About Google's approach to research publication – Jeff Dean(docs.google.com) |
About Google's approach to research publication – Jeff Dean(docs.google.com) |
It always amazes how blatantly authoritarian these "woke" types are. I would not be surprised if the sole reason she wanted the identities of every consultant was to engage in some sort of witch-hunting and bigoteering[0]
[0] https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Bigoteering
Whether that applies at all in this case is a separate matter.
> Nothing like a bunch of privileged White men trying to squash research by marginalized communities for marginalized communities by ordering them to STOP with ZERO conversation. The amount of disrespect is incredible. Every time I think about it my blood starts boiling again.
Which puts you in a no-win situation when you suspect that HR is doing shady stuff against you...
Like PG wrote, the worst thing you can say about an idea is that it is wrong, you don't need to resort to personal attacks or x-isms.
Since this is Google's side of the story its in their interest to use words that would imply she's overbearing, or otherwise unaccommodating
(for all I know she could be all of those things, but this narration isn't sufficient evidence to prove that)
If your entire career is built around solving a problem, then actually solving it is against your personal best interest.
edit: typo
It is sad to see him drop his credibility and become a PR mouthpiece. I know how this happens and I know why. But it is still sad to watch. Like watching you favourite band sell out to a big label.
High level research (and engineering) will involve egos and you should expect this kind of push back when you stop someone from publishing. Nothing here justifies how he handled it
Of course, I think many of us have seen this reaction before, maybe even done it ourselves. It’s bad for everyone, don’t do it Jeff!
Apparently Google has varying degrees of transparency when it comes to decision making. To be expected at a large company. There are some things my company & boss do that seem abnormal and out of character. You have to go with the flow sometimes and shut up. It seems like this person had some kind of utopian mindset where she felt management was obligated to explain everything around the blocking of her paper.
I doubt a guy like Jeff who wants to do tech all day has a vendetta against black women that want to publish papers.
What a way to go.
I don’t think there’s a contradiction in the reaction, personally.
The important issue in the paper seems to be that the paper villainized large language models, which Google has a vested interest in.
The paper was likely publishable with a bit more context in the introduction.
I've been in similar situations and they were handled offline.
The explosiveness of this situation seems to have been prepared the history of Timnit's relationship with Google.
This incident was just the spark.
> Highlighting risks without pointing out methods for researchers and developers to understand and mitigate those risks misses the mark on helping with these problems
You have to have sympathy for her position but in the end if all you do is offer criticism then it's hard to see you inside Google, let alone as a manager.
What we want to know is if that is actually the case.
People are forgetting about the part where she basically encourages her colleagues to talk to congress, at a time when tech CEOs are regularly being hauled in front of congressional committees. At the point when that is written, this clearly is an adversarial relationship between her and Google. And it wasn't Google that made it adversarial
I couldn't imagine writing something like that and keeping my job
Jeff's emails, which were surely also crafted with sign off from PR and legal, attempt to frame this "resignation" as an issue of the paper's content, as well as the inability to meet Timnit's demands. However, this framing does not seem to align with the experiences of other Google researchers, and does not explain why she was terminated in this particular manner. If that were really the case, why didn't they just wait for Timnit to return from vacation, try to resolve the issue, and if unsuccessful, accept her resignation? Why not try to deescalate and handle the situation more tactfully?
Timnit's account of the email she received also seems to confirm this:
"we believe the end of your employment should happen faster than your email reflects because certain aspects of the email you sent last night to non-management employees in the brain group reflect behavior that is inconsistent with the expectations of a Google manager. As a result, we are accepting your resignation immediately ..." [1]
So, what aspects of that email triggered such a prompt termination? Well, Jeff's first email says that Timnit was telling employees to "stop work on critical DEI programs", and I've similarly seen some comments focus on the part of her email that reads, "What I want to say is stop writing your documents because it doesn't make a difference," but Timnit is clearly not saying to stop DEI work, she's saying to "focus on leadership accountability" and to apply external pressure.
That seems to me to be the real issue, and the sort of thing that would trigger pressure from legal. The fact that the tone of the email is frustrated, and it airs some dirty laundry, would not necessarily result in firing, if leadership really wanted to keep her on, they could work something out. According to Timnit, her own manager was not informed, she's well liked by her academic community and her Google reports (who are expressing their dismay on Twitter), and Jeff has regularly praised Timnit in the past. So, the mention of congressional pressure in her email really seems to me to be the real catalyst here.
[1] https://www.twitter.com/timnitGebru/status/13343647354463313...
Seems pretty transparent.
And you are told after a while, that your manager can read you a privileged and confidential document and you’re not supposed to even know who contributed to this document, who wrote this feedback, what process was followed or anything. You write a detailed document discussing whatever pieces of feedback you can find, asking for questions and clarifications, and it is completely ignored.
According to her account, she was not given the feedback when she was told that the paper had to be retracted. After discussion, she was told her manager would read her the feedback without telling her who wrote it or what process was followed.
This is different than a normal peer review process that, anonymous or not, aims to provide feedback to the author so they can incorporate it.
Peer review in Academia is anonymous but has relative guarantees that the reviewer will have sufficient knowledge to judge your paper, won't be an academic rival out to skewer your work, and is generally capable of being a disinterested judge. As many others have pointed out here, Google doesn't do peer review in the academic sense, they do pre-publication review, almost always on short notice, for the purposes of protecting IP, mainly.
So imagine you're called in and told to retract your paper on substantive grounds provided by an anonymous reviewer whose feedback is sufficiently bad for you that you don't get a chance to amend your paper, it's just retracted, full stop. You can't have their written feedback, but after you kick up a fuss, you'll be granted a recitation of the feedback that won't change anything about the fate of your paper.
All this in the context of review that's normally a rubber stamp when trade secrets aren't involved.
Demanding to know who torpedoed your paper in an extraordinary way doesn't seem so unreasonable.
In all of my time at Google AI, I never heard of pubapproval being used for peer review or to critique the scientific rigor of the work. It was never used as a journal, it was an afterthought that folks on my team would usually clear only hours before important deadlines. We like to leave peer review to the conferences/journals' existing process to weed out bad papers; why duplicate that work internally?
I'm disappointed that Jeff has chosen to imply that pubapproval is used to enforce rigour. That is a new use case and not how it has been traditionally used. Pubapproval hasn't been used to silence uncomfortable minority viewpoints until now. If this has changed, it's a very, very new change.
Ultimately it makes the whole Ethical AI department look more like a rubber stamp for Google.
I get the impression that she wrote a hit piece on Google and published with Google's name. For me, it's correct they demand a retraction. It's simply unprofessional to critque your company for something while not mentioning the work they're doing to combat that.
Having said that, if Jeff were to make public the paper, criticisms of the paper, and improvements made to address the problems described in the paper, that could go a long way towards clearing the air.
Publishing a transparently one-sided paper in Google's name would be a problem, not because of the side it picks, but because it suggests the researchers are too ideologically motivated to see the see the problem clearly.
Ironically, it indicates systemic bias on the part of the researchers who are explicitly trying to eliminate systemic bias. That's just a bit too relevant to ignore.
In paper reviews you can often see reviewers asking the authors to rewrite, clarify, add extra experiments, add missing citations. It's all normal.
Representing a more truthful reality is not 'softening'.
It's only 'softening' for those who have an already accepted, extremist view, and for whom any evidence to the contrary doesn't help their arguments.
While initially sympathetic to the author - the more I read - the more I have completely the opposite view.
Even more, it sounds like Google didn't ask originally for retraction, they just asked to take into account the newer research contradicting the paper - the thing that any researcher valuing integrity over agenda wouldn't refuse.
If somebody wants to do that research and publishing they just have to find another source of funding, i guess.
Anyway, the firing wasn't over the paper, the firing was over the unacceptably unprofessional reaction to it.
What's different in her case is that you don't see the names of the people reviewing. Being the devil's advocate, she MIGHT have a pattern of aggressively attacking people who reviewed their work before. So they might have made the reviewers anonymous this time.
If they approved the paper the message would be "google thinks language models are a waste of resources and racist". There would be no academic debate on this topic as its been framed as woke and published by a militant activist, so any disagreement would be racist (see prior interactions between this researcher and other researchers [1]).
Thats why the standard process of publishing, peer reviewing, academic critique etc would not work.
Why would their researchers working on language models stay? when they can go to Facebook, OpenAI etc. Why would new researchers join?
[1] https://syncedreview.com/2020/06/30/yann-lecun-quits-twitter...
The proper response to her position would be to publish a response or critique. Attacking her entire field does nothing to further the conversation.
Demand the best from your multi-billion dollar corporations.
Submitting conference papers last minute is... normal.
You only bring in HR protections to protect the company from a legal standpoint.
This is sad gaslighting of a reasonable concern the team had.
Having to endure some external review for what could otherwise be sensitive material.
The inability for the SJW crowd to work reasonably within very reasonable terms, to then resort to aggressive tactics such as 'demand the names and opinions of everyone on the board' and then publicly misrepresenting the situation is going to lose you a lot of favour.
Every time I read one of these stories I immediately feel sympathetic to the individual, but then upon learning more, I feel duped and maligned for having been effectively lied to.
The doors are wide open for progress, those who take it to micro-totalitarian lengths are not doing anyone any favours.
https://melwy.com/blog/black-female-scientist-timnit-gebru-f...
Publishing a paper with a lack of rigor about some obscure mathematical technique isn't a problem for google (beyond some possible but unlikely mild reputation damage). Publishing a paper with a lack of rigor that says google is doing unethical things, when those things are questionably accurate, that is something google would (and should) have a problem with.
Whether the paper actually lacks rigor in a relevant way is not something I can comment on.
[1] https://www.platformer.news/p/the-withering-email-that-got-a...
In some cases, though, it's not simply a matter of listing it as other work in the Intro - you may need to incorporate it into your models, etc.
Previously, we only had one side of this story. But if this is Dean's best spin on Google's side of the story, I'm very tempted to conclude they're in the wrong here. Obviously I don't have all the information, but the information I do have feels consistent with the idea that someone important at Google didn't like Gebru's paper for corporate-political (meaning making Google look good, as opposed to political-political) reasons, they tried to get Gebru to play ball, she refused, and now they have to back-project a justification in the name of "scientific integrity".
Unfortunately, I think this is a story where most people's opinions about who's in the right will be more informed by their previous opinions about Gebru and Dean than the narrower question of what happened with this particular paper. I'm probably even guilty of that to some extent myself, given that I'm a fan of some of Gebru's previous work.
This, though, looks and feels like thinly-veiled retroactive and pretty unconvincing PR. It's short on detail and appears somewhat at odds with several points from Timnit Gebru's resignation note [0]:
- Dean says the paper was reviewed by a "cross-functional team". Gebru says she received the feedback through a "privileged and confidential document to HR"
- Dean says the paper was submitted for review on the day it was due to be published; Gebru says they had notified "PR & Policy 2 months before".
- Dean suggests the feedback was due to the paper not highlighting mitigating work for some of the limitations the paper was exposing. That seems like a very normal part of the research process. Why, then, does Gebru claim that she was told that a "manager can read you a privileged and confidential document" and that no other recourse or exploration of the feedback was permissible?
The only thing we know from the outside is that reality will be far more nuanced and complicated than the tidbits that leak out. Even allowing for that though - and reading some of the related comments here - Google isn't coming out of this well at the moment.
[0]: https://www.platformer.news/p/the-withering-email-that-got-a...
EDIT: Fixed spelling of Timnit Gebru's name.
employee: I'm not happy about x, y and z. If you don't do those, I'm going to quit.
manager: well we are not going to do those, so thank you for your time. We accept your resignation and would like it to start immediately (i.e. you're fired).
If you are gonna tell your manager that you plan to resign if a condition isn't met, then what do you expect them to say if they don't plan to fulfill that condition? It sounds like she was expecting them to say "Hey, well we don't want to meet your demands, but sure, we're happy to have a disgruntled employee around here, so feel free to stick around, or you could just quit on your own timeline, no sweat".
I suspect that many people would be fired on the spot for threatening to resign, so don't threaten it if you aren't okay with that consequence.
People claiming that the deficiencies in the paper are minor and wouldn't be blockers obviously have little experience submitting to academic journals. Other parts of Google doing deeply technical work probably don't have the same level of review as the Ethical AI group -- for obvious reasons.
There is usually a long back and forth -- there are even memes about the infuriating comments from "Reviewer 2" [1][2]. Omitting to mention argument-obsoleting developments in the field (from your own lab!) is more than enough to send you back to extensive redrafting.
To be clear on terminology -- a retraction is an academic black mark, and occurs to a paper after publication, usually for reasons of research misconduct. This is not an instance of that.
[1] https://twitter.com/redpenblackpen/status/113344056990719590... [2] http://jasonya.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/PowerRespon...
This sheds some new light...
