Do you think a civics class is a taught by a “priestly caste”? Or the ethics course in a medical or engineering program?

Words have meanings and neither of the terms you used are appropriate for this context. It’s possible that there could be an issue with the way standards are formulated but that’d be specific to a particular situation rather than inherent to the concept.

It's naive to think that a civics class or an ethics class is free of foundational prejudices. You suggest empowering a group of people to choose what to teach, and what not to teach, and thereby decide what constitutes "civics" or "ethics". And you advocate that this is outside of a parent's scope.

That's a priestly caste. Of if, as you say, there may be a problem in the formulated standards, then the body that formulates the standards would be the priestly caste. I don't have a problem with the concept, actually, but it's best to call it what it is. Pretending that this would be perfectly neutral is daft.

By this logic every class other than pure math involves a “priestly caste” because teaching involves decisions about what to cover and how to do so. In reality, what happens is that professionals in the field set standards for what should be covered and those are periodically reviewed and updated, and what keeps that from being the exercise in dogma which you appear to be worried about is having that process and the results public. The problem with priests occurs when they’re given special privileges without accountability, and that’s far less of a concern when, say, the standard is “a panel of experts recognized in the field accepted this standard after public comment” than “$DEITY says you have to do it my way, no questions”.

Put another way, real engineers, doctors, scientists who work with human subjects, lawyers, finance people, etc. do not seem to have a conceptual hazard from professional ethics codes. Why would we expect software development to be so different?

>Why would we expect software development to be so different?

It isn't. Recall the big push on DEI initiatives, quite similar to the push to remove blacklist/whitelist or master/slave in the software world. Or the guardrails put onto LLMs so they don't become antisemitic or whatever. Why was it a good thing to do? Because the priestly caste said it was, and tolerated no questions about it. You seem to be unaware of the concept of institutional capture.

And, yes, all teaching involves some sort of bias. We haven't yet created the human that is free from bias.

Surely you have the capability of making a distinction between doctrine established for hierarchical control and a teaching a basic system of deriving ethics or morality, with the exact intention of preventing such hierarchical control within an industry that has the power to make any extreme institutional system a reality. You've seen the effects of a generation of social media technologies and how it compared to the previous generation of internet communication such as BBS, forums, etc.

I assume you've lived long enough to witness an internet stewarded by those who place ethics or morality above purely capitalistic motivation, vs. an internet stewarded by a generation of new-age, fake-ethical "They 'trust me'. Dumb fucks" tech entrepreneurs.

The post I was replying to explicitly said we couldn't leave the teaching of things like ethics and morality up to parents. That's a priestly caste.

It's all well and good to say that your chosen priest caste won't exert hierarchical control, pinky swear, but history and human nature disagrees with you.

It's also odd to suggest that we can teach a system of deriving ethics or morality. Philosophers have been hard at work on this for a long time and haven't gotten terribly far, and they disagree with each other quite strenuously.

Have you taken a university level ethics course before?

They teach the different ethical frameworks, where they come from, and then get you to apply them to different situations. The classes don't tell you what's right and what's wrong, but rather, the different frameworks people can use to determine that.

SBF's mom is a legal ethicist at Stanford. Beyond her son, how many others has she mis-educated? Or, perhaps, a semester or two of ethics is insufficient and thus a waste of time and money?

Evidence of individual corruption is not an indication that we should not teach ethics altogether. This is why ethics need to be taught, so that people are better equipped to weed out bad actors.

That said, who did SBF largely derive his ethics from? His parents, at home, not at his mom's lectures. So all this does is illuminate why it's important for people to get exposed to a wider variety of opinions and ethical considerations.

Is it required that you attend a university-level ethics course to learn how to apply ethical frameworks? Very ecclesiastical. But it would explain why we can't leave this sort of thing to the laity of parents.

In any event, the poster I replied to also included "morality" alongside "ethics", which is why I suggest it's not as cut and dried as you imply.

It's important because ethics is a really complicated subject built on thousands of years of study and thought. It's worthy of being taught by an actual scholar who dedicated their life to understanding the field.

Parents can teach right and wrong, but they seldom teach about things like utilitarianism or hedonic treadmills.