
Lack of ethics education for computer programmers shocks expert - happy-go-lucky
https://www.stuff.co.nz/business/innovation/93629356/minimal-ethics-education-for-computer-programmers
======
rocqua
I had an ethics course. It was complete rubbish. It was shared with physics,
and mostly about how global warming was a bad thing. There was a little bit
about the philosophy of ethics, but there was nothing about general morality.
I don't think the manhattan project even came up.

Worse, the course is so universally dismissed by students, they had to make
attendance mandatory to get people to show up. Hence, no-one shows up with
anything resembling good-will.

In the end, it is the most universally despised course in physics and maths
that I know of. Heck, it made me care _less_ about global warming that's how
unsuccessful it was.

~~~
unityByFreedom
That's too bad. I enjoyed my college ethics course. The professor had been in
international business and worked with all kinds of countries whose people
expected bribes to do everyday business. The case studies were therefore super
interesting and thought provoking. It was taught pretty open ended and there
was never really a right or wrong answer. Your success depended on the
strength of your argument.

~~~
rocqua
The quality of such a course depends very much on the attitude of the
professor. In my case, it felt like the professor was glad to have another
audience to preach to. I imagine he is the only professor enthusiastic about
teaching this course.

~~~
unityByFreedom
Lol. Mine was enthusiastic too, due to his experience, and it was great.
_shrug_

------
doesnt_know
Stuff is like the Daily Mail of New Zealand, as a general rule you should
assume everything at that site is complete garbage. That being said, this
topic is definitely worth discussing.

I received my degree from a technical institute in NZ rather then one of the
major universities. For each level we were required to take a semester (6
months) long paper in Legal and Ethics.

I enjoyed them at the time and have also found the knowledge gained to be
extremely relevant in both my personal life and career.

The papers were quite broad and covered a range of topics including the
traditional idea of "ethics", copyright law/infringement, the NZ Privacy Act,
The Treaty of Waitangi [1]. We had an enthusiastic primary tutor and multiple
guest tutors from the industry (privacy officer, lawyer etc). Thinking back,
they were probably the best papers I took.

My day job now involves writing software that deals with the vast majority of
New Zealanders medical data. The ethical "grounding" and the knowledge gained
about the NZ Privacy Act in particular is quite literally at the front of my
mind with every commit. It makes me extremely nervous that our educational
institutes are shitting out software developers without any of this knowledge.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Waitangi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Waitangi)

~~~
spectre
That's a bit of a harsh comparison. Stuff is the online format of all of
Fairfax New Zealand's newspapers, some of which occasionally produce decent
stories. Stuff is mostly just shitty poorly researched journalism rather than
the Daily Mail's sensationalised tabloid bullshit.

------
voidhorse
I took a computer ethics philosophy course in college because I am into
computers/programming as a hobby and I am also very much into philosophy.

I was the only English major/Philosophy minor in the class. Every other
student was a computer science or IT systems major.

I was pretty shocked how lenient of an innate moral compass most possessed, I
don't expect folks to be Kantian justicars by default, but C'mon. The vast
majority seemed to align with the sort of base, selfish utilitarianism
pervasive in America that eventually leads to "if it isn't breaking some law
or as long as there's a loophole its good if it makes me money/benefits me or
if it benefits a sheer greater quantity of people regardless of how horrendous
the consequences are for those it doesn't benefit"

Nonetheless it was a fun class as we primarily looked at real life cases. As
with other industries, some of the shit people pull is baffling--guess that's
the result of years of delegating any ethics education whatsoever to the
home/parental responsibility or to religion. Another reason I think a
foundational education in philosophy should be mandatory in high schools
across the US, if not junior high, just as some foundational education in
computer science should also be mandatory these days.

~~~
fpig
I agree somewhat but I think it's a wider social problem - the society in
general not really looking down on this kind of behavior. Especially from
Americans, you often hear stuff like:

\- the company has a duty to make the most money possible legally for its
shareholders, so we shouldn't criticize them for doing something shitty as
long as it doesn't break the law

\- the employee can't be expected to lose their job over ethics, so no matter
how shitty what they did was, they get a pass

So when a company does something shitty, nobody did anything wrong, as long as
it was legal! The employees have to feed their children, the higher-ups have
to do what's best for shareholders, and the shareholders are too detached from
the company to blame.

Consider how sad it is that a massive amount of people literally holds the
view that a financial incentive makes otherwise unethical behavior OK. Nobody
will say that the fact that cheating on your wife is legal means it's ethical.
But as long as you are getting paid for doing something shitty, it's not seen
as unethical as long as it's perfectly legal by a lot of people.

When people _who are not even benefiting from them_ are defending shitty
actions, you can't expect better from the people who _are_ benefiting, as they
have an additional incentive to be unethical.

The idea that an economic incentive is an excuse to do something shitty needs
to go away.

