law, in US law falsity is an element of the tort, which means that the plaintiff bears the burden of making a prima facie case that the accusation was false by at least some evidence, the defendant doesn't bear the initial burden of showing that it is true or reasonably believed.
Also, there is a very good chance, since Mitchell was publicly involved in the controversy over Google's firing of Timnit Gebru before Google made the accusation, that Mitchell would be found to be a public figure within the context of Google's alleged defamation, which would heighten the requirement from falsity plus harm to proving actual malice.
Also, if Google is lying, they almost certainly also spent over a month building a constructed evidence trail and doctoring records to support the lie between the very public lockout and the actual firing.
So, no, winning a defamation case wouldn't be easy, wouldn't be quick, and wouldn't fail to be extremely expensive in litigation costs.
Plus, every step Google takes on this is just resulting in more of the remaining people in the affected area of the company going public with problems, and it’s not like Mitchell seems to be hurting for alternative employment so as likely the only value of winning the lawsuit would be a PR poke in Google's eye that they are getting on their own anyway...why bother?
The rule number 1 in letting people go: never go on record why you did that. There's a good reason for that - you're opening yourself up for lawsuits. Google violated that rule in a big way by making such a public and damaging statement. You bet they can back it up.
> And, it's not a court of law. At best, it's "allegedly moved files when they weren't supposed to".
Are you operating under the assumption that nothing should ever be stated as a fact unless determined by a court of law? Because that's not how I think of things.
(I do agree that Google is a biased actor here. If I hear that Margaret Mitchell disputes moving files in contravention of company policy I will give her the benefit of the doubt. But my default assumption will be that everyone is telling the truth about basic facts.)
It's pretty important to get it straight: what files did she move and why? So far it appears she did NOT do an Anthony Levandowski and steal IP. In particular Google has said zero about the actual dollar value of those files, or cited any damages from the movement of the files. It appears much more likely she was talking to a lawyer, which is a perfectly legal thing to do, and probably pretty wise given Google's maximally adversarial approach to this whole mess.
Yes you should always respect your employer's property. In tech, that's almost always IP stuff: code, diagrams, plans, etc. But don't let an employer defame a former employee with an intentionally "concise" story.
> So far it appears she did NOT do an Anthony Levandowski and steal IP.
From what I've seen, neither Google nor Margaret Mitchell have described the file transfer event in detail. We don't yet know the content of the thousands of documents she allegedly exfiltrated.
> It appears much more likely she was talking to a lawyer, which is a perfectly legal thing to do, [...]
I'm curious about this. Is it legal to copy and store _any_ documents that you deem necessary for your lawyer to see? Seems unlikely.
It doesn't matter what files she moved and why. What matters is they were internal Google documents and exfiltrating sensitive contents that you don't own is a fireable offence in any corporation.
She should have known better.
Just so everyone knows, in CA your assertions are false. CA courts have ruled that if a company protects documents or email systems then they earn the status of a trade secret. Theft of trade secrets is a felony criminal offence in CA. Do I think the CA AG is going to charge her? Unlikely. But there’s no need to demonstrate damages here like in a civil suit.
Illegally exfiltrating documents to your lawyer is also, illegal. Such documents would not be admissible in court and should be obtained through the usual lawful channels of legal discovery.
Just so everybody knows, sexual coercion is a criminal offense and yet Google certainly didn’t pursue Andy Rubin for that, actually they gave him a $90m severance.
An employer has a vested interest in letting you go can always find a reason that can be summarized as some violation of corporate policy.
Right now I'm writing this during the work day on my work computer.
I forwarded a work email to my own personal email once because my work email client wasn't syncing on my phone.
Could these be used against me if my employer cared enough? Undoubtedly.
OP is preemptively judging Mitchell 1 hour after she announced she was let go. We have no concept if there claims are legitimate and will not survive a wrongful dismissal lawsuit.
Google doesn't care. Paying Mitchell X Million dollars would be just a cost of doing business. In the meantime, an "uppity" provocateur is out of the building and not fighting for change.
This is something I feel like few people learn in life in the US. You may be morally right, but nobody ever has your back. The few that do you can probably call friends, but the many that don't will never lift a finger to help you legitimately when it matters.
I don’t see why you say US, it’s the same in any country.
Nobody in their right mind is going to quit their job over this during a pandemic, when it’s already so hard to find a job. I imagine ethics jobs are not in high demand.
you been out on these streets lately? lemme tell ya, you falling on your sword at this time in history without a rock-solid plan in place to keep that bread coming is going to leave you with a lot of regrets, i'll wager. there ain't a lot of companies in the world looking for "quit bc i thought the bosses gave a coworker a bad shake" on a resume, and they sure as hell ain't paying what google is.
In the Motorcycle Safety Foundation course, and probably in driver's ed everywhere there is the phrase: you can be right, or dead right. And they will write on your grave that you had the right of way.
Basically, is it more important to be right, or to be alive (or be employed).
Gebru was fired because she gave an ultimatum to her boss threatening to resign if they don't disclose names of all reviewers who criticized her work AND blasted group emails calling for sabotage https://docs.google.com/document/d/1f2kYWDXwhzYnq8ebVtuk9CqQ...
The gulf between "I know what I am supposed to say" and "I truly believe in this" grows wider by the day.
Rarely do people resign out of principle...but when you're claiming that your employer actively does evil and harms the least among us, and then continue to work for them, it is obvious that you are either entirely without morals OR you are saying what is socially rewarded to say, without meaning it.
At the same time, Google unveiled a "Black owned businesses near me" on Google Maps. How has that been received? We need look no further than Twitter: (the Tl;Dr. racists are using this to lower all ratings of these Black owned businesses)
Google recently added a feature allowing users to search for "Black-owned businesses near you". They're advertising it all over the place (see below).
I've also already started hearing from Black-owned businesses I follow that they're seeing an influx of racist fake reviews...
BLK MKT Vintage, for instance, got over 30 new, clearly fake reviews in 24 hours (e.g., calling them "a store that promotes segregation", saying their items were "broken" and "covered in dead cockroaches").
And if you look at the users writing those reviews...
The users leaving those fraudulent 1-star reviews for this business are also leaving 1-star reviews on dozens of other Black-owned businesses.
All this while Google pays for PR lauding this new feature.
We need to ask: is it always a good idea to make marginalized groups more visible? Whom does it benefit?
