[cmiles74]

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.

[Veedrac]

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.

[6gvONxR4sf7o]

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.

[cmiles74]

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.

[Veedrac]

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.

[webmaven]

> 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

[8note]

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

[vl]

> 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.