> Yeah, put more simply, they pushed out someone in their Ethical AI department because they did not soften critiques against AI enough.
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 your work is suddenly and unexpected roadblocked at the last second by internal review, the only way to make changes that prevent that from happening in the future is to clearly understand the situations and criticisms that led to the roadblock. This is why understanding who raised these concerns is important. Anonymous feedback blowing up a project at the final moments is sure to frustrate anybody. If what she has said is true then it was also very difficult for her to even have access to the substance of the critique in the first place, with the initial story from her management being that she would not be able to see the documents explaining why the paper was to be retracted.
The critique here appears to have been fairly minor, too. Failing to cite some recent research is rarely grounds for rejection.
>Now might be a good time to remind everyone that the easiest way to discriminate is to make stringent rules, then to decide when and for whom to enforce them.
It would be pretty easy to discriminate if you had loose underspecified rules, then decide action on a case by case basis. The problem seems to not be in the rules but in the deciding.
Why can't it be both? I once observed an instance very early in my career, while working in an employment litigation office where rules were explicitly created in order to box an individual in such that their actions, while completely legal and moral and in the course of their professional duties could be used as grounds for dismissal "because policy".
A lawsuit emerged. A settlement followed.
Just because "we made rules for this" doesn't mean the scrutiny should suddenly cease.
I mean this sounds deep and sensible and I support the underlying sentiment when it comes to laws and government force, but it's not so black-and-white in social situations..
Someone farts once - no big deal. Someone farts all the time => they're quitting or I am.
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.
According to Jeff Dean's account of events, yes. According to nearly everyone else's, this process was unusual in that it even involved reviewing for content and not just IP, and Gebru herself says that the website about the process says to submit at least 1 week before publication, not two.
"According to nearly everyone else's, this process was unusual in that it even involved reviewing for content and not just IP"
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.
> 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.
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.
"but they're fools if they think world-class academics are going to work for them under draconian publishing standards"
?
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.
I think that demanding retraction to a paper with no reason, and then only providing a verbal reason (aka the researcher cannot have the notes with them when making revisions), refusing to explain the process in which feedback was solicited, and then demanding retraction (NOT a revise and resubmit)...
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!
> when really their starting point is 'silence' and they really don't have to do anything at all.
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 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.
But they didn’t ask for more factual and contextualizing information. She wasn’t given a chance to revise the paper to include that. It was just canned.
I’ve only ever done the paper review process twice. In both cases I got it approved concurrently with submission to a conference. Other googlers have similar stories.
As a manager, if someone gives an ultimatum, you basically have to fire them. There's no real option; Ben Horowitz covered it somewhere, but the bottom line is that if you yield, you've given up all control.
This is rubbish. At Intel we called it "badge on the table". It's a statement of complete commitment (and I've been the beneficiary of someone going 'badge on the table' at least once, under circumstances I can't disclose).
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 only know of 2 cases where I know for sure that it happened, although I've heard rumors about more. It's not going to be one of those things where you run around yelling about it, especially if you succeeded (after all, flexing on your management that you did it is likely to make your management unhappy).
One case someone succeeded. The other case some other person resigned.
Sorry, that was clumsily put - what I meant was in one case person A got what they wanted, and in another case not involving anyone from the first case, person B didn't get what they wanted and resigned.
I understand some of the reasons why some managers think that way, but you can't have such simplistic rules.
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.
The problem with accepting anti-social behavior is that you encourage it. This individual or another will use the same strategy against you in the future, and it will create antagonism and toxicity.
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.
Ah the old I don't want to do my job and accept that there "was nothing I could do" which is middle management bullshit.
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.
Respectfully, we don't have enough information to judge whether she was net-positive to the team who was acting reasonably. That's a complex calculation, and I don't know whether management triumphed or failed.
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.
Fair, but I don't think we need to know what happened to asses what is happening now.
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.
> My point is that I do not know whether this situation could have been handled better.
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.
This suggests that:
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.
It looks like the root cause was A above. Everything after that cascaded from there.
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.
Is it anti-social behavior if a company tells you, 'do X or else'? Even recently plenty of companies have told employees that they can move and work remotely but they had better report it so their salary can be adjusted. The penalty for not reporting being firing.
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.
> 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.
But you're claiming that for a company there shouldn't be a choice, it should just lead to termination.
