[cmiles74]

My understanding is that the Google is pressuring it's employees (who are research scientists) to refrain from publishing papers that Google management believes casts a negative light on a Google product. It's not theoretical, researchers are quoted in the article and papers have been altered.

I find it difficult to come up with an analogy from a public institution. What is the product the math department would be pressuring it's members to protect?

Sure, each department in a university believes it's work important. That doesn't seem even remotely similar to me as this issue with Google.

[_Nat_]

I'm having trouble getting a clear perspective on what's going on. So many of the descriptions are vague and based on apparently informal descriptions, leaving much to the reader's imagination.

> It's not theoretical, researchers are quoted in the article and papers have been altered.

In grad school, PhD students' advisors typically insist on various revisions before publishing a paper, as publications reflect on the advisor and their institution. So there's nothing even slightly weird about Google having the same interest in revising the papers pushed by its researchers.

Unless there IS something weird about what Google's doing? But if so, what is it?

[cmiles74]

When an graduate school advisor provides feedback on a paper, the goal is to improve the quality of the paper. The peer review process also has the same goal in mind: produce a better paper.

According to this Reuters article, Google's new process happens after peer review and Google's other processes have completed.

"The “sensitive topics” process adds a round of scrutiny to Google’s standard review of papers for pitfalls such as disclosing of trade secrets, eight current and former employees said."

Instead of publishing the paper, Google will now review the paper with an eye to negative impact the paper may have on existing Google product (or lobbying efforts, etc.) Google isn't doing this to improve the quality of the paper, they are doing it to protect their business interests.

"For some projects, Google officials have intervened in later stages. A senior Google manager reviewing a study on content recommendation technology shortly before publication this summer told authors to “take great care to strike a positive tone,” according to internal correspondence read to Reuters."

I think this is very different from the advising process in graduate school.

Preventing people from disclosing trade secrets seem fair to me. Preventing valid research simply because it may negatively impact business strikes me as less reasonable.

"Four staff researchers, including senior scientist Margaret Mitchell, said they believe Google is starting to interfere with crucial studies of potential technology harms."

[_Nat_]

> I think this is very different from the advising process in graduate school.

All of that sounds normal to me. Including filtering out trade-secrets, which is completely normal when working with trade-secrets in grad school too. Additionally, it's completely normal to filter out intellectual property you might plan to patent; confidential information; proprietary industrial information; information protected by law; dangerous findings (e.g., hackers often omit details of an exploit until the relevant vendor has had time to fix); and a few other categories.

Maintaining a positive, constructive tone is also completely normal. For example, failed experiments are typically described as progressive steps toward an ultimate success; unforeseen problems are discoveries; and major issues are seen as research challenges to be overcome. Or, ya know, stuff like that.

I mean, is that all this story's about? Because if that's it, then it seems like nothing substantial. But if that's the case, why is this in the news?

[dofphoto]

> I find it difficult to come up with an analogy from a public institution. What is the product the math department would be pressuring it's members to protect?

couldn't the exact thing that happened at Google happened at a university? For example one researcher could publish a paper criticizing the methods that other researchers in the department have developed because of their carbon impact.

I think it's fair to say that there are internal pressures not to do that - - such a professor would have a hard time thriving in the department if they are attacking the methods of their colleagues.

[free_rms]

What if it's an inaccurate negative light?

The Gebru paper makes a lot of hay about carbon impact, but Google's put a ton of effort into mitigating that, they've been carbon neutral on paper since 2007: https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/sustainability/our-...

[cmiles74]

Sorry, I'm having trouble following this comment. In a public institution (as well as at Google) research papers are subject to peer review before publication. Now Google is adding _another review process_ after peer review, I don't believe this is something that would happen at a public university.

Do you have an example of a public university censoring research papers that passed peer review because that university believed the paper cast "an innacurate negative light"... on what, exactly?

[free_rms]

The tone of parent comment was "Google should tolerate research that's critical of Google", which I'm sympathetic to.

My rejoinder was that if it's inaccurately critical of Google, like hyping carbon impact without mentioning a decades-long carbon mitigation program, I get a lot more sympathetic to Google's position. Why should they pay someone to spread falsehoods about them?

I don't really care about the process minutiae.

[joshuamorton]

Does it make sense to mention Google's carbon mitigation program in a paper not specifically about Google?

"Large language models can have an outsized carbon emissions impact, but not Google's, those are carbon neutral".

[free_rms]

They'd probably want to finess it a little bit more than that, but yeah?

If you're going to bring carbon emissions into it, mentioning current mitigations as well seems relevant unless you're writing an op/ed piece.

[joshuamorton]

> mentioning current mitigations

The "mitigation" in question is buying carbon offsets (I mean there are improvements in DC efficiency also, but those only do so much, and language models ballooning 100x isn't going to be fixed with 10 or 50% efficiency improvements). For the moment "carbon neutrality" is only achieved through the purchase of energy offsets.

That doesn't mitigate. It offsets. Don't get me wrong, still better than nothing, but its not a mitigation.

[googlethrow3134]

What is the product the math department would be pressuring it's members to protect?

I’m not sure about math, but in physics it would be string theory which has been a dead end and has mostly served as a welfare program for boomer scientists