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Comment by robocat | Hacker News Reader

> The only way it stops is if engineers start refusing

I find it sad that this is seen as a reasonable statement: totally idealistic, hideously unrealistic, and it is awfully close to virtue signalling.

You might as well say that the prisoners dilemma is solved by asking everybody to not cheat.

Any solution has to be robust to the variety of engineers that exist: including the antisocial, the people doing it for the lulz or $, those that don’t give a shit about anyone but themselves, and the plain clueless that are simply unaware of the outcomes/implications of their work.

Clearly expecting engineers to just solve the problem hasn’t happened, so it won’t happen. Currently the only solutions I can see are based on legal restrictions upon our government organisations to protect ourselves from our own authorities.

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In general all types of dilemma situations are solved to a substantial degree by allowing people to communicate with each other and then individuals arriving at appropriate actions.

I am not advocating against regulations or the like but saying that individuals are of the hook because „I don’t matter anyway“ is a recipe for ongoing disaster.

We need all types of push back against injustice, unfairness, and plain stupidity. Making excuses doesn’t help anyone.

Doctors usually take an oath to do no harm when they become doctors. Is a similar thing for engineers so hard to imagine?

First software engineering would need to be codified and licensed as an actual engineering profession.

Issue is that there will be always those that will accept if someone refuse, for higher amount of money or bit of "nudge" (pressure). Let's not forget that even now we have black, gray and white hackers...

Doctors are a completely invalid comparison. Is your healthcare system hurting people? Yes, of course it is.

With a doctor, the patient and their family is highly motivated to ensure the doctor is doing their best to avoid harm in a high stakes and high cost transaction.

When you get doctors more removed from patients (say large commercial medical organisations or vaccines or medicines), then “doctors” can often make the same selfish decisions against the diffuse interests of those they affect.

And the implication that engineers are the only vital part in an organisation that has the agency of choice is amazing. Equivalent statements could be:

  * The only way it stops is if managers start refusing

  * The only way it stops is if shareholders start refusing

Those statements are clearly ludicrous, yet somehow it makes sense that engineers are responsible for choice?

I do believe us engineers need to try and act responsibly, and I do think using social pressure against unethical engineers is valid. But some anarchistic belief in self-policing is totally unrealistic. Likewise ethical guidelines do not seem to really help much in other professions like accountancy, legal or journalism. Our legal, regulatory, and political systems are there to help mitigate these types of issue.

In my country, software developers can't call themselves engineers unless they have an engineering degree.

>But some anarchistic belief in self-policing is totally unrealistic.

Engineers in my country are held to ethical standards with legal backing.

https://www.peo.on.ca/public-protection/complaints-and-illeg...

How is that even relevant? You are just changing the subject.

I'm sure truely authoritarian societies have professional engineering societies with ethics and rules about who can call themselves what.

How does your point relate to protection against state surveillance?

>But some anarchistic belief in self-policing is totally unrealistic.

I'm telling you that Canada has this. There are 12 professional engineering organizations in Canada, all are self-governing, all have legal backing to enforce sanctions against engineers that act unethically.

>truely authoritarian societies

Canada has its issues but I wouldn't call it authoritarian.

The point wasnt to only assign fault at engineers but to show that the problem is more broad then its the "governments fault" or "corporations fault." That we assign agency to these vast things but dont acknowledge individuals.

Yet the 20th century showed us a big list of examples of doctors breaking their oath, by conducting human experiments and so on… A few examples on different scales: [1][2][3][4]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_Syphilis_Study

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guatemala_syphilis_experiments

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731

[4]: https://www.businessinsider.com/the-military-tested-bacteria...

Of course some doctors are going to break their oath and do horrible unethical things, particularly in extreme situations such as wartime and under totalitarian regimes. But that's a dumb argument, you might as well say, well, people are always going to steal so let's not have any laws on stealing. The vast majority of doctors in a functioning society will uphold their oath first because they believe in it and second because their career depends on following it.

An Oath and law are completely different things (you won't go to jail for breaking your oath and you can very much go to jail even if you did not break it). In fact laws and oath are the two opposing sides in this very thread! Robocat is advocating for laws, and bobsmooth responds arguing in favor of oath.

Look at how many doctors stood up to say that the lab leak theory shouldn't be censored.

Look how many doctors are publicly stating that mandatory vaccination and vaccine passports are a violation of human rights and medical ethics.

Not too many. And certainly not the majority.

They're out there - but they are pariahed, smeared, and even getting death threats.

The problem with most of the statement is that it is subjective. It is not a black and white issue of ethics of mandatory vaccines. Arguments with merits exist on both sides the argument. And mandatory vaccination with the exclusion of religious and sound medical reasons (can't because of chemo therapy), have existed outside of COVID and has ruled in courts to be valid. However this is not a discussion on the ethics of medicine.

>this is not a discussion on the ethics of medicine.

It's a discussion of ethics. So...

I maintain that the fact doctors are so silent on important issues - however subjective they may be to you - shows that trusting in a code of ethics rather than _actual impartial oversight and accountability_ is daft.

And that applies equally as much to engineers and tech.

This is not the first instance of suggesting something like this. Look at the history of the ASCE and the AME which held very different views of engineering. ASCE more sticking to principle and the AME sticking more to business loyalty. Ultimately, there has been some happy medium reached. This has not existed and software and should. But the idealistic nature of the ASCE impacted most of the engineering fields even though it did not get it's way 100%. So you can call it idealistic and unreasonable, but a similar approach has worked to some degree.

Golden handcuffs are enough to rationalize anything eh

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