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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."
I have a CS degree. As part of that, I had to take quite a few humanities courses, do a lot of reading and research on other topics.
Sure there are some workers from trade schools where that kind of thing is not as prevalent, but it seems like most tech workers I've run into have also been to college (and often not even for CS degrees so they have an even wider range of education). So I'm not sure if there really is the problem being claimed...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
flunkies who can't pay for their basket weaving
Well, maybe basket weavers would be excellent at the creation of multi-threaded code?
It's not like they could be any worse than the people who are supposed to know computers.
If I had my way I'd cave all of their skulls in with a hammer
I'm sure to non-programmers that sounds violent but it's just the natural reaction to working on an old code base. Even (especially?) one you wrote...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Tech definitely needs more people with language skills when it comes to pasting the summary.
Tech definitely needs more people with language skills when it comes to pasting the summary.
If I had my way I'd cave all of their skulls in with a hammer and the world would be a better place.
Which is exactly what all the other worthless mentally defective autistic errors of nature like yourself will flood this thread with.
No manners, no social skills, no politeness or diplomacy, no empathy, no compassion. Pure sociopathy. You lot may be intellectually gifted, but from a human perspective, you are abominations who cause sorrow, pain, suffering and bloodshed wherever you go.
The very last thing Tech needs more of are gender studies majors.
Please stop trying to get intersectional loon-bags jobs where they can tell people what sexist, misogynist, homophobic, transphobic, blahblahblahblahblah pieces of shit they are and demanding they lower hiring standards to achieve a non-existent "perfect balance" of races, sexes and flat-out leftist-only ideology.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Many of those fields are critical. Psychology for one is HUGE.
In college, psychology is a dumping ground for people that can't figure out what else to major in. The most common job for psychology majors a year after graduation is "Uber driver". I don't think these people should be our guiding lights.
The premise of TFA is silly:
1. STEM degrees require a lot of humanities courses.
2. There is no objective evidence that STEM people are less ethical or empathic than humanities majors.
3. Many of the decisions TFA talks about aren't made by the engineering department.
That the leader of Mozilla is focusing on crap like this explains much about the state of their software.
It's quite clear that your AC parent has The Patience of Job compared to Gerald Butler (the OP) who called for mass genocide of people who major in "Sociology, Psychology, Management, HR, Political Science, Law, Philosophy, [and] History."
Of the two of them, you tell me who deserves to be voted off the island.
[Disclosure: I'm a STEM major. PhD in physics.]
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
What the world needs is more "Humanities" flunkies who can't pay for their basket weaving and feminist studies degrees
People who graduate with a 4-year humanities degree are basically just as employable and just as happy with their jobs as those with STEM degrees.
The other thing about getting yourself a humanities degree is that you aren't as easily socially engineered as someone who spends all his time with technical stuff and doesn't learn anything about people. The biggest suckers are those who are arrogant in their ignorance. I'm looking at you Gerald.
The head of theÂMozilla Foundation, Mitchell Baker, is warning that companies need to diversify
And that's where I stop reading. How about we just hire qualified people for a job and leave it at that? While I despise racists, mysoginists, etc. I've gotten to the point that any time I hear "diversity" I tune out because it's going to be bullshit. I also will not work for any company that has anyone with that word in their title. If that position is needed, then there's already something really wrong. Yes, there are some assholes in the world, but why would you want to force them to hire someone they are going to not want. I've had friends who were hired because of this kind of crap. And even though they were qualified, they were miserable. I know that Billy Bob Joe Jim's Klan Sheet company would lynch me on sight if they could, so I sure as hell don't want to work for him because he was forced to hire me. Do you think most white tech geeks would feel comfortable being hired to work in the ghetto because we need more white folks there? We need more fat old white men working as servers at Hooters too. There also aren't enough Asian rappers. And damnit, where are all of the quadraplegic trapeze artists.
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.
While Popper's Falsification rubric for determining what is scientific isn't particularly sophisticated, the idea that there can be a hypothetical experimental result that would disprove a hypothesis is at the core of STEM fields.
The problem in the recent humanities fields is that the core tenants of most disciplines are constructed in such a way as to be undisprovable. The moment you're learning things where it is impossible to construct a research project to disprove those things, you've moved into the realm of ideology.
While there's probably reasons why certain companies want their workers to unquestioningly accept whatever set of assumptions about the universe that the company wants to promote, the businesses that are ultimately successful are the ones that have workers that have functional bullshit detectors. And while science is far from perfect, the epistemological basis of science involves the eventual excision of bullshit hypotheses.
