Computer scientists vs humanities.

[Lucky Luciano]

Interesting read here. As a quant who uses numbers and computers most of my day doing socially useless crap, it is good to pause and look at this.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wired.com/2017/04/hey-computer-scientists-stop-hating-humanities/amp/

AS A COMPUTER science PhD student, I am a disciple of big data. I see no ground too sacred for statistics: I have used it to study everything from sex to Shakespeare, and earned angry retorts for these attempts to render the ineffable mathematical. At Stanford I was given, as a teenager, weapons both elegant and lethal—algorithms that could pick out the terrorists most worth targeting in a network, detect someone’s dissatisfaction with the government from their online writing.

Computer science is wondrous. The problem is that many people in Silicon Valley believe that it is all that matters. You see this when recruiters at career fairs make it clear they’re only interested in the computer scientists; in the salary gap between engineering and non-engineering students; in the quizzical looks humanities students get when they dare to reveal their majors. I’ve watched brilliant computer scientists display such woeful ignorance of the populations they were studying that I laughed in their faces. I’ve watched military scientists present their lethal innovations with childlike enthusiasm while making no mention of whom the weapons are being used on. There are few things scarier than a scientist who can give an academic talk on how to shoot a human being but can’t reason about whether you should be shooting them at all.

The fact that so many computer scientists are ignorant or disdainful of non-technical approaches is worrisome because in my work, I’m constantly confronting questions that can’t be answered with code. When I coded at Coursera, an online education company, I developed an algorithm that would recommend classes to people in part based on their gender. But the company decided not to use it when we discovered it would push women away from computer science classes.

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I don’t have a solution to this problem. I do know, however, that I won’t find it in my algorithms textbook; I’m far more likely to find relevant facts in Ta-Nehisi Coates’s work on systemic discrimination or Michelle Alexander’s on mass incarceration.

--snip--

There are many steps tech companies should take as well. Organizations should explore the social and ethical issues their products create: Google and Microsoft deserve credit for researching algorithmic discrimination, for example, and Facebook for investigating echo chambers.

-snip-

[bettyellen]

1. After this election- where women and POC saw the hatred and

Knew the "economic anxiety" spin was bullshit, guys gotta learn to listen to us. We knew. We didn't fall for it, while many who weren't so targeted insisted it wasn't going to be that bad. It's pretty fucking bad. And not valuing us enough to fully and vocally fight that bigotry along side of us hurts everyone. Discrimination is insidious and not always intentional, but the product of narrow and selfish thinking. Diversifying the work force in every area, especially AI is critical.



"Companies should hire the people harmed or excluded by their products: whose faces their computer vision systems don’t recognize and smiles their emojis don’t capture, whose resumes they rank as less relevant and whose housing options they limit, who are mobbed by online trolls they helped organize and do little to control. Hire non-computer-scientists, and bring them in for lunchtime talks; have them challenge the worldviews of the workforce."