[ExI] brave new world in education

[Dave Sill]

https://qz.com/1016900/tracy-chou-leading-silicon-valley-engineer-explains-why-every-tech-worker-needs-a-humanities-education/

In 2005, the late writer David Foster Wallace delivered a now-famous
commencement address. It starts with the story of the fish in water, who
spend their lives not even knowing what water is. They are naively unaware
of the ocean that permits their existence, and the currents that carry them.

The most important education we can receive, Wallace goes on to explain,
“isn’t really about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of
what to think about.” He talks about finding appreciation for the richness
of humanity and society. But it is the core concept of meta-cognition, of
examining and editing what it is that we choose to contemplate, that has
fixated me as someone who works in the tech industry.

As much as code and computation and data can feel as if they are
mechanistically neutral, they are not. Technology products and services are
built by humans who build their biases and flawed thinking right into those
products and services—which in turn shapes human behavior and society,
sometimes to a frightening degree. It’s arguable, for example, that online
media’s reliance on clickbait journalism, and Facebook’s role in spreading
“fake news” or otherwise sensationalized stories influenced the results of
the 2016 US presidential election. This criticism is far from
outward-facing; it comes from a place of self-reflection.

I studied engineering at Stanford University, and at the time I thought
that was all I needed to study. I focused on problem-solving in the
technical domain, and learned to see the world through the lens of
equations, axioms, and lines of code. I found beauty and elegance in
well-formulated optimization problems, tidy mathematical proofs, clever
time- and space-efficient algorithms. Humanities classes, by contrast, I
felt to be dreary, overwrought exercises in finding meaning where there was
none. I dutifully completed my general education requirements in ethical
reasoning and global community. But I was dismissive of the idea that there
was any real value to be gleaned from the coursework.

Upon graduation, I went off to work as a software engineer at a small
startup, Quora, then composed of only four people. Partly as a function of
it being my first full-time job, and partly because the company and our
product—a question and answer site—was so nascent, I found myself for the
first time deeply considering what it was that I was working on, and to
what end, and why.

I was no longer operating in a world circumscribed by lesson plans, problem
sets and programming assignments, and intended course outcomes. I also
wasn’t coding to specs, because there were no specs. As my teammates and I
were building the product, we were also simultaneously defining what it
should be, whom it would serve, what behaviors we wanted to incentivize
amongst our users, what kind of community it would become, and what kind of
value we hoped to create in the world.

I still loved immersing myself in code and falling into a state of
flow—those hours-long intensive coding sessions where I could put
everything else aside and focus solely on the engineering tasks at hand.
But I also came to realize that such disengagement from reality and
societal context could only be temporary.

The first feature I built when I worked at Quora was the block button. Even
when the community numbered only in the thousands, there were already
people who seemed to delight in being obnoxious and offensive. I was eager
to work on the feature because I personally felt antagonized and abused on
the site (gender isn’t an unlikely reason as to why). As such, I had an
immediate desire to make use of a blocking function. But if I hadn’t had
that personal perspective, it’s possible that the Quora team wouldn’t have
prioritized building a block button so early in its existence.

Our thinking around anti-harassment design also intersected a great deal
with our thinking on free speech and moderation. We pondered the
philosophical question—also very relevant to our product—of whether people
were by default good or bad. If people were mostly good, then we would
design the product around the idea that we could trust users, with controls
for rolling back the actions of bad actors in the exceptional cases. If
they were by default bad, it would be better to put all user contributions
and edits through approvals queues for moderator review.

We debated the implications for open discourse: If we trusted users by
default, and then we had an influx of “low quality” users (and how
appropriate was it, even, to be labeling users in such a way?), what kind
of deteriorative effect might that have on the community? But if we didn’t
trust Quora members, and instead always gave preference to existing users
that were known to be “high quality,” would we end up with an opinionated,
ossified, old-guard, niche community that rejected newcomers and new
thoughts?

In the end, we chose to bias ourselves toward an open and free platform,
believing not only in people but also in positive community norms and our
ability to shape those through engineering and design. Perhaps, and
probably, that was the right call. But we’ve also seen how the same bias in
the design of another, pithier public platform has empowered and elevated
abusers, harassers, and trolls to levels of national and international
concern.

At Quora, and later at Pinterest, I also worked on the algorithms powering
their respective homefeeds: the streams of content presented to users upon
initial login, the default views we pushed to users. It seems simple enough
to want to show users “good” content when they open up an app. But what
makes for good content? Is the goal to help users to discover new ideas and
expand their intellectual and creative horizons? To show them exactly the
sort of content that they know they already like? Or, most easily
measurable, to show them the content they’re most likely to click on and
share, and that will make them spend the most time on the service?

Ruefully—and with some embarrassment at my younger self’s condescending
attitude toward the humanities—I now wish that I had strived for a proper
liberal arts education. That I’d learned how to think critically about the
world we live in and how to engage with it. That I’d absorbed lessons about
how to identify and interrogate privilege, power structures, structural
inequality, and injustice. That I’d had opportunities to debate my peers
and develop informed opinions on philosophy and morality. And even more
than all of that, I wish I’d even realized that these were worthwhile
thoughts to fill my mind with—that all of my engineering work would be
contextualized by such subjects.

It worries me that so many of the builders of technology today are people
like me; people haven’t spent anywhere near enough time thinking about
these larger questions of what it is that we are building, and what the
implications are for the world.

But it is never too late to be curious. Each of us can choose to learn, to
read, to talk to people, to travel, and to engage intellectually and
ethically. I hope that we all do so—so that we can come to acknowledge the
full complexity and wonder of the world we live in, and be thoughtful in
designing the future of it.
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