Have such companies thought through the consequences for those they're "helping"? Was this done at the direction of those groups or paternalistically on behalf of?
This is yet another example of why app features cannot and should not replace community networks and mutual aid.
Technosolutionism, the white savior complex, and paternalism towards marginalized groups lead to selfish PR efforts that actively harm those they ostensibly "help".
In what will be an entirely self-serving, "everything is evidence for my existing worldview" claim...
...I would promote race-blindness as the solution to this. The more we talk about and focus on race, especially in a zero-sum context like "buy black-owned", the worse the racial tensions and competition will become.
People confuse cultural power with economic power...just because many powerful people/businesses support black enterprise right now, doesn't mean the wider society will just blindly follow with fists full of cash.
Racism is terrible. "Antiracism", with no regard to the actual outcomes, is hardly better. These businesses were not being harassed by awful people until Google tried to leverage them over their non-black-owned competitors.
See, I could probably get on board with being passively opposed to about half the stuff on that triangle. The other half is either outright bs or stuff I've never heard of.
Yes, antiracism must be measured by its effects. Google's campaign had antiracist intentions, and racist effects.
That doesn't mean we should all give up on effective antiracism, though. This tactic/campaign/etc. was not antiracist. Others can be. It's not clear at all why this should be taken to mean that "the more we talk about race...the worse the racial tensions and competition will become." The conversation around race in the US has been ongoing for decades, and there are many objective metrics whereby things have not become worse.
I could have been clearer but I meant to stress "in zero-sum contexts". Not all race discussion is necessarily bad/harmful in outcomes.
However it sure does appear to me that in the last five or ten years, the manner of the conversation has degraded so much that very very little progress is made per unit of "increasing tensions". That is entirely subjective, but it is how it appears to me.
Racism must absolutely be measured by intention, not effects. The very definition of racism is somebody actively discriminating against another race. Any other definition just ends up discussing Marxist ideas like "systems of oppression" which go nowhere and actively harm the conversation.
No, you'd like to define racism narrowly. Not that I can get in your head, but doing so sure makes it easier to imagine ourselves as not complicit. But evil is all too often banal, and passive.
I'm not complicit. I've never been in a position of authority over hiring or loans, etc... nor have I ever treated anybody differently for their skin colour. Racism is about intent and your definition expands it well beyond what figures like MLK understood it to be.
MLK named "the white moderate, who is more devoted to 'order' than to justice" as "the great stumbling block in [the] stride toward justice." I'm not expanding a thing.
That's still incorrect. I'm happy for there to be disruptions in order to get justice. What I don't agree with is that I'm somehow complicit for society's problems be virtue of being born into it. Or would you be prepared to charge your children with that burden too?
Here's one guess, off the top of my head: what actions have you taken to reduce the likelihood that police in your community will kill a black person unnecessarily?
Cause as much as I care about that issue, I never reached out to leaders in my community to encourage hiring more police and reducing overtime, for example. I didn't join any protest. I have been completely passive, standing by, waiting for someone else to solve the problem.
I could save a lot more lives per dollar/hour by working on antimalarial treatments in Africa. There's countless things we're not doing so save lives. That does not mean we're relentlessly evil.
If you aren't working to save every life, you're basically Godwin's Law.
You're strawmanning. I didn't call anyone relentlessly evil—the whole point is that complicity is woven into our daily lives in a way that's banal and easily ignored.
You could direct more resources this way or that. Do you? What about your time? Do you invite others in your life to do so as well?
The rather old viewpoint of content of character over skin color is the only good way forward in my opinion. I find it to be a real tragedy that skin color has come under hyper focus in the last decade.
I think it stems from a tragic mixture of deep desire to make things better (a good thing) and youthful impatience. Combined with the accelerated ability to disseminate ideas via the internet ... we are in an ongoing flame war that I never would have imagined. It makes me feel sick, sad, and frustrated.
> The more we talk about and focus on race, especially in a zero-sum context like "buy black-owned", the worse the racial tensions and competition will become.
My dad was telling me this yesterday. He saw sectarian conflict growing up in Bangladesh, and working in international public health, he’s been to 70 countries and has had a chance to see ethnic conflict first hand. In his observation, emphasizing differences will increase rather than decrease conflict.
Oddly, this is very similar to how colonial powers divided and conquered countries. They would emphasize differences between groups and treat them differently based on group membership, fueling animosity between them. Obviously the motivation for doing those things here in the US is different. But if you’re telling some kids they can go back to school and others have to stay in remote learning, based on the color of their skin, I’m not sure why would expect the result to be different. Measures like kids getting back to in person learning at different times based on skin color should worry people: see: https://www.wsj.com/articles/can-school-be-antiracist-a-new-....
And if it is opt-in, and happened to boost business instead of attracting racist reviews, I would fully expect non-black owned businesses to capitalize on that and opt-in as well.
I really didn't understand why they were doing that. It seemed very strange. I couldn't quite put my finger on why it didn't seem appropriate... just that it seemed wholly irrelevant to how I would decide where to shop. I freely admit, however, that as I middle aged white male I may have some blind spots.
> We need to ask: is it always a good idea to make marginalized groups more visible? Whom does it benefit?
No it doesn’t. And I wish people would stop experimenting with this sort of thing and treating it as some sort of fad.
I grew up, as an immigrant from a Muslim country, in a white Republican suburb in the 1990s. And it was great. I can’t imagine what life would have been like today - constant reminders of the fact that you’re different, white teachers admitting they’re “gatekeepers of white supremacy,” using “whiteness” as a pejorative, etc. I’m fully developed and fluent in the language so I can tolerate it. But I’ve got kids and this is not the culture I want my kids to grow up in.
Leaving aside whether this stuff is right on the merits. There is a limited number of white people who will put up with a constant drone of being called “racist” and being blamed for things that happened before they were born. As these confrontational tactics continue, people’s patience will wear thin. And if it becomes more prevalent to treat kids different based in their skin color, such as Evanston’s proposal to keep white and Asian kids behind in remote learning while letting other kids go back in person, people’s patience will evaporate in an instant. And overstepping that tolerance will have real consequences for people of color.
When white people amplify this hyper-activist, in-you-face approach, they aren’t just drawing attention to a problem, they’re picking a particular solution. And because they comprise a majority and control the culture, they can impose an approach that people of color (who have to live with the consequences) don’t necessarily want. When you jump on board this bandwagon, you’re not just changing the culture for yourself. You’re not just changing the culture for activist POC you went to grad school with. You’re changing it for the blue collar worker who happens to be a POC. And you can bet that what kind of culture he wants to live in is not well represented in the academic and activist circles that dream up these approaches.
