5 ms·

> They're not talking about computer programmers though (I agree they don't have the ability). This pigeon-holing was way beyond tiresome, not to mention gross

> They're not talking about computer programmers though (I agree they don't have the ability). This pigeon-holing was way beyond tiresome, not to mention grossly inaccurate, 20 years ago: please STOP IT. Computer programmers aren't in general some special class of person incapable of learning new skills and behaviours. Quite the opposite for the most part.

tremon 8y ago
I'm not sure I understand why you call this pigeon-holing. The GP explained that the professional field of programming has very little overlap with the professional field of social dynamics, and I was simply agreeing with that observation. "Most programmers don't know how society will evolve" appears to me a similar observation as "most pilots don't know how to build a plane". I don't really see why that's an objectionable statement.
- crankylinuxuser 8y ago
  This is, at its heart, a question of ethics in engineering disciplines. Software engineering is a combination of applied mathematics, data science, and significant engineering practices (do X with Y constraints). In Engineering proper, we have ethics classes. They entail in how things can fail and cause item, structural, and/or injury up to death. We have all read about the Therac-25. That was a software and hardware design choice that lead to the death of many. Computer science seems to skirt the ethics discussions just by being too new of a field. We (royal) aren't looking at the failure modes of having social media. Nor are we considering the ramifications of the code we write. Intelligence is the ability to write the code. Wisdom is the ability to understand its ramifications.
  - delinka 8y ago
    From whence does this wisdom come? Experience by oneself, or learning of the experiences of others. How does one gain experience in, say, "having social media" if we've never had social media until the last few years? Social media hasn't been around long enough for a single complete human generation to have experienced life without it. When MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, et al. were created, the "consequences" were providing an outlet for expression or keeping connected with friends and family. Noble causes. How do we get from there to "...and guess what, it'll be bad for individuals or society in $THIS_SPECIFIC_WAY"? I don't think it's possible. Ethics evolve with society. Society will develop the ethics necessary to teach computer scientists and programmers. Such things are already underway[1]. Further, I'm seeing too little nuance in the comments on this story. Someone puts a Raspberry Pi in a situation to be responsible for human lives and it fails - is Linus now culpable? 1 - https://www.computer.org/web/education/code-of-ethics https://www.computer.org/web/education/code-of-ethics
    - mulmen 8y ago
      It doesn’t take much study of history to see how cults form or the power of publishing anything you want as fact. Social media put the tools to do that in the hands of everyone. I won’t make a moral judgement on that decision but it is dangerously naive to think all technology has only positive externalities. The criticism of the current state of software engineering is that we don’t consider those externalities. “It’s new and we didn’t know what would happen” is a really shitty excuse to hear from an aerospace engineer after an airline crash.
      - jejones3141 8y ago
        A crash is the sort of outcome an aerospace engineering company should be able to predict. Celebrities burning huge quantities of aviation fuel on their way to and from conferences to pontificate about greenhouse gases isn't. It's not clear to me that anyone can predict the consequences of technology even a few years into the future (much less the seventh generation that some folks talk about and that would, if adopted, bring progress to a halt), nor whether any elite should be trusted to decide whether to permit the adoption of some technology. (If you suggest the government, consider Trump and net neutrality.)
        onceKnowable 8y ago
        >It’s not clear to me that anyone can predict the consequences of technology That’s the whole point of the article, no one person can ever figure that stuff out. That’s why the public needs tone informed. No matter how educated (malicious or not) an “elite” is, they’ll never be able to predict as much as the general public will. Yet a wider public debate can. Your example about greenhouse gases is a good example of this. Forget about the celebrities for a sec and look at the big picture: The guys in the hydrocarbon industry were experts at their jobs: developing oil, coal & gas and selling those products. Likewise the car industry, experts at building and selling cars. Their expertise is in building their particular products and selling them. They could not have been expected to understand the negative environmental effects. And moreover, it’s in their interest to ignore the negatives associated with their products because it’s much more profitable for them to produce cheap products that require little R&D. It took insights from the general public outside those industries to realize how those products affect the population as a whole: - Burning hydrocarbons releases far more CO2 than the planet can scrub via the carbon cycle, which has lead to the greenhouse effect. Not only that but certain types of coal produce the smog that once blighted our cities and literally killed people with weak respiratory systems. Not only all of that but the lead that was added to gas to prevent engines knocking, kills people too. - Emmisions from cars not only add CO2 to the greenhouse effect but other car emissions such as carbon nanoparticles, Nitric Oxides, sulfuric compounds also result in measurable deaths among the populations living among those cars. As a result, laws are passed to make cars release less emissions and also to reduce societal dependence on hydrocarbons. The public debate resulted in the population realizing that there are health hazards to both individuals in the short term and global climate in the long term, and resulted in laws being passed to reduce these health hazards as low as is possible right now. Without informed public debate we’d never have realized that these negative effects occur and we’d never have saved as many lives as has been saved now that our cities are not drenched in lead and Nitric Oxide saturated smog.
criddell 8y ago
No, but computer programmers aren't researchers publishing papers. I think the article is talking about research papers like this: http://dblp.org/db/conf/focs/focs2017.html http://dblp.org/db/conf/focs/focs2017.html So, what might the negative consequences be for An Input Sensitive Online Algorithm for the Metric Bipartite Matching Problem?

