Comment by acituan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by acituan | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> It's not "runaway activism" if you hire ethics researchers who find ethics problems.

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.

You seem to have an exceptionally narrow view of research; notably, that you can't start with a thing you want to prove, which is in fact step 2 of the elementary-school scientific method. You disagree with the conclusions, so like Google, you have retroactively declared the research incompetent. You seem to think this is within their rights, but this renders any future research from them irrevocably tainted -- from now on, it's no more than Google PR.

> notably, that you can't start with a thing you want to prove, which is in fact step 2 of the elementary-school scientific method.

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.

Ignoring future Google research in ethics has low-risks, as top ethics talent will certainly avoid working for Google, and prefer academic freedom elsewhere (where reviewers are external, to avoid CoI).

> as top ethics talent will certainly avoid working for Google, and prefer academic freedom elsewhere

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.

"The omitted research is clearly relevant" -- how do you know? Why do you get to decide?

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.

You don't have enough context or evidence to assert the things you asserting.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com