You think your kids won't be white? My father wasn't white when he came here 30 years ago. Somehow magically I am. The same thing will happen to you too.
I call it Schrodinger's whiteness. You are white enough to be blamed for right wing racism yet not white enough to not be the target of it.
It's hilarious to me that the "diversity in tech" movement scrupulously avoids noticing that all kinds of asian people exist in our industry.
Acknowledging them would undercut narratives about white supremacy, but you can't get away with calling them white either... so they're invisible! Good for them, frankly, I'm jealous.
> And if it becomes more prevalent to treat kids different based in their skin color, such as Evanston’s proposal to keep white and Asian kids behind in remote learning while letting other kids go back in person, people’s patience will evaporate in an instant.
Woah. The accelerationism here is truly scary. If our kids grow up in an environment with this rhetoric then it's not inconceivable we end up back in a segregationist hell-hole. Only needs to be normalized for one generation before the damage is done.
You would think that (((Larry Page))) and (((Sergey Brin))) would have made a company that appreciates outing minorities is a bad thing. I guess (((they))) don't mind and will stop deplatforming people who merely point out how (((they))) represent over 40% of billionaires despite making up less than 2% of the population.
Or, and hear out this crazy idea, we stop it with the racism from the left and right and treat people according to their circumstances and their character instead of who their grandparents were.
I would very much like to know how much testing Google did on the “Black-owned businesses near you” feature. I know they extensively test algorithm changes to their search engine before rolling them out to everyone. It would be really disturbing if they didn’t do due diligence on this feature, to make sure it has a positive impact for businesses using it.
Keeping lists of people who have special traits should be kept to an absolute minimum. Just ask the Dutch (good people got punished and killed trying to destroy the official registers of Dutch jews as it became clear the Nazis sought them.)
Pointing out the differences between people isn't going to help!
In the place I grew up in Europe there were almost no foreigners. But in summer holidays we lived next to a really black family at a camp site for years. Their dad were friends with my dad and well, that was it. They were humans like the rest of us.
Today it is almost like it is scarier to meet people from other cultures.
I hate Google, but I have to say this article is garbage. It sounds like she was fired for perfectly legitimate reasons. Trying to make it about racism or sexism is a disservice to those who actually care about those issues.
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[ 5.4 ms ] story [ 368 ms ] threadThis new tweet makes the firing official.
https://venturebeat.com/2021/01/20/google-targets-ai-ethics-...
This is one of those times where people are going to intentionally conflate Google's legit right to terminate employment with what is best for the long term culture of the company.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ERi2crDToYhYjEjxRoOzO-uO...
How do these things work at industrial labs, such as those of Google and Microsoft?
I know that some places feel that the people managers have to be the technical experts but I would strongly advise against working in such a place.
Also, can you clarify what you mean by 'shouting themselves into the void'? Are they being denied venues to publish their research, thereby rendering their shouting inaudible, or did you mean something else?
In other words MSFT allowed them to publish freely, it just (allegedly) ignored the implications of the research.
I'm not sure what university were you at where that was true - academia is horribly political (in many ways more than corporations in some ways less) and until you get tenure your job is to put up and shut up. Your career is dependant on good recommendation letters and goodwill of quality advisors.
Attacking your organization, supervisor or lab will end your career faster than Google cancels products.
Even after you gain tenure, you're still dependant on external funding to keep your research going and employ postdocs and other researchers. That funding disappears really quickly if you decide to start an assault against your organization or people paying you. Like these Googlers did.
life pro tip: for any paper with more than 2 authors, the last author is the most senior and did the least amount of work (if any). i leave it to you to conjecture about quid pro quo.
Universities are not very well-run when compared to your average fortune 500 corporation, and there is a lot of skullduggery that goes on inside of academic departments, particularly those that do not receive a whole lot of research funding, such as the humanities. The path to tenure is brutal and is full of pitfalls (in fact many positions are explicitly not tenure-track; there are many, many adjunct positions where folks are paid a pittance and forced to sign very unfair contracts that must be renewed periodically). Even with all that being said, academics do enjoy a degree of freedom that those in the corporate world can only dream of.
"Our security systems automatically lock an employee’s corporate account when they detect that the account is at risk of compromise due to credential problems or when an automated rule involving the handling of sensitive data has been triggered. In this instance, yesterday our systems detected that an account had exfiltrated thousands of files and shared them with multiple external accounts. We explained this to the employee earlier today. We are actively investigating this matter as part of standard procedures to gather additional details.”
https://venturebeat.com/2021/01/20/google-targets-ai-ethics-...
Even when CNN, MSNBC, Business Insider 'team up' to overrepresent an issue because 'some number of Google employees walked out for some reason' - it really doesn't help tell the story of 'relations' because it's hard to fathom what the rest of the 99% of Google staff think.
That said, anything that makes Google a less effective organization I support.
Funny how they co-announced monetary incentives around "diversity and inclusion", I expect nothing less from a giant evil ad company. A bunch of handwavy idpol stuff with the giant elephants in the room seems to be the status quo.
But generally, yes. Unless you have a truly extraordinary reason you can get easily fired in most companies.
https://www.whistleblowers.gov/statutes/sox_amended
> Releasing even a single internal document without permission is cause for firing, and possible legal action. I can't even fathom this being up for debate.
I was referring to "releasing", in general, as it was written in the comment. Obviously the protection is very conditional on how exactly it is done.
All outgoing email is being scanned for sensitive information in plain text or attachments. This is standard practice in every corporation and something you are being warned about when being on-boarded as a new-joiner.
And of course this same applies to file uploads. Again, this is standard practice in any company with IT security.
I'm just questioning why she would email to multiple external accounts directly from her corp email instead of saving to 1 personal account and then sharing from there, undetectable, many times. And yes, they would still have detected the 1 email but I'm questioning the accuracy of this explanation; sounds partly made up to make it sound more serious.
Part of my job is administering a system for detecting unauthorized sharing, exporting, or printing. It has thresholds and a rules-based engine for specifying what behavior should trigger alerts. Google's system is probably custom but there are definitely products on the market for this sort of thing.
