Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by acituan 2124 days ago
> Software engineers at facebook, on the other hand, are likely not aware of the full impact of their work

I feel like this is coming from a naive socially illiterate nerd stereotype. They are smart people, they might as well know much more than you expect.
1 comments
aruss 2124 days ago
The number of post-hoc internal memos and studies clearly shows that there are many consequences that FB engineers did not anticipate (though FB is not unique in this regard; consider how YouTube's recommendation algorithm feeds misinformation & outrage).

The whole point of TFA is that pure intelligence (particularly "computational thinking" type of intelligence) is no substitute for the knowledge and methodology already explored by various humanities and social science fields.

link
acituan 2124 days ago
> The whole point of TFA is that pure intelligence (particularly "computational thinking" type of intelligence) is no substitute for the knowledge and methodology already explored by various humanities and social science fields.

This is such a false dichotomy. There exists many, many technical programs that go to field and do that type of "social" research, using the precisely the same methodologies, knowledge of which end up with UX designers, product designers, product managers etc. This TFA readily admits. In other words, anything that social sciences can offer is already being incorporated into those programs. (I am talking about likes of human computer interaction, user experience, information processing science, network science, and tons of other hybrid programs)

link
noslenwerdna 2124 days ago
However, can a social science framework actually predict what would happen, rather than postdict (after it happened).

If so, why didn't they make such predictions in 2012 during Facebook's IPO?

link