~~~
voidhorse
Good point. I find this sort of attitude is really hard to root out too once
it's ingrained. I have one friend who I argue with all the time because,
coming from a family of small business owners himself, he is always rushing to
the defense of businesses and their less than venerable actions even when, as
you said, he himself doesn't directly benefit from said seediness. No matter
how many times I've tried to get him to see things from a more
humanistic/humanitarian side, that "best for business" bug in him seems
impossible to eradicate. It's like he's been indoctrinated to the point where
it's become as fundamental and ineradicable as a biological survival instinct.

People come to take certain values as constitutive of living a 'meaningful'
life and sleep on ever questioning them until it's far too late to really
challenge them any more, then pass them off, unquestioned and unanalyzed, to
their kids, and the rat race continues...

------
eropple
One of the most valuable CS courses I took in college was my ethics course.
Our honors college was pretty wide-ranging and rigorous, but CS students who
weren't in it (I think I was the only one at the time?) were mostly B.Sc.
students whose schedules were crammed with (largely superfluous) CS and math
courses that left very little time for stuff that's actually useful, like the
humanities. And because it was being taught by a CS prof, I went into it
expecting it to be awful and boring and trite. Instead it was taught by our
department head (who used to be at Watson) and Tom DeMarco (the author of
_Peopleware_ ) and it dug into not just ethics as considered by philosophers
(it was my first introduction to Alasdair MacIntyre, one that I've since
expanded on pretty extensively on my own) but the characteristics of human,
and not just computer, systems that lead people to do the wrong thing. It also
introduced me to the book _Customers who viewed Normal Accidents: Living with
High-Risk Technologies_ by Charles Perrow, which is so critical that I think
it's the closest thing to necessary reading that anyone working in any
technical field should be required to read.

I've heard a lot of people pooh-poohing the notion of ethics courses, but,
frankly, most of the people I've worked with would've benefited from the
exposure to thinking about their and others' actions outside of the most
immediately utilitarian, mine-mine-mine setting. The framework of analysis and
the vocabulary of ethics create a way to ask direct questions (and effectively
demand answers) from people who choose to act in one way or another. It's
valuable stuff.

~~~
unimpressive
>schedules were crammed with (largely superfluous) CS and math courses that
left very little time for stuff that's actually useful, like the humanities.

That's funny, because so far in my college education I would say precisely the
same thing except it'd be listing various superfluous humanities courses that
I could have lived without taking time away from the STEM I'm actually there
to study.

While I'm glad you got to experience the good stuff, I expect at most
institutions this would be just one more torturous thing to get marked off the
checklist.

~~~
eropple
So I just passed ten years since my freshman year of college, and I probably
would have said the same thing you're saying now, then, and been as misguided
about it as you are now. I went with a big puffed-up chest, sure that all I
needed was the piece of paper that said I already knew how to code, and I was
full of shit. Not because I didn't know how to code--I did, and at a fairly
high level--but because it's everything else that actually matters once you
graduate.

Unless you are a for-reals engineer--and that excludes somewhere north of 95%
of software folks, maybe north of 99%--very little of the "STEM [you're]
actually there to study" will apply when you leave college. If you're a CS
grad, you'll use a little of it (a little more in some, generally niche
fields), and it'll be useful, but by credit-hour it'll be the least
applicable, least useful part of your curriculum. On the other hand, you know
what is actually really useful for dealing with other people--the actual
_important things in your life_ \--on a everyday basis? Political science.
Microeconomics and the framework for understanding economic decisions. An
understanding of history through both history classes and through the lens of
literature so that you don't help repeat it. No bullshit--this is what makes
you, the generic you, capable and functional and useful to other people way
more than anything else. (It's usually the self-anointed "auto-didact" types
who leap all over the equally-self-anointed "hacker" label that are the most
tragically misled when they avoid this stuff in school. Getting rabbit-holed
or led to crankdom is no bueno.)

Universities are finishing schools for educated humans, not for tradeworkers.
If you're there to "learn STEM", you're there for the wrong purpose, and the
willingness of educational institutions to indulge in STEM hyperspecialization
is a tragedy in progress.

~~~
thehardsphere
Plus "STEM" as a category is inherently bullshit anyway. Not the individual
subjects in it, but the term as used to describe how you'll automatically have
better career success if you pick from that category, because of post-
secondary education magic.

------
mettamage
At my university they touched upon ethics (30 min. lecture). I also received
an ethics course at a business school. It helped me to form a vocabulary which
I appreciate, but unfortunately nothing else. My best ethics education is
having discussions with liberal arts students who care about societal
minorities and societal challenges.

I'd argue that subjects like: racism, feminism, discrimination, poverty and
similar topics confront a person to form an opinion and to empathise. I miss
that in the traditional ethics education that I have received.

Still, the traditional ethics education was much better than receiving
nothing. Especially people who go into fields like security should receive it.

~~~
jstewartmobile
This!

