Hacker News Reader

Comment by growlist | Hacker News Reader

Translation: 'We are horrified that Computer Science students - some of whom might go on to be the next tech billionaires - are managing to get through university without being completely brainwashed by leftist demoralisation!'

View on HN

Don't you think that, even from a strictly scientific perspective, more exchange of knowledge between computer science and social sciences would be good? Isn't it a shame that, for example, social media platforms don't benefit from the decades of research in social science to create a platform that's more beneficial for society? They hit roadblocks and cause problems which could have been easily prevented with this knowledge.

I think it's similar to the relationship between computer science and statistics - both can live without the other, but both have a huge benefit of connecting their knowledge, working together, and even merging their curricula (into data science).

If you haven't read the whole article, I really recommend doing so - I was put off by the title as well, but it's an interesting analysis and makes some good recommendations.

> Don't you think that, even from a strictly scientific perspective, more exchange of knowledge between computer science and social sciences would be good?

Hmm. Not necessarily. If you're speaking strictly from the point of view of sharing knowledge, well, there's nothing really stopping that now. But if we're talking about moving computer science departments into social science departments under the pretext of sharing knowledge, I'm not sure that's necessarily a good thing. It might be, but I'm not sure.

What would the effect be of putting physics in the social science departments? Or mechanical engineering? I think if you can answer that question, you can answer it for computer science, and by extension you could just say you could introduce all of these programs into the social science departments to share knowledge... in which case you could just have a university.

I agree that the unfortunate title of the publication makes this unclear, but that's pretty consistent with what the article says:

> Despite the title of this essay, I'm not actually advocating for the institutionalized transfer of computing departments into social science faculties—such a move is no doubt highly impractical and implausible—but rather for a change in mentality, a recognition that the field now and in the future will have more affinities with the concerns of the academic social sciences, and fewer with the natural sciences or engineering.

It's true that nothing is stopping the exchange of knowledge now, but the minor, often bad ethics course in CS doesn't give students the impression that social sciences is a field they can and should learn from. That's why students should be sensitized as to which problems they may face with the software they write, which are directly related to and possibly already examined by social science.

In my opinion, this would be similar to the statistics courses I had in my CS studies: Scratch the surface enough to get a feeling for what's realistically correctly solvable and implementable by a programmer with no deep statistical knowledge. That way, no time is wasted with half-correct implementations caused by not knowing that there's a deeper, complex statistical problem underneath.

Physicists and mechanical engineers simply do not wield the same amount of power that computer scientists/software engineers do. FYI the article does not suggest literally putting CS in the social science department. TFA is just arguing that in light of how CS is applied in society, computer scientists need to be more broadly educated. I was a cryptography PhD student for awhile and I can tell you by-and-large CS academics are so far up the ivory tower it's a wonder they don't die of asphyxiation. To ignore the reality that algorithms, and those that design them, hold an enormous, and growing, amount of sociopolitical power is not just willfully moronic, it's arguably leading to the death of liberal democracy.

On the contrary it's easy to make this argument for physics.

Would physicists have developed the atomic bomb if they had been required to take a few extra courses in social sciences and if physics departments had an extra multi-disciplinary professorship? I don't believe this would have made any difference.

The suggestions are at the same time radical and pointless. Arguably he is simply trying to colonize other fields, as he accuses CS of doing.

Historically that may have been true; I won't argue that point.

The difference between the atom bomb and CS is that the latter has a ubiquity of access and reproducibility that subject it to completely different ethical and philosophical concerns. The atom bomb doesn't change or influence our understanding of how political discourse operates in modern democracies. Things like social media and GPT-3 do.

I'd like to add that, when building an atom bomb, you are well aware of what you're doing - why you're still doing it is an entirely different topic (an interesting one which, in fact, falls right into the social sciences). Software engineers at facebook, on the other hand, are likely not aware of the full impact of their work. Their seemingly harmless and objective algorithms literally, although indirectly, cause deaths, and the engineers working on them should be aware of that.

> Software engineers at facebook, on the other hand, are likely not aware of the full impact of their work

I feel like this is coming from a naive socially illiterate nerd stereotype. They are smart people, they might as well know much more than you expect.

The number of post-hoc internal memos and studies clearly shows that there are many consequences that FB engineers did not anticipate (though FB is not unique in this regard; consider how YouTube's recommendation algorithm feeds misinformation & outrage).

The whole point of TFA is that pure intelligence (particularly "computational thinking" type of intelligence) is no substitute for the knowledge and methodology already explored by various humanities and social science fields.

> The whole point of TFA is that pure intelligence (particularly "computational thinking" type of intelligence) is no substitute for the knowledge and methodology already explored by various humanities and social science fields.

This is such a false dichotomy. There exists many, many technical programs that go to field and do that type of "social" research, using the precisely the same methodologies, knowledge of which end up with UX designers, product designers, product managers etc. This TFA readily admits. In other words, anything that social sciences can offer is already being incorporated into those programs. (I am talking about likes of human computer interaction, user experience, information processing science, network science, and tons of other hybrid programs)

However, can a social science framework actually predict what would happen, rather than postdict (after it happened).

If so, why didn't they make such predictions in 2012 during Facebook's IPO?

What deaths? I would tend to disagree that the algorithms caused deaths in any event, unless they were maybe physically brought about by the algorithm in some way... You might as well say electricity or the internet itself caused those deaths.

I don't think the issue with big social networks (and other big tech actors) is one of ignorance. It seems to me many of the bad things they do are very deliberate.

Sometimes the things they don't care about are also very deliberate. Google is perhaps the champion of causing harm by not caring about things. This is sometimes ascribed as being caused by their "engineering-centric culture", but I fail to see how engineering excellence can mesh with the real world experience of using their products. A broken clock is still broken even if all its gears are beautiful.