(We have a publication approval process, but its purpose is to prevent IP leaks and maybe shield liability, not uphold scientific rigour standards)
They know they have a bubbling ethics problem and they've screwed over their best chance to do anything other than completely fuck it up.
In history, this will be a wtf double facepalm moment.
https://twitter.com/le_roux_nicolas/status/13346019609729064...
Our aim is to rival peer-reviewed journals in terms of the rigor and thoughtfulness in how we review research before publication.
But Gebru writes that HR and her management chain delivered her feedback in a surprise meeting where she was not allowed to read the actual feedback, understand the process which generated it, or engage in a dialogue about it:
Have you ever heard of someone getting “feedback” on a paper through a privileged and confidential document to HR?
A week before you go out on vacation, you see a meeting pop up at 4:30pm PST on your calendar (this popped up at around 2pm). No one would tell you what the meeting was about in advance. Then in that meeting your manager’s manager tells you “it has been decided” that you need to retract this paper by next week...
And you are told after a while, that your manager can read you a privileged and confidential document and you’re not supposed to even know who contributed to this document, who wrote this feedback, what process was followed or anything. You write a detailed document discussing whatever pieces of feedback you can find, asking for questions and clarifications, and it is completely ignored.
(from https://www.platformer.news/p/the-withering-email-that-got-a...)
I've been through the peer review process at Physical Review Letters, SIGMOD, and VLDB. You get a document containing all the reviewer's comments, plus a metareviewer's take on the overall decision and what has to change. You can engage in dialogue with the metareviewer, including a detailed response letter justifying your choices, highlighting things the reviewers may have missed, and explaining where you plan to make changes. You get additional rounds of comments from the reviewers in light of that letter on later drafts.
I'm not a Googler, and I have no idea what the standard review process looks like there, but what Gebru describes does not sound at all like peer review. I also note that Dean does not contradict Gebru's account of the meeting or feedback process. If I had a paper rejected in this fashion, I would also demand to know what the hell was going on and who was responsible.
This feels off.
Hopefully more employers will reject hiring "woke" people after seeing the trouble they're causing.
However, the suggestion that employers will work to identify and preemptively reject employees with an SJW bent is not only sound but almost certainly already underway.
Now I think I was wrong, Google looks like they're full of crap. If the research doesn't pass muster I'd like to read it and pass my own judgement. I'm guessing the tone was justified.
OTOH Timnit sounds like a down-the-middle SJW type, which means that every conflict is about identity, privilege, and so on, which honestly hurts her message. To me, its enough that Google shut her paper down and wouldn't tell her why or give her even a chance for a different outcome -- perhaps it is, ironically, her SJW nature that makes it risky for Google to engage her in the way she wants to be engaged, because a deeper conflict cannot look good for Google in the current cultural climate. (E.g. sounds like she's got strong intellectual integrity points, and weak SJW points to make about Google, but they couldn't engage the former without also dealing with the latter.)
Funny, because she mobbed Yann LeCun and after she obtained a forced apology from him and an invitation to a civilised and serious discussion she said "this is not worth my time".
Maybe it wasn't worth their time.
I can see how this might be frustrating for academics working within Google. The field already has systems in place for peer-review. While I admire the idea of Google holding their research to a certain standard, it also provides a mechanism for dismissing research that paints Google (the corporation) in a bad light. If a paper is good enough to pass an (external) review process, why should it not be published?
There are many journals that have a poor track record on peer review, and in fact even those that have a generally good track record often have times that it famously failed.
Whether we agree or not, Google want to protect their reputation. Because not every journal will be up to their standards, ensuring that papers do meet a standard is going to be important for them.
They could do this by only allowing submission to certain journals, but this would require an understanding of each journal, its processes reputation, etc. Perhaps easier is just to review papers before they are submitted.
This does also allow them to protect potentially NDA'd info from being accidentally included in a paper given to external reviewers, which is (whether you agree or not) something they will clearly want to do.
I'm in industry and am not allowed to even talk about the projects I work on, much less publish papers, it kills recruiting conversations with maybe 10% of the people at conferences.
If managing people were the same skill set as computer science perhaps we would not be seeing this play out as it has.
This is seriously a massive failure on the part of Google to handle their own shit. I often wonder if these people are too old or out of touch to appreciate how this kind of thing may or may not blow up on social media.
To not consider how this might cause public relations issues especially when dealing with someone who has an established social media presence seems like a misstep.
On the flip side maybe they thought it was worth it. Weather the storm for a few days and twitter will move one. It's hard to say.
The correct name is really MapShuffleReduce and the most important step is the shuffle, because it's a distributed sort. Of course, they didn't invent distributed sort, but combining these three concepts together in a distributed fashion and running it as a production system is really what was important.
Even if Google is acting presenting the chain of events faithfully, their final move to jump on an opportunity to remove the researcher and call it resignation seems so aggressive and incongruous that from the outside it makes it seem like this conflict is rooted in a larger and more difficult relationship that they calculated was no longer in their interest.
I’m wondering if the cost benefit analysis is still looking that way on the inside, because this move and the attention it’s causing is so contrary to their stated goals that I have to wonder if Google is committed to those goals at all. Others must be wondering exactly the same thing.
Probably, even Google knows this, and this is just a mistake. If I was in the position of this researcher, I’d threaten to quit, too. Google’s actions suggest it wants to appear to care about ethics in AI rather than actually caring. That’s not a environment conducive to her to have any impact, so why stay? Clearly she’s not going to have a problem finding a job elsewhere.
This post from Jeff Dean simply underscores that he has failed to balance the need for diplomacy with the research thesis of his own research group. I'm not saying he's being malicious, but incredibly tone deaf. While I appreciate he gets "attacked" at nearly every talk (at one retinopathy talk I saw him grilled for 10 minutes on race), he's going to continue to get this sort of attention until he can stop being the Googler who wants to tell you why their view is right.
It seems disparaging your own company while ignoring research that counters yours is Google’s limit, but we’ll have to wait to see the research paper if it leaks.
> Unfortunately, this particular paper was only shared with a day’s notice before its deadline — we require two weeks for this sort of review — and then instead of awaiting reviewer feedback, it was approved for submission and submitted. A cross functional team then reviewed the paper as part of our regular process and the authors were informed that it didn’t meet our bar for publication and were given feedback about why. [...] We acknowledge that the authors were extremely disappointed with the decision that Megan and I ultimately made, especially as they’d already submitted the paper.
When it was "approved for submission," was that approval final and actionable, or some kind of conditional approval? Is demanding a retraction after an approval the normal way it works at Google, or was this an unusual occurrence that Gebru was right to question?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25292386
Google: "we aren't going to give you x, so you can have y. in fact, you can have y starting right now."
i'd say she tendered a conditional resignation and they called her bluff and accepted it.
It's not a stretch to say that the world has a problem with discrimination, or that big personalities can rock the boat when they go against the grain. Or that corporates have interests to defend.
I'd like in this case, though - not to say that all the other factors aren't worthy of examination as subjects in their own right - to see this paper. The authors/collaborators are leaders in the field. There are legitimate concerns about AI/ML; the validity/reliability of data from which, nowadays, consequential outcomes are derived.
Please, let's ignore - at least for now - the corporate politics, the heat of the race/gender politics, the PR machines weighing in (look at all the news outlets grabbing this atm), and take a look at what the paper says. The right people (those in the field and qualified/able to do so) should be listened to.
As for the politics of this, and the posturing and politicising and agenda-building on all sides: that doesn't help.
AI and ML affect us all now. This is a trend. Let's at least expose the findings of acknowledged leaders in the field - let's see this study - before we descend into the sideshows of politics and factionalism. Please.
Edit to clarify: tl;dr - I've not seen/read this contested paper. Whatever its contents, I want to see them, and imo that is more important than the current controversy blizzard etc.
The rest, to me, is a distraction. This specialist/academic, has a really good rep. I care not about character or friendliness or whatever. As a brain, this person is documented as having the chops. I want to see the report.
One of their most valuable functions is to stop you "letting go of" people for stupid and petty reasons that blow up in your face, spectacularly.
There's also the angry email that she sent to other people ranting about Google's behavior and telling them to stop work.
Either of these scenarios would get you fired any place that I have worked.
I mean... come on man.
Jeff is way better than this so I really have no idea what’s going on here.
https://twitter.com/timnitGebru/status/1335017524937756672
> 1/Man there’s so much to pick apart. Let’s start with one thing. I want to ask if Jeff Dean has looked at the publication approval policy that he keeps on mentioning in his email. Like, for example, a simple look at the website? Let’s read.
> 2/First off “Start the PubApprove process at least 1 week in advance of any deadline”. Okay, not sure where the 2 weeks in Jeff’s email came from.
> 3/ But ALSO “The perfect policy” “There is no such thing as the perfect policy. Fortunately Googlers like to do the right thing. Please do that here—read the policy and do what makes sense.”
> 4/ ALSO “Meanwhile, we strive to make the PubApprove process as lightweight as possible: hopefully eliminating the temptation to skip it.” I don’t know man you might have to resign immediately if you just “do what makes sense” so beware.
> 5/ Finally, I wouldn’t want to know what would happen to you if you had “the temptation to skip it” mentioned on the website. Beware researchers
> 6/In spite of this, we gave a heads up BEFORE even writing the paper—on September 18. Saying that we were about to write this paper. So much to say here, so much. But I’ll stop here for now.
What I don't understand is why in the discussion nobody proposed amending the paper rather than withdrawing it. If Dean's issue was it didn't cite papers X,Y and Z, rather than demand a withdrawal, why didn't he just demand "I want you to amend the paper to add cites to X,Y,Z". And then, if Gebru and her coauthors were willing to add those cites, that would resolve it.
Indeed, from what I understand, "you should add a cite to X" is common peer review feedback, and a lot of papers get citations added due to requests from peer reviewers. So this isn't hugely different from that scenario.
It would seem that withdrawal over this issue would only make sense if Gebru and her coauthors refused to amend the paper to add the requested citations, but I haven't heard anything saying that she did refuse to do so. It isn't clear if the alternative solution of amending rather than withdrawing was ever brought up in the discussion by either party.
Not that I'm a researcher or anything, but if I was, and a superior told me "we need you to withdraw your paper because it doesn't cite X,Y,Z", my immediate response would be "How about I add the citations you are requesting and resubmit it with those additions?"
Unless corporate tells you to kill the paper and you need something that resembles legal cover.
If a paper does not analyze the improvements from recent work, and just older work that has been surpassed (deemed inefficient by Dean), the new reanalysis might not be as favorable to the results as the paper proposes which means the paper is moot.
Or the second point is about bias in language models, but it sounds like these issues are mitigated in recent research, which means people are already aware and have solved a bulk of the issue being described in the paper.
But certainly it's possible that the paper's contributions stands strong even after accounting for the recent work that Dean mentions. In that case, it could be corrected for camera ready. But my point is that we can't tell right now without seeing the paper, and the relevant research that was omitted.
And Jeff has lost mine. Even if his comments are not just bad faith, his blindness borders on incompetence for the role he has. Yet another clever, blind white man.
I hope a position in the Biden administration can be found for her, and her vision can have a larger societal impact.
Wait, really? That’s an important detail if true. The one-day timeline was a central part of the narrative surrounding this story. Notifying them two months ahead of time makes this a completely different situation.
I’m a bit skeptical. Could this claim be verified somehow? Since it’s very public news at this point, we may as well try to be rigorous.
I agree that Google isn't looking good at the moment. But if I had a colleague who seemed intent on finding ways to place the company in legal jeopardy, then I too would avoid direct communication whenever possible.
I don't think these two takes are at odds with each other at all. It sounds like a cross-functional team reviewed the paper and produced that "privileged and confidential document" but Gebru didn't find that document sufficiently detailed.
1. Was the treatment of her research in internal review reasonable?
2. Was terminating her employment reasonable after she sent the (now public) email to the women-and-allies brain listserv?
3. Was the end of her employment at Google a resignation or a firing?
To me, (3) is by a wide margin the least interesting part of the story and all of the discussion here is missing the point entirely. Whether she was fired or resigned has zero bearing on whether (1) and (2) show reasonable or unreasonable actions.
link to abstract and discussion - https://old.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/k69eq0/n_t...
Part of being a good manager is understanding your employees and helping them succeed. If someone makes a statement like this in the heat of frustration it doesn't necessarily mean they will actually quit. If they're a valuable member of the team you should present them with an opportunity to save face and remain.
To me this seems like taking an opportunity to fire someone they already wanted to get rid of. Either that or a bad manager who wanted to flex their power as a threat to the rest of the team.
One of the more difficult lessons I learned as a manager: Once a team member starts giving ultimatums in order to get their way or override decisions, it's not in your best interests to give in for the sake of keeping that employee. The obvious exception is if you realize you were actually wrong from the start, but reversing decisions for the sake of caving to someone's demands is a problem.
