10 ms·

I am neither a software developer nor a philosopher, but I am a Computer Science researcher who spends a fair amount of time talking with colleagues in the Phil

I am neither a software developer nor a philosopher, but I am a Computer Science researcher who spends a fair amount of time talking with colleagues in the Philosophy department. My view is mostly the opposite of the headline -- philosophers need scientists/engineers/practitioners more than the other way around. Asking and attempting to answer big questions about the world requires, first, understanding the world. And today, understanding the world requires immense technical expertise. One example: philosophers are quick to opine on the problem of bias in machine learning, but almost all lack even a CS 1 level understanding of answers to basic questions like "what is an algorithm?", and therefore mistake these fairly straightforward questions as somehow profound [1]. And all but a precious few philosophers [2] are frankly technically unqualified for discussions about how to actually address bias in ML. Things only get worse when we enter questions about AI & Theory of Mind, computer ethics, etc. -- [1] Of course, "what is an algorithm?" can result in conversations that lead to deep questions; my point is that there is a standard and more-or-less fit for purpose definition that's given in every CS 1 class, and understanding that definition is a prerequisite for deeper interpretations of the question. Diving off the deep end without having e.g. written and analyzed a simple sorting algorithm will always be a waste of time. [2] Often those with either excellent training in the analytic tradition or, more commonly, some serious background in a quantitative field such as Mathematics or Physics.

