Lack of ethics education for computer programmers shocks expert

https://www.stuff.co.nz/business/innovation/93629356/minimal-ethics-education-for-computer-programmers

50 75 9 years ago

stuff.co.nz

This article is about New Zealand's schools but This is absolutely correct in the US too. We are seeing the results of programmers not understanding or caring about what their code skills can do. Viruses, black hat hacking and privacy invasion are partly due to people in the computer industry not understanding or caring about ethics. None of my computer courses included ethics as part of the lectures or reading. But I've taken business courses that at least touch on ethics. And if you are planning to get a degree in Law,Medicine,Genetics and business you will be taking courses that teach ethics. You can even take complete courses on the subject to meet requirements but in the computer sciences field it's not standard or required.

With the impact computer technology has on our society we definitely need to start teaching it in schools.

jjoonathan2• 9 years ago

Is there any evidence that "teaching ethics" works? I wouldn't expect it to, but I'd be happy to be wrong.

Viruses, black hat hacking and privacy invasion are partly due to people in the computer industry not understanding or caring about ethics.

Yes, but the breakdown is .1% not understanding and 99.9% not caring (which typically takes the form of rationalization).

WillPostForFood• 9 years ago

You can have effective or ineffective teaching of ethics, but you can teach it. We aren't born ethical creatures, it is a learned behavior.

voidhorse4• 9 years ago

I'd be skeptical that it can teach you a moral reaction in the sense that after taking this course you'll leap at any injustice, but what it can do, and what is important, is furnish you with an ethical vocabulary and number of frameworks of thought to consider when a potential ethics issue crops up and stir that discussion/consider the situation from multiple angles--yes it won't force you to do that, but it will give you the tools you need to do so should you encounter that situation rather than leaving you a sitting duck while your superiors or whomever decide it's okay for you not to fix that bug in your self driving car code that you're aware could prevent the car from ever ceasing to accelerate (or some equivalently ridiculous and dangerous issue).

barry-cotter• 9 years ago

There's no evidence that teaching ethics makes one more ethical. Professional ethicists are no more moral than other philosophy professors or other professors.

http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzAbs/EthSelfRep.h...

The Self-Reported Moral Behavior of Ethics Professors (in draft)

Eric Schwitzgebel and Joshua Rust

Abstract: We examine the self-reported moral attitudes and moral behavior of 198 ethics professors, 208 non-ethicist philosophers, and 167 professors in departments other than philosophy on eight moral issues: academic society membership, voting, staying in touch with one's mother, vegetarianism, organ and blood donation, responsiveness to student emails, charitable giving, and honesty in responding to survey questionnaires. On some issues we also had direct behavioral measures that we could compare with self-report. Ethicists expressed somewhat more stringent normative attitudes on some issues, such as vegetarianism and charitable donation. However, on no issue did ethicists show significantly better behavior than the two comparison groups. Our findings on attitude-behavior consistency were mixed: Ethicists showed the strongest relationship between behavior and expressed moral attitude regarding voting but the weakest regarding charitable donation.

com2kid4• 9 years ago

None of my computer courses included ethics as part of the lectures or reading.

Ethics was a required course for me back in 2005. Looking at ABET requirements[0] for 2016-2017, ethics is still a requirement. I'll admit that more than 1 course would've been nice, but it is part of the required curriculum in the US.

(Also required was a course in doing presentations, which was actually quite helpful!)

[0]http://www.abet.org/accreditation/accreditation-criteria/cri...

rsj_hn9• 9 years ago

There is no such thing as a "required curriculum in the U.S."

Each university has their own requirements for each degree, and you can pick your major/degree.

In my university, since I was in the college of liberal arts and sciences and tested out of English, I had to take basically 4 semesters of any class that had a "literacy" label. I choose Chinese History (2 classes), Chaucer (1 class), and Post Impressionist Art (1 class). That fulfilled the liberal arts portion of my graduation requirement.

In no universe was there a requirement to take an "ethics" class -- that's way too specific and most ethics classes are rare in today's college curriculum. I just needed 4 classes with an "L" next to their class description in the syllabus, and there were a wide variety -- literally hundreds -- to choose from.

