Also from Gebru's memo ([0] in the parent comment):

>And you are told after a while, that your manager can read you a privileged and confidential document

Emphasis mine. Showing your employee that you don't even trust her with a written copy of the rejection of her paper is not a great way to engender a good working relationship. Note that this pretty clearly seems to have happened before Gebru sent the email that Dean characterized as an ultimatum.

It sounds like there wasn’t a great working relationship. It seems management was concerned (reasonably, based on her track record) about the prospect of her responding with hostility directed at the coworkers who expressed concerns about the quality of the work if she managed to discover their identities. Refusing to let a person have a written copy of anonymous feedback is a rational thing to do if you’re concerned that the person will closely analyze the feedback in an attempt to de-anonymize the reviewers.

The fact that she issued an ultimatum for the identities of the reviewers suggests that management was correct to have safeguarded them in the first place.

What I could read was and from the responses of her own teammates was the fact that the paper passed the internal review and that she already gave heads-up to the PR department about her work and they gave a heads up to her and suddenly a meeting pops-up and a manger's manager says to her that you need to either retract the paper or make certain changes. She was fine with the internal committee being anonymous but at this stage anyone would have demanded the same, i.e. who is the authority that thinks this paper sets a lower precedence for what google stands for i.e. some sort of human engagement and what does the authority do they take her at her word twist it and fire her by "accepting her resignation" what does this sound to you, for me a kind of high and might attitude by the authorities i.e. how come a black woman that too from the ethics department question our conception of the matter, let us how her what we can do Fire Her!!!.

This might sound a bit exaggerated but all of this is just putting google in bad light and top of that over 500 googlers have written a letter demanding an explanation for the same, those guys know about there internal workings more than you and me, so it is surprising how many review processes does google have, its just like double pressure first get the internal clearance and then work with the original reviewers of the conference. And now Jeff comes up with this explanation:https://docs.google.com/document/d/1f2kYWDXwhzYnq8ebVtuk9CqQ....

And for not once he mentions that the paper did already pass the internal standard review process.

"based on her track record"? The fuck does that mean? If you wanna say that people shouldn't call out their employers, then say that. No need for character assassination.

Anyone can look up her tweets and her interactions with, eg, Yann Lecun, and make a pretty good inference.

I looked them up. I found the exchange robust but not extraordinarily so. She was firm but didn't seem to step out of line.

What inference was I supposed to make?

Her contributions to the exchange were certainly unprofessionally hostile (“I don’t have time for this.”), but in and of itself that sort of behavior isn’t a real problem. The actual problem is that as a person with a large following, her hostility precipitated harassment by her followers that ultimately drove Lecun from Twitter. For someone on the receiving end there isn’t a meaningful distinction between whether someone harasses them directly or whether they incite harassment by others.

From what I’ve read about Gebru and this situation it doesn’t seem implausible to me that had she identified the reviewers she would have named them in a public venue and characterized their criticisms as being driven by discriminatory bias or an intent to suppress her work. Obviously nobody is going to present criticism, regardless of whether the criticism is legitimate, if that is a possible consequence.

Call out her employers? No. I’m referring to the exchange she initiated with Yann Lecun that caused him to be harassed to such an extent that he withdrew from Twitter.

Really makes one wonder if this document is one that Google does not want to come out in discovery, ever, and that it's in some system with a relatively short TTL before it gets deleted, because policy.

> Really makes one wonder if this document is one that Google does not want to come out in discovery, ever, and that it's in some system with a relatively short TTL before it gets deleted, because policy.

I suspect not, because it's probably a carefully constructed document to fit the pretextual narrative of the constructive termination campaign that it was part of, which was targeting Gebru based not on the particular paper but on race/sex and criticism around the internal culture on those issues.

At least, it's pretty clear to me from all the Google AI people describing how Dean’s characterization of the review process does not comport with the usual practice of that process, and in some way differs from even the official documented process, suggests very strongly that the entire review issue was pretextual and personally targeted, and not about the paper itself at all. The interpretation of what is behind that pretext is a little more speculative, but you don't need a pretextual campaign unless the actual basis is prohibited or even worse for PR than the pretext.