I got that book based upon a HN recommendation. It's fascinating reading and made me think carefully about how much sleep I was getting.
I used to think of sleep as something that I could put off on a whim and catch-up on over the weekend. I would stay up later to play video games or program if I felt like it. Now, I'm a lot more rigorous in keeping to my nighttime sleep schedule. Whatever I'm doing can normally wait until the next day.
As someone who just learned about this kerfuffle a few minutes ago, that doesn't make sense to claim that she was fired.
If you offer to resign if new conditions of employment aren't met and the company accepts your resignation without honoring your exact terms of schedule, it sounds like you largely were responsible for terminating your own employment. Claiming that you were "immediately fired" as she tweeted just sounds dishonest to me.
If someone states I will do X if you don't do Y, it still comes down to the person choosing to take some action X. If you don't take action Y, it is still on the first person to choose to take action X. She may have intended to hand in her resignation, but she did not get the chance.
She said if these conditions are not met, I will work with you on an end date. That's not what happened, she was terminated immediately with the rationalization being that they didn't like the tone of the email she sent to the Google Brain Women and Allies listserv. That alone points to it being a termination.
Is she largely responsible for her employment ending at Google. You could say yes, but fact is that Google is the one who cut things off.
Once both parties decide to part way, I don't think it's reasonable to think that you will get to choose the exit date at your own liking.
Either party can choose an earlier date, but not a later date.
I don't really care if she left or Google fired her. But framing it as Google is evil for firing her seems dishonest when she was the one who gave the ultimatum.
The GP illustration of jumping it being pushed is quite apt. Your comment suggests that if someone threatened to jump under certain circumstances but was instead pushed you would be ok with that.
This isn't just a framing. She was fired. Now you may say "she was asking for it" but that doesn't change the fact that she was fired.
No, the jump/push analogy is too contorted to be meaningful. Employers and employees have a relationship that has processes that have common meanings and names like "resigned" or "fired".
There's no accepted relationship if you push someone threatening to jump. You're just an a-hole committing assault and possibly murder.
Is there a link to the letter that she sent? That could help to clarify.
The demand is something around exposing the identities of the peers who reviewed and rejected her paper. If Google doesn't give her the identities of those peers, she say she will leave the company.
Comparing to suicide is a bit much though. When considering death, everything else becomes secondary, so we can't use that analogy for comparison.
The push/jump illustration holds just as well if you are at the edge of a pool. You don't need death on the line to understand the difference between who is making the decision.
"If you eat dinner today, I'll commit suicide." - I'll probably skip dinner to save life.
"If you eat dinner today, I'll quit my job" - then, I'll probably tell person that they can quit their job. I'm not gonna skip my dinner for that.
I hope this illustrates that, when death is involved, everything else becomes secondary, and we prioritize not death over everything.
So, it's a bad analogy to use in Timnit's situation where she will quit if she doesn't get to see the identities of peer reviewers. This situation is not life and death.
The debate about her being fired or resigning is a debate about who to believe about what led up to it. People who insist she resigned see her saying she was fired as evidence of a victim complex and publicity seeking. People who insist she was fired see Google saying she resigned as evidence of unfair treatment and dishonesty.
> People who insist she was fired see Google saying she resigned as evidence of unfair treatment and dishonesty.
I don't see any unfair treatment. Her ultimatum isn't satisfied, so both part way.
This group of people also hyper-focus way way too much on this part, which is not the important.
It's much better to focus on other stuffs like her paper didn't get approved because o A, B, and C. Or how Google suppresses her paper because of X, Y, Z.
Instead these people are yelling that Timnit was fired unfairly when she was the one who gave the ultimatum first...?
I actually spent a bit of time searching for a letter she sent with an ultimatum to her management. I've seen this referenced multiple places as "the email that got a Google researcher fired": https://www.platformer.news/p/the-withering-email-that-got-a...
But that doesn't seem right. That looks more like a different type of letter, sent to a wider audience than just Timnit to her manager(s).
I've seen referenced that there was a timeframe for when she was going to quit that she mentioned. I see no such reference in that letter.
Maybe there's a real copy of the letter floating around. My guess is that people pretend that they've seen "the letter" but only read this other one I referenced above.
I'm happy to be proved wrong, though. I have no dog in this fight except to understand the truth of the situation. If you've seen a different letter than shows her ultimatum and time frame, please share.
I've been following this story quite closely and afaik I know the email Gebru sent that included her 'do this or I quit' ultimatum hasn't beenade public. The email you link to is an an earlier email that, like you say, was sent to a wide group of people within the company
Because this particular job does require a certain independence to do it properly
Does it also require a certain intellectual integrity to do properly?
Because claiming that you were "immediately fired" online, then later having to "clarify" that you actually submitted your resignation because some demands weren't met sounds pretty dishonest to me.
Looks like Timnit Gebru made an ultimatum and offered her resignation if the terms of the ultimatum were not met. Google accepted her resignation and chose to have it effective immediately (as is often the case when you resign and a company feels like it would not be beneficial to have a longer departure period).
It's not like I'm taking only the words of others. I'm reading what Gebru herself chose to put out there.
I agree that it could be viewed as firing language, but only if we had no context.
