
Computing belongs within the social sciences - kbit
https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2020/8/246368-why-computing-belongs-within-the-social-sciences/fulltext
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sharpneli
Considering that Social Sciences are in midst of a replication crisis with no
end in sight I'm not that sure they have anything useful to offer, except
perhaps how to best do p-hacking to get results that one wants.

The claim that computing is a social science because it has big effect on
society is simply bollocks (This was explicitly claimed in the article, heck
it had a subtitle "Why Computing Is a Social Science").

The effects of computing to society definitely is social science. But social
sciences have exactly zero to offer on how to, as an example, define an upper
bound for certain algorithm.

Just as physics has massive impact on the world the actual act of doing
physics had nothing to do with social sciences. How on earth does social
sciences help me to solve some particularily nasty partial differential
equation? How the results are used are yet again part of social sciences as
that talks about what happens to society, but the actual physics is completely
out of it.

And as I said at the start, the track record of Social Sciences is not too
good. I'm quite doubtful they can even say anything valid on the actual
matters that fall under it.

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LargoLasskhyfv
Considering that Computer Sciences are in a software crisis since the 70ies,
with no end in sight I'm not that sure they have anything useful to offer,
except bloat, sidechannel attacks, cargo culting and enabling of BS-jobs,
which they promised to eliminate.

I really don't get your point.

~~~
sharpneli
We are having conversation with the engineering result from applying CS and
physics.

Seems to work relatively well.

~~~
LargoLasskhyfv
Could also be said about (some) social sciences (in some contexts).

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tzs
Do CS students not already take social sciences classes as part of the general
degree requirements at their university?

At MIT, every undergraduate is required to eight courses in arts, humanities,
or social sciences. That works out to taking one arts, humanities, or social
science class per semester. Specifically, you have to take one from art, one
from humanities, and one from social science. You also have to pick a
particular field and take a series of courses in that field.

Caltech is similar, but not quite as structure. Every undergraduate must take
36 units of humanities (Caltech has a different unit scale than most others--
one term of most classes earns you 9 units, and there are 3 terms per academic
year) , 36 units of social science, and 36 units of humanities or social
sciences.

For someone who took the minimum number of units possible to get a CS degree
at Caltech, 22% of their coursework would be in humanities or social sciences.
20% for someone who took the average CS course load.

I'd just assumed that it was like that at most other schools too.

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dgb23
I agree that there should be room for ethics but the recommendations in the
article seem extreme and lacking.

Especially the "Web development" example in section 2 seems to be quite off.
In fact the counterargument for section 2 seems to be very convincing!

CS/IT is such a broad, rapidly progressing field that you cannot be prepared
_enough_ on technical subjects.

As someone who has no formal CS education I'm impacted immensely by this. I
don't only need to keep up with current technology (mostly in my free time)
but also often had to catch up on topics that my peers learned in University.

I'm not complaining though. I love it. But to say that there is _easily_
enough room for additional, non-technical/mathematical subjects seems to be
quite unrealistic! Especially if we look at the hiring practices of our
industry. Apparently having a degree is not nearly enough even from a
technical standpoint.

~~~
grardb
I majored in CS in college, and I would say there is actually _easily_ enough
room for additional, non-technical/mathematical subjects in the curriculum.

As part of my major, I was required to take: two calculus courses, two physics
(or chemistry–but almost nobody did) courses, linear algebra, and two discrete
math courses. I can confidently say that aside from some very basic physics
from the first of the two classes, I have used absolutely none of the
knowledge in any of those courses in my life, and if we are just talking about
my career (mostly working on Etsy and Trello), then I haven't even used the
physics. The rest, I have effectively forgotten completely.

Some of my CS electives also proved not to be that useful for much; for
example, my courses on computer graphics, compilers, and operating systems. I
retain some basic knowledge from those courses which sometimes come in handy
for quickly understanding tangentially-related concepts, but definitely
nothing to spend entire semesters on.

Of course, I'm not arguing that _nobody_ who studies computer science should
learn the things I've listed, but it seems silly to me to make them
_required_. I took both my calculus and physics courses during my first year
of college, and by my third year, I had probably forgotten almost 100% of it.
In terms of my career trajectory, and even in terms of the value of
knowledge/education for the sake of being knowledgable/educated, it was a
complete waste of my time and money.

Often times, I wish I was able to learn a wider variety of things in college.

I think the bigger issue here is that computer science is so tightly coupled
with software engineering. I hope that as time goes on, we get better at
separating the disciplines in the same way that we've separated other sciences
from engineering (e.g. chemistry vs chemical engineering, physics vs
mechanical/civil engineering, etc.).

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jonnypotty
I like the idea that we should make the fact that it isn't real science
concrete so people know what they're getting into.

Allying it with the bit of universities that have abandoned any idea of the
value of ideas being linked to actual evidence though is a terrible idea.

Make it part of the engineering department, those guys get the meeting place
between a technical discipline and something that has to actually exist in the
real world.

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Animats
No, much of computing belongs in the business school, communications
department. Facebook, Google, Twitter, and all the ad-supported "tech"
companies are part of the advertising industry. Put all the application-
related courses for low-level computer science over there. Web and app
development go there.

Classic hardcore CS, where people make distributed databases, new algorithms,
and robot control systems, worry about proof of correctness, and study
automata theory, is part of mathematics.

Machine learning is a branch of statistics.

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Nasrudith
Looks like STEMvy acting up again - trouble with jobs in sector again? My mind
may be frayed cynical but this bears resemblence to the same old bullshit of
previous decades of academics politics; trying to bully their way onto the
gravytrain while calling it "interdisciplinary" but only adding one STEM
course at best while treating them as the well of all evils in the world,
something they should certainly know better than given evil long predates the
accused. The "Science wars" for one. I guess it is time for shitty remakes
again there too.

Seriously, there is the same pattern of vague claims to benefits, one-sided
elective requirements while poisoning the well to call anyone who disagrees
with them close-minded and evil. Sadly/fortunately interdisciplinary never
explicitly teaches this sort of bullshitting. Sadly because it could be useful
in these fights, fortunately because we are all better off with a minimium of
this crap wasting our lives.

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booleandilemma
Maybe physics belongs there too. I mean hey, physicists created the atom bomb.

