[ExI] brave new world in education

[William Flynn Wallace]

On Wed, Jun 28, 2017 at 3:02 PM, Dave Sill <sparge at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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.
> ​--------
>

​I think that in addition to being splendidly written, in some ways it is
the best thing I have seen since I joined.  It ought to be published
somewhere.  bill w​

> ​
>
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