To the degree that we've collectively built a dark forest, it's been in part due to this lack of multi-disciplinarianism.
Humans are amazingly adept at rationalization.
But depressingly few of my peers seem to be true general "artisan scientists" as I see it, understanding engineering to be not only a job but a craft, a discipline, an art form, a power and a responsibility.
So much is possible today. Individuals in developed countries, and even many in underdeveloped countries with access to tech, have more velocity at their fingertips than almost any individual in history.
We've built critical systems which rapidly create value with the slightest gesture. But few really take the time to sit down and connect enough dots to see enough of a bigger picture to make meaningful and considerate modifications to the status quo. Few push back against what they're told, few take the time to deeply appreciate even a fraction of the complex systems which create modern society.
We have to do better about educating ourselves, our peers, and our offspring. We need to encourage generalists, facilitate access to multi-disciplinarian education, and hold ourselves and others to higher ethical standards which are themselves informed by a broad perspective.
This certainly comes at the cost of one's personal time. However, I think a majority of us are overentertained and could be better about conditioning ourselves to routinely seek out and learn new things.
But yeah, people should be curious and willing to try things, even things that doesn't seem to be the thing for them.
I would love to choose to be an artisan, a craftsman, a changer of the world, a multi-discipline Renaissance Man, (or just an over-entertained couch potato) but I need to make my mortgage payment next month.
For the most part, our station in life is something we constantly wage war against from the moment of birth. Coming from a very poor and abusive background, I was homeless by 16 and left with a choice of fully committing to boring technical work, or taking advantage of already being at rock bottom and surgically improving my skills over years until I've become as well-rounded as I would like. It's a lifelong journey, though.
I do wish you luck and I hope you do find time to accomplish some of your desires. You will definitely have to create time and space for it though, free time likely won't magically appear within your current routine.
I'm sorry to rebutt your very first assertion but we had been in a cultural and scientific Renaissance and the last 15 years have been the slow unwinding of that. We got lucky that the internet explosion overlapped with the tail end of publicly supported cultural and scientific production.
I hung out with physics majors in college, all of them smarter than us compsci chuds, and uniformly they are absolutely struggling to survive as post docs or in industry. One of my college buddies has worked at nasa for 4 different firms and has had to move to Texas, Kansas, and Maryland for these gigs and has once again landed on a project where the funding got cut and is looking for a new job. Another works in nano scale semiconducting and had to move to Finland to get project funding from the EU since the US has made basic research funding so scarce. And after several post doc roles he is leaving the field after his last grant wasn't renewed, with not an ounce of negative feedback. Just, sorry we don't have any money anymore. He's now going to go into failure analysis for a mobile phone manufacturer to pay the bills.
The woes of cultural production have also been well documented.
We are in a cultural and scientific collapse
https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/25910/what-does...
Now I say that stem is just a tool that does no good by itself. It's just as harmful as beneficial. An engineer doesn't like to think of themself as a tool, but tough shit. Without the humanities an engineer is exactly that, merely a tool that others wield, and others decide how to wield and to what ends.
Stem tells you how to build a bridge or a bomb. The humanities tells you whether/when/why to build a bridge or a bomb.
We need a field that is able to systematically cartograph the limitations our brains impose on us, society and technology. We need a world map of blindspots, of disabilities l. Not 15 years ago we congratulated ourselves on plans to degrowth , and look at what happened during the pandemic.
While I agree that disdain is not the right reaction, neither is misdescribing what these disciplines are. And the most important fact about them is: they are not sciences.
We do not have a science of how people work, how groups of people work, how collective action works. Dealing with people is an art. It requires applying non-repeatable human judgments to non-repeatable human situations, and doing so constantly, day after day, year after year, realizing that there is never going to be a stable state of things, there is never going to be a time when you have dealt with all the conflicts and solved all the problems and can sit back and relax.
Engineers are understandably uncomfortable with such a situation because it goes against everything we (I say "we" because I'm an engineer myself) are taught. We are taught to engineer solutions to problems, solutions that keep working, if not forever, at least for a long enough time that we aren't constantly having to manage them. A well built bridge does not require constant engineer attention once it is finished.
But there is no such thing when it comes to humans and human relationships. They do require constant attention in order to survive and flourish. But we have no science of how to do that, the way we have a science of how to build bridges. All we have is our fallible human judgment, and if we're lucky, some rules of thumb that, while they aren't science, are hopefully better than nothing. Unfortunately, I think what rules of thumb we have have been mostly ignored in the process of building systems like social media.
Cite something or don't @ me.
Yes, we do, but their predictive power, if it exists at all, is very poor. Science is about building models with good predictive power. If you don't have that, you don't have a science, at least not in any way that matters.
And there are social science hypotheses that can predict outcomes.
To that degree, studying enough sociology to be able to make the statement, "Compartmentalization and hierarchy of academic subjects contributes to software engineers being unwitting used to replicate social structures," is not dependent on sociology being a science. It is true without relying on an arbitrary epistemology.
Findings don't replicate, data is used to tell lies, policy built on scientific findings is mostly unrelated to the findings, focus is primarily guided by culture instead of discovery or curiosity. I read a lot of sociology, and the general level of critical thinking and concern for the truth in journal articles is much lower than biology, engineering, or even economics.
It's true that the most egregiously wrong prediction in the Federalist papers, that the US would not have political parties because it was too large, was the work of Madison, not Hamilton. But AFAIK none of Hamilton's predictions turned out very well either.
