stephanie

this is........not a good take responding to a reductive statement with an even more reductive statement accomplishes nothing and it’s disconcerting to see this coming from ppl you look up tohttps://twitter.com/patio11/status/1070874040619819009 …

What tech scandal do you think would have been prevented by having engineering students take an ethics course in college? Silicon Valley doesn’t have a monopoly on dubious business decisions. Why isn’t there a call for insurance claims adjusters to take humanities courses?

Thanks to uniquely strong job security, I’d claim that tech workers are more likely to worry about the ethics of their work—that’s why you see things like the Project Maven and Dragonfly protests.

i think “scandals happen anyways” and “non engineers also suck” are both flimsy arguments, and i don’t agree w/ the default tendency of tech ppl to judge the impact of complex social systems like education by simple quantifiables like scandals prevented or dollars earned

1. at baseline, other eng professions have ethics reqs for a reason. eng is a field where the external impact created per individual worker is big + lasting, and that not being ingrained in the tech mindset is part of why all the software around us is such garbage

2. broader point but why are ppl so against humanities/stem cross-reqs!! taking classes where you’re forced to think differently & work w/ppl who think differently and care about diff things makes you a) better at whatever you do and b) less of a sociopath