alisonkisk 6y ago
Software people not philosophers promulgated the nonsense idea that "algorithms can't be biased", so I think software people need plenty of help understanding what an algorithm is, with help from philosophy and humanity. Software, being mostly based on math is a prime example of "map that is not the territory".
- throwawaygh 6y ago
  > Software people not philosophers promulgated the nonsense idea that "algorithms can't be biased", so I think software people need plenty of help understanding what an algorithm is, with help from philosophy and humanity. (E: throwaway894345's comment is of much higher quality than mine.) Very few serious software engineers -- and virtually zero computer scientists -- have ever held this opinion. It's an extreme minority view. And, I know a few philosophers who also repeat this nonsense. Those that do hold this view IME are almost always folks who are invested in a personal politics that is congruent with dismissing concerns about bias. Without exception, IME, they're also knee-jerk antagonistic toward other ideas about bias that don't involve computers (eg they're the first ones to complain about implicit bias training). These people also tend to be the annoyingly pedantic type ("bias has a technical meaning in statistics!" sort of thing). In other words, they're politically invested, and no amount of input from philosophers -- or technicians/scientists -- is going to change their strongly held personal politic beliefs. Again, anyone who has spent a moment around philosophers knows that they are just humans who are not immune from the exact same problem.
  - jimktrains2 6y ago
    > Very few serious software engineers -- and virtually zero computer scientists -- have ever held this opinion. It's an extreme minority view. And yet here we are selling software, like facial recognition, to organizations that can ruin people and have little oversight based on how well those same algorithms are supposed to work?
    - throwawaygh 6y ago
      > And yet here we are selling software, like facial recognition Speak for yourself. (Also, last I checked, most CEOs, boards, and sales forces don't have technical backgrounds.) > to organizations that can ruin people and have little oversight based on how well those same algorithms are supposed to work? And how do you get oversight? That's a political problem, not a philosophical problem. If you want to sway the opinions of regulators and legislators, please do not reach for the philosophy dept. Convincing regulators and legislators to do stuff is not the job of a philosopher. So what is the job of a philosopher? This kind of brings us back to my original point from which we've now strayed. Philosophy is a field of study. The job of a philosopher is to do philosophy. In order to do that job well, philosophers require more input from technical experts than they currently receive. This matters precisely because philosophy is important; good philosophy is the lifeblood of a healthy society, but it's increasingly difficult to do good philosophy without some scientific training.
      - jimktrains2 6y ago
        I do not sell such software. You blame companies, but is that to mean that engineers are supposed to turn a blind eye to ethical issues in the products their employers sell? Other engineering disciplins whole-heartedly disagree. Regulation is besides the point. The comment I replied to said that software engineers have never held the belief that their algorithms aren't biased and I was simply pointing out that that is either false on a large scale or those engineers are complicit with the use of their software in unethical ways because of those bias issues in the software.
        6y ago
- true_religion 6y ago
  Algorithms are just encodings of their methodology of their creators. Here's an algorithm to detect foreigners in my country: Step 1: Calculate skin tone ratio of person Step 2: If light skinned then assign person to bin "foreigner". This will work in 99% of cases, so by one standard its a good algorithm that requires little effort to give valid results. However, it's just encoded the bias that light skinned people can't be citizens, and thus fails for mixed children, refugees and the thousands multigenerational dependents of expats. No one can really say computers are unbiased. They simply do what you tell them to do. In my opinion, we computer scientists and practicing engineers understand that, but the general population has the mystique that the machine is somehow more right than a person, simply because you can't see the person(s) who programmed the machine.
  - adamsea 6y ago
    Very good point. And, this algorithm would totally fail in my country! As the U.S. has a wide variety of citizens of various skin tones. Which I'm very happy about : ). Which I think supports what you're saying; not only do algorithms have biases, but we also can't assume they are universally applicable across a domain (in this case that a single facial recognition algorithm will have the same degree of accuracy in all places across the globe).
    - true_religion 6y ago
      Yep, I agree. Facial recognition is a field where you commonly see overfitting to culture where the tech package was created in. One dead stupid example, I can think of is biometric cameras being unable to differentiate between faces accurately on the default settings. The cameras are sourced from Europe, and universally use an exposure setting that's too short to do anything more than bring out the whites of someones eyes if you have dark skin tones and are in a normally lit room. Just setting the explore to be a little longer, results in decent results for dark skin tones (and of course, worse results for light skin tones). Consumer technologies like iPhone camera's on the other hand get it right, because they were forced to start testing on different culture groups due to bad press, but their ubiquity leads to people forgetting that every single setting in a camera can lead to better or worse outcomes, and you can't always rely on having a fast processor like an iPhone to autocorrect for you.
ntsplnkv2 6y ago
I disagree. You don't need to understand exactly how a nuclear bomb works to understand its impact. We've let scientists/engineers/practitioners control the steering wheel for decades, and what do we have? Insidious adtech, lies spreading uncontrollably, populism at extreme highs across the world, etc. All to make more money. And you think we need more of that in this debate? We need philosophy first - not second.
- throwawaygh 6y ago
  > I disagree. You don't need to understand exactly how a nuclear bomb works to understand its impact. Sure, but critique is the easy part of anything (including philosophy). You do need to understand how a nuclear bomb works in order to eg design an effective monitoring program. And not just how it works, but how it is built. BTW, you also don't exactly need a professional philosopher to explain the dangers of a WMD or the pitfalls of facial recognition. Broad critique is the easy part. Specific critique is what leads to solutions, and specificity requires expertise. > We've let scientists/engineers/practitioners control the steering wheel for decades But we haven't!!! How many POTUSes have been STEM people? How many representatives? How many senators? How many governors? How many federal judges? How many CEOs? Very, very precious few people who control the actual machines of power in our society have any amount of STEM training. So, no, technologists have not been at the healm of the United States. On the contrary, non-technical people -- lawyers and business people, mostly -- have been managing a highly technical world for decades. That's why we had no economic policy to manage the impact of automation in the 1990s. It's why we still have no climate policy. And it's why we had a complete dearth of privacy regulation in the early 2000s.
  - adamsea 6y ago
    Good point. And I just want to throw on to that (not saying folks are disagreeing w/this) that IMHO some amount of technical expertise is necessary but not sufficient for the kind of socially responsible decision-making we are talking about. JFK (or whomever) didn't need to be a physicist, but he did need to understand a little physics. And math, etc.
  - 6y ago
adamsea 6y ago
Do you think there is room for various kinds philosophical thought within Computer Science itself? Honest question. As an undergrad studying Comp Sci and also taking philosophy/literature classes it struck me just how rich the Computer Science metaphors are, and how much creativity seemed to go into coming up with a lot of the fundamental ideas of Computer Science. But of course it's also possible that I was applying my own bias; I know most of the Comp Sci folks from the 50s/60s/70s were pretty heavy math folks. But pursuing a graduate Comp Sci degree is something I've considered on and off. Alan Kay has always been especially inspiring. TBH I've also felt like there's some unexplored areas where Computer Science and Poetics, or Literary Theory, could make a really interesting combination. Again it's a question of rich metaphors and investing meaning into use-of-language in a very comprehensive and granular way (grammar, one verb or adjective versus another, theories of narrative, etc.
- throwawaygh 6y ago
  > Do you think there is room for various kinds philosophical thought within Computer Science itself? Honest question. Yes, of course! Many areas of computer science grew out of various areas of philosophy, and that's still true. I guess my main thesis in this thread is that, today, philosophers need STEM in order to do good philosophy more than STEM folks need philosophy to do good engineering/science. "More than" is comparative, not absolute, and of course STEM folks can benefit tremendously by interacting with philosophers (see: the first line of my top-level post). > But pursuing a graduate Comp Sci degree is something I've considered on and off. There are some great CS departments that interact heavily with Philosophy departments. Carnegie Mellon even has a joint PhD program: http://logic.cmu.edu/ http://logic.cmu.edu/
  - adamsea 6y ago
    Thank you for your response - much appreciated! And for pointing out the Carnegie Mellon program. What is the academic job market like this days for CS Phd's, if I may ask?
btrask 6y ago
This article is such a great opportunity for introspection ("what do we need in order to do better?"). It's too bad that the top comment has turned it into an opportunity for egotism ("they need us!").
- throwawaygh 6y ago
  This isn’t idle speculation. I’m not a software engineer anymore. Also, I publish with philosophers. We do not need input from the typical professional philosopher to do better.