If someone is so ready to quit that they'll flaunt it to the company, it's doubtful that reversing a single decision is going to suddenly make them happy again with their employer. Worse yet, it sends a message that threatening to quit is the way to get what you want from the company. Once you validate the strategy, you will get a lot more of it.
Unfortunately, if someone already has one foot out the door and has been complaining openly (even on Twitter, in this case) about their employer, it's best for everyone to go their separate ways. From there, focus on identifying and fixing any underlying problems to minimize the chance of this happening again in the future.
See her previous (potential) legal troubles with Google that she even acknowledges herself.
> I was in the middle of a potential lawsuit for which Kat Herller and I hired feminist lawyers who threatened to sue Google (which is when they backed off--before that Google lawyers were prepared to throw us under the bus and our leaders were following as instructed) and the next day I get some random “impact award.”
https://www.platformer.news/p/the-withering-email-that-got-a...
> If I can’t know who is providing reviews to my work, it’s difficult for me to imagine continuing to work as a part of this group.
Many people would still describe this (erroneously) as an ultimatum even though it could be bleakly summarized in the same vein as a true ultimatum.
In any case, she has been very vocal on twitter and has not seemed to deny that she gave some sort of ultimatum. If she didn't give an ultimatum, it would only make Google look worse, so why not mention that on Twitter (given that she has tweeted probably 100 things about this incident in the last two days)? Given the absence of a denial, I'm going to assume that it was worded as an ultimatum.
The thing is, there's a big difference between resigning and being fired for cause, even if both end with you not working at the company anymore.
Maybe she isn't that important for the company? Why bother working with someone making demands if they aren't worth your time. Google might have actually thought she was detrimental to the company and wanted an excuse to fire her and she gave it.
AI ethics are important and I'm willing to bet that the Google execs want to know about biases and other problems in their products and probably don't care that much what is published. They probably don't want high maintenance researchers that cause them headaches and are obsessed with microaggressions, etc. I expect that this stuff has been a distraction for too long and they are happy to be rid of this and happy for the signal it sends across the company.
I have little sympathy or concern for Ivy educated elite in-fighting. There is probably a huge number of qualified people just dying to have the opportunity to work there, have access to those resources and do research.
Tweet explaining how she "resigned": https://twitter.com/timnitGebru/status/1334343577044979712?s...
An external reviewer of the paper: https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/k69eq0/n_t...
I think you should be more open about what potentially actually happened because your first sentence seems very accusatory without proper information, the very bias that Gebru speaks of. According to her email that Dean references in his, her "feedback" for the paper was given in the form of a confidential HR document. That seems highly nonstandard for a review process supposedly only concerned with scientific rigor and is not addressed at all by Dean's statement. Further, his statement clearly, likely intentionally, muddies the water about what the actual sequence of events were that led to the paper being created, internal reviewers originally being notified, when the submission happened, who approved it, who submitted it externally, who asked for this to be retracted, and when and in what order all this happened. The fact that his statement, that was apparently meant to clarify these exact proceedings, makes it even more vague about what actually happened seems pretty damning to Dean's case, in my opinion.
Both Gebru's and Dean's statements have very little overlap in flavor and in facts, so it's pretty apparent something is going on here that is nontrivial and abnormal.
The non-research motive is arguably to control the narrative about using ML (I admit I still choke at calling it AI) and big data techniques. I fail to see how this is advanced by having a very public spat.
I've no doubt some senior exec decided she had to go, but I don't think it is because of any intersectional reason, or to cover up any particular publication, but that she wasn't seen as an asset to the company. Strategies for negotiating exercise of power are very different at Google to social sciences academia (or twitter, which is engorged with righteousness over this), which she seems not to have grasped. There are few enfants terribles in corporate tech that don't have controlling stock.
There's a classic documentary about this phenomenon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9UiF7BsC1Ig
To be clear, both of these had been received for the paper in question.
> Unfortunately, this particular paper was only shared with a day’s notice before its deadline — we require two weeks for this sort of review — and then instead of awaiting reviewer feedback, it was approved for submission and submitted.
It seems like someone short-circuited the review process and submitted without review to meet a deadline, with a post-submission review. When this occurred, it was not all green lights. The expectation is that you then pull the submission and, post review, submit elsewhere. After all, conferences are all virtual now, it is not a hardship to submit elsewhere.
If you have other information as to the facts or the internal process do tell.
She has a Twitter army ready to set their aim on her reviewers and a track record, they can't reveal the names.
Which is of course not to say you can't have a more measured negotiation. But it can be hard to walk back from give me X or I do Y, especially if there isn't a lot of middle ground between giving you X or not giving you X.
If an employee is adversary toward the company, the trade off needs to be made no matter how much valuable the employee's work is.
This is a non-issue tbh. She wants to leave. Company wants her to leave. They both agree to part way because the premises are fulfilled (i.e. company can't meet her requirements).
If you want to get technical, I'd bet her employee's status is still in tact for 2 weeks; she just doesn't have access to laptop and etc.
I strongly encourage people to read some books on negotiations - as well as read up on legal ramifications to some negotiations.
Pretty much all books/courses on negotiations say: Ultimatums have their place, but are a minefield (i.e. they can blow up on you), and should be used as a last resort. From a negotiations standpoint, the response was adequate - which is why they all caution against using such an approach.
As for the 2 week thing, this is a convention, but not a requirement. In my company, it's not unusual for someone to be shown the door the same day they announce they plan to leave to another company (it's not the norm, but not at all unusual). The manager/company always ponders whether there are risks in keeping the employee for a few more weeks vs the gains, and this is the question Jeff pondered - that he did this is quite normal. Will the employee provide anything useful to us in those two weeks (e.g. handoff work to others, etc)? Could he/she cause problems (bad mouth people to fellow employees, steal IP, etc). If it's a disgruntled employee, they are usually shown the door the same day. In Timnit's case, it's unlikely there was any value in letting her stay for 2 more weeks.
I once intended to leave the company I was working for. The night before, I took out everything of (personal) value from my cubicle, as well as from my work machine. Only then did I have the discussion with my manager.
Having seen how she communicates and handles difficult situations, I think she really should read those kinds of books. Sometimes her behaviors are textbook examples of what not to do.
(Hint: If you're trying to influence someone, or a whole industry, you are negotiating, whether you choose to think of it that way or not).
Possibly because she made a personal problem into a team/department problem by asking their colleagues to stop working ("stop writing your documents because it doesn’t make a difference"). I couldn't imagine a company where such a call for work refusal wouldn't immediately lose you a ton of goodwill.
> ...if we didn’t meet these demands, she would leave Google and work on an end date.
Google's response to this was not accepting of her terms, it was to force an end-date for her —immediately— and lock her out of their systems ASAP.
A manager in ethics shouldn’t ask Google to break the law by not providing confidientality that was requested.
It is not implied anywhere that the reviewers requested confidentiality. It is certainly not implied that Google would be violating the law to rescind that confidentiality (and, to be clear: they almost certainly would not be).
I imagine some reviewers extracted agreement from management before giving negative feedback on this paper that the “anonymous” in “anonymous feedback” was a promise. This explains the unusualness of the situation, why the feedback flowed though a special HR channel, why specifically management was unwilling to let her have a written copy of the feedback (that could be closely analyzed to de-blind the reviewers), and why management accepted her resignation and the resulting fallout rather than agree to de-blind the reviewers.
Image that one set of NDA'd data was included in the paper, that painted Google in a bad light, but a different set of NDA'd data was excluded in paper, that painted Google in a good light.
I have no idea if that's what's going on here. But if some of the people who objected to publishing the paper thought this was happening, it may explain their objections to publishing the work.
I wouldn't say this has blown up in their face. But to be honest, I've not seen that much drama about it than one post. Have I been missing something?
This seems a very solid move from Google. Someone tried to bully their way into getting information from Google they shouldn't give out. If you go to HR in confidence that confidence should be upheld. The fact someone had to go to HR for a peer review and the fact it was upheld states something.
If someone says "Do X or I'll quit" when you're not going to do X, it is a resigination and seems quite standard that they don't want such an active detractor within their company ranks.
I believe she basically sent an email to fellow employees basically telling them to stop working. That alone is a firable. That is completely nuts and unacceptable work place behaviour. The fact Google didn't fire her for that should speak volumes.
To me, from a HR point of view, this is completely the right move to make.
This is little more than gossip unless you can point to something specific that people can judge for themselves. Saying “she basically did X” is a clever way to influence how people feel about her.
I’ll admit, I had negative thoughts till this thread. Now I’m not so sure. She’s definitely passionate, and one might say aggressive, but more and more people are saying that it’s extremely unusual for Google to demand a rejection for academic reasons rather than business concerns. Whether she was a good employee is kind of beside the point now.
I mean, whether or not this stands up legally isn't worth discussing but I don't think this is typically how an ultimatum goes. Rather it's more along the lines of "this or I'll quit", "okay, we're not doing this", "right, I quit". It's not called calling your bluff for nothing.
I agree that her email to the Brain group makes her position at google almost untenable, but that's a separate question. However, it might make her choose not to fight them on the resignation.
This morning, there were front-page posts about this on the New York Times, Washington Post, Wired, Google, BBC, and Financial Times. It's being covered pretty widely.
Just anecdotally, I don’t think a man sending a “do x or I’ll quit” email would be met with the same response. I think issues of race and gender are playing a role here, and that’s a shame, because while firing (accepting this resignation) of this researcher might make short term business sense, it seems like it does harm to Google’s long term credibility in trying to engage with reducing the barriers faced by (among others) women and people of color.
It’s a shame there wasn’t a pathway to keeping the dialogue going, for example by getting in touch with her and letting her know that some things she was asking for wouldn’t work, but that you could work with her to accomplish her goals in some other way.
From my privileged outside point of view, that seems like it could have been a more humane response which could have disarmed the conflict. I think opportunities to pursue options like that are de-emphasized when management are put in an all or nothing position.
A missed opportunity for leadership.
Edit: I'm not sure what this tweet is referencing, but it's an indicator of her attitude towards her superiors, I can see why they would want to let go of her.
Social media is not real life. Every company, Google included, needs to simply ignore social media outrage and focus on their mission instead.
Internet outrage only has power because companies give it power. Angry words and hit pieces from biased media do nothing on their own. If you don't let them make you afraid, you have no reason to be afraid of them. The internet screamed at Coinbase after the company showed their internal activists the door, but Coinbase is doing just fine. See? Nothing to be afraid of. Just get rid of troublemakers.
Also: Googles bar for hiring is extremely high. For multiple senior engineers/managers to corroborate this description is rather damning.
The 'email from Timnit' doesn't exactly look good... I would expect a manager posting company lists in that manner to be dismissed (or a junior employee to receive some mentioning about professional conduct, if not dismissed).
I don't believe anyone has published the ultimatum email, which I think would be more accurately described as what precipitated the outcome.
[1]: https://twitter.com/timnitGebru/status/1334881120920498180
They didn't give her a chance to address those factors at first.
Later they had a manager read the confidential feedback on the paper in question, but still didn't leg her read it herself.
If that feedback was only saying that the paper lacked relevant new context and advancements, why were they being so cagey about it? Something doesn't smell right about that.
Also it's likely that her contract allows Google to provide her pay in lieu of her working out the end of her contract, so they are probably able in general to move dates like this (not commenting on the other aspects of this situation though).
The variation in reviewers' response is often due their lack of knowledge and unfamiliarity with the problem. Take a look at the recent reviews on some of the more popular conferences on OpenReview.net. Most of the reviews don't have any substance and are often vague/generic.
I'd take the reviews from peers that I trust and are aware of my work more seriously than reviewers of conferences.
Publishing a piece of work for the sake of publishing by ignoring the processes that are put in place is outright irresponsible and that's the end of it.
> Since when is a scientific paper required to do that.
Unfortunately, for a long time (since well before my time, at least).
The mappers, shufflers, and reducers are all independent of each other, reading and writing from the filesystem, and managed by a coordinator. There's nothing like MPI, other than the use of the Stubby RPC system, which sort of resembles MPI but has completely different distributed communication semantics.
>Have you ever heard of someone getting “feedback” on a paper through a privileged and confidential document to HR? Does that sound like a standard procedure to you or does it just happen to people like me who are constantly dehumanized?
So she did get feedback of some kind, though my reading is that it was probably vague legalese that she reasonably deemed insufficient.
[0] https://www.platformer.news/p/the-withering-email-that-got-a...
(1) the substance of the feedback and actionable specifics (e.g. "you didn't cite X")
(2) the actual text of the feedback (if it was given in written form)
If she was denied (1), I agree that is grossly unfair. If she was denied (2) but granted (1), I don't think that is so unreasonable. If feedback is anonymous, sharing its exact text can give away who gave it (you can often work out who wrote something just from the style of language the author used, especially if these are people you know and work closely with.)