I would take a look at (and consider donating to) FIRE to understand the current state of academic freedom in universities.
https://www.thefire.org/news-and-media/
Just to give two examples:
Bret Weinstein was fired from Evergreen for not participating in a no-white-people-on-campus day (and he was also subject to credible death threats, requiring police escorts when present on campus)
Gordon Klein was suspended for refusing to promise to give higher grades to black students. https://nypost.com/2020/06/10/ucla-suspends-professor-for-re...
And then we have the epidemic of academic mobbing, where colleagues engage in herding behavior that focus their rage on one of their colleagues in a type of modern equivalent of Monsters on Maple Street. It is estimated that 12 percent of those mobbed end up committing suicide. https://www.universityaffairs.ca/opinion/in-my-opinion/acade...
There are many, many things that will get you fired or subject to attack in the modern university, and I don't see any reason to view academia as a place that provides more intellectual freedom than private industry. Indeed, it is often the epicenter of cancel culture and petty utopian dictators.
The culture present in the organization will determine whether you need to always be on the guard from saying the wrong thing that might destroy your career or whether you are free to challenge incumbent ideas/viewpoints/theories.
Personnel is policy. The legal charter of an organization is far down the list of factors that determine how much freedom you have -- the mindset of your peers and of the leadership in the organization matters much, much more.
Dissent is not being tolerated, when in former times, it even used to be welcome.
> A settlement was reached in September 2017 in which Weinstein and Heying resigned and received $250,000 each, after having sought $3.8 million in damages.
He resigned as part of a settlement when he sued them. The university paid to get rid of him.
It's a radical story and it needs more attention.
And some guy who was temporarily suspended and then immediately reinstated.
And this proves profs with tenure have the same or worse protections than employees of private industry?
Have you ever heard of "at-will employment"?
This is one of the things that really annoys me about the anti cancel-culture warriors.
I get it, there has been some excess, some poor decisions made, but the hyperbolic, bad faith, and often dishonest framing they often use makes me really suspect of basically anything they say.
In MOST states in the US your boss can fire you for NO REASON at all. Or ANY reason save a few federally protected reasons like race/gender etc. That's "at-will" employment.
Anyone who tells you this is the same as the protections tenured profs have is a liar or complete moron.
> How does research in an industrial lab vs. a university work, insofar as independence is concerned?
There was no "no-white-people-on-campus" day. There was an optional off-campus field trip for a seminar aimed at people living with a white perspective.
Bret Weinstein was not fired. He resigned with $500K severance as part of a settlement agreement arising from his lawsuit against the school for failing to protect him from students who verbally harassed him.
Primary Source: https://app.leg.wa.gov/committeeschedules/Home/Document/1705...
Long-term summary of events: https://www.theolympian.com/news/local/education/article1750...
Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bret_Weinstein#Evergreen_State...
Likewise, your description of the Gordon Klein incident was grossly inaccurate, even compared to the right-wing NYPost's version of the events:
https://nypost.com/2020/06/10/ucla-suspends-professor-for-re...
He was suspended for unprofessionally mocking his students.
> the event asked white participants to stay off campus
That by itself is illiberal and ludicrous.
But that's not the college's doing nor is it the college's responsibility.
Interpretation 1:
There was a "no-white-people-on-campus day" at a university, a professor named Bret Weinstein-- a white person-- was on the campus that day (either in defiance or without foreknowledge of the event), and was consequently fired for being white while on campus.
Interpretation 2:
There was a "no-white-people-on-campus day" at a university where white people were singled out to attend some off-campus event (whether mandatory or optional), Bret Weinstein-- a white professor-- did not attend this off-campus event (whether in defiance or accidentally, whether going on campus, or not), and consequently the university fired Bret Weinstein for his action of not attending an event targeted exclusively at white people.
Interpretation 3:
You are leaving some crucial detail that explains what actually happened.
If #3 isn't the case I'll eat my hat. If it is, you should consider the possibility that some kind of anti-academic axe-grinding is keeping you from writing as clearly as you could about historical events.
Edit: clarification
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/01/opinion/when-the-left-tur...
http://www.cooperpointjournal.com/2017/04/10/day-of-absence-...
——————————————
Clarification: I’m speaking about women researchers in an academic setting in general. And hoping to lend a bit of detail on this researcher as a person.
I don't know why this person was fired, but looking over the email/document she posted on her twitter it looks like she is asserting that her employers are racists and sexist on little evidence. Why would you, or she, expect to be permitted to slander the company this way and still keep her job? Although I don't know if she published this document before or after her termination, so it may, or may not have been a factor.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1f2kYWDXwhzYnq8ebVtuk9CqQ...
https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/k77sxz/d_t...
Dr. Gebru was told the paper shouldn't be published with Google's name and some of the feedback on it that she received had to do with the paper not mentioning how Google was combating or leading on the problems with language models that she called out. In other words, if her paper had made Google look good, they probably would've been okay with her publishing it. Given that her paper made Google look bad, they wanted her to change it or not publish it. When she got that feedback she sent her intemperate email (in which she included her ultimatum to resign) and was terminated shortly after.
I think it's debatable, given that she did offer an ultimatum, whether she was fired or resigned - but I know she prefers the former and I think that's at least a coherent way to describe what happened (Google accepted one side of her ultimatum by firing her).
[1] https://www.edd.ca.gov/uibdg/Voluntary_Quit_VQ_135.htm
A more charitable assumption might be that they wanted her paper to address feedback from the reviewers in lieu of being published as is. The feedback that she was presenting a biased interpretation by leaving unmentioned the existing work being done to combat bias in the models.
Your statement that "it's hard for women in CompSci" rings false to me. I think women do face higher barriers in many corporate settings that have been mostly male-dominated, but my personal observations about women in CompSci academia lead me to believe that women are treated better vis-a-vis their counterparts in other university departments, and also in other male-dominated industries.
Sounds like you're just projecting your own expectations onto them tbh
If you were in the ethics department of a company, unpacked deep seated entrenched breach of social norms and were blocked from talking about it but still believed in ethics, what would you do?
I am unsure I would be prepared to do what she and Timbru did but that's a long way from the implied cynicism and also frankly abject legalistic kow-towing implicitly in your statement.
