Would you feel differently if, say, Apple hired a "Privacy Watchdog", with a long history of activism on the topic? Someone you could trust to speak out if something was amiss.
If the person is later fired, that's a sign that something is wrong at the company. But if they stay, and have generally good things to say, that's a sign the company can be trusted.
I do think this is a good system!
It's really hard for execs, including but not limited to PR, to have worked really hard on getting some message/narrative accepted by the media/analysts/etc. and then have a high profile employee on social media or in a major publication saying it's sort of B.S. even as an occasional thing.
ADDED: It doesn't make it "right" for them to storm into their boss' office and demand said person be fired but it is at least an understandable human reaction. I think anyone who takes that kind of role has to understand they'll be a lightning rod, feel passionate about it anyway, and understand they may well eventually set off a tripwire and be fired in a very public and humiliating way.
[1] https://www.thedailybeast.com/why-the-new-york-times-fired-i...
Oh, absolutely—that’s practically a part of their job description!
I'm not meaning to take sides here, and I think what you're saying needs to be kept in mind in understanding this, but it's hard for me personally at least to not see this in terms of some diversity-speech Streisand effect.
Jeff Dean is a solitary worker (male, white, known political agenda).
Google is one of the largest players in AI, not to mention one of the largest companies in the world, and the focus politics surrounding Tech in general.
Defending Google’s AI ethics is politics.
But it's not a solitary worker, many Google AI workers have spoken up and said that even if the management narrative is true as to what happened in the specific case, it would represent a radically different review process — both as to what the review looked at and the request to retract rather than correct when there was a plenty of time for corrections for the conference — than is applied in Google AI research to other workers.
This strongly suggests that even if Google's incident-specific behavioral narrative is true as far as it goes that the entire incident was constructed as personally-targeted harassment, and that the narrative about qualitative motivations and regular process are false.
My implication was that in the absence of all the facts, many are making a deliberate choice to believe one side or the other.
As far as this specific community, I'm not surprised that many (not all) take Google at their word.
My weakly-held assessment agrees with your comment here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25316014
The following comment and thread demonstrate how many in the HN community reflexively defend Google.
It seems like we share an overall impression of what is going on.
It seems to me that ‘reflexive’ and ‘deliberate’ are contradictory adjectives when assessing people’s responses.
In this case, it seems like the technology review article supports the idea that there are real concerns being raised, and elsewhere it has been suggested that the reasoning for the firing is not credible.
But it should be understood going in that there's no way to "fire" a person like this (at least without raising a storm), regardless of the reason. I don't think that should be such a problem—it's like giving tenure to a professor, except unlike at some universities, an organization will only have a small number of this kind of employee.