If she was given actionable specifics ("add a cite to X"), then knowing who it came from and the exact text of it is irrelevant and I don't think she has a right to it. If she was denied actionable specifics, that is grossly unfair to her. I think one difficulty is that her account makes it sound like she was denied that, Dean's makes it sound like she wasn't, I wasn't there so I don't know whose account is more accurate.
However, she was also told that the paper was to be retracted and that she wouldn't be allowed to address the feedback and keep the paper published. So the form in which the feedback was provided was immaterial.
For example suppose that Timnit was told to withdraw after an incomplete review indicates that they don't want to publish. If she asked at that time for a complete list of things to fix, nobody can give it to her because the review isn't finished. Nor can they produce it in a timely matter because it takes time to do the review.
Later the detailed feedback is ready. And if she wanted to submit the paper elsewhere, she could have fixed it and done so. But by then things have blown up and it is too late.
What’s wrong with Google saying, “we refuse to comply with your demands, and we understand you may feel blablabla. We are trying to streamline our submission process and we would like you to help us do that.”? Maybe it’s because Google doesn’t actually have a desire to work with her, in which case, the ultimatum (or whatever it truly was) is just a convenient out.
> Maybe it’s because Google doesn’t actually have a desire to work with her, in which case, the ultimatum (or whatever it truly was) is just a convenient out.
There's almost no question about that in my mind. Maybe google didn't see her work as useful. Maybe she was just an asshole and they didn't like working with her. I have no idea. But if you are already on thin ice (or your company even feels just neutral about you) and you give an ultimatum, prepare for them to use it against you.
It sounded from her account a straightforward threat to leave.
In any case, making this an issue sounds way overkill.
Both want to part way. Either side can choose an earlier date of the termination.
She doesn't need Google's permission to leave earlier. Google also doesn't need her permission to make her leave earlier.
My guess is they chose the latter because they don't like employees that run such hard negotiation tactics, and she was becoming too internally disruptive. Either way, any employee should know they are at risk after playing those cards, if not in the short term, then in the long term.
It's just unreasonable.
I disagree with this. It's really the only way to negotiate, pretty common. The wording is important here. If you word it as "Do X or I'll quit" it sounds childish, if you word it as "I believe the company should X, otherwise I can't see myself working here comfortably and will have to consider my resignation" it sounds professional, but the idea is the exact same.
As I point out in another comment[1], not only is this not true, negotiation experts universally criticize this as a way to negotiate.
Yes, in that they are both childish. Your version just added more weasel words. The second you bring up the "R" word as a threat you have played your hand; everything else is window dressing.
Ugh, this is a bit infuriating to me. I think there are a ton of parallels in this whole situation to the James Damore memo issue, and IIRC Damore was fired pretty quickly: Google employee sends out an email to a wide distribution, and while that email may make some valid points, the overall tone of the post guarantees it to be a net negative to the company, and then when the employee is let go, they bitch and moan about how there is some sort of conspiracy in the company against them.
I believe firing Damore was the right decision and I believe Google was right to accept Gebru's resignation.
This is spin at best, gaslighting at worst. We'll never get the full story (and should we? it is an internal company matter made public, after all)..
Not really sure what the point of an 'ethical AI' department is when there's no transparency or accountability facing the public because if it can be cancelled internally at any point if it threatens the company you've basically recreated some kind of Soviet ministry for truth
The official outputs and products of that department should (hopefully) be public and shared, I 100% agree with you. But that's not what this is about.
This matter in particular is an internal employee/employer dispute and dismissal, and is only public because of the high profile of the persons involved.
And what I meant that we'll never get the full story is that these kinds of situations are always more complicated than they appear. We are only seeing the tip of the iceberg, and are not privy to the history that led to this moment.
These kinds of things don't just happen out of nowhere.
If I had to guess who's "more right" here, I'd side with Timnit, personally.. but again I don't have all the facts, so it's just a gut feeling based on what I know about how large enterprises work.
How can she fight? Just curious, the US is almost completely an at will employment. Fighting to get your name dirted that you didn't resign but were fired, seems odd. Google seems to saving face for her if anything.
Even with a contract? I know little enough about US labour laws, although I'm pretty sure it's not at-will all over. Where I am (not the US) you can sue for unfair dismissal.
> Fighting to get your name dirted that you didn't resign but were fired, seems odd.
Yeah, I agree if there's a good chance if the resignation stands. However if she could get a court to say she was unfairly dismissed it might be a different case, as it would help her case that Google have acted unfairly towards her. None of this publicity is going to help her future employment potential generally but may help in niche circles that she might be aiming for.
Resigning sounds better than being fired when no other details are available. It's irrelevant when the parties publish their sides of the story.
- Bargaining For Advantage (https://www.amazon.com/Bargaining-Advantage-Negotiation-Stra...)
- Negotiation Genius (https://www.amazon.com/Negotiation-Genius-Obstacles-Brillian...)
- Getting To Yes (https://www.amazon.com/Getting-Yes-Negotiating-Agreement-Wit...)
- The Coursera course from the University of Michigan (and not the Yale one).
- Getting Past No (https://www.amazon.com/Getting-Past-Negotiating-Difficult-Si...)
- Difficult Conversations/Crucial Conversations/Nonviolent Communications
The last bullet (arguably the last two bullets) are about conversation skills, but that is an essential part of negotiations.
I won't claim to be good at this stuff. It takes a lot of effort and practice to change habits you've formed your whole life. But still, I've improved somewhat. What I do think I've become much better at is identifying why someone's efforts succeeded (or in this case, failed).
I would also recommend Influence by Cialdini. It is not a negotiation book at all, but will make much of the material in those books more meaningful if you've read this book.
Books/courses I discourage:
- Never Split The Difference
- The Lynda course (there may be more than one now, but the one I took years ago was bad).
[1] https://twitter.com/timnitGebru/status/1334364736457240577
It's fairly standard to let the employee leave the building immediately but still on payroll for 2 more weeks.
Again, I think it's a non-issue. Both wants to part way. Either party can singlehandedly make that date earlier.
It seems one side brings up this point because other points are not salient, so they try to make it like "you see they fire me today. I actually want to leave in 10 days instead. This is unethical!!". It's a weak point and muddles the main point.
"Effective today" has legal meaning. It's an issue because it shows Google acting in bad faith.
Then you aren't bluffing.
It can be to my benefit in negotiation for the other party to think that I am in such a situation, and so I may still say "give me X or I will leave."
If I do not intend to follow through, I am clearly bluffing.
If I intend to follow through, but absent this gambit I have preferred to stay even in the absence of X, I think we can still call it a bluff in a weaker sense - I am not misleading about my future actions, but I am misleading about the strength of my preferences.
Abstract
The past three years of work in natural language processing have been characterized by the development and deployment of ever larger language models, especially for English. GPT-2, GPT-3, BERT and its variants have pushed the boundaries of the possible both through architectural innovations and through sheer size. Using these pre- trained models and the methodology of fine-tuning them for specific tasks, researchers have extended the state of the art on a wide array of tasks as measured by leaderboards on specific benchmarks for English. In this paper, we take a step back and ask: How big is too big? What are the possible risks associated with this technology and what paths are available for mitigating those risks? We end with recommendations including weighing the environmental and financial costs first, investing resources into curating and carefully documenting datasets rather than ingesting everything on the web, carrying out pre-development exercises evaluating how the planned approach fits into research and development goals and supports stakeholder values, and encouraging research directions beyond ever larger language models.
Anyone have the actual paper?
https://old.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/k69eq0/n_t...
I have plenty of experience in Natural Language Processing (NLP), but I am not an expert in ethics and bias – although I have read my fair share of papers on it. To me, the abstract comes across as modest, very reasonable, and exploring questions highly relevant to the community as a whole. Sure, if I was to review it I would be picky in regards to any strong empirical claims since I suspect it would be difficult to demonstrate conclusively some aspects of what they hint towards in the abstract. But as a position paper it looks better than plenty of work already published at top-tier NLP venues and I doubt that it could not get accepted on academic merits.
Still, to echo the parent, does anyone have the paper in its entirety?
None of this is adding up to the process issue Dean is claiming.
You mean spoke to journalists? Or gave a legal deposition?
Non-anonymously, yes, and also non-anonymously on social media and other public venues.
> Or gave a legal deposition?
There being no lawsuit in which for them to be deposed on the issue, that would be impossible.
What would be bad is letting a disgruntled employee hanging around company accessing company's material.
So it feels like, suddenly, the cornerstones of the arguments against her are vaporizing before our eyes. This could go badly for El Goog unless they stop making official statements on the matter.
Saying nothing would have been better than giving a convenient post for all the former Google employees to come out of the woodwork and say “That’s not true! Google never did academic reviews; they solely checked whether business IP was being exposed.”
It’s ironic that people are painting her as unprofessional in that context; I’d be frustrated too, if that’s really the situation.
I think that there isn't internal academic review of the sort implied by Jeff at Google.
Timnit seems pretty clearly in the right here. As an AI researcher at a competitor, this impacts my desire to join Google in the future. I imagine these sort of PR disasters hurt their standing in the academic labor market.
Why do you think that?
What does this even mean? The power and resource disparity between Google and an individual researcher are so vast that this in no way can go bad for Google.
The idea that a few members on HN are disillusioned with Google is just another Tuesday for them. They literally do not care...no business of this size and magnitude do. The general public will never hear about this and if they do, they won't understand it, and if they do then they aren't the general public.
If it seems absurd that anyone would turn down a job at DeepMind, well... Let's just say, in my experience, prestigious institutions tend to come with a pile of downsides that everyone puts up with (because prestige) but no one really talks about (because no reason). If you care about shipping results quickly -- some researchers do (or at least I do) -- then the idea of joining a big company is already worrisome. Like you're a professional rower, happily rowing along and navigating wherever you want to go, then you're asked to join a galley rower: https://youtu.be/TyzQ-bVaqPU?t=294
There's no substitute for Google-scale work. (Working on TPUs would be a dream, IMO; where else could you possibly build those?) But if you join Google as a researcher, it sounds like your ideas have to (a) pass through their internal academic review, (b) pass through a journal's review, and then finally your idea can be published to the wider scientific community for comment. (b) was painful but possibly worthwhile, with arxiv serving as a bucket to catch everything else. Why roll your own internal review process? And why is Google trying to micromanage what researchers are allowed to publish?
I know we're probably missing a lot of the story. But on the other hand, Jeff has now given an official side of that story, so it's not like they didn't have a chance to set expectations.
Someone in the ML community posted the abstract and provided feedback, which seems to indicate that this followed the typical review cycles for conference papers.
It's gossip as in I haven't seen anyone confirm the validtiy of https://www.platformer.news/p/the-withering-email-that-got-a... but I've also not seen anyone deny it. In fact, it seems everyone is confirming it unoffically.
From the blog post:
> "What I want to say is stop writing your documents because it doesn’t make a difference."
Is telling your fellow employees to stop working, if their job is writing those documents which I highly suspect it will be.
> Whether she was a good employee is kind of beside the point now.
I think it goes to show the good faith Google tried to have with someone who in my opinion was creating a hostile work envoirment.
I felt similarly to you yesterday. Now I’m not so sure. It sounds like she was criticizing company process and was frustrated not being able to have any impact on what she perceived were real problems to the integrity of the process. I can empathize with that feeling, and I’ve done some embarrassing or unprofessional things when I was younger and slightly less wiser in similar situations.
I dunno mate, people here are suddenly trying awfully hard to repeat their points about her personal behavior / paint her as an unprofessional loon. And that’s a pretty convenient distraction if her criticisms were true, wouldn’t you say?
> I also feel badly that hundreds of you received an email just this week from Timnit telling you to stop work on critical DEI programs. Please don’t.
What I get most from this whole discussion is the extremely nauseating level of entitlement from some employees at Google.
Just out of curiosity why would Google let her resign on a sepcific date given that she was already sending inflammatory emails to her coworkers?
> Fewer people would be criticizing Google if they just accepted her actual offer.
Highly unlikely. This issue has become politicized, so people would keep ciriticizing Google even if they let her.
The same paper from outside of Google also creates liability, but now the argument for increased damages becomes about whether Google knew.
[1]: https://venturebeat.com/2020/12/03/ai-ethics-pioneers-exit-f...
HR wouldn't have made the final decision here, it seems other departments did. HR was just how someone felt it was safe to communicate that feedback, which for me is a major issue in a workplace.
That's just not the same as giving scientific feedback in the review process for research and shouldn't be in the way there.
Someone thought they HAD to goto HR to provide the feedback because no other way was safe. If you want to act about the scientifc review process, that should never happen and when it does there should be serious action taken.
Also, it's strange to be giving google so much benefit of the doubt here. On the same day this happened the NLRB filed two formal complaints against google for retaliatory firing practices. If any participant in this drama has a known record of retaliatory and unfair labor practices, it is google, as documented by the federal government's extremely detailed complaint.