"Yea, that whistle blower had it coming, they signed the same contract i did" is pretty sad. Its not this case, sure, but its in the room, alongside sacking union organisers, refusing to approve talks, private illegal nonpoaching deals with Apple, paying your founder millions to cover up their sexualising the workforce,
Whatever you do, just don't try to engage in things that go against the rules of employment (and quite possibly are illegal) like downloading and send confidential documents to third-parties.
now, we don't know if this joint was one of those "haha, yeah, we'll get back to ya" things in management's eyes from the start, but it sure looked like its leadership either was not informed or intended to make it actually matter. praise ought to be given there, as this industry seems largely morally bankrupt. however - and i'm not intending to be super negative here - she may have known that her and G weren't gonna work out, and this was just the most spectacular way to set sail.
I've met and worked with a small, couple of handfuls of google people, men and women, all amazingly skilled. Meredith Whittaker was one of them and I think her termination was unnecessary. I do think less of Google as a consequence.
Like, if he did that, I'd be pretty incensed honestly. I'd expect him to tell me "Dude, you can't go around taking these guys out to dinner. That's like a bribery violation and shit, homie".
If he had to keep warning me, I could see him feeling that his professional ethics are being called into question, and then I'd expect him to either:
* quit and maybe blow the whistle
* stay and blow the whistle and then I'm gonna retaliate within my legal ability
Or emailing your expense report to who knows whom.
As far as I know, she's made this about perceived sexism, racism, and personally attacking hermanagers for failing to step up regarding various topics NOT related to AI ethics. There hasn't been much discussion about actual AI ethics, at least not on her behalf.
What does this mean in English?
Please. Don't be that person. What did you think it meant? What specifically. Was without meaning. Not what do you disagree with: to even pose the question, you have to be literate and capable of reading. At this point your question is actually a statement. In other channels I'd say it more bluntly.
Your point is well made otherwise and I take it on board. I need to be more careful, thoughtful.
The AI ethics people were meeting structural process and behaviour around their own work, which i believe they felt fundamentally contradicts that.
They did not receive support to say it outside the company. Ultimately in at least one case, they probably broke their terms and conditions of employment and have been terminated.
Looking at it from the perspective of what people say they expect from the modern workplace, it wasn't a good alignment. People expect equity. They expect to be able to speak their mind. Within limits people can and do, but some staff have found the informal rules of what you can say about Google were not what they think they wanted.
Fired for cause, and at-will terms of employment are entirely normal. Nobody can seriously say Google broke the law, absent strong evidence. If you hire somebody to occupy a senior role, but constrain their ability to self assert, its a bit contradictory.
What do you think society at large wants, from the entities which now control the vast majority of our private state as individuals?
It's not cool, it's just weird.
It is an open secret among my correspondents that I on occasion do twitch the English language in mail messages and published works. Paper referees have come to agreement on what they call millsspeak to refer to the subtilities with which I personalize my work. If you read my papers or my mail, you know my resonances. If not, you can calibrate my naughtimeter from children's books
Jon Crowcroft, who is a CS professor in Cambridge, but was a phd student in ucl-cs when I worked there in the eighties: http://paravirtualization.blogspot.com/ also, probably presumptuous to call him a peer: if he keeps going, he may be one both literally, and by appointment. Of the realm that is, not I.
Overall I think I miswrote above. Absent a time machine, it stands.
Obviously, this stuff irritates a lot of people. I apologise, but really at this stage I doubt I'm changing.
Btw, and please forgive me if this is a breach of privacy but HN comment history shows you've accumulated a 25 year deep curated unix command history file. If I had the forethought to have done the same (which btw, is a brilliant idea) it would be older than yours. It most definitely would not be better, and very possibly more narrow in focus. I suspect, the pretensions of written English aside, we're not that different.
https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffcm&q=one+finger+points+out%2C+th...
First result:
> 'When you point a finger at someone, remember there are three pointing back' ...
...the "one finger points out, three point in" rule, generally applies...
parse any better?
1 - https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ERi2crDToYhYjEjxRoOzO-uO...
If you have this pinned to your Twitter (on 2/5) about your employer why are you still working there and not resigning? It took Google 14 days to fire her, which I suppose is the typical two weeks notice since that date.
Simple: she wants to still be paid by Google.
I was reading a book about dry stone bridges, and one of the bridges featured was built across a stream in a protected watershed. The builder said he was surprised the permit for it was approved, he told the client to expect it to be rejected. Talking to the government bureaucrats & scientists, he found out that they had to approve a permit every now and then. Not just because of political reasons, but strategic ones -- if they denied every permit, people would start ignoring and circumventing their department. By approving one every once in a while, they kept themselves in the loop as gatekeepers and prevented more harm than they would have by denying everything. His own bridge project was minimally harmful, and was the token approval so they could keep denying the real problem applications.
I feel like there's a lesson there for other gatekeepers trying to fight the good fight.
It can also mean stealing company IP to try and start a competitor.
Both may be equally forbidden by policy, but they're vastly different acts.
This is my personal anecdote. I had experienced working with an online activist co-worker. She was one of the people who are very popular online, but most of her co-workers hated her. She was extremely entitled, always bossed people (who are at the same level as her) around, did very little of her actual job because she was busy in more important online activism. She had a Messiah Complex, and we were all there just to support her in her worthy cause. That's why I am conflicted when I see activist employees getting fired.
But if a company serially butts heads with people whose actual jobs ARE to hold said company accountable in some way, I find it suspicious.
If a company keeps firing accountants "because they kept yapping about GAAP", wouldn't that raise a red flag with you? Or if a company told their auditor's managers that they'd take their business elsewhere unless more reasonable auditing standards were applied — a practice only all too common in the lead up to financial scandals.
If a president keeps firing inspector generals because apparently they are all part of a Grand Conspiracy against America, wouldn't that be a bit suspicious?
So if Google serially fires AI ethicists, some HN commenters keep insisting that all of them must have been uniquely unreasonable and toxic people, but my money would be on Google having increasing issues with being held to certain ethical standards.
As an aside, paradoxically, it may not be a good sign either if such watchdogs stay at a company forever, appear to be perpetually content and grow highly prosperous. The reason why is left as an exercise to the reader.
Internal audits ranging from a technical issue that impacted clients to sexual harassments investigations are all handled privately and details are shared AFTER the issue is handled. And the details shared are filtered to avoid legal liabilities/bad PR.
An ethics team can certainly coexist with this, the same paper that caused this chain of events could have been shared internally, get a team on board to try to improve on those issues and later publish both the Parrots paper at FAccT and fixes simultaneously in a technical conference.