However, we have context. We know that an ultimatum including a resignation threat was given.
Accepting that resignation and making the termination of their employment relationship immediate with some extra "Yeah, this is for the best" language doesn't mean that she was fired.
If you only want to consider the limited context of ignoring that she submitted a resignation ultimatum, aren't you just cherry picking?
No, I am not ignoring the context. If anything, phrasing Google's response as additional "Yeah, this is for the best" language while denying her terms for ending employment (when in practice it is very rare to immediately let someone go when they want to set up an exit date on their own terms) is cherry picking.
There's a lot of truth in that, but it's not strictly true.
And yet, rayiner's comment appeared faded-out from down-voting when I came upon it.
And that's the real problem. He had truth and thoughtfulness in his comment (yeah, you can quibble about federal attempts to override local policy), yet even a smart group of people like regular HN users tribalistically downvoted it. Rayiner sinned by making a coherent argument against throwing Republicans under the bus for metro-area problems.
We are a tribalistic society and it's only getting worse. Trump said he could shoot someone on 5th Avenue and his supporters would defend him. He was probably right. When evidence of Biden's family corruption surfaced before the election, the media and tech giants actively suppressed and subverted the information.
Ending no-knock warrants or shuffling around police roles just eats away at the edges of the problem. If as a society, we can't find ways to get at truth and logic that cuts through the dynamics that push tribalism, we're doomed to a never-ending race toward the drain.
Are there any persons who can work, say, 8+ hours? I mean, really work, not be at office.
Yes. Some people can, some people can't. Some people can, but they don't really need to in order to do the job that they get paid for. Some people struggle for 9 hours a day trying to do the job that someone else can do in 2.
Mental performance varies tremendously from person to person, as does athletic performance. Can someone run 4 miles in 20 minutes without stopping? Sure. Some people can keep up that pace for a marathon (26 miles).
I wouldn't worry so much about what other people are doing. Just focus on your own performance and improve it (or don't) based upon how you feel about your productivity and its impact on your life. If enhancing it is your goal, you've taken the first step of measuring it and understanding what influences it. You could cut out distractions and see how that works for you.
For me, improving my performance has always meant synching up my work with what interests me. Sometimes that can mean changing what I'm working on - when I have that flexibility. Sometimes I have to jump-start my interest in a more boring problem by trying to mentally frame it in a way that I framed other problems that have interested me in my life.
Efficacy is still tested with vaccines because there is a statistical expectation of contracting a given disease.
If you give 40,000 people a random mix of placebo and vaccines and then monitor whether or not they contract the target disease, you get an indication of efficacy by comparing the vaccinated group to the placebo group.
If you're not in one of the early target groups, I would assume that tens of millions will have received it before you - in the USA alone. We should have a lot of data to look at in a short amount of time.
I ignore all of the COVID vaccine messaging histrionics. The level of ignorance and political maneuvering out there is astounding.
When I'm afforded the option to get the vaccine, I'll make an assessment of risks based upon data we have at that time vs the risks of contracting COVID.
If I had to make that decision today, I'd take the vaccine. But by the time I'll likely be able to get it in February or so, we'll have millions more data points that I'll be able to consider.
I played sooo much of Bolo. Still one of my top-favorite games ever. I was so into it, I printed out guides and read them when I couldn't actively play the game. I started to memorize the different "pill-taking" layouts so I could easily take a base so quickly and flawlessly. Well, needless to say my skills weren't too useful because I wasn't able to arrange AppleTalk games of Bolo very often... but when we played, I usually destroyed!!! hahaha :) Ahh, such a great game. :)
Bolo was a cult phenomenon back in its heyday in the early-to-mid 1990s. It was a game with a great deal of tactical and strategic depth that it allowed a huge range of player ability. It definitely wasn't the kind of game where some newbie could just start playing and get a lucky win or be a master in days or weeks. It felt more like a sport where you needed to practice the basics (like you mentioned on taking PBs) while you also learned a lot about strategy.
My favorite times were the Bolofests where traveling boloers would come into town and we'd all get together to play on a LAN.
I bought a Mac Plus recently, and one of the new things I installed on it's MASSIVE 20 megabytes hard drive was Bolo. And then I proceeded to waste a good hour playing it all sadly by myself without the Localtalk network that used to be full of games, back in the day. sniffle
Soooo there's actually one really cool thing you can do: run additional copies of Bolo with "brains" like aIndy, Brainwave or so on which act as actual players (sometimes a lot better than actual players haha) ... This was another really fascinating feature of Bolo that many other multiplayer games never had. So you can have simulated multiplayer! Worth a try!
I know... but it's not the same as hearing the screams of despair as your arch-tank-enemy gets destroyed by your cleverly laid mine from across the office floor! :-)
Oh yeah, very true indeed! First time I played was at a course at a university. Was amazing energy having ~8-person Bolo matches. Unforgettable experience tbh :)
I used to think of sleep as something that I could put off on a whim and catch-up on over the weekend. I would stay up later to play video games or program if I felt like it. Now, I'm a lot more rigorous in keeping to my nighttime sleep schedule. Whatever I'm doing can normally wait until the next day.