tremon 8y ago

I'm not sure I understand why you call this pigeon-holing. The GP explained that the professional field of programming has very little overlap with the professional field of social dynamics, and I was simply agreeing with that observation. "Most programmers don't know how society will evolve" appears to me a similar observation as "most pilots don't know how to build a plane". I don't really see why that's an objectionable statement.

crankylinuxuser 8y ago
This is, at its heart, a question of ethics in engineering disciplines. Software engineering is a combination of applied mathematics, data science, and significant engineering practices (do X with Y constraints). In Engineering proper, we have ethics classes. They entail in how things can fail and cause item, structural, and/or injury up to death. We have all read about the Therac-25. That was a software and hardware design choice that lead to the death of many. Computer science seems to skirt the ethics discussions just by being too new of a field. We (royal) aren't looking at the failure modes of having social media. Nor are we considering the ramifications of the code we write. Intelligence is the ability to write the code. Wisdom is the ability to understand its ramifications.
- delinka 8y ago
  From whence does this wisdom come? Experience by oneself, or learning of the experiences of others. How does one gain experience in, say, "having social media" if we've never had social media until the last few years? Social media hasn't been around long enough for a single complete human generation to have experienced life without it. When MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, et al. were created, the "consequences" were providing an outlet for expression or keeping connected with friends and family. Noble causes. How do we get from there to "...and guess what, it'll be bad for individuals or society in $THIS_SPECIFIC_WAY"? I don't think it's possible. Ethics evolve with society. Society will develop the ethics necessary to teach computer scientists and programmers. Such things are already underway[1]. Further, I'm seeing too little nuance in the comments on this story. Someone puts a Raspberry Pi in a situation to be responsible for human lives and it fails - is Linus now culpable? 1 - https://www.computer.org/web/education/code-of-ethics https://www.computer.org/web/education/code-of-ethics
  - mulmen 8y ago
    It doesn’t take much study of history to see how cults form or the power of publishing anything you want as fact. Social media put the tools to do that in the hands of everyone. I won’t make a moral judgement on that decision but it is dangerously naive to think all technology has only positive externalities. The criticism of the current state of software engineering is that we don’t consider those externalities. “It’s new and we didn’t know what would happen” is a really shitty excuse to hear from an aerospace engineer after an airline crash.
    - jejones3141 8y ago
      A crash is the sort of outcome an aerospace engineering company should be able to predict. Celebrities burning huge quantities of aviation fuel on their way to and from conferences to pontificate about greenhouse gases isn't. It's not clear to me that anyone can predict the consequences of technology even a few years into the future (much less the seventh generation that some folks talk about and that would, if adopted, bring progress to a halt), nor whether any elite should be trusted to decide whether to permit the adoption of some technology. (If you suggest the government, consider Trump and net neutrality.)
      - onceKnowable 8y ago
        >It’s not clear to me that anyone can predict the consequences of technology That’s the whole point of the article, no one person can ever figure that stuff out. That’s why the public needs tone informed. No matter how educated (malicious or not) an “elite” is, they’ll never be able to predict as much as the general public will. Yet a wider public debate can. Your example about greenhouse gases is a good example of this. Forget about the celebrities for a sec and look at the big picture: The guys in the hydrocarbon industry were experts at their jobs: developing oil, coal & gas and selling those products. Likewise the car industry, experts at building and selling cars. Their expertise is in building their particular products and selling them. They could not have been expected to understand the negative environmental effects. And moreover, it’s in their interest to ignore the negatives associated with their products because it’s much more profitable for them to produce cheap products that require little R&D. It took insights from the general public outside those industries to realize how those products affect the population as a whole: - Burning hydrocarbons releases far more CO2 than the planet can scrub via the carbon cycle, which has lead to the greenhouse effect. Not only that but certain types of coal produce the smog that once blighted our cities and literally killed people with weak respiratory systems. Not only all of that but the lead that was added to gas to prevent engines knocking, kills people too. - Emmisions from cars not only add CO2 to the greenhouse effect but other car emissions such as carbon nanoparticles, Nitric Oxides, sulfuric compounds also result in measurable deaths among the populations living among those cars. As a result, laws are passed to make cars release less emissions and also to reduce societal dependence on hydrocarbons. The public debate resulted in the population realizing that there are health hazards to both individuals in the short term and global climate in the long term, and resulted in laws being passed to reduce these health hazards as low as is possible right now. Without informed public debate we’d never have realized that these negative effects occur and we’d never have saved as many lives as has been saved now that our cities are not drenched in lead and Nitric Oxide saturated smog.

criddell 8y ago

No, but computer programmers aren't researchers publishing papers. I think the article is talking about research papers like this: http://dblp.org/db/conf/focs/focs2017.html http://dblp.org/db/conf/focs/focs2017.html So, what might the negative consequences be for An Input Sensitive Online Algorithm for the Metric Bipartite Matching Problem?