alisonkisk 6y ago

Software people not philosophers promulgated the nonsense idea that "algorithms can't be biased", so I think software people need plenty of help understanding what an algorithm is, with help from philosophy and humanity. Software, being mostly based on math is a prime example of "map that is not the territory".

throwawaygh 6y ago
> Software people not philosophers promulgated the nonsense idea that "algorithms can't be biased", so I think software people need plenty of help understanding what an algorithm is, with help from philosophy and humanity. (E: throwaway894345's comment is of much higher quality than mine.) Very few serious software engineers -- and virtually zero computer scientists -- have ever held this opinion. It's an extreme minority view. And, I know a few philosophers who also repeat this nonsense. Those that do hold this view IME are almost always folks who are invested in a personal politics that is congruent with dismissing concerns about bias. Without exception, IME, they're also knee-jerk antagonistic toward other ideas about bias that don't involve computers (eg they're the first ones to complain about implicit bias training). These people also tend to be the annoyingly pedantic type ("bias has a technical meaning in statistics!" sort of thing). In other words, they're politically invested, and no amount of input from philosophers -- or technicians/scientists -- is going to change their strongly held personal politic beliefs. Again, anyone who has spent a moment around philosophers knows that they are just humans who are not immune from the exact same problem.
- jimktrains2 6y ago
  > Very few serious software engineers -- and virtually zero computer scientists -- have ever held this opinion. It's an extreme minority view. And yet here we are selling software, like facial recognition, to organizations that can ruin people and have little oversight based on how well those same algorithms are supposed to work?
  - throwawaygh 6y ago
    > And yet here we are selling software, like facial recognition Speak for yourself. (Also, last I checked, most CEOs, boards, and sales forces don't have technical backgrounds.) > to organizations that can ruin people and have little oversight based on how well those same algorithms are supposed to work? And how do you get oversight? That's a political problem, not a philosophical problem. If you want to sway the opinions of regulators and legislators, please do not reach for the philosophy dept. Convincing regulators and legislators to do stuff is not the job of a philosopher. So what is the job of a philosopher? This kind of brings us back to my original point from which we've now strayed. Philosophy is a field of study. The job of a philosopher is to do philosophy. In order to do that job well, philosophers require more input from technical experts than they currently receive. This matters precisely because philosophy is important; good philosophy is the lifeblood of a healthy society, but it's increasingly difficult to do good philosophy without some scientific training.
    - jimktrains2 6y ago
      I do not sell such software. You blame companies, but is that to mean that engineers are supposed to turn a blind eye to ethical issues in the products their employers sell? Other engineering disciplins whole-heartedly disagree. Regulation is besides the point. The comment I replied to said that software engineers have never held the belief that their algorithms aren't biased and I was simply pointing out that that is either false on a large scale or those engineers are complicit with the use of their software in unethical ways because of those bias issues in the software.
      - 6y ago
true_religion 6y ago
Algorithms are just encodings of their methodology of their creators. Here's an algorithm to detect foreigners in my country: Step 1: Calculate skin tone ratio of person Step 2: If light skinned then assign person to bin "foreigner". This will work in 99% of cases, so by one standard its a good algorithm that requires little effort to give valid results. However, it's just encoded the bias that light skinned people can't be citizens, and thus fails for mixed children, refugees and the thousands multigenerational dependents of expats. No one can really say computers are unbiased. They simply do what you tell them to do. In my opinion, we computer scientists and practicing engineers understand that, but the general population has the mystique that the machine is somehow more right than a person, simply because you can't see the person(s) who programmed the machine.
- adamsea 6y ago
  Very good point. And, this algorithm would totally fail in my country! As the U.S. has a wide variety of citizens of various skin tones. Which I'm very happy about : ). Which I think supports what you're saying; not only do algorithms have biases, but we also can't assume they are universally applicable across a domain (in this case that a single facial recognition algorithm will have the same degree of accuracy in all places across the globe).
  - true_religion 6y ago
    Yep, I agree. Facial recognition is a field where you commonly see overfitting to culture where the tech package was created in. One dead stupid example, I can think of is biometric cameras being unable to differentiate between faces accurately on the default settings. The cameras are sourced from Europe, and universally use an exposure setting that's too short to do anything more than bring out the whites of someones eyes if you have dark skin tones and are in a normally lit room. Just setting the explore to be a little longer, results in decent results for dark skin tones (and of course, worse results for light skin tones). Consumer technologies like iPhone camera's on the other hand get it right, because they were forced to start testing on different culture groups due to bad press, but their ubiquity leads to people forgetting that every single setting in a camera can lead to better or worse outcomes, and you can't always rely on having a fast processor like an iPhone to autocorrect for you.

