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Comment by Crash0v3rid3 | Hacker News Reader

“Luke Stark declined a $60,000 research award from Google in support of the ousted leaders of its ethical AI group.”

Ugh...I’m all for standing up for what you believe in, but I think he was foolish for turning down this money.

He's an assistant professor, so although he's probably not rich, I imagine he has pretty good career prospects in general, and is probably financially secure already. I'm sure he could use the $60,000 (he was applying for it in the first place after all!) but I suspect that getting or not-getting that money isn't going to be really life-changing for him. So it doesn't seem so foolish to me.

Besides, what's the point in principles if you're not willing to sacrifice anything to stick to them?

Money is to fund research, not personal use. Job security highly dependent on bringing in grants.

Yes, this is an important point, thank you. The research award goes to the university, not personally to the researcher (at least so says the award information at [1]). Nevertheless, I think this guy will have other opportunities and this grant isn't going to make or break him.

[1] https://research.google/outreach/research-scholar-program/

Lots of luck in academia, he’s taking a risk at assistant level.

Also the PR and street cred from this move is likely worth more to him?

Asst. professor is tenure-track probably, but not yet tenured. So he will be out unless he can bring in the kickbacks (overhead) for his institution.

To be fair this is really not that much money. Cannot even pay for a postdoc for a year.

It may not be much in the scheme of things, but most universities pool grants. After taking operational costs (as much as 50%) the funds are then delegated to department for dispersement across payroll, research, etc. Depending on grant stipulations.

Every grant no matter the size is important. When I sat on the board of a Computer Science department, the University was pushing professors and students alike, to press for research grants of any size to help bolster the coffers.

It's a messed up system honestly, but they definitely have a set number of grants they need at a minimum.

Fortunately this will probably work out in the professors benefit in the long run within his industry and hopefully help with future grant writing endeavors.

Can in the social sciences, which he may be.

Also it’s an unrestricted award, which might be used in an existing project, e.g. to buy your students or post docs new computers, or go to a few conferences or such.

But yes, not much money.

Integrity is worth more than money. It's not the cash but the principle. It made the news, so his moral courage clearly had an impact. You can't buy integrity but you can sell it.

I guess it depends on the strings attached. If there are basically none, then he could have taken the money and donated it to a charity he believes in.

You can't do that if you work for a university and the grant goes through your workplace.

Visiting Gebru's Twitter reveals that he is, for now, getting a lot of positive attention for his decision, which could be more valuable to him.

Yeap. It's entirely possible some angel investor-types and foundations could throw even more coin his way than he turned down. I praise him for his moral courage.

He's a non-tenured faculty at a school nobody heard of with an 'ok' publication track record and managed to put himself in a CNN article + HN frontpage.

I guess to him that's worth more than 60K.

I don’t think so. The CNN article and HN front page (really?) will mean zero to the tenure committee that will decide his fate in the near future.

He might try to use his 15 minutes of glory to jump fence to a better institution.

And if the tenure committee has non-technical folks in it, they might be sympathetic to the fired Google researchers so who knows!

People prioritize lots of stuff. It’s funny to me when people stand up for dumb causes, but to each their own as what seems dumb to me is important for another.

Sometimes taking money from someone hurts your reputation or public identity, then it makes sense to decline... but this particular case is hard to relate to.

Might be smart "antifragile" behavior in the NNT sense. Though I'd argue he's investing in a social identity where, due to his immutable characteristics, he can never have too high a status.

That said, he's already gotten the PhD and the professorship, so a lot of those are sunk costs at this point. Incrementally, this is cheap. And it might not be worth backing out of his dead end.

If you consider Google as the embodiment of evil (which is a reasonable position to have in some circles), then refusing its money is just as natural as it should have been for MIT to refuse Epstein's.

it's a great symbolic gesture

If it helps him attract grad students, the ROI is better than $60k

If he can get an offer from Google, he’ll find the money in other ways.

In your view is there ever a reason to turn down money?

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