~~~
brodouevencode
Ha, I was going to make this exact argument. The flip side of this is that it
cost Zuck almost nothing to get Facebook up and running with users using it.
To build any type of nuclear weapon I assume that would cost millions to
billions, thereby making the barrier to entry rather high.

That is not an endorsement of the authors proposal however. I would like to
see it go the other way: treat it more like an engineering discipline and as
part of that students would be required to attend the engineer ethics course
that (almost) all engineering curriculums have.

But even admittedly that's not seeing the forest for the trees. The
questionable systems that are built that are the result of many people working
willingly together across a variety of disciplines (to the author's suggestion
even). I'm not so sure making computing more multi-disciplinary is the right
answer because in fact and in practice it's already that way.

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AnimalMuppet
By the same argument, chemical engineering belongs with biology, because the
chemicals produced (and their byproducts) impact biological systems. Which is
true, but it still doesn't mean that the two disciplines should be lumped
together.

Computing may need more exposure to social sciences, but it absolutely does
_not_ belong within the social sciences. (More accurately, product management
or program management needs more exposure to the social sciences - those who
decide what programs are going to _do_ and how they're going to interact with
people and society. Computing in general - algorithms, programming techniques,
and so on - doesn't even need that.)

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yarrel
I see that the humanities are continuing with their unexamined sense of
entitlement to colonize other disciplines.

This obsession with teaching (tech) workers ethics is a bourgeois pastoral
fantasy.

Someone needs to read some Foucault.

~~~
kbit
A "bourgeois pastoral fantasy"? Can you expand on that?

Shouldn't engineers who design social media algorithms have some basic
knowledge of social dynamics and psychology?

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acituan
> Shouldn't engineers who design social media algorithms have some basic
> knowledge of social dynamics and psychology?

Firstly, let’s not reduce decision making to something only software engineers
do because typically product managers have huge, even the most, responsibility
on product decisions.

Secondly, what makes you think they (incl. engineers) don’t have that basic
knowledge? Most software people I know are autodidacts at heart and are
interested in social domains just as much. These people are also fed the _warm
data_ from their social software systems and can robustly hypothesise on them
(they have to) because features based on those hypotheses is applied back to
real life next quarter.

If they are following dark patterns, it is not for lack of knowledge on social
dynamics or psychology, but because they would follow normativities of growth
and engagement rather than social good.

Looking to social sciences, there seems to be a huge variability on how
reputable and reliable their knowledge making machinery nowadays works. Hoax
paper crises demonstrated that there are at least some weak spots that are
very gameable.

I don’t mean this as an insult to social sciences but we could also say if
engineers attended church or participated in any religious or spiritual
practice to deepen their moral understandings it could be a force of good, but
we can’t _prescribe_ that exposure because it would be too ideological. I fear
the same might be the motivation here.

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verdverm
Wow, ACM is taking a reputability hit for this piece. Who's editing that
publication now?

If it were how the social sciences need to embrace computing, that would be a
legitimate claim from my experience at University.

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travisoneill1
That's impractical. The social "science" students would never be able to pass
classes that involve real math.

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aruss
Take it from a former mathematician, the computer "science" students wouldn't
either.

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brodouevencode
Fun fact: the author has his PhD/MA in political science. BSc in computer
science.