ntsplnkv2 6y ago

I disagree. You don't need to understand exactly how a nuclear bomb works to understand its impact. We've let scientists/engineers/practitioners control the steering wheel for decades, and what do we have? Insidious adtech, lies spreading uncontrollably, populism at extreme highs across the world, etc. All to make more money. And you think we need more of that in this debate? We need philosophy first - not second.

throwawaygh 6y ago
> I disagree. You don't need to understand exactly how a nuclear bomb works to understand its impact. Sure, but critique is the easy part of anything (including philosophy). You do need to understand how a nuclear bomb works in order to eg design an effective monitoring program. And not just how it works, but how it is built. BTW, you also don't exactly need a professional philosopher to explain the dangers of a WMD or the pitfalls of facial recognition. Broad critique is the easy part. Specific critique is what leads to solutions, and specificity requires expertise. > We've let scientists/engineers/practitioners control the steering wheel for decades But we haven't!!! How many POTUSes have been STEM people? How many representatives? How many senators? How many governors? How many federal judges? How many CEOs? Very, very precious few people who control the actual machines of power in our society have any amount of STEM training. So, no, technologists have not been at the healm of the United States. On the contrary, non-technical people -- lawyers and business people, mostly -- have been managing a highly technical world for decades. That's why we had no economic policy to manage the impact of automation in the 1990s. It's why we still have no climate policy. And it's why we had a complete dearth of privacy regulation in the early 2000s.
- adamsea 6y ago
  Good point. And I just want to throw on to that (not saying folks are disagreeing w/this) that IMHO some amount of technical expertise is necessary but not sufficient for the kind of socially responsible decision-making we are talking about. JFK (or whomever) didn't need to be a physicist, but he did need to understand a little physics. And math, etc.
- 6y ago

adamsea 6y ago

Do you think there is room for various kinds philosophical thought within Computer Science itself? Honest question. As an undergrad studying Comp Sci and also taking philosophy/literature classes it struck me just how rich the Computer Science metaphors are, and how much creativity seemed to go into coming up with a lot of the fundamental ideas of Computer Science. But of course it's also possible that I was applying my own bias; I know most of the Comp Sci folks from the 50s/60s/70s were pretty heavy math folks. But pursuing a graduate Comp Sci degree is something I've considered on and off. Alan Kay has always been especially inspiring. TBH I've also felt like there's some unexplored areas where Computer Science and Poetics, or Literary Theory, could make a really interesting combination. Again it's a question of rich metaphors and investing meaning into use-of-language in a very comprehensive and granular way (grammar, one verb or adjective versus another, theories of narrative, etc.

throwawaygh 6y ago
> Do you think there is room for various kinds philosophical thought within Computer Science itself? Honest question. Yes, of course! Many areas of computer science grew out of various areas of philosophy, and that's still true. I guess my main thesis in this thread is that, today, philosophers need STEM in order to do good philosophy more than STEM folks need philosophy to do good engineering/science. "More than" is comparative, not absolute, and of course STEM folks can benefit tremendously by interacting with philosophers (see: the first line of my top-level post). > But pursuing a graduate Comp Sci degree is something I've considered on and off. There are some great CS departments that interact heavily with Philosophy departments. Carnegie Mellon even has a joint PhD program: http://logic.cmu.edu/ http://logic.cmu.edu/
- adamsea 6y ago
  Thank you for your response - much appreciated! And for pointing out the Carnegie Mellon program. What is the academic job market like this days for CS Phd's, if I may ask?

btrask 6y ago

This article is such a great opportunity for introspection ("what do we need in order to do better?"). It's too bad that the top comment has turned it into an opportunity for egotism ("they need us!").

throwawaygh 6y ago
This isn’t idle speculation. I’m not a software engineer anymore. Also, I publish with philosophers. We do not need input from the typical professional philosopher to do better.