I think, in general, a humanities education has real benefits. Ethics, well, it depends on the course and person taking it. Unfortunately a lot of the humanities courses are in some strange "hate the patriarchy" mode where you are taught to hate white people, and this isn't really something conducive to building products with mass appeal in a nation with a white majority.

Having said that, there are many great opportunities to learn more about the humanities just by reading the classics or taking some online courses. You have to pick and choose. I actually think most programmers are much better people -- much more honest and ethical people -- than the humanities graduates I know, and that this is primarily due to their avoidance of humanities classes as currently taught in american universities. Also, there is something about studying the humanities that tends to make you look down on people, which is something I didn't see when I interacted with mathematicians or engineers.

rsj_hn9• 9 years ago

I've never heard of Abet. The U.S. higher education accreditation system is decentralized. Schools can pick which (if any) they want to accredit them, but the real schools pick regional bodies:

For instance, University of Texas at Austin is accredited by the Southern Association of Colleges. MIT is accredited by the New England Association of Schools and Colleges. Caltech is accredited by the Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC) -- see a pattern? None of them are accredited by Abet.

ajarmst2• 9 years ago

"Ethics" when taught as part of a professional education usually relates to professional ethics as encoded by codes of practice. While certainly related to morality, legality, religious ethos, humanism, etc. professional ethics shouldn't be conflated with them. As a case in point, I doubt that many would argue that American lawyers and businesspeople are, as a group, noticeably more moral actors than computer programmers, despite the benefit of that additional training.

Moral behaviour is the concern of a society, not merely of a profession. If we are concerned that actors in important sectors of our economy are behaving immorally, our first thought shouldn't be to blame the CS curriculum, as though three credits of pondering "Eve knows they're faking the test results for QA, but her shares vest in 30 days" would fix the problem.

Rather, I think what might be needed is the development of a stronger sense that IT development should be a professional pursuit, in the sense of a community of practice that holds itself to a high standard, and has governing bodies that will enforce that standard. That is, it may be time to treat developers the way we treat doctors, lawyers and engineers. (Of course, many already are engineers, and thus already have a code of practice and the requisite three credits of "dilemma of the week" studies.)

rocqua4• 9 years ago

The profession is currently growing too quickly for any such community to form.

Any such community is going to exclude some people (the immoral ones). As morality and competency at programming aren't that strongly correlated, those people are still going to be able to find work.

Attempts to limit this by regulation will constrict supply of labour so much it'll never pass. Arguably, it should never pass.

zmonx2• 9 years ago

Wow! One of the professors whom they interviewed and are quoting throughout the article is Richard O'Keefe: The author of "The Craft of Prolog" and very famous Prolog, Erlang and Smalltalk programmer in the respective communities who even has his own Wikipedia page:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_O%27Keefe

His personal web page is also full of interesting texts about very diverse topics, and well worth a look:

http://www.cs.otago.ac.nz/staffpriv/ok/

tacomonstrous• 9 years ago

So I went and read the piece on whether mathematics is invented or discovered, and found it to be surprisingly shallow. Hope this isn't an indication of his other work (which I'm much less qualified to evaluate).

zmonx2• 9 years ago

Interesting. Personally, I found the observation about the pulsations of the jellyfish quite insightful and a good and very short counterargument against the quoted opinion.

There are other texts too on the page, which you may find better. I can only say that in all the language communities Richard used to post and still posts (notably Prolog and Erlang) he enjoys tremendous respect and is known for his technical expertise on very diverse topics. He is definitely a top-notch computer scientist and instructor who enjoys worldwide recognition in the relevant circles.

mettamage• 9 years ago

At my university they touched upon ethics (30 min. lecture). I also received an ethics course at a business school. It helped me to form a vocabulary which I appreciate, but unfortunately nothing else. My best ethics education is having discussions with liberal arts students who care about societal minorities and societal challenges.

I'd argue that subjects like: racism, feminism, discrimination, poverty and similar topics confront a person to form an opinion and to empathise. I miss that in the traditional ethics education that I have received.

