[yarrel]

I see that the humanities are continuing with their unexamined sense of entitlement to colonize other disciplines.

This obsession with teaching (tech) workers ethics is a bourgeois pastoral fantasy.

Someone needs to read some Foucault.

[kbit]

A "bourgeois pastoral fantasy"? Can you expand on that?

Shouldn't engineers who design social media algorithms have some basic knowledge of social dynamics and psychology?

[acituan]

> Shouldn't engineers who design social media algorithms have some basic knowledge of social dynamics and psychology?

Firstly, let’s not reduce decision making to something only software engineers do because typically product managers have huge, even the most, responsibility on product decisions.

Secondly, what makes you think they (incl. engineers) don’t have that basic knowledge? Most software people I know are autodidacts at heart and are interested in social domains just as much. These people are also fed the warm data from their social software systems and can robustly hypothesise on them (they have to) because features based on those hypotheses is applied back to real life next quarter.

If they are following dark patterns, it is not for lack of knowledge on social dynamics or psychology, but because they would follow normativities of growth and engagement rather than social good.

Looking to social sciences, there seems to be a huge variability on how reputable and reliable their knowledge making machinery nowadays works. Hoax paper crises demonstrated that there are at least some weak spots that are very gameable.

I don’t mean this as an insult to social sciences but we could also say if engineers attended church or participated in any religious or spiritual practice to deepen their moral understandings it could be a force of good, but we can’t prescribe that exposure because it would be too ideological. I fear the same might be the motivation here.