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Tech Suffers From Lack of Humanities, Says Mozilla Head (theguardian.com)
The head of the Mozilla Foundation, Mitchell Baker, is warning that companies need to diversify their hiring practices to include more people from backgrounds in philosophy and psychology if they want to tackle the problem of misinformation online. He also "warned that hiring employees who mainly come from Stem -- science, technology, engineering and maths -- will produce a new generation of technologists with the same blindspots as those who are currently in charge, a move that will 'come back to bite us,'" reports the Guardian. From the report: "Stem is a necessity, and educating more people in Stem topics clearly critical," Baker told the Guardian. "Every student of today needs some higher level of literacy across the Stem bases. "But one thing that's happened in 2018 is that we've looked at the platforms, and the thinking behind the platforms, and the lack of focus on impact or result. It crystallized for me that if we have Stem education without the humanities, or without ethics, or without understanding human behavior, then we are intentionally building the next generation of technologists who have not even the framework or the education or vocabulary to think about the relationship of Stem to society or humans or life."
"Stem is a necessity, and educating more people in Stem topics clearly critical," Baker told the Guardian. "Every student of today needs some higher level of literacy across the Stem bases. "But one thing that's happened in 2018 is that we've looked at the platforms, and the thinking behind the platforms, and the lack of focus on impact or result. It crystallized for me that if we have Stem education without the humanities, or without ethics, or without understanding human behavior, then we are intentionally building the next generation of technologists who have not even the framework or the education or vocabulary to think about the relationship of Stem to society or humans or life."
"Stem is a necessity, and educating more people in Stem topics clearly critical," Baker told the Guardian. "Every student of today needs some higher level of literacy across the Stem bases. "But one thing that's happened in 2018 is that we've looked at the platforms, and the thinking behind the platforms, and the lack of focus on impact or result. It crystallized for me that if we have Stem education without the humanities, or without ethics, or without understanding human behavior, then we are intentionally building the next generation of technologists who have not even the framework or the education or vocabulary to think about the relationship of Stem to society or humans or life."
Speaking of false news, could we at least get a few details correct. More about Mitchell at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I expect Cowboy Neil to keep everything on Slashdot 100% true news you can use.
A great deal of modern humanities teaching is deliberately obfuscated pretentious bullshit. A person with a logical mind, especially one trained to rigorously solve technical problems, has a difficult time with such convoluted garbage.
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That's all well and good, except the attacks on science and reason mostly come from the right.
She wasn't even supposed to have the job. She literally chased out the chosen next-in-line CEO Brendan Eich (creator of JavaScript) by getting a bunch of her SJW staff to physically keep him out of the building and threaten him. Look it up *and note how a lot of news didn't cover it at all*. There's a personal account from him floating around too.
Here's hoping Brave development progresses to the point we can all just forget about FireFox and Mozilla at some point in the near future.
> Leaving aside that many "hard" sciences have the same reproduction problem (e.g. climate science)
Yep, all this technology we have based on "Hard Science" only works randomly. It's like magic. The same magic that "Soft Sciences" rely upon.
Laughable.
Things like CBT, you don't evaluate as a single sample. You look at statistical bodies and meta studies of those "hard science" studies (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3584580/).
It's efficacy is shown to have significance. In other words, it's not a sure fire cure, or working in even a majority of cases, but has an effect well above a lack of intervention of simple conversation.
So, it comes down to "It'll help some people in some circumstances". Which is fine. It's one tool in an arsenal of tools that should be tried, and discarded if it doesn't work in that case.
Where did you get your concept of it not working by reproducing, and that it's not able to be examined or evaluated by "hard science"? Because whatever source you got it from is provably wrong.
Johnathan Haidt talks about this. Conservatives have a 5 spectrum axis of values. Leftists have only 2, and of the 2 one will always will over the other: harm reduction. The Left literally sees the world in black and white. While conservatives see the world in full color.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!