Still, the traditional ethics education was much better than receiving nothing. Especially people who go into fields like security should receive it.

jstewartmobile3• 9 years ago

This!

Dealing with the public, along with the occasional lefty PBS documentary, really opened my eyes. If it weren't for those experiences, I'd probably have ended up just as much of a whitebread, Breitbart, alt-right suburbanite as my coworkers.

voidhorse4• 9 years ago

I took a computer ethics philosophy course in college because I am into computers/programming as a hobby and I am also very much into philosophy.

I was the only English major/Philosophy minor in the class. Every other student was a computer science or IT systems major.

I was pretty shocked how lenient of an innate moral compass most possessed, I don't expect folks to be Kantian justicars by default, but C'mon. The vast majority seemed to align with the sort of base, selfish utilitarianism pervasive in America that eventually leads to "if it isn't breaking some law or as long as there's a loophole its good if it makes me money/benefits me or if it benefits a sheer greater quantity of people regardless of how horrendous the consequences are for those it doesn't benefit"

Nonetheless it was a fun class as we primarily looked at real life cases. As with other industries, some of the shit people pull is baffling--guess that's the result of years of delegating any ethics education whatsoever to the home/parental responsibility or to religion. Another reason I think a foundational education in philosophy should be mandatory in high schools across the US, if not junior high, just as some foundational education in computer science should also be mandatory these days.

fpig• 9 years ago

I agree somewhat but I think it's a wider social problem - the society in general not really looking down on this kind of behavior. Especially from Americans, you often hear stuff like:

- the company has a duty to make the most money possible legally for its shareholders, so we shouldn't criticize them for doing something shitty as long as it doesn't break the law

- the employee can't be expected to lose their job over ethics, so no matter how shitty what they did was, they get a pass

So when a company does something shitty, nobody did anything wrong, as long as it was legal! The employees have to feed their children, the higher-ups have to do what's best for shareholders, and the shareholders are too detached from the company to blame.

Consider how sad it is that a massive amount of people literally holds the view that a financial incentive makes otherwise unethical behavior OK. Nobody will say that the fact that cheating on your wife is legal means it's ethical. But as long as you are getting paid for doing something shitty, it's not seen as unethical as long as it's perfectly legal by a lot of people.

When people who are not even benefiting from them are defending shitty actions, you can't expect better from the people who are benefiting, as they have an additional incentive to be unethical.

The idea that an economic incentive is an excuse to do something shitty needs to go away.

voidhorse4• 9 years ago

Good point. I find this sort of attitude is really hard to root out too once it's ingrained. I have one friend who I argue with all the time because, coming from a family of small business owners himself, he is always rushing to the defense of businesses and their less than venerable actions even when, as you said, he himself doesn't directly benefit from said seediness. No matter how many times I've tried to get him to see things from a more humanistic/humanitarian side, that "best for business" bug in him seems impossible to eradicate. It's like he's been indoctrinated to the point where it's become as fundamental and ineradicable as a biological survival instinct.

People come to take certain values as constitutive of living a 'meaningful' life and sleep on ever questioning them until it's far too late to really challenge them any more, then pass them off, unquestioned and unanalyzed, to their kids, and the rat race continues...

platinumrad• 9 years ago

"selfish utilitarianism"

I get it, you're a Kant stan but come on, that phrase is literally oxymoronic.

voidhorse4• 9 years ago

Hehe fair enough.

There is an argument latent here drawing upon Horkheimer's observations that the collective, under the increased technologization and automation of society, has become a proxy for the individual, or perhaps more accurately replaced the romantic/enlightenment notion of individual, which would indeed cause a sort of paradox in which utilitarianism, the collective being by proxy identified with or being an extension of the self, would be selfish.