Many times these practitioners of these ”soft sciences” are cloistered away in the ivory towers of academia and away from regular people whom they actually look down on because they don’t match their theories.
This isn't a new concept, but the compartmentalization of subjects in school is one of the factors at play along with a hierarchy of subjects and students. You can observe how a lot of computer science folks hold mathematics and physics in high regard, and biologists, and sociologists in low regard. It's no coincidence that this maps to relative possession of the habitus valued by the ideological hegemony.
Again, it works to reinforce social statuses rather than dismantle them, often in ways that are detrimental to those actively, albeit unknowingly, contributing to the same systems.
No rational being left then.
Qualitative precision matters. HN crowd presumably loves true social network academics.
Dark forest Vs real could probably be described by networks.
Also Social Media Networks are conversational markets, run by market makers with different kinds of incentives. I do not recall seeing descriptions like this but it would bring real empathy to the space to merely describe things like this.
Broadcast all is NOT the norm in price discovery. Why is it the starting point in social networks? We are brainwashed.
My issues with the "soft" sciences, is chiefly their inability to replicate findings, and the paradoxical authority these so called scientists seem to gain despite not actually following the scientific method. It doesn't have to be this way either.
I'm not saying everything in these fields are total bunk or anything but I've been deceived by them enough by now that they have lost my trust. I'm sure there are plenty that actually do good science but I'm not capable of telling them apart from the rest unfortunately.
Even more concerning is this pretentious attitude reminiscent of what I'd expect from a religion or political movement than a field of science. Are we starting to treat universitys like cathedrals now? A scary thought.
If you’re not thinking about that it just means you have no idea what stuff you are loading into your designs. It’s still there you’re just not aware of it. It’s like being the unwitting carrier of a disease or a parasite.
Makes me think of brain slugs in Futurama for some reason.
If you suspect that you're being lied to by the consensus, feel free to read alternatives by heterodox scholars. I suspected that they're crank.
It's not like I particularly agree with the way things work now, only that we shouldn't make things worse by making obviously stupid moves in the wrong direction.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
(I don't think the GP comment was very good either, but taking the thread flameward is definitely not what we want.)
If you engage outside the scientific community, you're most likely going to encounter cranks.
Ideas that were not taken seriously even by the people who put them forward:
> Ronald Reagan launched his 1980 campaign for the presidency on a platform advocating for supply-side economics. During the 1980 Republican Party presidential primaries, George H. W. Bush had derided Reagan's economic approach as "voodoo economics".[23][24] Following Reagan's election, the "trickle-down" reached wide circulation with the publication of "The Education of David Stockman" a December 1981 interview of Reagan's incoming Office of Management and Budget director David Stockman, in the magazine Atlantic Monthly. In the interview, Stockman expressed doubts about supply side economics, telling journalist William Greider that the Kemp–Roth Tax Cut was a way to rebrand a tax cut for the top income bracket to make it easier to pass into law.[25] Stockman said that "It's kind of hard to sell 'trickle down,' so the supply-side formula was the only way to get a tax policy that was really 'trickle down.' Supply-side is 'trickle-down' theory."[25][26][27]
> Political opponents of the Reagan administration soon seized on this language in an effort to brand the administration as caring only about the wealthy.[28] In 1982, John Kenneth Galbraith wrote the "trickle-down economics" that David Stockman was referring to was previously known under the name "horse-and-sparrow theory", the idea that feeding a horse a huge amount of oats results in some of the feed passing through for lucky sparrows to eat.[29] Reagan administration officials including Michael Deaver wanted Stockman to be fired in response to his comments, but he was ultimately kept on in exchange for a private apology.[30]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trickle-down_economics#Reagan_...
See also:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kansas_experiment
It'd be like saying traffic engineering and urban design are bullshit because politicians keeps building highways—when traffic engineers know this won't solve the issue of traffic:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downs–Thomson_paradox
Also:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/15-minute_city#Conspiracy_theo...
Just because quack ideas attributed to a particular field are used to justify certain ideological ideas or policies does not mean the field itself is devoid of valid models.
Because Skinner boxes exist. There are entire multi-billion dollar industries built around them (casinos, gacha games/loot boxes), just to pick a super low-hanging-fruit example.
And very little of psychology covers what is used in ads.
For example, history is frustrating because you are going to end up in unique circumstances and you're not going to be able to see into the future, only the present. Yet, we must at least have an understanding of the world around us and critical thinking skills that can only come from with doing history.
This is 100% a sociological take though. Ie: it is in part doing sociology. Perhaps without knowing it, you've arrived at an Althusserian perspective on structuralism through the lens of conflict theory.
Do you suppose that these institutions be systematically studied and can we build models of how they work to reproduce the status quo?
Engineers due tend to be pretty critical of things that can’t be accurately and consistently measured (not meant as a slight. It’s true, but it doesn’t make those soft sciences worthless), but they aren’t the only ones making these systems.
Most of the time, engineers are given requirements and build systems to satisfy them.
You wouldn’t blame a construction worker for gentrification, right?
I have yet to see any actual backing for such claims. Only standard academia's toxic social knife-fighting and Kafka-traps. The specific form of bullshit being mounting social pressure as a weapon. Where where not agreeing with them and their theories means clearly you are more wrong and a worse person for not agreeing with them and thus you must agree with them!
It always rung of a scam to justify mandatory electives to justify the existence of their professorships. There is no intellectual honesty to be found here, only snobbery and blind adherence to cliches.
There are plenty of engineers for hire, and sociologists can build their own vision.