How do you know that?
"In all of my time at Google AI, I never heard of pubapproval being used for peer review or to critique the scientific rigor of the work. It was never used as a journal, it was an afterthought that folks on my team would usually clear only hours before important deadlines. We like to leave peer review to the conferences/journals' existing process to weed out bad papers; why duplicate that work internally?"[2]
[1] https://twitter.com/le_roux_nicolas/status/13346019609729064...
A summary of the events, as best as I can tell, is the normal presubmission review was done. After the paper was approved and submitted, someone, whether this was upper management or some other entity, did some additional review and required that the authors withdraw (?, but retract is the wrong term) the paper.
From what I know, both firsthand and from other sources[0], while not spotless, the issues with the paper were mostly nitpicks and fairly straightforward to resolve. That they weren't even provided until some escalation from Dr. Gebru is strange. That even after they were, sort of, provided, she and her team were not given the option to address them in the paper, is extraordinarily strange.
[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/k69eq0/n_t...
What makes you think they weren't given the opportunity? We were told specifically they _were_ given an opportunity to revise, and instead, demanded HR(!?) provide attributed versions of any and all statements made by any colleagues regarding the paper (!??!!?), or they'd 'work on setting an end date'
I'm not exactly proud, excited, or anything but pensive about this series of developments, and it's _highly_ likely Jeff feels the same way. Everything got too hostile and out of control here for people to be able to work together healthily moving forward, and I'm skeptical of anything beyond that being anything more than people attaching a narrative to an unfortunate breakdown in a relationship.
His words were, and I quote "we require two weeks for this sort of review". That is an absolutely false statement, and Jeff knows it. I see no other characterization than a lie. I take no solace in that fact, priors were that Jeff Dean was an above average executive and ran a more ethical then average org. I'm disappointed to see my trust was misplaced and that Jeff was willing to endorse that document, but I'm not going to not hold someone accountable when I see them do something obviously wrong, even if we work for the same employer. Ethics extend beyond that.
> 1 day is certainly unreasonable.
It is not though. It's the norm.
> We were told specifically they _were_ given an opportunity to revise
This is not true (if you believe this to be true, can you cite said statement?). I'd be more than happy to discuss this with you privately, my username should be obvious ;)
Full Disclosure: I work at Google.
As a POC myself, I understand there is a time and place for this.. and it definitely isn't all the time, publicly, on social media.
I fear that people like Timnit are inappropriately wielding justice rhetoric to benefit their own careers, at the cost of actual injustices that may occur to others. This is just my opinion.
One thing I rarely see is people talking about her email where she said “give me a and b or else I’ll leave” - paraphrasing slightly. This isn’t in dispute, she readily admits this.
What ... is an employer supposed to do with this? Also she’s a manager, so there are extra lame legal crap. It feels like they could have not taken her bait - which sounds like hyperbole to me - but I guess they did, and do they have to?
I can’t say about any of the review things, if she is being over reviewed or not, could be. Demanding to know everyone who looked at her work so she could... wage a Twitter war of destruction, well I could understand not wanting to do that. I mean if I was asked to review her paper, I would decline. Who would get into that?
This is hardly the first time it's happened at Google and won't be the last.
And, from what I understand, that she wanted to discuss the issue in person when she returned from vacation (which she was on at the time.)
EDIT: I point this out because I think that this potentially recasts the whole communication from an non-negotiable ultimatum to something more like a fair warning to avoid blindsiding anyone going into an in-person discussion in which negotiation is implicitly anticipated.
Then, she should have said that.
It would be ridiculous for Google to let her hang out at the company.
"Oh we cannot meet your meet ultimatum for sure. But please feel free to hang around and finish your vacation. We'll wait for you, a disgruntled employee, to choose when to leave."
You're not wrong. But it's also the least charitable interpretation anyone could have. Why would anyone tell their coworkers "Stop working, go to McDonalds instead"? Nobody would do that, because that would be both unhelpful and dumb.
Now, maybe it's true that she was telling her coworkers to come play dota 2 with her for 8 hours on company time. But without far more context, we can't know. And there's almost zero additional information here.
Think about how you'd want to be judged. Would you want someone to take a single sentence, stripped of context, and parade it around as if you'd said something you didn't? I wouldn't.
Listen, yesterday I was in complete agreement with you and the other commenter. I felt like she might have been an entitled employee, spreading drama wherever she went, and that Google had been generous to humor her for as long as they did. But today I'm (un)surprised to find myself feeling like I was being a judgmental ass based on very little information.
Her actions seemed crazy, but now that the dust has settled, it seems like her heart was probably in the right place, and that Jeff was giving her an exceptionally hard time for unclear reasons. Her reaction reminds me very much of how I acted at the breaking point. It gets exhausting to try to work around someone who is determined to stand in your way.
The principle of charity applies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity#:~:text=I....
You'd be correct to say that I'm guilty of the same thing in reverse: I'm extrapolating far in the other direction, inventing all kinds of plausible-sounding stories about bully managers and such. But it doesn't feel like mental gymnastics to read her comment as "I am extremely frustrated and disappointed that writing these papers seems not to matter whatsoever, and we should probably take a hard look at whether we're having any effect."
That boils right down to "stop writing your documents because it doesn't make a difference," just offensively curt. And yes, phrasing does matter, but people keep saying she said X when it sounds like she said Y.
My take is that the reviewers wanted to be able to express some mundane criticisms about the quality of the work without having to expose their identity to a person with a public reputation of unusual hostility.
https://www.platformer.news/p/the-withering-email-that-got-a...
But you are not right about privileged and confidential : it limits what Google can do legally.
,,Privileged and confidential communication is the interaction between two parties having a legally protected, private relationship.''
And importantly, in the context of a company like Google, an executive (like jeff Dean) likely has the authority to "unprivilge" said contents, whatever they are.
To me it sounds like the person who submitted the feedback to HR was using privileged and confidential communication.
And yes, Jeff Dean has the authority, but the HR who got the feedback doesn't.
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2011/10/14/the-gervais-principle-...
> This is a simple and child-like example of the operation of a basic human instinct: the heads-I-win-tails-you-lose or HIWTYL (let’s pronounce that “hightail”) instinct. It is the tendency to grab more than your fair share of the rewards of success, and less than your fair share of the blame for failure.
Now whether one buys into that as literally true or not is one thing, but I think it is definitely a useful way of thinking about situations like these.
In fact, the “Golden Ticket Reconsidered” section at the link sounds somewhat like I imagined incentives within AI ethics research at Google are structured:
1. Cut a deal for performance-linked bonus for successful initiative
2. Set up a committee and charter it to collect, vet & recommend ideas
3. Drop hints & suggestions to create things that leadership favors
4. Create appropriate urgency in the work of the committee to achieve the risk-levels you want in the ideas produced.
The outcome of such a system:
> If it works, you praise everybody generously, hand out a few gift certificates, keep your bonus to yourself, and move on. If it fails, you blame the people in charge of the work for failing to consider an “obvious” (with 20/20 hindsight) issue. The chair of such a committee would likely be Clueless [a term of art in the blog series], his appointment being a false honor — a case of being set up take a fall
Further on, the author brings up the “Hanlon Dodge.” Dean’s characterization of Gebru’s termination (“resignation”) seems quite like that to me.
To be fair it doesn't sound like her ultimatum was "I'll leave immediately"— that was forced on her by Google, and is an important detail.
> Timnit responded with an email requiring that a number of conditions be met in order for her to continue working at Google, including revealing the identities of every person who Megan and I had spoken to and consulted as part of the review of the paper and the exact feedback. Timnit wrote that if we didn’t meet these demands, she would leave Google and work on an end date. We accept and respect her decision to resign from Google.
I find it unlikely Dean would lie about that, not least because the email would be easy to find.
Now, were the actions leading up to that effectively a firing, ie Timnit would have been unable to effectively continue in her role? Quite possibly.
[1] https://www.platformer.news/p/the-withering-email-that-got-a...
Which means that Google is likely to have to produce all of the documents that they didn't want to produce.
It looks like Google's AI Ethics team is meant to be green washing.
> It is not though. It's the norm.
Not sure what I'm supposed to do with this. A literal intrepretation has you claiming that all Google researchers only allow 24 hours of review of their papers before submitting them for publication. That sounds wrong!
Fwiw, I'm not sure what you mean by legalistic. I see Jeff's interpretation as more legalistic: this is the policy, while mine is based on practice: the policy isn't enforced, and here's what people actually do. And like I said, it brings me no joy to see that Jeff is lying to justify this. I have a deep respect for his technical achievements, and prior to this my understanding was that he was an above average executive. Perhaps he still is. But that's not an excuse for me to not levy criticism at him when I see him do something wrong.
In practice, Google doesn't require two weeks for pub approvals. I'd be more than happy to provide the underlying date I'm basing that statement on, but obviously not here. Granted, if you want you can find the data for yourself and if encourage you to do so!
> . A literal intrepretation has you claiming that all Google researchers only allow 24 hours of review of their papers before submitting them for publication.
Given your experiences with Google reimbursement policy, why would you expect adherence to the written publication approval process to be different?
That's why I'd much prefer to have this conversation on corp. I can show you raw data and you can draw your own conclusions no need to listen to me or my interpretation whatsoever.
Salary aside (because I do doubt she earned $1M+/year, my guess is probably more on the ballpark of $300k~$500k and either way not really denting Google's finances), you are not wrong, but also it's worth understanding here we're entering the realm of the notion that companies can (and for many reasons should) be about more than maximizing shareholder value.
Also, if I'm being completely honest, from a PR perspective this could be worse than Timnit's paper might've been just given how public it has become and the people involved. People internally are perhaps more comfortable having that paper not be published and not having Timnit in their ranks, but as far as PR for Google goes this isn't great.
But that aside, Google should want this kind of paper published. They absolutely should want to know and discuss every possible weakness in the ethics of their approach to AI - Google has a scale of influence so large that how they act in areas like AI, trickles down to many other organisations. To me, that gives them a responsibility to make it as ethical as is reasonably possible, and that will only happen if experts are allowed to speak freely.
One can make short-term arguments about how that hurts them, but the long-term damage of getting massive AI systems wrong, will be far, far worse.
But as others point out, it's entirely in Google's long-term interests to have internal critics who prod Google and the rest of the industry toward long-term behavior. So I think it makes good sense for them to have independent academics that occasionally make people uncomfortable.
that reminds how in USSR each non-miniscule factory, organization, etc. had "the department #1" - it was an ideological check and control department which at sufficiently large/important organizations even included KGB officers.
Should we really keep manufacturing cars using the same tools that Stalin used?
1. There exist laws to prevent discrimination against people based on protected attributes 2. ML models make predictions based on attributes without interpretability (it's not possible to prove that protected attributes are not factoring into model predictions) 3. Empirical observation that a model proxies a protected property exposes corporation to liability for regulatory non compliance 4. Therefore any study that could expose bias of a model used in production is to be road blocked or prevented ...
To combat flows like above -- seems like regulators are going to need to update rules with third party audits and an incentive structure that encourages self-regulation and derisks self-detection and self-reporting of non-intentional violations... ideally google should not be put into a position where it is incentivized to police its own ai ethics research to ensure that such research doesn't expose their own illegal/non-compliant activity ...
In this case, there were recent changes to the statute of limitations for CA laws that extended it from a year to 3 years, which could be why this whole process seems weird.
https://www.ebglaw.com/news/ab-9-extends-employees-statute-o....
"In all of my time at Google AI, I never heard of pubapproval being used for peer review or to critique the scientific rigor of the work. It was never used as a journal, it was an afterthought that folks on my team would usually clear only hours before important deadlines. We like to leave peer review to the conferences/journals' existing process to weed out bad papers; why duplicate that work internally?"[2]
[1] https://twitter.com/le_roux_nicolas/status/13346019609729064...
And in hindsight, it seems dumb to think it'd be any other way. Of course the researchers are their own judge. That's what the reviewers are for! You submit your paper for academic review at a journal, and the reviewers are in charge of reviewing.
Would you really want to mess with that dynamic if you're a big company? It's been a tried-and-true way to do science for more than a century. It's also a recipe for failing at science, as many will attest. But being allowed to fail at science is a key aspect of science. It would be terrible if we only published papers that were completely correct in every detail, because it means everyone is playing it safe rather than pushing the boundaries. The most interesting work is usually on the frontier of some new idea.
When the news broke, I didn't give it a second thought. "Oh, Jeff is saying that there's an academic review process. Yeah, obviously DeepMind would have something like that. And what's this -- she sent the paper one day before the journal deadline? That's almost giving them the middle finger. Yeah, pretty clear-cut firing."
... But when you think back on it, none of that adds up. Researchers are paid to do research. Being hamstrung by some manager insisting that you namedrop every relevant paper from the last decade would certainly be rigorous, but not necessarily productive. Sure, you can argue that maybe she should have talked about X or Y. But you could also write your own paper.