All that aside, I was not being precise in my terminology--I was simply trying to express that most of the students were utilitarian so long as a few conditions held: (a.) they were either in the group that benefited or persons they know/social groups they interact with benefited and (b.) they were not in the minority that suffered negative effects form the utilitarian decision to simply benefit the majority. (c.) They could somewhat offload responsibility for the moral choice by claiming they were simply making a more 'objective' decision by working based on quantities and benefiting the majority (in reality as per (a.) often really just working off a sublimation of their own interests)

Now, sophisticated utilitarians who actually know what they are talking about don't fall prey to this sort of stuff--I'm talking about the average American who is utilitarian to the extent he heard the term summarily defined once and now considers the benefit to the majority the de facto best choice in every situation and does so with little reflection--as stated prior, his utilitarian bent often suddenly disappears when he suffers as the minority in the decision or when he isn't a member of the benefited majority (in which case he simply doesn't take a stance and considers the decision to not concern him).

Similar charges could probably be leveled against Kantians, but I think Kant's theory enjoys a bit more immunity from these sorts of adherents as it has not been popularized like utilitarianism--chances are you'll come across the term 'utilitarian' in everyday life at some point whereas you're not likely to hear anything about Kantian morality outside of an academic, or perhaps in a rare case judicial, context.

woodruffw• 9 years ago

I am a dual CS/Philosophy major, and this is my take as well (with respect to the general moral attitudes of my CS peers).

I've been agitating for an ethics class in my own department for about a year now, to little effect. Reactions to my proposal have ranged from sheer disinterest ("ethics? who cares?") to snark ("not until the next big scandal") to outright (admittedly plausible) dismissal ("we'd have to remove something else from the syllabus"). It's been disheartening, to say the very least.

jstewartmobile3• 9 years ago

This is giving entirely too much credit to coursework. When the ethos of the entire culture is "f-you, I've got mine", adding a philosophy course in high school is going to be like pissing in the ocean.

RRRA• 9 years ago

Told my alma mater the same thing for a 5 years post graduation survey.

Mind you, I was on the free software club, for example, and ethic was always there for some of us.

But I encourage everyone to write to the director of their Comp. sci. / Eng. departement to ask them why is this field not deserving of ethical questioning and/or what do they plan on doing to fix this.

I know lots of 20 yo might consider this a boring waste of time or not understand the importance of this kind of education, but sadly that reaction makes this an even more pressing issue to think about and would alone justify the teaching of ethics in the context of this field's short history...

We're on the verge of big fights to preserve and improve the Internet's openness & neutrality along accessible general purpose computing for all and other basic foundations some are taking for granted while lobbies are fighting against them.

But the future of free speech depends on this education and foreshadowing by an educated population...

Not enough people are fighting back and older politicians need to be shown a few things we might see coming before the rest of the population is able to catch up.

(N.B. Same goes for many fields, but computing is now such an important and direct part of the social tissue, got there so fast, that it's getting even more important everyday.)

unityByFreedom3• 9 years ago

Thanks for your comment, it's good.

ckuhl• 9 years ago

I'm a student currently majoring in business and in computer science and the difference between classes at the two schools is stark. To maintain one of its' business accreditations the school has to teach ethics in every single business class. By comparison not once have I ever heard a thing about ethics from any of my CS classes.

While I suppose you could argue that business students will be in positions of power, it feels out of place when every other student is.

rocqua4• 9 years ago

I had an ethics course. It was complete rubbish. It was shared with physics, and mostly about how global warming was a bad thing. There was a little bit about the philosophy of ethics, but there was nothing about general morality. I don't think the manhattan project even came up.

Worse, the course is so universally dismissed by students, they had to make attendance mandatory to get people to show up. Hence, no-one shows up with anything resembling good-will.

In the end, it is the most universally despised course in physics and maths that I know of. Heck, it made me care less about global warming that's how unsuccessful it was.

unityByFreedom3• 9 years ago

That's too bad. I enjoyed my college ethics course. The professor had been in international business and worked with all kinds of countries whose people expected bribes to do everyday business. The case studies were therefore super interesting and thought provoking. It was taught pretty open ended and there was never really a right or wrong answer. Your success depended on the strength of your argument.

rocqua4• 9 years ago

The quality of such a course depends very much on the attitude of the professor. In my case, it felt like the professor was glad to have another audience to preach to. I imagine he is the only professor enthusiastic about teaching this course.

dgcoffman• 9 years ago

My CS degree program required an ethics course. It was an immense waste of time.

wolfgke• 9 years ago

Everybody who is in the periphery of hacker (in the traditional meaning as in "Hacker News" and "hacker space", not in the meaning used in media) probably knows the hacker ethic that was originally formulated by Steven Levy:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_ethic

drivingmenuts• 9 years ago

Where would one even begin to design an ethics course for programmers, though?

