Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by cmiles74 2008 days ago
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.

2 comments

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.
> 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

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