Data science, and probably software engineering in general, needs something like the Iron Ring [0], where you make a pledge to not build bad things. While I un

Data science, and probably software engineering in general, needs something like the Iron Ring [0], where you make a pledge to not build bad things. While I understand the author of this Medium post wanted to do something good, and maybe even managed to mitigate something worse... ultimately, the project is a failure. People have died because of Facebook [1]. The analogy I want to draw is of a civil engineer, responsible for adding additional support to a bridge. The bridge partially collapses, killing people. Maybe the work lead to less of a collapse, but the moral thing to do is to loudly object to the bridge being used at all. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Ring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Ring [1] https://www.npr.org/2021/05/13/996570855/disinformation-dozen-test-facebooks-twitters-ability-to-curb-vaccine-hoaxes https://www.npr.org/2021/05/13/996570855/disinformation-doze...