They are experts in how the technology works. That doesn't make them an expert in how other humans will take advantage of what they have discovered/created. I've taken the charity of assuming the scientist or engineer themselves had non-evil aims.
> This is an interview in Nature. Academics with the ambition to publish in academic journals, be they prestigious like Nature or Science, or smaller and more niche like <insert your favourite journal here>, are taking on a role of a philosopher.
Yes, but a philosopher on which topic? A doctorate from an engineering background is not equally as educated as someone with degrees in history or other studies of human nature in regards to the societal effects of technology.
Humanity benefits when the broader impacts of technology are factored in. Who does this, with what influence, is arguably one of largest themes in human history. This particular proposal is just one of many options.
I don't find this article particularly compelling. Having a requirement for a social-impact section is a blunt instrument; it might become just a pro-forma exercise.
I think I would be more interested in encouraging (not requiring) journals with strong ethical foundations let authors opt-in to discuss social impacts. If they do, I would expect these social impacts to be vetted by social scientists, philosophers, ethicists, and so on -- areas where computer scientists often have large blind spots.
The Ph in PhD actually means something. It's not some kitschy decoration.
I'm sure that comes across as a dumb question, but, modernity - technology.
The irony of mathematics being naturally built in, reinforced into all of us, over and over. Computer science.
From wikipedia:
> From the ancient world, starting with Aristotle, to the 19th century, the term "natural philosophy" was the common term used to describe the practice of studying nature. It was in the 19th century that the concept of "science" received its modern shape with new titles emerging such as "biology" and "biologist", "physics" and "physicist" among other technical fields and titles; institutions and communities were founded, and unprecedented applications to and interactions with other aspects of society and culture occurred.[1] Isaac Newton's book Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687), whose title translates to "Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy", reflects the then-current use of the words "natural philosophy", akin to "systematic study of nature". Even in the 19th century, a treatise by Lord Kelvin and Peter Guthrie Tait, which helped define much of modern physics, was titled Treatise on Natural Philosophy (1867).
> "systematic study of nature"
And what do we do? What is nature to study? What is life to study?
Our own puzzled face, staring back at us.
"Real studying". Figure out what it means when you don't have anyone to design tests to check your own knowledge for you.
Bongs. Is it fun to insult people for thinking?
Real studying only means something when you have a teacher and an educational institution. Real world is much harder. You can watch your own understanding loop around itself hundreds of thousands of times. And still not know, do I know anything at all?
How many times do you have to observe something before you accept it as fact. 1 time? 2 times, perhaps once indirectly? 3? Infinite? How many ways can a truth be conveyed, and how many ways can you be made to interpret it so you know the difference between being entrusted with an awareness, or whether you've been manipulated into accepting it.
Socrates, aka "I know that I know nothing", had 3 books written about him. Aristophanes, The Clouds - he was a bumbling fool. Ever think about why he appeared that way to different sets of people?
Post-modern philosophers will quite correctly argue that you can no very little about things just by observing them, and in fact can never get close to complete knowledge that way.
Mechanical languages though, mechanical systems. Not particularly interested in quantum physics. That breaks things down so much to the point that everything can unfold into a somewhat distorted method of processing your own knowledge. Like trying to understand something from both yourself, and what is not yourself.
Mathematics. Logic. Those things can be accepted at face value. I think that's the closest one can get to complete knowledge. That's my opinion though.
Actual studying. I'd say it's next to impossible to have a complete understanding about anything. You can always think you have the full understanding, but that's just very specific to whatever test or goal post designed for you, or you design for yourself.
Bertrand Russell wrote 370 pages of a book to prove 1 + 1 = 2.
Is that coherent enough?
Are you referring to relativism vs. objectivsm? Or, that people can have the understanding of a concept, but lose it in trying to explain it?