Our reach is pretty wide and on graduation, one person might go to work for an open source company, requiring one set of ethics, and another might go to work for a government agency, requiring a completely different set.

How do you design a curriculum that satisfies both sets of needs, unless you just want to get totally political?

Jtsummers• 9 years ago

You need to pair it with with specific topics on safety (preserving human life, body, and property), privacy (a grayer area), and professional ethics (responsibility to clients, self, society).

Practical discussions on why specific systems have failed and in what ways, particularly where ethics and professional violations can be observed.

Classically, the Therac 25 as an example of failure at many levels. See Tragic Design (a recently published O'Reilly book) for cases of bad design leading to tragic or potentially tragic results. A number of them could be turned into case studies in ethics. Examine why security breaches and privacy breaches happen. What obligation do we as engineers have to the public, the customers, and the clients acquiring the systems we make?

eropple3• 9 years ago

One of the most valuable CS courses I took in college was my ethics course. Our honors college was pretty wide-ranging and rigorous, but CS students who weren't in it (I think I was the only one at the time?) were mostly B.Sc. students whose schedules were crammed with (largely superfluous) CS and math courses that left very little time for stuff that's actually useful, like the humanities. And because it was being taught by a CS prof, I went into it expecting it to be awful and boring and trite. Instead it was taught by our department head (who used to be at Watson) and Tom DeMarco (the author of Peopleware) and it dug into not just ethics as considered by philosophers (it was my first introduction to Alasdair MacIntyre, one that I've since expanded on pretty extensively on my own) but the characteristics of human, and not just computer, systems that lead people to do the wrong thing. It also introduced me to the book Customers who viewed Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies by Charles Perrow, which is so critical that I think it's the closest thing to necessary reading that anyone working in any technical field should be required to read.

I've heard a lot of people pooh-poohing the notion of ethics courses, but, frankly, most of the people I've worked with would've benefited from the exposure to thinking about their and others' actions outside of the most immediately utilitarian, mine-mine-mine setting. The framework of analysis and the vocabulary of ethics create a way to ask direct questions (and effectively demand answers) from people who choose to act in one way or another. It's valuable stuff.

unimpressive2• 9 years ago

schedules were crammed with (largely superfluous) CS and math courses that left very little time for stuff that's actually useful, like the humanities.

That's funny, because so far in my college education I would say precisely the same thing except it'd be listing various superfluous humanities courses that I could have lived without taking time away from the STEM I'm actually there to study.

While I'm glad you got to experience the good stuff, I expect at most institutions this would be just one more torturous thing to get marked off the checklist.

eropple3• 9 years ago

So I just passed ten years since my freshman year of college, and I probably would have said the same thing you're saying now, then, and been as misguided about it as you are now. I went with a big puffed-up chest, sure that all I needed was the piece of paper that said I already knew how to code, and I was full of shit. Not because I didn't know how to code--I did, and at a fairly high level--but because it's everything else that actually matters once you graduate.

Unless you are a for-reals engineer--and that excludes somewhere north of 95% of software folks, maybe north of 99%--very little of the "STEM [you're] actually there to study" will apply when you leave college. If you're a CS grad, you'll use a little of it (a little more in some, generally niche fields), and it'll be useful, but by credit-hour it'll be the least applicable, least useful part of your curriculum. On the other hand, you know what is actually really useful for dealing with other people--the actual important things in your life--on a everyday basis? Political science. Microeconomics and the framework for understanding economic decisions. An understanding of history through both history classes and through the lens of literature so that you don't help repeat it. No bullshit--this is what makes you, the generic you, capable and functional and useful to other people way more than anything else. (It's usually the self-anointed "auto-didact" types who leap all over the equally-self-anointed "hacker" label that are the most tragically misled when they avoid this stuff in school. Getting rabbit-holed or led to crankdom is no bueno.)