I'll admit, I didn't think highly of her. All I knew was that she liked to stir up drama. Why won't she just keep quiet and do her job like everyone else? Yet now it seems like she was doing her job. And if I ask myself how I'd react in that situation -- some middle manager is forcing a bogus new "review" process, and now they're demanding us to retract a paper that we put several months of work into, for reasons other than "You're revealing Google's IP," then my thoughts would be: (a) where were you during the two months I've been writing this and asking for feedback? (b) what are you trying to accomplish here, and is this really how a world-class institution treats the process?
Every company is different. And at Google scale, different teams are different. But now it's looking pretty bad. They certainly had grounds to fire her, and for many folks perhaps that's enough, but as a researcher I'm thinking "Why did Google try so hard to retract her paper anyway?" They keep dancing around that. And the article certainly doesn't address it:
Our aim is to rival peer-reviewed journals in terms of the rigor and thoughtfulness in how we review research before publication.
Why? That's the point of publishing! Do reviewers just say "Oh this is from Google" and click the "approve" button? Maybe, but the whole point is for people to read a paper and decide for themselves whether it's mistaken. This whole "keep it under the rug until it's polished perfectly for six months for no reason other than prestige" is... well, rather a grim-sounding idea.
Outsiders can't know what insiders know. But we can picture various things based on the information we're getting. And this reads like some manager tried to double down, and she called him on it each time. After four or five doublings, now it's headline news and Google is looking like they went nuclear without some very solid reasons.
Google's story would not fly where I worked, or where I work now.
It would seem deeply problematic for an AI ethics researcher to have the expectation that when they critique their own employer, they should mention all their work to ameliorate bias or ethics problems, but to not have a similar expectation when they're critiquing other companies. Is the point of having an ethics researcher to expand our understanding of ethical issues, or merely to aid in PR?
If a university administrator were to attempt to tell a PI not to submit a paper critical of work from another lab at the same institution, I think that would be judged as a shocking overreach. But for Google, we're not even in agreement that this behavior is a problem. It's unfortunate that we expect so little from corporations, even if those corporations are some of the main drivers of research in a field.
But the parent comment to which I responded, and which I quoted, specifically said the problem was to criticize google while working for google, and seemed to approve that this should be judged unacceptable.
> I get the impression that she wrote a hit piece on Google and published with Google's name. For me, it's correct they demand a retraction.
The "regardless of who's doing the work" part is key, and not all participants in this conversation are on the same page about it.
Seriously. Choosing who to cite is a discussion and a battle. It's not done thoughtlessly.
Ethics researcher publishes piece critical of company's activities
Company is shocked as to how this could happen.
Company calls it out.
Researcher realizes the limits of her narrative setting powers.
Non-vocal majority is happy to see runaway activism being curbed in corporate settings. Slow march through institutions is slowed down for a day.
Reasons for not citing research, especially recent research, range from lack of relevance (since even though environmental improvements could have been done, they were not done! So the actual impact wasnt lessened by them at all!); To simply not having known about it. The correct reviewer response to this would be an "accept with corrections" to "revise and resubmit"; retraction is overboard. Moreover, that's the role of a conference reviewer, not the employer. Once your employer starts interfering with what you can and can't publish, it's time to find a new affiliation indeed.
Hopefully the paper gets leaked so we can judge for ourselves.
It's one thing for reviewers, even anonymous reviewers, to reject a paper on its merits; it's another, in Timnit's own words [0], to be told "'it has been decided'" through "a privileged and confidential document to HR" despite clearing the subject matter beforehand. In light of a more general frustration, it's very reasonable for Timnit to escalate the situation by putting her own career on the table, simply to request that people engage with the paper rather than flat-out rejecting it.
And if Jeff wants to respond by immediately cutting ties, and by putting out a document that doesn't even address the situation at hand (edit: much less the underlying issues of unequal treatment for women that Timnit describes)... that's a reflection of his ethics and the ethics of the company that stands behind him.
[0] For those who haven't read Timnit's memo that Jeff references in the OP, it's worth reading: https://www.platformer.news/p/the-withering-email-that-got-a...
EDIT 2: follow https://twitter.com/timnitGebru to see more of her side of the story. She retweeted https://www.wired.com/story/prominent-ai-ethics-researcher-s... as a good explanation of the situation for laypeople.
>And you are told after a while, that your manager can read you a privileged and confidential document
Emphasis mine. Showing your employee that you don't even trust her with a written copy of the rejection of her paper is not a great way to engender a good working relationship. Note that this pretty clearly seems to have happened before Gebru sent the email that Dean characterized as an ultimatum.
The fact that she issued an ultimatum for the identities of the reviewers suggests that management was correct to have safeguarded them in the first place.
I didn't read that. I read the person _demanded_ who said a particular critical feedback, or questioned the approaches instead of addressing them. The person gave the ultimatum to resign if details were not shared.
If people have an expectation of Google to turn out academically pure research then I certainly respect the position and encourage it in reality. But thinking like that means life is going to contain a bunch of surprises that really shouldn't be surprising. Google is simply not going to employ people who they recognise as undermining the success of Google. It is not feasible to run a company that way; roughly speaking companies can choose between ruthlessness and bankruptcy. If you expect tolerance of radicals and debate, look to the universities.
The possibly shady part is that they could be suppressing evidence that they broke the law, but, like your said, they can decide how to run their own business. I'm not even sure if the researcher would be a whistleblower if they didn't intend to report something illegal.
To makes matters worse, in this case at least, the law or laws they may be breaking were established to protect a class of people the researcher is a member of.
Universities used to tolerate radicals and debate. But going by the copious media reports of the last few years, that doesn't seem to be how they operate any more.
You can't have it both ways.
And then when there was backlash they "promised to do better" and Sundar Pichai came out with some "principles" that the company would follow for AI.
Another 1-2 years later and here we are again - this just proves that whatever "AI Ethics Board" they might set-up, it will end up being a sham, because they'd never allow that board to stop them from using AI however they like if it's in the interest of the company's profit growth.
If we want real AI oversight we need to demand it from outside nonprofits or even government agencies (why not both?!) - and there should be zero affiliation between the company being monitored and those organizations/agencies.
It might be that they follow ethics because the appearance to do so has a monetary public relations value. It always comes down to that, and for publicly traded companies that set up things like an "AI Ethics Board" it is always for show since the incentives don't allow for anything else.
At the end of the day someones compensation depends on these things and you can't be hurting the bottom line.
The founders have a controlling stake.
The critique here appears to have been fairly minor, too. Failing to cite some recent research is rarely grounds for rejection.
--Nicolas Le Roux
It was only ‘at the last second’ because Gebru chose not to follow the normal procedure.
If the paper genuinely can't be ready until one day before the external deadline, the right thing to do is engage with the reviewers in advance, explain the problem, and provide them with drafts and work in progress, so that they can complete their work a few hours after yours.
What Gebru did is the equivalent of bypassing code review and pushing to prod on Friday afternoon.
This is a essentially false. The author submitted the paper the day before publishing, given there at least was some form of standard review - the actions by Google could not be construed as 'roadblock'.
There is no 'roadblocking' and the review was certainly not 'unexpected.
The constant misrepresentation of the facts in this situation is harmful for those ostensibly wanting to do good.
"This is why understanding who raised these concerns is important."
Since there was no roadblock - this answer makes no sense.
The answer more likely that the researcher wanted a named list of what she perceived to be as her personal enemies.
"Failing to cite some recent research is rarely grounds for rejection."
There doesn't seem to be any reasonable cause for major concern in this whole issue - it seems the company raised some points and she could have managed them reasonably in professional terms.
Google stepped in and changed the procedure for this paper, because they wanted to spike it because they were embarrassed by it.
Asking for the identity of people that have the authority to ask for a withdrawal of your research without stating their issues with it seems understandable, if excessive.
But maybe I misunderstood something.
I don't see anything contradicting, but merely failing to add the "regardless" footer. Admittedly, sometimes I read too quickly.
Perhaps it's just me as a URM, but her email resonated with me, especially this part. I see this position of calling what she did "exhorting them to stop working" often, but this isn't really what she did.
I too care about DEI, but after putting lots of time and effort into it I saw how futile the effort was in my organization because there was real buy-in from higher ups. I was putting a lot of unrewarded volunteer work helping with "inclusivity" and talking about the problems/solutions, but that was all it was in the end for the people we needed action from; "talk". I did decide eventually to dial it back and stick to my actual paid job of programming, and although I didn't send an email to other people telling them their effort was being wasted, if someone came and asked me, I'd tell them to not bother. There's other places, usually further removed from the the company and easily PR-able channels, where the effort is better spent.
In any case, I hope you realize your comment is full of hyperbole and the people who think she isn't in the wrong, myself included, aren't being unreasonable. We're smart people too.
> There's no way that Google (or any company) would continue to employ her after that
I agree. None of this comes as a surprise and I'm sure she expected it too; that doesn't mean Google is in the moral high ground.
I also suspect that if she'd written the equivalently passionate comment about a technical failure or bad product choices, people here would be cheering her on. Especially if she were a he.
I personally do not have enough info to decide who is telling the truth in this case.
And that's both a negotiating position and a resignation.
I suspect not, because it's probably a carefully constructed document to fit the pretextual narrative of the constructive termination campaign that it was part of, which was targeting Gebru based not on the particular paper but on race/sex and criticism around the internal culture on those issues.
At least, it's pretty clear to me from all the Google AI people describing how Dean’s characterization of the review process does not comport with the usual practice of that process, and in some way differs from even the official documented process, suggests very strongly that the entire review issue was pretextual and personally targeted, and not about the paper itself at all. The interpretation of what is behind that pretext is a little more speculative, but you don't need a pretextual campaign unless the actual basis is prohibited or even worse for PR than the pretext.
The Soviet Union was about equality for workers. Who could be against that?
> Unfortunately, this particular paper was only shared with a day’s notice before its deadline — we require two weeks for this sort of review — and then instead of awaiting reviewer feedback, it was approved for submission and submitted. A cross functional team then reviewed the paper as part of our regular process and the authors were informed that it didn’t meet our bar for publication and were given feedback about why. [...] We acknowledge that the authors were extremely disappointed with the decision that Megan and I ultimately made, especially as they’d already submitted the paper.
There is no statement at all of how to reconcile "approved for submission" with "didn’t meet our bar for publication", which probably means that there is no reconciliation, and the cancellation was done outside normal process.
I wonder if he is trying to say that there was a process error, it was approved without review (in error), she sent it out, and then they came back to her and said "wait, no, you can't publish that after all"
A lawsuit emerged. A settlement followed.
Just because "we made rules for this" doesn't mean the scrutiny should suddenly cease.
Someone farts once - no big deal. Someone farts all the time => they're quitting or I am.
This might sound a bit exaggerated but all of this is just putting google in bad light and top of that over 500 googlers have written a letter demanding an explanation for the same, those guys know about there internal workings more than you and me, so it is surprising how many review processes does google have, its just like double pressure first get the internal clearance and then work with the original reviewers of the conference. And now Jeff comes up with this explanation:https://docs.google.com/document/d/1f2kYWDXwhzYnq8ebVtuk9CqQ....
And for not once he mentions that the paper did already pass the internal standard review process.
What inference was I supposed to make?
This is ethics for Google's AI+Search which is currently undergoing global scrutiny, particularly by Congress and specific politicians who are considering anti-trust measures against Google - and who believe that 'their political party is being treated unfairly'.
It's existential concern for them right now, relating to the possible breakup of the company.
Every public communication on 'ethics' or search results etc. at Google is obviously going to have to be reviewed.
If you're publishing the latest thing on 'AI Random Number Generation' obviously nobody cares about anything other than IP.
The fact is, she must have known this and submitted anyhow - which is in and of itself not so bad, but that there was calamity afterwards ... there is no excuse.
Google was absolutely reasonable - they did not ask to change the nature of the research, but wanted to make sure that information about new, better processes were included.
It's beyond gracious for Google to do this, when really their starting point is 'silence' and they really don't have to do anything at all.
A request for a fairly short review with very basic and reasonable concerns blew up.
This is not a public university, you don't get perfectly tenured academic freedom, if Google wants to put a reasonable subnote in there - and take 2 weeks to do it, it's perfectly fine.
Obviously Google would have kept her if they wanted to, but it's clear they were both looking for a way to part ways and it's probably for the better.
They may be allowed to, but they're fools if they think world-class academics are going to work for them under draconian publishing standards that are not even consistently specified. I'm sure Gebru could get a tenured position at a university of her choice. They're throwing away a lot by choosing to die on this hill.
They can't have their cake and eat it too; if they want hire people to do AI ethics research, and then censor them for doing their job, then they should get called out for ethics-washing, which is exactly what's happening.