I'm really trying in good faith you get you to make what I consider a coherent response. Personally, I've studied rhetoric, logic, philosophy (the moral kind), and science (the natural philosophy kind). I have a subtle enough knowledge of all of these to understand and appreciate nearly all points of view and have intelligent discussions with a wide range of people on a wide range of topics.
But, so far, nothing you said seems to contradict my statement that the P in PhD refers (with the exception of people getting PhDs in philosophy departments) to natural philosophy, which is to say, the quantitative, experiment and hypothesis based approach to understanding how the universe works, as opposed to moral philosophy, which is a primarily logic-oriented approach to abstract and concrete problems experienced by humans.
That those two intersect to some degree, and that some people who obtain PhDs in quantitative fields do spend some time being introspective about moral philosophy, but it's not commonly required in the form of coursework or research.
Perhaps the closest relationship between moral philsophy and natural (which is what we now call "science') is math, and it's still very much an undecided problem as to whether math and science are the same thing (https://www.dartmouth.edu/~matc/MathDrama/reading/Wigner.htm... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_universe_hypothes... being the two most interesting statements on that problem) and whether the logic employed by philosphers is the same thing as mathematical logic. There is some useful prior writing on this, for example https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/philosophy-mathematics/
Ultimately though I just can't see what point you're making. I think you're saying all knowledge is relative, and even scientific/natural philosophy is identical to moral philosophy, rather than "all students of the natural sciences should also take classes in philosophy to develop a more intuitive understanding of epistemeology"
You kept insulting me. Why would I try to make a clear point?
> The Ph in PhD actually means something. It's not some kitschy decoration.
In Germany, the doctor's degrees are quite different. Typical ones for the HN audience are (for a long list cf. https://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Liste_akademische... ):
- "Dr.-Ing." for engineering (typically including Computer Science)
- "Dr. rer. nat." (doctor rerum naturalium) for natural sciences (typically also including mathematics). Even though the university of Frankfurt am Main issues the "Dr. phil. nat." (doctor philosophiae naturalis) title instead, the "nat." ending for the latter one is very important to distinguish it from the "humanities doctor's degree" "Dr. phil." (doctor philosophiae)
TLDR: In Germany, the names of the doctor's degrees make it very clear that they have nothing to do with philosophy.
It literally looks like anyone can change knowledge, override it, mutate it, destroy it, falsify it.
I don't know why most people get PhDs these days, you are correct. But I know what it used to mean, and I hope it means that one day again, soon.
In the real world you have to jump through hoops no matter what you do. Ignorance to them is stupid.
We live in society, that doesn't make everyone a sociologist. It just means everyone who lives in society should at least devote some portion of their thinking to the contemplation of society, including institutions of education. People in academia are not omnipotently protected from the forces of society. If society doesn't value these institutions, they go away.
The Ph in PhD is important. It really is, and it's idiotic to let that distinction be viewed as something that's just, obsessed with a pedantic, tiny niche of no real consequence.
I've considered myself an autodidact for much of my life. I've also had a great education (MSc, only worked on PhD for one year and left school due to health complications). Comparing these two worlds is hard, but teaching yourself when you can be taught by others is the hard, long, and painful way to learn stuff. And you never know what you know when you only have your own knowledge to trust, checking against everything else, with no real stable, structured, foundational, 'stand on the shoulders of giants' mechanic for the discovery, pursuit, and application of truth / knowledge.
You can have some idea that the individual mind independently can be related to the entire body of academia like it's some metaphor for their functioning as an organizational entity, a super colony of minds that function like one - tested against the rest of the world - but that's oversimplified. Our own puzzled face, staring back at us. We are all part of one big system, but some stuff, distinction really does matter. I don't talk to many people who have PhDs that I know of in real life, just one. He's the only person who seems to really understand the absolute delicate fragility of, and the consequential burden - that comes with the discovery, creation, pursuit, and retention of knowledge, at least that I know of, in real life.
How does that relate to having an extra understanding of sociology, or philosophy? I honestly think my point is built into the experience I am relating, or at least I have to hope I can still convey that much, correctly.