Universities are finishing schools for educated humans, not for tradeworkers. If you're there to "learn STEM", you're there for the wrong purpose, and the willingness of educational institutions to indulge in STEM hyperspecialization is a tragedy in progress.

aaronbrethorst• 9 years ago

Thanks for the book recommendation; purchased.

eropple3• 9 years ago

For sure. I've bought six copies over the last few years and keep lending them out. They don't come back, but I'm OK with that.

gravypod• 9 years ago

My college required a CS specific ethics course. Everything the teacher said had an obvious rebuttal and when I brought them up he would agree with me and move on. It was at that time I picked up TIS-100 and played that in class rather then sit there and be spoon fed the dribble.

Finished the first set of puzzles and the hidden one all in the first half of the semester!

doesnt_know• 9 years ago

Stuff is like the Daily Mail of New Zealand, as a general rule you should assume everything at that site is complete garbage. That being said, this topic is definitely worth discussing.

I received my degree from a technical institute in NZ rather then one of the major universities. For each level we were required to take a semester (6 months) long paper in Legal and Ethics.

I enjoyed them at the time and have also found the knowledge gained to be extremely relevant in both my personal life and career.

The papers were quite broad and covered a range of topics including the traditional idea of "ethics", copyright law/infringement, the NZ Privacy Act, The Treaty of Waitangi [1]. We had an enthusiastic primary tutor and multiple guest tutors from the industry (privacy officer, lawyer etc). Thinking back, they were probably the best papers I took.

My day job now involves writing software that deals with the vast majority of New Zealanders medical data. The ethical "grounding" and the knowledge gained about the NZ Privacy Act in particular is quite literally at the front of my mind with every commit. It makes me extremely nervous that our educational institutes are shitting out software developers without any of this knowledge.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Waitangi

spectre• 9 years ago

That's a bit of a harsh comparison. Stuff is the online format of all of Fairfax New Zealand's newspapers, some of which occasionally produce decent stories. Stuff is mostly just shitty poorly researched journalism rather than the Daily Mail's sensationalised tabloid bullshit.

dukoid• 9 years ago

Lack of ethics education for journalists (and politicians) shocks me...

Seriously: Put it in school, seems to be helpful (not only) for most other professions.

thehardsphere4• 9 years ago

I don't know if it would help for those two. The problems are less about knowing what's ethical behavior and more about disagreements regarding how the world ought to be.

Camillo3• 9 years ago

Auckland University computer science associate professor Ian Watson, said this was a problem because the mostly 20-something-year-old, caucasian males creating apps were making race and gender divides worse.

Oh, fuck you and the horse you rode in on. The tech industry has given everyone in the world access to nearly all of humanity's knowledge. It has enormously extended everyone's ability to communicate. It has made it easier to learn, to solve problems, to find a job, to start a business, to talk and trade and work with people all over the world.

For less than $150 [0], you can buy a computer that is infinitely more powerful than the one I used to teach myself programming as a child, and gain access to all of the above.

And we have to get dressed down by clowns who charge teenagers thousands of dollars to fill their heads with garbage, leaving them saddled with debt and with no usable skills? You have to be kidding me.

Make no mistake, these maneuvers are not at all about "ethics". They are about a certain breed of parasites looking for new ways to latch onto a productive industry.

That said, a basic liberal arts education (not taught by those clowns) would certainly be useful to engineers. Or to anyone, really (I studied the history of philosophy in high school, didn't you?). If nothing else, it would give them the confidence to rebuff this kind of nonsense.

[0] https://www.google.com/search?q=chromebook&oq=chromebook&aqs...

fdavison• 9 years ago

This rationalization is a slippery slope. "Good works" does not entitle one to behave unethically. Seems close to these two from the Ethics Alarms website list of Unethical Rationalizations:

21. Ethics Accounting (“I’ve earned this”/ “I made up for that”) holds that someone can eliminate or mitigate wrong doing by loading up the good side of the ethics ledger so that the bad side looks puny by comparison.

