Re:Should computer science researchers disclose negative soc...
by criddell on Friday August 03, 2018 @09:49AM
(#17679799)
I don't really get the intent. The last paragraph makes an attempts to justify, but I think it doesn't make a very good case.
Think about some of the most famous and influential papers and try to come up with negative consequences. When Codd wrote A relational model for large shared data banks, should he have tried to think of ways big databases could be abused? When Ritchie and Thompson published the paper that introduced Unix, what could they predict? Or Knuth's many papers on compiler design?
Do other disciplines do anything similar? Computer science papers are often so close to mathematics, I suppose mathematics papers should include similar disclosures, right?
This feels a little like putting cancer warnings on everything in California. At least there I understand what they thought the outcome might be but maybe they didn't foresee how quickly people tune it out and you end up making it harder to communicate danger when it's actually there.
Think about some of the most famous and influential papers and try to come up with negative consequences. When Codd wrote A relational model for large shared data banks, should he have tried to think of ways big databases could be abused? When Ritchie and Thompson published the paper that introduced Unix, what could they predict? Or Knuth's many papers on compiler design?
Do other disciplines do anything similar? Computer science papers are often so close to mathematics, I suppose mathematics papers should include similar disclosures, right?
This feels a little like putting cancer warnings on everything in California. At least there I understand what they thought the outcome might be but maybe they didn't foresee how quickly people tune it out and you end up making it harder to communicate danger when it's actually there.