Well, the company is in slightly different position from the manager. They can abrogate the manager's authority, but that would permanently undermine that individual. On the other hand, they can also choose to accept the subordinate's resignation. They could try to transfer the subordinate somewhere else, but that's also risky, and wouldn't really address the ultimatum in this case.
Accepting a resignation achieves three separate objectives:
I think you're coming at the ultimatum from some sort of strange power dynamic perspective, where an employee who successfully gets their ultimatum approved somehow disenfranchises their manager of their authority, enabling future employees to…what? Vie for the managerial position? This has a "crush dissent" kind of vibe.
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.
What gets me is all this talk of an employee making their terms of employment known (this so-called "ultimatum") being somehow unusual. An employee/employer relationship is ultimately a running series of ultimatums. What's really discouraged is making each one explicit, but of course, that doesn't mean they aren't there, nor that occasional forthright discussions aren't customary. What do these people think a performance review is?
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.
Getting to the point where things need to be explicitly stated is unusual, I think. The rest of the ultimatums remain unsaid because people are aware of them already and work within their bounds already. And getting to the point where you have to give a verbal ultimatum requires a party to not be aware of its existence, which is rare when communication isn’t totally broken.
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?
It wasn't veiled at all, it was a bald-faced ask, why dodge it? If the veiled accusations that some people utilize in the name of CRT is bothersome, why wouldn't you call THAT out from the very start?
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.
But you're doing the thing. The tactic that you agree is bothersome.
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.
okay, well since the comment I initially replied to has been edited entirely post hoc to represent an entirely different tenor than what you originally replied with, I guess I need to edit mine as well:
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.
What stands in your way other than being faced with possible objections to, and responses in kind to whatever your critiques may be? Objections and responses that-I would boldly say-are not stopping you from making said critiques, or rather, they hold no enforceable power that precludes you or anyone from making rebuttals of your own.
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?
Alright, here's my substantive criticism of how CRT affects various groups in practice (not doxxing my membership in any of these groups):
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.
We just went through a mini-version of it: the go-to move is that any criticism is immediately labelled as closet white supremacy.
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.
> Is that what you truly believe I did above? That I am labeling you, and think you to be a white supremacist?
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.
"an opportunity for a responsible manager to talk and rethink"
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.
Maybe in certain situations. But as an engineer on more than a couple of occasions I have pushed back on safety concerns and I was adamant that certain things be fixed for the company's reputation and for safety reasons. I did go over my manager's head because he wouldn't listen. Should I have been fired? Ultimately on one occasion I went up 4 layers of org chart to a VP who finally had the sense to listen because my concern was going to cost the company a lot to fix. I didn't get fired and actually got a bonus and raise that year because I stood my ground. However I never threatened to resign, they would have had to fire me to get me out of there :)
That's not true at all. You can say you'll (go to the media/refuse to sign off on the regulatory paperwork/refuse to change the code that way and they don't have anyone else who can do it/refuse to change the password) or any of a number of other things.
I once worked on a federal IT contract where the project manager for the team was from another company. He was a dishonest, backstabbing snake, and it reached a point where I was quite fed up.
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 told my boss I won't work past 6pm and that I won't bring my work phone on vacation. I've had reports tell me they'd leave the team unless they can see a certain rate of career growth. No instant firings on either side.
As a manager, it's your job not to push people to a corner where they need to make an ultimatim. If your company is ethical, you should be able to navigate this.
Well, you're assuming she was pushed in 'to a corner where they need to make an ultimatim [sic]'. All I know is that she used an ultimatum to challenge/corner her manager, and he decided to discontinue their working relationship.
She certainly felt that she was pushed into a corner where she had to make an ultimatim. As a manager, it's my job to make sure my people don't get into situations where they feel that threatened.
I disagree with your premise. I abide by Andy Grove's philosophy, which is that the manager's job is to optimize value production by a team. Sometimes the manager's objectives are in conflict with those of the subordinates, and there is no way to avoid the problem.
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.
Hey, just so you know, regardless of whether things work this way under /today's environment/ and/or whoever has said it as some "management wisdom", the words you have typed here represent some blatant power-tripping BS to anyone with half a brain.
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.
Isn't the definition of "ultimatum" that no further compromise is possible? You can try or offer different alternatives, but if the other person is really at the ultimatum stage then you've both already lost.