11. The King’s Pass, The Star Syndrome, or “What Will We Do Without Him?”

One will often hear unethical behavior excused because the person involved is so important, so accomplished, and has done such great things for so many people that we should look the other way, just this once. This is a terribly dangerous mindset, because celebrities and powerful public figures come to depend on it. Their achievements, in their own minds and those of their supporters and fans, have earned them a more lenient ethical standard. This pass for bad behavior is as insidious as it is pervasive, and should be recognized and rejected whenever it raises its slimy head. In fact, the more respectable and accomplished an individual is, the more damage he or she can do through unethical conduct, because such individuals engender great trust. Thus the corrupting influence on the individual of The King’s Pass leads to the corruption of others.

https://ethicsalarms.com/rule-book/unethical-rationalization...

Camillo3• 9 years ago

True, but that's not at all what I meant. I'm not saying it's ok for tech to do bad things because of other good things it has done. I am saying that it is wrong to accuse tech, on the whole, of "making race and gender divides worse". Universal access to information benefits everyone, with no distinction of race and gender. World-spanning communication networks help bridge the divide. Cheap electronics make these resources accessible even to the needy (think of the unjustly bemoaned homeless or refugees with smartphones - they are not a luxury, but a vital lifeline). Etc.

Could we do more? Should we do more? Sure. But that doesn't mean others are justified in completely misrepresenting the history of this industry's contributions to the world.

dang• 9 years ago

Would you please not rant like this on Hacker News?—regardless of how wrong someone else is or how bad an article. You've done this before, and it lowers the quality of discussion.

Camillo3• 9 years ago

Sorry about that. Please go ahead and remove the comment, I can't.

thehardsphere4• 9 years ago

Haven't read the article yet, but this headline is dumb.

If the subject of the headline is an expert, how could they be shocked? That would imply they've hit a limit to the relevance of whatever their expertise is.

thehardsphere4• 9 years ago

Now I've read the article. A better headline would be "One old man is surprised that the world doesn't work the way he thinks it should."

tnecniv3• 9 years ago

Since we're sharing experiences, I had a pretty interesting ethics course in college. We were taught consequences, not morals, since trying to teach a bunch of twenty-somethings morals that they may or may not need to exercise in their careers was deemed impractical. The class mostly revolved around what might happen in situations like using substandard materials, whistleblowing, etc.

anjbe• 9 years ago

One of my favorite computer security talks is this one, given by Alex Stamos in 2013: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eEeHTQHTSgE

The whole talk is very worthwhile, and I recommend watching it.

Near the end of the talk, he essentially teaches a quick ethics class, describing a few hypothetical situations and discussing what the right option would be. At the end, he expresses how important it is to think about these things in advance, because it’s a lot easier to make the morally right decision if you’ve taken the time beforehand to consider what is morally right.

Sometime after giving the talk, he joined Yahoo as CISO. There, he encountered one of the exact scenarios he described at 45:00 in his talk. (You may remember it, the Yahoo government spying story that came out last year: http://www.businessinsider.com/marissa-mayer-secret-yahoo-se...) For what it’s worth, he resigned quietly, exactly what he said in the talk that he would do in that situation.

I guess that demonstrates that he had the right idea to consider ethical dilemmas in advance. It certainly led me to think about issues I might encounter in my work.

golemotron• 9 years ago

We can't have experts being shocked now, can we?

open_bear• 9 years ago

There is a code of ethics by NSPE (National Society of Professional Engineers): https://www.nspe.org/resources/ethics/code-ethics

And as programmers are calling themselves engineers, they should adhere to that code.

jstewartmobile3• 9 years ago

With "ethics" being just another word for the codified value-system of "experts", in what bizzaro world would an "expert" not be "shocked"?

mto• 9 years ago

I had to take a few of those courses but I doubt they make much sense. I felt that you are mostly discussing "don't so bad things" all the time, captain obvious stuff... There's the one type of people who care about things anyway and the other type who don't. Can't imagine that the second type can be convinced by course blabla.

Lack of ethics education for computer programmers shocks expert

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