11–20 of 64 posts
Translation: 'We are horrified that Computer Science students - some of whom might go on to be the next tech billionaires - are managing to get through university without being completely brainwashed by leftist demoralisation!'
It's more about recognizing that computing now controls a great deal of power and wanting a large slice of that power.
Translation: 'We are horrified that Computer Science students - some of whom might go on to be the next tech billionaires - are managing to get through university without being completely brainwashed by leftist demoralisation!'
Don't you think that, even from a strictly scientific perspective, more exchange of knowledge between computer science and social sciences would be good? Isn't it a shame that, for example, social media platforms don't benefit from the decades of research in social science to create a platform that's more beneficial for society? They hit roadblocks and cause problems which could have been easily prevented with this k…
Sometimes the things they don't care about are also very deliberate. Google is perhaps the champion of causing harm by not caring about things. This is sometimes ascribed as being caused by their "engineering-centric culture", but I fail to see how engineering excellence can mesh with the real world experience of using their products. A broken clock is still broken even if all its gears are beautiful.
More to the point, I really wonder how exposure to the social sciences may help fix any of this.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don't you think that, even from a strictly scientific perspective, more exchange of knowledge between computer science and social sciences would be good? Isn't it a shame that, for example, social media platforms don't benefit from the decades of research in social science to create a platform that's more beneficial for society? They hit roadblocks and cause problems which could have been easily prevented with this k…
> Don't you think that, even from a strictly scientific perspective, more exchange of knowledge between computer science and social sciences would be good? Hmm. Not necessarily. If you're speaking strictly from the point of view of sharing knowledge, well, there's nothing really stopping that now. But if we're talking about moving computer science departments into social science departments under the pretext of shari…
> Despite the title of this essay, I'm not actually advocating for the institutionalized transfer of computing departments into social science faculties—such a move is no doubt highly impractical and implausible—but rather for a change in mentality, a recognition that the field now and in the future will have more affinities with the concerns of the academic social sciences, and fewer with the natural sciences or engineering.
It's true that nothing is stopping the exchange of knowledge now, but the minor, often bad ethics course in CS doesn't give students the impression that social sciences is a field they can and should learn from. That's why students should be sensitized as to which problems they may face with the software they write, which are directly related to and possibly already examined by social science.
In my opinion, this would be similar to the statistics courses I had in my CS studies: Scratch the surface enough to get a feeling for what's realistically correctly solvable and implementable by a programmer with no deep statistical knowledge. That way, no time is wasted with half-correct implementations caused by not knowing that there's a deeper, complex statistical problem underneath.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don't you think that, even from a strictly scientific perspective, more exchange of knowledge between computer science and social sciences would be good? Isn't it a shame that, for example, social media platforms don't benefit from the decades of research in social science to create a platform that's more beneficial for society? They hit roadblocks and cause problems which could have been easily prevented with this k…
I don't think the issue with big social networks (and other big tech actors) is one of ignorance. It seems to me many of the bad things they do are very deliberate. Sometimes the things they don't care about are also very deliberate. Google is perhaps the champion of causing harm by not caring about things. This is sometimes ascribed as being caused by their "engineering-centric culture", but I fail to see how engine…
The more I participate in the "tech won't fix social problems" kinds of discussions, it dawns on me that it's not the tech that's the problem, but the business models behind that tech's development and deployment. Sure, in small companies, the "tech person" and the "business person" are sometimes the same individual, but I still can't think of a single example where harmful technology was irresponsibly deployed "because it would be elegant/useful/cool" - the problems happen when the motivation is, "because it's easy money".
But that line of thinking reduces the issue to the usual problems of society run by market economy, which is already a well-trodden ground, so you can't find new scapegoats there.
Wow, ACM is taking a reputability hit for this piece. Who's editing that publication now? If it were how the social sciences need to embrace computing, that would be a legitimate claim from my experience at University.
Translation: 'We are horrified that Computer Science students - some of whom might go on to be the next tech billionaires - are managing to get through university without being completely brainwashed by leftist demoralisation!'
Don't you think that, even from a strictly scientific perspective, more exchange of knowledge between computer science and social sciences would be good? Isn't it a shame that, for example, social media platforms don't benefit from the decades of research in social science to create a platform that's more beneficial for society? They hit roadblocks and cause problems which could have been easily prevented with this k…
Especially the "Web development" example in section 2 seems to be quite off. In fact the counterargument for section 2 seems to be very convincing!
CS/IT is such a broad, rapidly progressing field that you cannot be prepared enough on technical subjects.
As someone who has no formal CS education I'm impacted immensely by this. I don't only need to keep up with current technology (mostly in my free time) but also often had to catch up on topics that my peers learned in University.
I'm not complaining though. I love it. But to say that there is _easily_ enough room for additional, non-technical/mathematical subjects seems to be quite unrealistic! Especially if we look at the hiring practices of our industry. Apparently having a degree is not nearly enough even from a technical standpoint.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don't you think that, even from a strictly scientific perspective, more exchange of knowledge between computer science and social sciences would be good? Isn't it a shame that, for example, social media platforms don't benefit from the decades of research in social science to create a platform that's more beneficial for society? They hit roadblocks and cause problems which could have been easily prevented with this k…
> Don't you think that, even from a strictly scientific perspective, more exchange of knowledge between computer science and social sciences would be good? Hmm. Not necessarily. If you're speaking strictly from the point of view of sharing knowledge, well, there's nothing really stopping that now. But if we're talking about moving computer science departments into social science departments under the pretext of shari…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don't you think that, even from a strictly scientific perspective, more exchange of knowledge between computer science and social sciences would be good? Isn't it a shame that, for example, social media platforms don't benefit from the decades of research in social science to create a platform that's more beneficial for society? They hit roadblocks and cause problems which could have been easily prevented with this k…
When have those decades of research ever actually been applied to "create a platform that's more beneficial for society?"
Outside of that... I would say it's pretty clear that society benefits from research in law, psychology or history, for example.