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Comment by ericmay | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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.

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?

> 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)

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.

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