Still the whole thing is sad because the research they were conducting is impactful
I sometimes don't agree with decisions my (present and past) employers have made. But I'd never go to the media or public forums with those disagreements. If I thought it was so important that I had to do that, I'd resign first.
I strenuously avoid making any public comment about my current employer. (Even past employers, I may be a little more open, but I'm still careful about what I publicly say – don't want to violate any confidentiality obligations, and don't want to unnecessarily burn bridges in case I want to seek re-employment or other commercial relations with them in the future.)
If any of my employers (current or past) caught me downloading company documents/emails/etc in order to share them with the media or other external parties – I'd expect to be fired.
Instead, if you'd please make your substantive points thoughtfully and without taking the thread further into flamewar hell, we'd be grateful.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Your last sentence has the implication that people should not attempt the change or challenge from within the corporate capitalist ideology of the big tech companies, which together make up a large portion of the entire technology industry and the US stock market. They should just concede and “move on”.
I’m kind of sympathetic to this view. Someone who joins a corporate law firm to “change things from within” is going to get a deserved skeptical smirk. It’s not just attempting to dismantle the master’s house with the master’s tools. It’s attempting the dismantling while standing next to the master inside his own house, asking him to pass the hammer.
Wouldn't that conflict with Google's no-politics policy?
https://www.businessinsider.com/google-community-guidelines-...
Also was flippantly disregarding the tech as sufficiently compelling to ignore what you feel is really damaging if such a thing exists. I personally would have a high bar for technical work being sufficiently interesting, and a medium bar for keeping quiet.
The immediate example I think of is that I'd have a hard time accepting FB money to write JS there, because of ultimately how they make money maybe or not respecting the ceo. Granted, I have no idea what it's like on the inside.
There was so much idealism even on Hacker news. Nowadays I witness the strange contradiction of people bashing giant tech companies while mostly discussing how to found the next giant tech company.
A lot of us did genuinely believe it. However as the companies grew and became mega corps the realities of life in normal companies have slowly made themsleves felt.
It’s a bit like the Adam Curtis documentary hyper normalization. Where we all pretend that everything is still the same as before, but beneath the still free sushi ,massages and high compensation a lot has changed.
Of course, in my mind that's a completely separate question from whether or not Google is being evil in this case. As far as that goes, I honestly really don't know the answer.
I hate that the HN audience put so much significance on google “abandoning” (it didn’t) this mantra. Anyone who actually understands depth in any topic knows that it’s not as simple as “don’t be evil”.
Like oh cool thanks man. Yeah now I know exactly what the right moral path is - just don’t be evil duh.
It adds no practical value to decision making other to serve as directional inspiration. But you’re not going to be sitting there trying to find the right balance of weights in search ranking in order to keep fairness and equity and just be like “right, don’t be evil”
The proper goal, as I see it, is to plan to build the next giant tech company and be willing to step on as many toes as necessary to make it happen... but to have an ideal in mind that goes beyond that 'growth at all costs' stage in which the company could actually increase the health of its ecosystem.
Ideal is right, because that is idealistic to the point of naivete. The second a company takes its eye off the ball and starts trying to better the world, its competitors swoop in and take over.
The right answer is for a society to create laws that ensure the behavior we want to see out of corporations. When that's not effective because corporations have undue influence on the legal system, then it's very clear and simple the problem you need to solve.
Ultimately, a civilisation runs on both rules and tools, and while we clearly have opposite biases about where the low-hanging fruit are, I think we also both know it's not really true that there are zero improvements to be made in either realm. I'd be happy to share my scepticism about attempts to reform the 'rules' side of the equation if you like, but my own interest is in tools.
Some tools allow a few players to dominate a limited number of niches, others allow many players to thrive in many niches. If you're going to be a toolmaker, trying to gain dominance and then keep the environment static is actually a self-limiting strategy, Nothing in nature or history has proven able to do that. The only time one player can dominate a limited number of niches is when there are few niches to begin with. Successfully dominating a niche actually gives more opportunities to create niches adjacent to one's own. Amazon carving out a niche in e-commerce is what allows it to provide services to authors and vendors.
> The only time one player can dominate a limited number of niches is when there are few niches to begin with.
What?? What are you even saying? It's an entire world filled with niches. There's no sense in which niches are limited. How does it ever make sense to talk about "a limited number of niches"??
If that were true, people would still be buying pet supplies from Pets.com and books from Amazon.com. The fact everyone knows what is meant by 'FAANG' should demonstrate how few actual niches exist in the digital space.
Communication is difficult when worldviews are very different and you seem uninterested in meeting me halfway. I'd be happy to explore this area of dialogue further, but you'd need to agree to stop insulting me.
I don't understand. Amazon sells some very large percentage of every book sold in the world. What are you saying?
The fact everyone knows what is meant by 'FAANG' should demonstrate how few actual niches exist in the digital space.
What does this mean? A niche is a very specific market segment. The presence of extremely large players does not negate the presence of niches. Niches exist whether or not there companies taking advantage of them.
Communication is difficult, that's why words matter. I think you should choose your words more carefully and make sure you are double-checking that the things you are saying actually make sense.
From a complete outsider, this seems like a smart shift toward more mature leadership.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26198789
Google never actually intended to follow through with any of their recommendations if it meant going against its financial interests.
Probably, but this also means that they didn't hire the best people for the job, just the people who would have looked better in the position.
I don’t know how these ethics professionals added value to Google. I _do_ know that repeatedly belittling your CEO and employer on a public forum might win you lots of virtue signalling points but not be constructive for the company paying you a salary.
It sounds like she dredged through her email, and sent emails she found to an ex-employee. That's probably going to get you fired.
Perhaps there are things one can do with the emails you found that are fireable, that’s beyond my (lack of) legal expertise, but searching? That doesn’t seem right.
Honestly this whole thing strikes me as something more legally complex than engineers can analyze. I for one want to hear an actual expert weigh in on this, once enough facts are known. Anything else has too high a risk of foolish things being said.
Google did not immediately comment on those claims. Its statement said of Mitchell: “We confirmed that there were multiple violations of our code of conduct, as well as of our security policies, which included the exfiltration of confidential business-sensitive documents and private data of other employees.”
Yeah, uh, don't do this.
There's no story here, this is an obvious outcome.
Edit: to add that the more interesting question is whether they should sue her. If they don't, that may be the contextually-appropriate version of letting her off the hook easy (to live up to their culture or for morale or for optics or whatever reason).