Don't know where you work, but my company has people with humanities degrees who picked up technical skills after they graduated.
Humanities majors can learn to perform well at technical skills. I see no reason why STEM majors can't do the reverse.
To get a degree of any kind, you must learn how to think and how to self-educate. That sets you up for success across many fields.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
The translation is there's a balance - you don't want your engineers to be incapable of empathy or ignorant of history, in the sense of not caring about hurting people.
"Old man yells at systemd"
It's not the tech people that are the problem. It's the fuckwit sociopaths in management that have forced thing to be the way they are.
Hate to break this to you, but some of those "fuckwit sociopaths" have STEM degrees.
You need technical skills to develop technology. And you need human skills to convey what you have developed to other humans. Including management.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
Tech needs executives who have a set of morals, and who listen to and trust their STEM people when they wave a red flag, rather than a bunch of sales guys who'd sell their grandmother for a quick buck.
Seen it too many times to count. "Just get it shipped" trumps all other concerns.
I have degrees in both camps, Science (Physics, Computing) and Humanities (Public Policy).
I have seen and been involved in the thought processes and the implicit value hierarchies that underlie both types of thinking.
The utterances of Ms Baker need to be exposed and refuted immediately. They are dangerous and sociopathic.
The attack on science by the current marxist inspired SJWs threatens us with a return to the dark ages.
Read some history.
Read "A Canticle for Liebowitz"
For the love of science and our civilization, resist this.
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.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
How about....and this is just a thought, just spitballing here, instead of taking donations from people that actually want you to make a DECENT BROWSER and spending it on virtue signaling how woke you are, how about using it to....oh I don't know...making an actual browser people want to use instead of a really cheap shitty Chrome ripoff?
But hey keep on blowing money to show how virtuous you are, cuz "get woke go broke" isn't a thing, that's fine because this user that actually used to hand out your browser waaay back when it was a Suite, moved on to PaleMoon. Oh and hey, my browser extensions actually work there, giving me an actual reason to use it over Chrome! Huh wadda ya know, a browser that actually has real reasons to use it over the big two instead of just being a piss poor copy of the other guy...wow, maybe you should think about that, maybe when you aren't giving money to Antifa?
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Here is an incomplete list of study fields with obvious blind spots:
Psychology - around half their studies do not replicate, still cannot explain basic phenomena of daily life, increasingly infused with politics, hindered by ethics (not a bad thing, but a fact) to conduct important research
Economics - reductionist approach to humans, has no concept of basic facts of human life (e.g. altruism), in the real world economists are as often wrong as they are right, mass blindness to black swans, has led us into the financial crisis
Gender studies and its relatives - has taken its own subject and turned it into a mixture of politics, bullshit bingo and sanctuary for rejects. Fundamentally flawed and unscientific to the core.
No, thanks. We don't need any of these people anywhere. Most of them are already doing enough damage as they are. "Diversity" is a bullshit term when it is enforced, because it is becoming the exact thing that it pretends to combat - exclusion. "sorry, we already have three black people, we need an asian person now". And the rallying cry of "needs more diversity" has become a synonym for "we are jealous that something in the real world actually works without us being involved".
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
My experience in the tech field is that companies constantly pressure their employees for more productivity, and that everyone can be moral. You don't need a degree in philosophy or psychology to be caring and aware of what is right/good...just as you don't need a computer science degree to program.
Oh, and it wouldn't hurt to punish people who are immoral. Just like it would help to do the same in politics.
Psychologists can actually help people, though I suspect it's the thin end of the bell curve of that crowd. And killing all the lawyers never solves anything - not saying don't do it, just that we'll inevitably need a new crop of them.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Hey, now, we don't need genocide. We just need an arc ...
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
The problem for those guys isn't the STEM degree - they were probably OK people when they were younger. Then they got MBAs.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Psychology majors often find employment in marketing, social engineering/networking, project management, politics, lobbying and other jobs were spending 4-8 years learning how to push somebody's buttons pays off. Many of them do a find job of manipulating techies into working long hours for low pay.
Mozilla is hurting because browsers are incredibly complex beasts and they don't have nearly as much money as they used to. As a techy you'd think you'd know this.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Cupcake bakeries need to hire more employees with degrees in astrophysics, bringing their much-needed understanding of electron degeneracy pressure in white dwarfs and pair-instability supernovae to the cupcake industry.
Afternoon child daycare centers need to hire more trained welding technicians, who understand when to use arc or gas welders depending on the material used and the appropriate flux needed for strong joints in compressive or tensile loads in bridges, skyscrapers and submarines. This is vital for the children's well-being.