Philosophy should be important to society, and it's a shame when it's not.
That's a little freaking ironic if you don't mind me saying. A PhD represents it's own authority by virtue of being awarded by the tiny fraction of people in the world who actually understand the problem space you might be studying enough to say "Research accepted. We trust you can take our place as educators and researchers in the future when we are dead."
Also, there's a good reason the Greeks had that archaic way of categorizing knowledge. Hyper-connectivity of all knowledge available at once is a total clusterfuck to deal with from an individual mind perspective. Just because it's old doesn't make it wrong. History repeats itself, etc.
At least in computing, this seems to have been largely false. Whatever my respect for the expertise of creators, their track record on predicting the future uses of their developments has been genuinely bad. I don't think that's an indictment of their skills, just an acknowledgement of how complex and rapidly-changing systems really work.
Understanding the future impact of ARPANET was impossible without also anticipating the rise of home computers, but the creators of ARPANET had no special expertise on that point. Computability experts and chip designers got predictions about topics from weather modeling to AI Go play totally wrong because everything from GPU computation to neural network advances have rendered their accurate domain knowledge misleading. And the track records of AI experts predicting the real-world role of AI is so infamous that I don't think I need to elaborate.
Honestly, I expect that this would be computer science's Modernist moment. Corbusier and friends were genuinely excellent architects, but the move from "designing on sound principles" to "trusting that we know all the future uses of buildings and designing for those" was disastrous. The result is a legacy of inflexible building design, hostile urban planning, and government-embraced block housing that caused real harm to the people it was inflicted on.
"A better grasp on their topic than everyone else" is presumably true, but it's not enough. Complex systems are often beyond what any one person can predict, and that only becomes more true when they're also rapidly changing from many directions. I don't think most creators in computer science can make predictions good enough to act on until their creations have been exposed to the world for a while.
First of all, I love me a good Le Corbusier bash, and I totally agree with you here. I also get where you're coming from.
However, what the article asks for is the equivalent to demanding that Le Corbusier would have to ask at every step "how could my design, supposedly built on sound principles, have negative consequences?" which isn't something I recall being a thing he used to do.
Of course it won't be enough, but one could argue that if the experts don't even bother to try, things will be even worse.
This is a good point, and I'm very much in favor of that. The man himself seems to have been much more fond of questions like "how can I force people to accept a version of this design that uses round numbers for elegance?"
I think the proposal made me jumpy because I have so many bad associations with asking technologists to explain the consequences of their work to others. It calls to mind things like The New Digital Age, which seemed totally devoid of introspection (and frankly stupid or even malicious in a lot of places) but was a huge hit with people making important choices about investment and regulation.
I'm still very hesitant about things like the mention of public funding boards using these assessments to shape their decisions, but I appreciate your point about preemptively looking for possible negative outcomes. Something like a medical attitude that considers failures and negative events separately could potentially make a lot of sense. We live in a world where the UK police are using facial-recognition software which provides 95% false positives, and it would be nice to at least have an academic framework for talking about how that's not just ineffective but actively bad.
People who create something, who research something, should by definition have a better grasp on their topic than everyone else. To expect that they are more knowledgeable, and therefore better equipped to see what it means, and therefore also have a civic duty to explain this to less well-informed, not not patronizing. It's acknowledging their expertise.
> Engineers are not philosophers and should not be placed in this role.
This is an interview in Nature. Academics with the ambition to publish in academic journals, be they prestigious like Nature or Science, or smaller and more niche like <insert your favourite journal here>, are taking on a role of a philosopher.
And sure, engineers may "just" apply technology by comparison, but honestly I find that a very dismissive attitude as well. They are the "praxis" to academia's "theory", meaning that what they do actually has consequences in our lives. So if anything, their works comes with even more of a moral obligation to "Do The Right Thing" than that of academics.