If that's true, that's not very ethical is it?
You want a gulf of difference between the punishment for nefarious activity and the punishment for well-intended-but-unlawful activity.
> Margaret Mitchell, Google Research and Machine Intelligence
But I do think they can miss her, since there are already 8 people responsible for Ethics and Diversity, with 11 responsible for the actual organization of the conference.
Maybe they can update https://iclr.cc/ to reflect the fact that she is not representing Google anymore?
This is so pretentious. Ethics is a branch of philosophy and even religion with deep debates raging from 4000 years ago and no end in sight. Hundreds of specialists have been going at it in multi-decades efforts and yet any of their opinions must not carry more weight than the average citizen's. Mitchell has a BS in Linguistics an MS in computational linguistics and a PhD in CS. Her fist paper about something even tangentially related to ethics is from 2015.
The core of ethics derives from evolution. Societies with certain sets of cooperative and competitive values destroy, dominate, and expand. Mutations are constantly happening and some of those ethics can lead to the self-destruction of a culture, while some make a culture even more dominant. Some are neutral and just background noise and have no substantial impact on the society.
In the grand scheme of things the only thing that matters for morals and ethics is whether the culture that embodies those ethics can survive against pressure from other cultures.
Some ethics have been selected into the genome as they provide superior fitness of individuals.
The idea that we should pursue equal outcomes is a mutation. In general it has been shown to destroy a culture (socialism) when competing with more capitalistic cultures. The victim type culture is likely to be much weaker than one where people constantly compete to rise to the pinnacle of power and wealth.
Ultimately power and wealth drive innovation; and innovation, especially of weapons, drives domination. There are other types of domination, such as media, food, language, etc.
It's pretty common for rule-breaking and law-breaking to be ethical when rules, laws, and norms are unethical.
According to Google.
Remember, an entity that has a reason and a justification to do what it wants will manufacture whatever evidence it needs to do that.
And, it's not a court of law. At best, it's "allegedly moved files when they weren't supposed to".
Maybe I'm wrong, but afaik she has yet to deny doing exactly what they've claimed. My guess is that in her mind she was doing something totally reasonable by trying to dig up old emails that she remembered that she thought would help her friend's case against Google, and feels that even if that's against the letter of her agreements with the company it should be morally okay. Which is fine as a moral argument, but you're still gonna get fired.
That seems like the natural thing to do if you feel like you may already be in the process of being fired. I assume a lawyer would advise you to be quiet about it, right?
Despite the popular refrain of “truth is an absolute defense” in the context of defamation law, in US law falsity is an element of the tort, which means that the plaintiff bears the burden of making a prima facie case that the accusation was false by at least some evidence, the defendant doesn't bear the initial burden of showing that it is true or reasonably believed.
Also, there is a very good chance, since Mitchell was publicly involved in the controversy over Google's firing of Timnit Gebru before Google made the accusation, that Mitchell would be found to be a public figure within the context of Google's alleged defamation, which would heighten the requirement from falsity plus harm to proving actual malice.
Also, if Google is lying, they almost certainly also spent over a month building a constructed evidence trail and doctoring records to support the lie between the very public lockout and the actual firing.
So, no, winning a defamation case wouldn't be easy, wouldn't be quick, and wouldn't fail to be extremely expensive in litigation costs.
Plus, every step Google takes on this is just resulting in more of the remaining people in the affected area of the company going public with problems, and it’s not like Mitchell seems to be hurting for alternative employment so as likely the only value of winning the lawsuit would be a PR poke in Google's eye that they are getting on their own anyway...why bother?
Are you operating under the assumption that nothing should ever be stated as a fact unless determined by a court of law? Because that's not how I think of things.
(I do agree that Google is a biased actor here. If I hear that Margaret Mitchell disputes moving files in contravention of company policy I will give her the benefit of the doubt. But my default assumption will be that everyone is telling the truth about basic facts.)
You do understand that if Google is lying, they'd be get sued for libel and potentially millions of dollars in settlement and even more in PR damage.
Yes you should always respect your employer's property. In tech, that's almost always IP stuff: code, diagrams, plans, etc. But don't let an employer defame a former employee with an intentionally "concise" story.
From what I've seen, neither Google nor Margaret Mitchell have described the file transfer event in detail. We don't yet know the content of the thousands of documents she allegedly exfiltrated.
> It appears much more likely she was talking to a lawyer, which is a perfectly legal thing to do, [...]
I'm curious about this. Is it legal to copy and store _any_ documents that you deem necessary for your lawyer to see? Seems unlikely.
Illegally exfiltrating documents to your lawyer is also, illegal. Such documents would not be admissible in court and should be obtained through the usual lawful channels of legal discovery.
In short, don’t do this. It’s theft.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/25/18023364/google-andy-rub...
In short, don’t abuse coworkers sexually. It’s a crime.
Right now I'm writing this during the work day on my work computer.
I forwarded a work email to my own personal email once because my work email client wasn't syncing on my phone.
Could these be used against me if my employer cared enough? Undoubtedly.
OP is preemptively judging Mitchell 1 hour after she announced she was let go. We have no concept if there claims are legitimate and will not survive a wrongful dismissal lawsuit.
Google doesn't care. Paying Mitchell X Million dollars would be just a cost of doing business. In the meantime, an "uppity" provocateur is out of the building and not fighting for change.
- 2,000 signed a petition to support Timnit [1]
- 2 employees resigned to support Timnit [2]
When it comes to voting with your feet, no one actually gives a shit.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/12/04/thousands-petition-google-fo...
[2] https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/04/tech/google-employees-quit/in...
Nobody in their right mind is going to quit their job over this during a pandemic, when it’s already so hard to find a job. I imagine ethics jobs are not in high demand.
Basically, is it more important to be right, or to be alive (or be employed).
Gebru was fired because she gave an ultimatum to her boss threatening to resign if they don't disclose names of all reviewers who criticized her work AND blasted group emails calling for sabotage https://docs.google.com/document/d/1f2kYWDXwhzYnq8ebVtuk9CqQ...
Mitchell was fired for exfiltrating thousands of files illegally and sending to external accounts https://venturebeat.com/2021/01/20/google-targets-ai-ethics-...
Rarely do people resign out of principle...but when you're claiming that your employer actively does evil and harms the least among us, and then continue to work for them, it is obvious that you are either entirely without morals OR you are saying what is socially rewarded to say, without meaning it.