Most importantly, symphony orchestras (whether public or privately-managed) need to get on the bandwagon (as it were) and hire more software engineers adept in low-level microcontroller coding in assembly language, supplemented with theory-oriented CS graduates who can develop better sorting algorithms for the violin section.
"We had to destroy the village in order to save it"? Really? That's all you can come up with?
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
The humanities are overwhelmingly liberal, as they should be. Free speech, free inquiry, and opposition to the supposed divine right of kings and popes is anathema.
"Liberal" is only the same as "left" if you're in the Estates General. Similarly, "libertarian" is not "conservative" is not "fascist".
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That list reads like a catalogue of personal failings
"I have no social skills so can't see the value of even thinking about social issues.
I have no no management skills so can't understand the need to manage projects and enterprises.
I'm post-truth so think all politics are a waste of time."
Of course history isn't worth studying, there is nothing we can learn from the past, right?
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
There are a lot of people who call themselves "liberal" and "conservative" who aren't.
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Gerald Butler (the OP) who called for mass genocide of people who major in "Sociology, Psychology, Management, HR, Political Science, Law, Philosophy, [and] History
They'll just be killed off by the crushing weight of their student loans (I'm looking at psychology, philosophy, and history here specifically). Those majors should at least somehow require people to learn how to spend their money better. One of the RAs from the dorms I was in was a history major and she's always talking about how she's going to be paying her loans for the next 30-40 years. She also only pays the minimum amount, even though she can afford more. And then she decided to go back to further her education in history....
The psychology one just reminds me of my first roommate. He came for mechanical engineering, but was not very smart. He was also a borderline alcoholic with huge anger issues. When he failed every class his first semester... he switched to psychology. I always envisioned him eventually trying to act as a therapist, but ending up erupting into screaming fits at his patients. (psychology didn't work out for him)
"Psychologists can actually help people, though I suspect it's the thin end of the bell curve of that crowd."
There's probably a problem in the capitalist way future graduates are allowed to sign in instead of their intellectual requirements: you are too idiot for an engineering? you still can enroll on Psychology or History, so no wonder the average Psychologist or Historian ends up being too stupid... for anything of real value.
Traditional humanities majors can. Gender studies majors can't
There's a big difference between a rational proto-science (heck, logic originated from philosophy!), quasi-science or even a sane description of something inherently non-scientific (like literature) -- and Orvellian doublethink that teaches people something contrary to obvious observation.
The former group teaches students a way of thinking. The latter group is religion.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Psychologists can actually help people, though I suspect it's the thin end of the bell curve of that crowd. And killing all the lawyers never solves anything - not saying don't do it, just that we'll inevitably need a new crop of them.
That's where corporate America took a hard turn. When insurance companies decided to stop paying for mental health visits, or revising co-pays to make using insurance for psychology services expensive, an entire industry got turned on its head and psychologists were out of work. They turned their target on corporate America and made a compelling case for why their behavioral analysis abilities would be a force multiplier to increasing the success rate of successful hiring, and boom - HR departments became...well, look at what they have evolved into today.
Like attracts like, and like promotes like. Adding a wave of soft science and psychologists didn't fix that - it just changed the paradigm of what was liked.
Tech doesn't need more humanities majors. Tech needs more well rounded people.
All of them. Now how about a comment with more depth than a political snipe which is so broad it can be countered with examples from every side of the political spectrum.
How 'bout _neither_.
If someone constructs a false dichotomy between Stalin and Hitler, just kick HIM in the balls.
The real problem is 'Stalin' isn't as socially unacceptable as 'Hitler'. He should be. Young Communists _should_ be treated just like young Nazis. WTF is wrong in that family to start.
Finally the comparison should be between the crazed, bad shot, Bernie bro with an rifle at a softball game vs. the Nazi 'playing death race'. Your comparison is fairly called cherry picking.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Free speech which does not allow hate speech is not free speech, freedom of association which does not allow discrimination is not freedom of association.
Language evolves, to use liberal without a modern or classical qualifier in this day and age is obtuse or naive. The educators in the humanities are overwhelmingly modern liberals.
Who do you think is defending those old slave-era statues? You pretty much repeated Trump's defense of the neo-nazi wing of the GOP. "Some good people there". It would be a joke if it wasn't so serious. Those are really, really bad apples. They've been vocally defended by the guy in the Oval office, by most of the GOP, and now by you. You degrade yourself defending those people.
Proceed to tear down any statue that offends you or anyone else.
Then burn history books, works of art, buildings, bridges, and anything else that you think must be purged.
Just remember, it always ends badly.