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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
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!!!
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.
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.
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