Neither position is good for the soul.
https://twitter.com/dmetaxak/status/1362856231212212224
Google recently added a feature allowing users to search for "Black-owned businesses near you". They're advertising it all over the place (see below).
I've also already started hearing from Black-owned businesses I follow that they're seeing an influx of racist fake reviews...
BLK MKT Vintage, for instance, got over 30 new, clearly fake reviews in 24 hours (e.g., calling them "a store that promotes segregation", saying their items were "broken" and "covered in dead cockroaches").
And if you look at the users writing those reviews...
The users leaving those fraudulent 1-star reviews for this business are also leaving 1-star reviews on dozens of other Black-owned businesses.
All this while Google pays for PR lauding this new feature.
We need to ask: is it always a good idea to make marginalized groups more visible? Whom does it benefit?
Have such companies thought through the consequences for those they're "helping"? Was this done at the direction of those groups or paternalistically on behalf of?
This is yet another example of why app features cannot and should not replace community networks and mutual aid.
Technosolutionism, the white savior complex, and paternalism towards marginalized groups lead to selfish PR efforts that actively harm those they ostensibly "help".
...I would promote race-blindness as the solution to this. The more we talk about and focus on race, especially in a zero-sum context like "buy black-owned", the worse the racial tensions and competition will become.
People confuse cultural power with economic power...just because many powerful people/businesses support black enterprise right now, doesn't mean the wider society will just blindly follow with fists full of cash.
Racism is terrible. "Antiracism", with no regard to the actual outcomes, is hardly better. These businesses were not being harassed by awful people until Google tried to leverage them over their non-black-owned competitors.
Don't you know that colorblindness is white supremacy? So good luck with arguing that.
https://twitter.com/CoralineAda/status/1267529522041282563
For those who don't know, this is the author of Code of Conduct and Hippocratic License.
That is the most tepid, centrist, mainstream view you could have. Literally the view of MLK
For fucks sake, the US is lost if this continues, and I don't say that lightly.
That doesn't mean we should all give up on effective antiracism, though. This tactic/campaign/etc. was not antiracist. Others can be. It's not clear at all why this should be taken to mean that "the more we talk about race...the worse the racial tensions and competition will become." The conversation around race in the US has been ongoing for decades, and there are many objective metrics whereby things have not become worse.
However it sure does appear to me that in the last five or ten years, the manner of the conversation has degraded so much that very very little progress is made per unit of "increasing tensions". That is entirely subjective, but it is how it appears to me.
To do anything else is evil.
Cause as much as I care about that issue, I never reached out to leaders in my community to encourage hiring more police and reducing overtime, for example. I didn't join any protest. I have been completely passive, standing by, waiting for someone else to solve the problem.
If you aren't working to save every life, you're basically Godwin's Law.
You could direct more resources this way or that. Do you? What about your time? Do you invite others in your life to do so as well?
I think it stems from a tragic mixture of deep desire to make things better (a good thing) and youthful impatience. Combined with the accelerated ability to disseminate ideas via the internet ... we are in an ongoing flame war that I never would have imagined. It makes me feel sick, sad, and frustrated.
My dad was telling me this yesterday. He saw sectarian conflict growing up in Bangladesh, and working in international public health, he’s been to 70 countries and has had a chance to see ethnic conflict first hand. In his observation, emphasizing differences will increase rather than decrease conflict.
Oddly, this is very similar to how colonial powers divided and conquered countries. They would emphasize differences between groups and treat them differently based on group membership, fueling animosity between them. Obviously the motivation for doing those things here in the US is different. But if you’re telling some kids they can go back to school and others have to stay in remote learning, based on the color of their skin, I’m not sure why would expect the result to be different. Measures like kids getting back to in person learning at different times based on skin color should worry people: see: https://www.wsj.com/articles/can-school-be-antiracist-a-new-....
No it doesn’t. And I wish people would stop experimenting with this sort of thing and treating it as some sort of fad.
I grew up, as an immigrant from a Muslim country, in a white Republican suburb in the 1990s. And it was great. I can’t imagine what life would have been like today - constant reminders of the fact that you’re different, white teachers admitting they’re “gatekeepers of white supremacy,” using “whiteness” as a pejorative, etc. I’m fully developed and fluent in the language so I can tolerate it. But I’ve got kids and this is not the culture I want my kids to grow up in.
Leaving aside whether this stuff is right on the merits. There is a limited number of white people who will put up with a constant drone of being called “racist” and being blamed for things that happened before they were born. As these confrontational tactics continue, people’s patience will wear thin. And if it becomes more prevalent to treat kids different based in their skin color, such as Evanston’s proposal to keep white and Asian kids behind in remote learning while letting other kids go back in person, people’s patience will evaporate in an instant. And overstepping that tolerance will have real consequences for people of color.
When white people amplify this hyper-activist, in-you-face approach, they aren’t just drawing attention to a problem, they’re picking a particular solution. And because they comprise a majority and control the culture, they can impose an approach that people of color (who have to live with the consequences) don’t necessarily want. When you jump on board this bandwagon, you’re not just changing the culture for yourself. You’re not just changing the culture for activist POC you went to grad school with. You’re changing it for the blue collar worker who happens to be a POC. And you can bet that what kind of culture he wants to live in is not well represented in the academic and activist circles that dream up these approaches.
I call it Schrodinger's whiteness. You are white enough to be blamed for right wing racism yet not white enough to not be the target of it.
Acknowledging them would undercut narratives about white supremacy, but you can't get away with calling them white either... so they're invisible! Good for them, frankly, I'm jealous.
This is interesting. Can I ask what your ethnic background is?
Woah. The accelerationism here is truly scary. If our kids grow up in an environment with this rhetoric then it's not inconceivable we end up back in a segregationist hell-hole. Only needs to be normalized for one generation before the damage is done.
Or, and hear out this crazy idea, we stop it with the racism from the left and right and treat people according to their circumstances and their character instead of who their grandparents were.
Keeping lists of people who have special traits should be kept to an absolute minimum. Just ask the Dutch (good people got punished and killed trying to destroy the official registers of Dutch jews as it became clear the Nazis sought them.)
Pointing out the differences between people isn't going to help!
In the place I grew up in Europe there were almost no foreigners. But in summer holidays we lived next to a really black family at a camp site for years. Their dad were friends with my dad and well, that was it. They were humans like the rest of us.
Today it is almost like it is scarier to meet people from other cultures.