I don't know why so many people love to defend power, especially when that power is not benevolent.
The fundamental difference between activism and research is that activism sets the agenda ahead of time while research explores the knowledge space and reports findings. One helps us incrementally make better sense of the world, the other wants us to narrow on particular facts while omitting other relevant facts in the name of advancing a cause.
> Reasons for not citing research, especially recent research, range from lack of relevance ... To simply not having known about it
The omitted research is clearly relevant. Deciding what is relevant and what is not is precisely what narrative warfare is. If they did not know about the adjacent research, then they would simply be incompetent researchers (which I highly doubt is the case).
> The correct reviewer response to this would be an "accept with corrections" to "revise and resubmit"; retraction is overboard.
There is no retraction because there was no external publication. Jeff Dean states reviewer response as you stated was there but was ignored by the approver.
> Once your employer starts interfering with what you can and can't publish, it's time to find a new affiliation indeed.
Corporate researchers are still employees and are bound by a job description. Independent of the content of the research, it is also entirely within the rights of the employer to set a certain bar of quality being cleared. In this case it seems like Google didn't want affiliation with this paper, not the other way around.
On the contrary, I totally agree with you on this, researcher needs to pick a particular part of the combinatorially explosive knowledge space to explore, in that they get to be opinionated on what hypothesis they want to prove. What they can't do is however to ignore opponent research that conflict with their propositions. This is precisely what Jeff Dean is talking about in his second letter, you need opponent processing to overcome self-deception and bullshitting.
You can't have opponent processing when you omit relevant research, try to steamroll the review process, throw a tantrum when your paper is found lacking, and ask names to further your agenda through social engineering.
It is not onto me to prove if and why I disagree with the conclusions, it is onto the paper to prove that their assumptions and methods were sound to begin with, if they want their conclusions to be taken seriously. And they were not.
> but this renders any future research from them irrevocably tainted -- from now on, it's no more than Google PR.
On the contrary, this move increases trust in Google research and it would have lessened if they were to buckle under activist strong-arming.
If folks think this was a sign of broken research machinery, they are free to ignore all future Google research, at their own risk for competitive disadvantage.
I wrote a paper recently in which I omitted most tangentially-related papers in mathematical physics, as they would not be mathematically accessible to the audience in question and also do not address the questions posed in the paper. A mathematical physicist wrote to me and was grumpy about it. Fine, I added his name one more time to make him happy. That's the reality of research papers.
It's clear that Google didn't want to be affiliated with this paper. And it's clear that it's time for Gebru to find a place with intellectual freedom, so her work can be judged on its merits.
Agreed, but there's obviously a difference of perspective about what transpired here and I don't think any of us knows with certainty what the truth is. Finding ethics problems is grand and all, but framing a narrative that misrepresents those problems is highly problematic, particularly if they are in a role that makes them the leading ethical voice of the company.
From what I’ve read about Gebru and this situation it doesn’t seem implausible to me that had she identified the reviewers she would have named them in a public venue and characterized their criticisms as being driven by discriminatory bias or an intent to suppress her work. Obviously nobody is going to present criticism, regardless of whether the criticism is legitimate, if that is a possible consequence.
?
I suggest it might be 'foolish' to imply that 'a 2 week quick review with minor additions' are anything remotely 'draconian'.
Just the opposite -- this is a siren call to great researchers who want to be highly paid and work on great and novel things, full well knowing Google has a very light review process, won't interfere or suppress.
This makes Google sound like a great place to do research, probably better than most public institutions.
yeah that's super draconian.
ESPECIALLY if other people in your department are claiming no one else has to go through this, just one of the few black women! Damn!
This is false.
The requirement for a fairly light review process, and asking for more, truthful, factual and contextualizing information to be disclosed is not censorship.
Nobody is suppressing research, or even asking that specific opinions or results be changed.
The commenter above used the term 'draconian' to refer to this process, which is just superlatively false.
"I don't know why so many people love to defend power, especially when that power is not benevolent."
How is this power not benevolent exactly?
What's 'hard to understand' is the petulance and irreverence people have for the offices and responsibilities they hold, and the lack of professionalism in their conduct.
This should have been an easy issue to address by any mature researcher who cared about working with others to achieve positive outcomes - instead of trying to force their opinion on an organization, or engender public support for their career.
There are plenty of reasonable voices at the table for 'Ethics in AI' nobody has a magic wand in this equation.
I wouldn't be that sure. I know the "headline narrative" is invested in painting Google as evil (and they don't tend to be that wrong in many instances), but the actual sentiment among the general talent pool is very divided in this instance. There is a sizeable percentage who are relieved to see activist pressure being resisted in a corporation and would be inclined to make a pick on that basis. We all know corporate pressure is not the only threat to academic/intellectual freedom.
Further, she claims that initially she was not allowed to even see the contents of the criticisms, only that the paper needed to be withdrawn.
Let's say you were working on a feature. At the 11th hour, just before it hit production, you get an email telling you to revert everything and scrap the release. Apparently somebody in the company thought it had problems but they won't tell you the problems. Then after prying you do get to see the criticisms and they look like ordinary stuff that is easily addressed in code review rather than fundamental issues. They still won't tell you who made the critiques. Would you be upset?
Fro my understanding, this paper had already passed peer review and been accepted. Google management then decided to block the publication using the IP review process.
Timnit shared the paper a day before the publication deadline, ie, no time for internal review, and someone with a fat finger apparently approved it for submission without the required review.
1) Is the review protocol that requires a two-week review period a peer review process intended to maintain scientific rigor, or an internal controls process intended to prevent unwanted disclosure of trade secrets, PII, etc.?
Repeating the comment at the very top of the thread:
> Maybe different teams are different, but on my previous team within Google AI, we thought the goal of google's pubapproval process was to ensure that internal company IP (eg. details about datasets, details about google compute infra) does not leak to the public, and maybe to shield Google from liability. Nothing more.
If it's not a scientific peer review process, arguments about why scientific peer review is generally anonymous are irrelevant, just like arguments about why, say, code review is generally not anonymous would also be irrelevant. It's a different kind of review process from both of those.
2) In practice, is the two-week review period actually expected / enforced? Other Googlers, including people in her organization, are saying that the two week requirement is a guideline, not a hard rule, and submissions on short notice are regularly accepted without complaint:
https://twitter.com/le_roux_nicolas/status/13346245318860718...
https://twitter.com/ItsNeuronal/status/1334636596113510400
https://twitter.com/lizthegrey/status/1334659334689570817
(I don't work for Google, but I work for another very IP-leak-sensitive employer that does ML stuff, and we have a two-week review period on publications. The two-week rule exists for the purpose of not causing last-minute work for people, but if you miss it, it's totally permissible to bug folks to get it approved, and if they do, it's not considered "someone with a fat finger." It certainly doesn't exist for the purpose of peer review - it's assumed that the venue you're submitting to will do review, and I think everyone understands that someone from your own employer isn't going to be a fair peer reviewer anyway. There is a "technical reviewer" of your choice, but basically they just make sure you're not embarrassing yourself and the company, and there's no requirement for how deeply they review. I think I've gone through the process twice and missed the deadlines both times.)
So, if this "rule" exists on paper, but only exists in practice for her, then this is the textbook definition of unfairness.
https://twitter.com/william_fitz/status/1335004771573354496
https://twitter.com/mena_gonzalo/status/1335066989191106561 (an intern!)
(... Also, comparing this rule to our overpoliced society where everyone commits some sort of crime and the police just choose who they go after kind of reinforces my point about unfairness. Sure, it may have been strategically wrong for her to not do everything by the book, but if so, it's very interesting that the in-house ethicist has to play by all the rules to not get fired and the practitioners can safely skip them.)
Anyway, the culpability for rubber-stamping this paper is on the person who rubber-stamped it, given that short approvals are commonplace. Saying "You should have known that this approval didn't really count, so it's your fault for going through the normal process and not realizing it should have been abnormal" is nonsense. That's literally the job of the reviewer, and if the reviewer can't do that, someone else needs to fulfill that role. At worst, if they told her on day one "Your job is publishing high-impact papers with fundamental conflicts of interest with the company, so everything needs detailed review from X in addition to the usual process," that would be different. But they didn't. Better yet, they could have flagged her in the publication review system as needing extra review. There were lots of options available to Google if they weren't trying to make up rules after the fact to censor a researcher.
And in any case, she gave advance courtesy notice of the planned work: https://twitter.com/timnitgebru/status/1335018694913699840 Someone could have said something then. They didn't.
This is key, and I don't see it being mentioned as much in other comments. It was approved.
It doesn't imply that if a manager or VP or CEO concedes the point at issue once, then the person can now go around "putting their badge on the table" and getting their own way over and over again on other issues; probably making a habit of issuing ultimatums (ultimata?) will get you fired PDQ.
I guess it only works if you have a good enough reputation that people actually want to you to stick around.
One case someone succeeded. The other case some other person resigned.
An ultimatum like this is an opportunity for a responsible manager to talk and rethink, but it seems like Google jumped at the opportunity to double-down on their mistake and then send out cowardly emails claiming the employee had actually resigned.
If I were to apply a simplistic rule here, I would actually invert it - if you get to a point where you are sufficiently undervalued that you feel the need to issue an ultimatum, you basically have to resign.
No, an ultimatum is a choice between two options; she offered Google a choice, and they selected. Expecting them to try to carve out a 'third way' is just unrealistic.
I agree that you can frame this many ways; she could have portrayed this as her resigning in protest, instead of blaming Google for being vindictive.
It is fine if you think that, but accept that you are the weak one here. If you want to err on the side of keeping your job it's fine, but don't pretend you didn't make a trade off.
You do not have to accept anti social behavior but a good manager would have handled this and it would never have reached this point, public or otherwise. This whole episode is failure of management top to bottom.
Ultimatums shouldn't be a frequent occurrence but they are a part of business relationships. It seems a bit unfair for an employer to treat an employee ultimatum as a fireable offense when company policies are sometimes the equivalent.
Employees sometimes decide that an employer ultimatum is offensive and quit sometimes too. But I don't think it is nor should be a set-in-stone rule that an employee that issues an ultimatum should be terminated.
But you're claiming that for a company there shouldn't be a choice, it should just lead to termination.
Not saying it's wrong or right, but couldn't she make the exactly symmetric argument?
Mostly it's an opportunity to let the staffer know that such ultimates are unacceptable, and that taken literally by her own terms - she could be called out and let go. Which is what happened.
It's very doubtful that if they wanted to keep her, that they couldn't have found terms.
Surely the manager would have bent, indicated the wording was a little bit strong, and found a way forward.
It seems clear they were wavering, she crossed a line and offered them the path out and they took it.
If there were material issues being covered up, there was material suppression of information, this story would look completely different - but there wasn't.
This was the right thing to do by Google in a tricky situation.
I told my company that I was fed up and the only way I would continue in that situation is if I was given a sizable raise because I wasn't paid enough to put up with him. They gave me the raise rather than having me walk. I worked there for several more years after that.
I never issued an ultimatum before or since. Maybe there are people issuing threats all the time, bug it seems to me that people usually do that if they're frustrated but they want to stay at the company. For IT folks with desirable skills it's far easier to just get another job.
I hope you've said it with the intention to make a point about how dysfunctional certain managers can become, rather than illustrating a belief. If you can't lead other human beings without having control over them, then please hang up your leadership hat and go do something else for a living.
-Another manager.
Given that, at least in Timnit's narrative, the email included a request to discuss the issue in person when she returned from vacation, I don't think that the "ultimatum" characterization is uncontroversially accurate for the immediate case.
There’s tons of issues I wouldn’t compromise on, and better leave the company if I had to. Does that mean I’ll be fired the very second these subjects become remotely relevant and/if I make clear where my boundaries are ?
"X is the lowest price I can sell for, take it or leave it" "How about X-10?" "Done"
"I want to read 5 books!" "You can either read one book before bedtime or go to bed now" "How about 2 books?" "Okay, but then straight to bed!"
The narratives from the participants on the actual communication differ on key points relevant to evaluating whether it was really an ultimatum.
Sometimes the person making an ultimatum is right, sometimes they're wrong. It shouldn't be as adversarial as viewing yielding as weak. Insisting on always "winning" is in my view the weak position.
Additionally, firing someone is not always legal in some countries, even after an ultimatum, assuming they pick the wording of their ultimatum carefully (e.g. "I may very well resign if/unless [desired condition]") to retain control over whether they will later finalize their conditional decision to resign.
As one example, in Quebec, employees who don't qualify as "senior management" and who have been employed at a company there for an uninterrupted period of at least 2 years cannot legally be fired without what the law considers good cause, period, not even if the company gives them a notice period or pay in lieu. Any alleged noncompliance or misconduct that falls short of the most extreme examples must be first dealt with a graduated process of progressively stronger discipline, and it must be possible for someone to recover from that instead of having the outcome of the process as a foregone conclusion. There is a government tribunal to which an aggrieved party can appeal if they aren't happy with the outcome, with the power to order remedies including back pay and even reinstatement.