More to the point, I really wonder how exposure to the social sciences may help fix any of this.

Strongly agreed. Exposure to social sciences won't fix problems caused by your business model, because market competition is stronger than individual morals. Even if you decide not to proceed in harmful way, there will be a competitor who's less moral and will corner the market in your place.

The more I participate in the "tech won't fix social problems" kinds of discussions, it dawns on me that it's not the tech that's the problem, but the business models behind that tech's development and deployment. Sure, in small companies, the "tech person" and the "business person" are sometimes the same individual, but I still can't think of a single example where harmful technology was irresponsibly deployed "because it would be elegant/useful/cool" - the problems happen when the motivation is, "because it's easy money".

But that line of thinking reduces the issue to the usual problems of society run by market economy, which is already a well-trodden ground, so you can't find new scapegoats there.

I agree that the market economy is the underlying problem of it all. However, I wouldn't completely dismiss computer scientists' lack of knowledge in social science as part of the reason. I'm hopeful enough to think that, knowing the incredible harm the software they are writing could inflict on other people or society as a whole, some computer scientists would be less willing to participate in it.

Try to avoid generic phrases like "causing harm".

"Google is the champion of circumventing long established norms, such as the prohibition on wiretapping, and evading responsibility for doing so" says a lot more than "causing harm".

Blaming Google for that is some bizzare history retconning bullshit. You want the DHS, FBI, CIA, and NSA for that.

Calling Google wiretapping would be like calling your bank a wiretapper because they log every transaction. Those previously listed bad actors with badges agencies doing so would be business as usual.

It is utterly exasperating to see "Big Tech" magically become the magnet for blame of things they don't even remotely do and see people believe any ole bullshit that confirms their preconceptions.

Your hostility is a little weird. Maybe you think *.gov are worse and should be mentioned before Google. That is a legitimate position to have.

On the other hand, Google drove surveillance vans all over the world, hoovered up people's home network wifi frames, and promoted the engineer who "accidentally" introduced that "bug". If that isn't circumventing a norm against wiretapping, I'm not sure what is.

Entities and disciplines can communicate without being the same. An idea we seem to be losing, not in small part thanks to social science.

> not in small part thanks to social science.

I'm genuinely curious what you are referring to here?

My, admittedly limited, understanding of current social science theory seems to claim more and more that boundaries of race, class, gender etc are real boundaries that preclude identification and understanding. I identify with men, because I am a man, I can't possibly understand a woman's point of view for the same reason. We are encouraged to believe in privileged positions where knowledge is spesific to this position and irrelevant in others.

Computing requires a common language and a common understanding, as does any discipline where you are dealing with the real world. If you extend social theory into computing you WILL end up with people claiming it is discriminatory to privilege any ideas within the field. Sounds like a nightmare to me.

You seem to be thinking of gender studies? I don't know much about that, especially in the US. It may be right to criticize that field and its methodology. Social science, however, also includes fields like psychology, history and law, all of which I assume you'd agree are hugely important for society.

Also, as I've mentioned in another comment, the article is not advocating for computer science and social sciences to 'become the same', but to improve communication and mutual appreciation and knowledge. (The title is a bit unfortunate.)

If you're suggesting that people who make software could benifit from being more rounded human beings then I agree.

What would be the cost of from moving CS away from its current home?

On the recommendations:

1. The courses taught are very low level, below the level of building platforms. There really isn't a social science perspective to algos, OS, CPU arch.

2. This is already the case, 50% of classes must be from outside the department with more rules about what is required

3. This is already the case

The author seems misinformed about the nature of CS programs and how departments already work.

My point about ACM pushing garbage content shall remain

> My point about ACM pushing garbage content shall remain

Sadly, I think you're right. Not sure if it's an attempt to remain relevant or if the group itself is just waning, but the quality over the past number of years has diminished. It's like they're now just trying to meet minimum word requirements.

When have those decades of research ever actually been applied to "create a platform that's more beneficial for society?"

You're joking right? You're proving the article's point. The social sciences have informed policymakers for decades. The US was founded by social scientists (as TFA defines them, the social sciences include philosophy and so on).

Isn't that more worthy of damnation than praise? Superpredator broken windows, and all other sorts of convenient bullshit. Now policymakers are all about very selective hearing for demagoguery to be fair. We know this well enough because the absolute dumbasses still think cryptography backdoors are a good idea in spite of every credible expert screaming at them for decades "No you fucking morons! It would weaken our own security while not even helping for actual bad actors!"

Definitely, social sciences have gotten a lot of things wrong. And the pipeline from science (social or otherwise) to policy is pretty broken, to put it mildly. Isn't it all that much more important that computer science absorbs that history, so as not to make the same missteps?

Ah, well, if TFA defines the Founders as social scientists, then I can call today's AR-15 a muskeet. Precisely one of the issues of today social sciences is the absolute perversion of language (on purpose).

You can make everything a social science with a bit of imagination.

Isn't this just being pedantic? How is TFA's point changed by substituting "social sciences and other humanities" for "social science"?

“Social sciences and other humanities” would add an additional problem because social sciences aren't humanities.

Digital platforms? They haven't, that's the point.

Outside of that... I would say it's pretty clear that society benefits from research in law, psychology or history, for example.

decades of research in social science to create a platform that's more beneficial for society

Post 1 example of that.

Sort of, I guess, if you squint.

It's more about recognizing that computing now controls a great deal of power and wanting a large slice of that power.

IDK - I don't think too many students get into the computing field because they are power hungry. If they gain a lot of power because they "release the next big X" then that's a byproduct and not the motivation.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com