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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 st

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.
- ntsplnkv2 6y ago
  >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. That's just logistics - it comes after your philosophical understanding of the item. We don't have to monitor things that aren't bad. We monitor nuclear proliferation because we've already made a philosophical judgement on it. It came first. > But we haven't!!! The United States is an open market system. What drives most innovation is the free market, not the government. The government is almost always reactionary by nature. Software engineers have free choice to work on what they please. They choose to work for big money on insidious technology and they know it. You can't just blame someone else. > 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. This logic is circular. We live in a highly technological world that can only be created by scientists/engineers, but they have no power. So how did we get to this highly technological world if they had no influence or power? Clearly they had power and clout - to suggest otherwise is just, well, wrong. No one is holding a gun to any software engineer's head in the US. None of them have to work on adtech. But they do, to make money, more than most people need. So spare me that we need more of these types of "philosophers". We don't have climate policy because people stand to lose money, just like we have software engineers that refuse to take pay cuts to work on actual helpful technology instead of adtech.
  - throwawaygh 6y ago
    > That's just logistics - it comes after your philosophical understanding of the item. We don't have to monitor things that aren't bad. We monitor nuclear proliferation because we've already made a philosophical judgement on it. It came first. But professional philosophers do not all agree on the morality of developing nuclear weapons, nor do those who do agree have particularly convincing answers about how to actually denuclearize. So I'm not exactly sure how professional philosophy is supposed to solve this problem -- they don't agree, and even those that do offer no particularly useful solutions. "Software Needs Philosophers" is NOT the same as "software engineers should abide by a strict code of ethics that aligns with my personal ethics". The latter is simply equivalent to the observation that "the world would be better if only I had perfect fiat". Sans such fiat, you need politics. And, again, philosophers do philosophy. Not politics. Regarding the rest of the post, the USA is run by business people and lawyers. To look at who occupies the major seats of power in government and business but then conclude otherwise requires a tremendous amount of mental gymnastics. Lots of relatively powerless people do things that are crucial to society -- factory workers, migrant farm workers, etc. Do you really think better philosophy would prevent software engineers from working on ethically dubious projects? I seriously doubt it. I also doubt that putting technologists in charge of everyone would result in a wonderful utopia. But don't blame the state of the world on technologists when business people and lawyers are the ones setting the rules and leading the teams that play by those rules. Anyways, this is all quite far afield from the original thesis of my top-level post, which was simply that professional philosophers need STEM professionals in order to do philosophy, perhaps more so than STEM professionals need philosophy to do good engineering/science. Which itself is, admittedly, quite far afield from the original article :)

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.
ntsplnkv2 6y ago
>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. That's just logistics - it comes after your philosophical understanding of the item. We don't have to monitor things that aren't bad. We monitor nuclear proliferation because we've already made a philosophical judgement on it. It came first. > But we haven't!!! The United States is an open market system. What drives most innovation is the free market, not the government. The government is almost always reactionary by nature. Software engineers have free choice to work on what they please. They choose to work for big money on insidious technology and they know it. You can't just blame someone else. > 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. This logic is circular. We live in a highly technological world that can only be created by scientists/engineers, but they have no power. So how did we get to this highly technological world if they had no influence or power? Clearly they had power and clout - to suggest otherwise is just, well, wrong. No one is holding a gun to any software engineer's head in the US. None of them have to work on adtech. But they do, to make money, more than most people need. So spare me that we need more of these types of "philosophers". We don't have climate policy because people stand to lose money, just like we have software engineers that refuse to take pay cuts to work on actual helpful technology instead of adtech.
- throwawaygh 6y ago
  > That's just logistics - it comes after your philosophical understanding of the item. We don't have to monitor things that aren't bad. We monitor nuclear proliferation because we've already made a philosophical judgement on it. It came first. But professional philosophers do not all agree on the morality of developing nuclear weapons, nor do those who do agree have particularly convincing answers about how to actually denuclearize. So I'm not exactly sure how professional philosophy is supposed to solve this problem -- they don't agree, and even those that do offer no particularly useful solutions. "Software Needs Philosophers" is NOT the same as "software engineers should abide by a strict code of ethics that aligns with my personal ethics". The latter is simply equivalent to the observation that "the world would be better if only I had perfect fiat". Sans such fiat, you need politics. And, again, philosophers do philosophy. Not politics. Regarding the rest of the post, the USA is run by business people and lawyers. To look at who occupies the major seats of power in government and business but then conclude otherwise requires a tremendous amount of mental gymnastics. Lots of relatively powerless people do things that are crucial to society -- factory workers, migrant farm workers, etc. Do you really think better philosophy would prevent software engineers from working on ethically dubious projects? I seriously doubt it. I also doubt that putting technologists in charge of everyone would result in a wonderful utopia. But don't blame the state of the world on technologists when business people and lawyers are the ones setting the rules and leading the teams that play by those rules. Anyways, this is all quite far afield from the original thesis of my top-level post, which was simply that professional philosophers need STEM professionals in order to do philosophy, perhaps more so than STEM professionals need philosophy to do good engineering/science. Which itself is, admittedly, quite far afield from the original article :)