Similar things are found in many European countries, though certainly not all.
Of course, ultimatums with more definitive wording like "I resign if/unless [condition that the listener has control over]" -- note the absence of hesitating words like "may very well" -- can irreversibly become an effective resignation worldwide, based on choice of the listener on whether to satisfy or reject the condition.
This doesn't seem logical to me. I don't doubt there are indeed scenarios where this is true, but as an absolute, this doesn't resemble my real world experience at all. It seems like kind of the opposite of how human interaction should work.
I think that statement presumes some degree of unreasonableness. Honestly, I value having employees that have principles and clear boundaries, if for no other reason than I can rest assured that when I'm not observing/involved, those principles and clear boundaries are still there. Now, if those principles are, "I won't accept that paying me gives you any kind of authority over what I do", then you know that's not going to work out for anyone involved. However, if it is something like, "You can't pay me enough to do X", and I have no desire for them to do X, I'm really okay with that.
A leader is not a friend or an ally, they are just a leader; the leader can be friendly and supportive, but they are still just a leader.
"Tuesday Gebru emailed back offering a deal: If she received a full explanation of what happened, and the research team met with management to agree on a process for fair handling of future research, she would remove her name from the paper. If not, she would arrange to depart the company at a later date, leaving her free to publish the paper without the company’s affiliation."
I read that as an explicit ultimatum.
https://www.wired.com/story/prominent-ai-ethics-researcher-s...
Putting the ultimatum in e-mail form really raises the stakes, because there may be other people CC-ed or BCC-ed, and any response could later be weaponized.
If the relationship was already troubled, anything like an ultimatum is an opportunity for the manager to be rid of all their troubles.
The level of the threat also comes into play, and more severe threats increase the risk/tension. If the guardian had threatened to disown the child rather than send them to bed, we would read the situation differently.
They way this was handled doesn't make any of the involved parties look good.
It does seem like she judged the situation incorrectly, as she is now complaining, not gloating.
The fact that this has over-flowed into the public sphere is a failure.
If they handled the situation correctly it should have been sorted internally. Whether the person in question spilled the beans at all is proof of that.
Managing people is a skill, and being good at computer science does not make you a good manager. They should know that complaining to social media is an option that someone might take and they should consider that when dealing with these issues.
The fact that we are here discussing anything at all proves the above, It isnt 1995, if someone feels slighted for whatever reason, expect it show up on Twitter, true or not. You don't want to be chasing the narrative with a potentially one sided google doc. No one is giving the mega corp the benefit of the doubt in 2020 which means it is bad PR either way.
"a good manager would have handled this and it would never have reached this point, public or otherwise. This whole episode is failure of management top to bottom."
My point is that I do not know whether this situation could have been handled better. We don't know enough to judge whether this could have been sorted out neatly. You seem to think that a clean resolution was possible, and you might be right, or you might be wrong.
Accepting a resignation achieves three separate objectives:
-resolves the ultimatum
-discourages future ultimatums
-preserves the status quo ante
In every employment contract there is a balance of things and employee is willing to do and an employer is willing to provide in exchange. If my boss said that they wouldn't pay me anymore I would rightfully respond with an "ultimatum" of "pay me or I quit". That's the ultimatum they respond to every day by paying me; they look at the balance of things I offer, consider what I provide to the company to be adequate, and then give me the money I ask for. The same is true for any ultimatum: you come to the table with one final negotiation; the negotiation of "do you value me? Then you must provide me this". It's an entirely transactional exchange.
Now, ultimatums are general to be discouraged not because they undermine some sort of authority, but because they are a sign that negotiations have broken down on both sides. As a manager, your goal should be to try to reach a compromise far before that point–not only does to hurt your relationship if you don't, even when the ultimatum is "successful" from the point of the employee, but by letting a conflict reach an ultimatum point you're exposing yourself to significant risk and often poor deals. The way to handle an ultimatum is to forestall "pay me x or I quit" with "I'll pay you almost x if you show good performance for the next three months". If you are at the point where the argument is "I'm going to quit" then yes, you may have to carry through with the termination if you think what they provide is less valuable than what they want from you, but you should really be looking at what you did to get to that point instead.
Yeah, and whether intended or not, a "fire anyone who gives you an ultimatum" strategy absolutely creates that vibe.
If you have a top down management style where you employees do not question anything you say, that might be the way to go, but I find in the software business what you want is the opposite. You want all the criticism and feedback you can get from your skilled and knowledgeable work force. If you don't get that, you're wasting the majority of that money in their pay check.
The irony here is that if you have a manager firing someone who presents an ultimatum, then tat in itself is effectively an ultimatum that you are supporting. ;-)
That of course also doesn't mean you accede to every ultimatum. I mean, if your business plan is to do X, you want employees that will help you to do X. If they are getting in the way of X, then you need different employees anyway. Usually though, you and they have already worked out that they want to work with you to help you do X before you hire them.
So the main reason you get ultimatums is because they didn't anticipate and do not like the approach you are taking to get to X. Assuming they are smart and have good judgement (and again, if not, why did you hire them? why are you paying them?), there's a very good chance that there are some problems with your approach and you'd be wise to at least consider that possibility and their perspective. They may be trying to save you from making a terrible mistake, and feel like it is incumbent on them to stop working for you because allowing you to proceed would be working against that goal you hired them for.
It's not uncommon for two people to have very different perspectives on what helps to achieve a company's objective. It's also not uncommon for one of those people to be horribly, horribly wrong. Sure, if you've got an employee who has presented an ultimatum based on horribly wrong judgement, it may make no sense be their employer.
I'll tell you though... just because their a subordinate doesn't automatically mean they are the ones exercising horrible judgement... and the farther you go up the food chain, the more severe the consequences from supporting someone's horrible misjudgement. So having a policy of summarily firing subordinates who present ultimatums both creates the wrong environment to get the best out of your team and terribly harmful for the leadership of your organization.
Usually the goal of management is to employ explicit, stop-gap communication to avoid having to get to the explicit question of continued employment, because the company has already made a committment to that employment by hiring the employee in the first place. Obviously, most employees want to continue on, also. So it seems nonsensical to view anything save an explicit declaration of resignation as the same. "I would like to discuss what would cause me to resign," is not a declaration of resignation, and the people reading this situation in good faith understand that.
You might think that's exhausting, I certainly do, but that's what we're dealing with here.
I consider that this being discussed in a public sphere a failure regardless of situation as it looks bad on the company no matter what.
If a person feels their only way out is to appeal to the mob then I think the people doing the management have made a misstep. If that person has a history of appealing to the mob then it is still a misstep as that should have been considered when dealing with the issue.
Perhaps they did the calculus and this is the best result, but looking in, it doesn't feel like it.
Let's follow the timeline and discover a root cause:
1. Anonymous feedback being given through HR about a
research paper in AI Ethics to be published in an
academic forum.
2. Manager schedules a meeting where: “it has been
decided that you need to retract this paper by next week..."
without context and without a chance to confront others.
3. She puts an ultimatum to her boss that she can't
continue to work there with conditions like that limit her
freedom to speak and research. Google decides to accept
her resignation.
A. People can just go to HR with criticisms of a research paper
apparently with the intent to sabotage authors, and HR is
apparently fine with being used like this. Or possibly a manager
convinced HR that OKR's trump AI Ethics.
B. They wanted her to say certain things in an academic forum --
which didn't appear to be IP/Trade Secret related, but for
some other reason, which they refused to disclose. This is
in an environment of ethics where papers might become guidelines
for legislation.
C. They're not interested in fixing the issues she brought up,
because they allowed #1 and #2 to happen above.
Should HR be involved in "fixing" a paper in AI ethics? Probably not. Just like you wouldn't take your car to HR to get it repaired. They simply don't have the knowledge to do so.
Then Jeff Dean probably has $20 to $30 million wrapped up in Google, so he's going to take their side on the matter publically, unfortunately. Privately he may have been cussing out HR because of forcing him into the situation. We don't know.
Why? Is there something about CRT that threatens your means and way of living, or is it forcing a type of introspection about what minorities have and continue to go through in various forms and machinations you'd rather not entertain?
Anyways I was just explaining to OP that the situation was already about that stuff before any response was considered.
That tactic is not a problem inherent to CRT, that tactic is a problem with how people deploy and weaponize CRT.
In the absence of anything else, yes, people are going to make assumptions.
Edit: I agree that one could incorporate some CRT into their worldview without becoming insufferable, in fact I think lots of normal people have without calling it that. That said, there are a lot of true believers out there, that's who I was talking about.
No, I'm not doing that right now, I am trying to understand your framing of CRT and where your issues lie with it. It would seem those issues lie with how certain people argue CRT, not CRT itself.
Thank you for clarifying that.
They are just that, objections and responses. Which you are free to entertain or not, attempt to unpack and understand or not, respond to with better critiques, objections, observations and rebuttals of your own...or not. But you're not being prevented from making them by anyone or anything short of I suppose committing some sort of crime in order to make that point (that's just an extreme example to stretch the metaphor).
This is the form and function of debate, it is a crucible that boils away impurities of all manner and dialect (for anyone who may be thinking they've heard this one before, yes, I absolutely stole this from an episode of Star Trek).
If you feel you are being stopped from doing any of this, might I ask why and how you have been completely prevented and kept from expressing yourself?
Elite coastal white: Absolutely not threatened. Beneficiary of the system and knows how to navigate all of the social codes.
Less elite or poor white: Takes the bullet that was aimed at the elite white.
Asian: Scores way too high on tests for their % of the population and this is a problem for a worldview that cares about what % of college slots go to which races
Professional class black or latin: Does great, huge beneficiary of CRT activism
Working class black or latin: Invisible and accidentally hurt despite good intentions. CRT proponents tried to pass a referendum legalizing racial discrimination in hiring in California this year, which would have helped professional class POC and probably hurt this class. Fortunately it failed.
EDIT: I removed some cattiness above. Not trying to pull the rug out from under you but I'm rate-limited and wanted to focus on my actual points. I don't think I'm a caricature of 'unwoke' person who never thought about or dealt with these things before.
Is that what you truly believe I did above? That I am labeling you, and think you to be a white supremacist?
If so then allow me to be clear for a moment: I have literally no way of knowing if you're a white supremacist. I have no way of knowing if you're not actually an armada of ants collectively working to actuate the keys of a mechanical keyboard or a Boltzmann brain sending these messages through some strange and baffling form of quantum entanglement. What I am trying to expose is the very real reality that these are uncomfortable conversations, that's just intrinsic to this topic and the climate we are in.
This is fine. It is fine to admit being uncomfortable trying to process where we are, how we got here, and how we got out of it.
But one has to start by looking that beast in the face first in order to reckon with it. For some, that uncomfort gets unwittingly channeled into anger and frustration and they might not even know why or even realize it, but that can be focused, and turned into knowledge and wisdom on the issues. One's just gotta start, like I said: see it for what it is, and working from there.
If you took that to be me associating you with white supremacy, I'll try to find other ways of seeking out clarity from people next time.
Looked like it to me, an uninvolved curious third party.
> the very real reality that these are uncomfortable conversations
Huh, that's what the poster that you replied to said. Weird that you got all up in their grill about it.
Let me just attempt to paraphrase the initiating series of comments, seeking only to illustrate how your comments looked to me, not attempting to do justice to the full meaning of each commenter.
nickff > advice on how the manager should do power dynamics
saagarjha > "strange power dynamic" [followed by lots of savvy commentary, irrelevant to my point here]
free_rms > CRT is all about power dynamics. That's the point. I find it exhausting, but me being exhausted is not the point, the point is that it's about power. [bit of a reductionist take on the parent comment, but probably correct?]
dvtrn > Are you exhausted because, as a beneficiary of oppression, you'd rather the oppression continue? Or is it because you're just too lazy to care about fairness?
free_rms > See, I dunno where you got that I'm an oppressor, where did this threat come from?
Yikes! And free_rms didn't even say that your implication that she/he is an oppressor was wrong, nor were they defensive about it. They just said that it's exhausting! I mean, it would be! Who would not be exhausted by that, whether or not it's a fair accusation!
I mean... now, at the bottom of this thread, you imply that you were seeking to know more, and not trying to imply that the exhaustion is evidence of being a bad person. Okay, I believe you, and nothing in your first comment belies that reading (though some of the intervening comments, hmn not so sure). But I don't think it's the natural read of what you said, at least it wasn't the natural read for me.
Me personally, btw, I dunno what CRT is, so in my privileged ignorance (enabled, of course, by my general white privilege) I'm immune to the exhaustion. I read this whole thread to see if I could learn something useful. Not so far, though I don't regret the time spent.
I dunno, is this helpful? Maybe I'm not being helpful.