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Comment by bite_tongue | Hacker News Reader

Seems reasonable for a company to not fund research that directly goes against their bottom line.

When the result is predefined it's not research anymore, it's advertisement. Still calling it “research” is fraud.

Exactly. This isn't science. Sometmies science finds uncomfortable results, and if it's not truthful about them, then it's not science.

This. Google wants their cake + to eat it to by hiring the best in class Ph.D's with the allure of doing "academic research" but paid a big-tech salary.

Turns out it's mostly PR and buying yourself credibility at this point.

Honestly find it confusing how almost everyone from the outside could see that teams reason for existing was PR but the team itself seemed totally oblivious to the fact.

Upton Sinclair comes to mind: It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!

You think it's impossible management factions had different agendas? Or researchers didn't expect to spend their whole careers there?

> When the result is predefined it's not research anymore, it's advertisement. Still calling it “research” is fraud.

Like, when you see someone who's an amazing software engineer with a great salary, and you know they spend a lot of time doing research. Then you suppose the research must be paying off. Over time, survival tends to equal truth.

For almost any paper I read, before I pick it up, I know there were statistically significant findings. Those results were not predefined. Instead they are part of the academic review process that filters out null results. That same process (depending on the field) also rewards novelty or all sorts of other things. It's very much a human process.

I'd guess it's an operation of: here's a set of acceptable results. P-hack your data to show statistical significance for at least one of them

If Google did not want to fund research that conflicted with their bottom line, they could have avoided hiring researchers interested in that kind of work. Instead they hired these people and told them they would be free of censorship. Now that these people work there and depend on Google for their paycheck, Google is instituting this new policy. During a global pandemic.

Sounds like censorship to me: hire the people in the field who might publish research you disagree with, then pressure them from a position of power.

You're confusing the ideas with their presentation. Google never allowed someone to post a paper under their name saying ‘datacentres generate CO₂, that's evil and we should focus on smaller datacentres’, but that doesn't mean they didn't care about CO₂ production; clearly they did, since they're now carbon negative.

Same thing here. The researchers' jobs aren't to publically deface Google, they're to help direct Google down the right path.

I agree that Google may have been interested in hiring these researchers to help "direct Google down the right path". That seems reasonable to me.

I'm not seeing where I confuse "the ideas with their presentation" or where anyone talked about researchers "publicly defacing Google". The Reuters article is talking about ML and AI researchers who are now (recently) finding their research subject to a new review policy, above and beyond the typical peer review that they expected.

What's Google's going to care about is "are we going down the most profitable path" though.

It's a bit different from the right path

Google always had internal review processes. If your argument is not that the new review process is unreasonable, just that people were hired under the expectation that there would be none, then I get where you're coming from but it doesn't sound very likely to me.

> Google always had internal review processes. If your argument is not that the new review process is unreasonable, just that people were hired under the expectation that there would be none, then I get where you're coming from but it doesn't sound very likely to me.

Here is my steelman position: I think the objection is that the old internal review was reasonable, and while the argument can be made that the new one does not seem unreasonable to many people under the principle of "don't bite the hand that feeds you", it's reasonableness in a faux-academic setting is at least debatable, and in any case it is inarguable that the new one is more restrictive than the one that was in place when these researchers were hired.

So, at the very least, this seems like a unilateral bait-and-switch on Google's part. The company is now reneging on the representations made to prospective employees regarding their academic freedom.

"I have altered the deal; pray I do not alter it any further.": https://youtu.be/WpE_xMRiCLE

In twitter culture, public defacing seems to be the primary way to help direct things go down the right path. Want to get google down the right path? Publicly call them out for not doing it already and get enough other people to do the same that there’s no option but to loudly comply.

> and told them they would be free of censorship

Of course they never really said it for simple legal reasons, when you sign the employment contract you actually agree to a lot of censorship.

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