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I see this attitude a lot on HN, something along the lines of "the social problems created by this new/hypothetical technology would be hard to solve, so let's

I see this attitude a lot on HN, something along the lines of "the social problems created by this new/hypothetical technology would be hard to solve, so let's not bother trying". But as the current social media regulation fracas shows, if technologists are unwilling to engage with broader society to address the problems they create, solutions will be imposed upon them by politicians who are probably less informed about which measures are or aren't effective. We're willing to devote a lot of time and effort to solving hard technical problems, we should be at least as willing to use some of that energy to solve the associated social problems as well.

User23 8y ago
> We're willing to devote a lot of time and effort to solving hard technical problems, we should be at least as willing to use some of that energy to solve the associated social problems as well. Here's the thing: technological expertise in no way implies social expertise. In fact anecdotally they are inversely correlated. Technologists would benefit from moving in the humility direction outside of their chosen field, they are already hubristic enough as is. For what it's worth, this phenomenon is widespread beyond technologists. It's easy to think that because you're really good in one field, that you must be really good in other fields too. But sadly it generally isn't so.
- heyitsguay 8y ago
  For sure, it's not up to technologists alone to solve these problems, but we should be willing to be part of the larger discussion and to learn more about the social ramifications of technological choices.
  - jerf 8y ago
    We did have those discussions. That's why the licenses are written the way they are. "Don't do evil" with the license is not a term that can be added either in theory or in practice. There is no world in which suddenly the prison-industrial complex is stopped because we wrote the right licenses. You can make more narrow restrictions, but those will still have a way of backfiring or having unanticipated results anyhow, not to mention that I'm yet to see one of these sorts of licenses end up on a product where it actually matters anyhow. Practically and legally speaking, there's no lever here to discuss the misuse of. I mean, heck, I'd give you at least a 25% chance these things were already developed in a context that doesn't permit open source to be used anyhow.
morpheuskafka 8y ago
> the problems they create So the authors of busybox, linux kernel, display drivers, and all of the myriad open source components used are responsible for basically every embedded hardware product in the world?

User23 8y ago

> We're willing to devote a lot of time and effort to solving hard technical problems, we should be at least as willing to use some of that energy to solve the associated social problems as well. Here's the thing: technological expertise in no way implies social expertise. In fact anecdotally they are inversely correlated. Technologists would benefit from moving in the humility direction outside of their chosen field, they are already hubristic enough as is. For what it's worth, this phenomenon is widespread beyond technologists. It's easy to think that because you're really good in one field, that you must be really good in other fields too. But sadly it generally isn't so.

heyitsguay 8y ago
For sure, it's not up to technologists alone to solve these problems, but we should be willing to be part of the larger discussion and to learn more about the social ramifications of technological choices.
- jerf 8y ago
  We did have those discussions. That's why the licenses are written the way they are. "Don't do evil" with the license is not a term that can be added either in theory or in practice. There is no world in which suddenly the prison-industrial complex is stopped because we wrote the right licenses. You can make more narrow restrictions, but those will still have a way of backfiring or having unanticipated results anyhow, not to mention that I'm yet to see one of these sorts of licenses end up on a product where it actually matters anyhow. Practically and legally speaking, there's no lever here to discuss the misuse of. I mean, heck, I'd give you at least a 25% chance these things were already developed in a context that doesn't permit open source to be used anyhow.

morpheuskafka 8y ago

> the problems they create So the authors of busybox, linux kernel, display drivers, and all of the myriad open source components used are responsible for basically every embedded hardware product in the world?