> Isn't the definition of "ultimatum" that no further compromise is possible?
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.
I'm responding narrowly to the subthread here, which is about firing someone who gives an ultimatum in the abstract. I don't know enough about the specifics of Timnit/Google's situation to pass judgment. (I'm also an employee there, so doing so would be unwise and a potential violation of confidentiality rules if I did know anything.) To me I'm filing it under "Everybody sees through their emotions, and different people will have different perceptions of what actually happened and what people actually intended."
Your point seems to be that not willing to compromise on a specific point means the employee is lost forever.
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 ?
Well there are a few factors which make this situation different. If the ultimatum had been made in person, I'd think there might be room for negotiation, depending on the relationship between manager and subordinate.
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.
I agree. An ultimatum given in an e-mail is more difficult to treat as a negotiation tactic, and it seems like there is much more to this story than we will ever know.
They way this was handled doesn't make any of the involved parties look good.
Her description, quoted from a Wired article which she has re-tweeted (which I interpret as an endorsement) is as follows:
"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 don't want to work for a manager who will never think: "Huh, this situation is serious enough for someone to make this kind of ultimatum. Who is right and why? Let me take a moment to think about it with an open mind and pick the most appropriate reaction regardless of what I previously thought."
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.
> but the bottom line is that if you yield, you've given up all control.
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.
Indeed. The very idea of using words like "yield" or "control" belies a fundamental weakness - managers who are so insecure that they can't ever change their minds in case someone figures out how mediocre they are (when in fact the opposite is true - listening to your expert employees and allowing them to change your opinions is seen by them as a sign of strength).
I'm sorry, but that's no more true than when the ultimatum is the other way around.
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.
As a manager, your job is to manage people to get results, and if you are insecure enough about managing those people that you feel you have to enforce some sort of idiotic one size fits all policy then you shouldn't be a manager and should resign yourself, immediately.
This isn't (or wasn't) a review process for scholarship. Oodles of people within Google (even within Brain) have gone through this process and it seems to have always been the case that it just checks for things like PR problems, IP leaks, etc.
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?
Because this isn't peer review — or at least, it's not meant to be (per the top-level comment). That's the whole issue, really: there already exists a peer review process to ensure the paper's academic rigor, so why is Google hiding behind a claim of the necessity of anonymity for a corporate (not academic) process?
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.
Please go read the link first. Jeff clearly states that Google has a review protocol for journal submission which requires a two weeks internal review period.
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.
That's not under dispute. What's under dispute is:
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:
(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.
Papers differ. A short, straightforward, low-impact paper on a non-controversial topic could probably be reviewed in a glance or even rubberstamped. A long, complex, high-impact paper on a controversial topic (or worse, a paper with a fundamental conflict of interest) might take a long time and definitely can't be rubberstamped. The paper at question seems to fall under the latter category? It's like skipping a stop sign; 99 times you do it in your neighborhood with no one around and there are no consequences whatsoever, but that one time you do it in downtown with a cop parked right around the corner and you get a ticket.
I think the "skipping a stop sign" analogy doesn't quite work because there was someone around - someone had to approve it, and furthermore, the fact of the late submission and shortened approval is recorded in the review system. If they wanted to tell people "Hey, in the future, don't do that," they could. There'd be more of an argument there if the common case was that, say, people ignored the system and submitted anyway and hoped nobody would notice.
(... 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.
> 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.
This is key, and I don't see it being mentioned as much in other comments. It was approved.
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.
I’ve personally submitted papers for this form of review on the same timeline that she did. No problems. So no, I don’t consider the method by which her paper was rejected to be normal practice.
Given that internal prepublication review at every company I've ever been with is merely there to avoid IP leakage, I find it very hard to believe that the feedback is is given in good faith. It's like the oil industry claiming that a climate change paper isn't talking enough about the economic benefits of growing citrus in Alaska. Quite frankly, there's simply no reason to address them, because the problems with BERT, exist with every LLM.
Google stepped in and changed the procedure for this paper, because they wanted to spike it because they were embarrassed by it.
Unless she lied in her first e-mail, which it doesn't seem like she did, the reason she made those demands is because they asked for a retraction of the paper without indicating why the paper should be retracted.
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.
Dean's statement is clear that it was approved before being submitted:
> 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"
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.