Dealing with the public, along with the occasional lefty PBS documentary,
really opened my eyes. If it weren't for those experiences, I'd probably have
ended up just as much of a whitebread, Breitbart, alt-right suburbanite as my
coworkers.

------
zmonx
Wow! One of the professors whom they interviewed and are quoting throughout
the article is Richard O'Keefe: The author of "The Craft of Prolog" and very
famous Prolog, Erlang and Smalltalk programmer in the respective communities
who even has his own Wikipedia page:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_O%27Keefe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_O%27Keefe)

His personal web page is also full of interesting texts about very diverse
topics, and well worth a look:

[http://www.cs.otago.ac.nz/staffpriv/ok/](http://www.cs.otago.ac.nz/staffpriv/ok/)

~~~
tacomonstrous
So I went and read the piece on whether mathematics is invented or discovered,
and found it to be surprisingly shallow. Hope this isn't an indication of his
other work (which I'm much less qualified to evaluate).

~~~
zmonx
Interesting. Personally, I found the observation about the pulsations of the
jellyfish quite insightful and a good and very short counterargument against
the quoted opinion.

There are other texts too on the page, which you may find better. I can only
say that in all the language communities Richard used to post and still posts
(notably Prolog and Erlang) he enjoys tremendous respect and is known for his
technical expertise on very diverse topics. He is definitely a top-notch
computer scientist and instructor who enjoys worldwide recognition in the
relevant circles.

------
anjbe
One of my favorite computer security talks is this one, given by Alex Stamos
in 2013:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eEeHTQHTSgE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eEeHTQHTSgE)

The whole talk is very worthwhile, and I recommend watching it.

Near the end of the talk, he essentially teaches a quick ethics class,
describing a few hypothetical situations and discussing what the right option
would be. At the end, he expresses how important it is to think about these
things in advance, because it’s a lot easier to make the morally right
decision if you’ve taken the time beforehand to consider what is morally
right.

Sometime after giving the talk, he joined Yahoo as CISO. There, he encountered
one of the exact scenarios he described at 45:00 in his talk. (You may
remember it, the Yahoo government spying story that came out last year:
[http://www.businessinsider.com/marissa-mayer-secret-yahoo-
se...](http://www.businessinsider.com/marissa-mayer-secret-yahoo-
security-2016-10)) For what it’s worth, he resigned quietly, exactly what he
said in the talk that he would do in that situation.

I guess that demonstrates that he had the right idea to consider ethical
dilemmas in advance. It certainly led me to think about issues I might
encounter in my work.

------
dgcoffman
My CS degree program required an ethics course. It was an immense waste of
time.

------
WheelsAtLarge
This article is about New Zealand's schools but This is absolutely correct in
the US too. We are seeing the results of programmers not understanding or
caring about what their code skills can do. Viruses, black hat hacking and
privacy invasion are partly due to people in the computer industry not
understanding or caring about ethics. None of my computer courses included
ethics as part of the lectures or reading. But I've taken business courses
that at least touch on ethics. And if you are planning to get a degree in
Law,Medicine,Genetics and business you will be taking courses that teach
ethics. You can even take complete courses on the subject to meet requirements
but in the computer sciences field it's not standard or required.

With the impact computer technology has on our society we definitely need to
start teaching it in schools.

~~~
jjoonathan
Is there any evidence that "teaching ethics" works? I wouldn't expect it to,
but I'd be happy to be wrong.

> Viruses, black hat hacking and privacy invasion are partly due to people in
> the computer industry not understanding or caring about ethics.

Yes, but the breakdown is .1% not understanding and 99.9% not caring (which
typically takes the form of rationalization).

~~~
WillPostForFood
You can have effective or ineffective teaching of ethics, but you can teach
it. We aren't born ethical creatures, it is a learned behavior.

~~~
jjoonathan
Kids learn at a very early age to pay attention to what people do over what
people say. "Do as I say, not as I do" is always going to be ineffective.

------
RRRA
Told my alma mater the same thing for a 5 years post graduation survey.

Mind you, I was on the free software club, for example, and ethic was always
there for some of us.

But I encourage everyone to write to the director of their Comp. sci. / Eng.
departement to ask them why is this field not deserving of ethical questioning
and/or what do they plan on doing to fix this.

I know lots of 20 yo might consider this a boring waste of time or not
understand the importance of this kind of education, but sadly that reaction
makes this an even more pressing issue to think about and would alone justify
the teaching of ethics in the context of this field's short history...

We're on the verge of big fights to preserve and improve the Internet's
openness & neutrality along accessible general purpose computing for all and
other basic foundations some are taking for granted while lobbies are fighting
against them.

But the future of free speech depends on this education and foreshadowing by
an educated population...

Not enough people are fighting back and older politicians need to be shown a
few things we might see coming before the rest of the population is able to
catch up.

(N.B. Same goes for many fields, but computing is now such an important and
direct part of the social tissue, got there so fast, that it's getting even
more important everyday.)

~~~
unityByFreedom
Thanks for your comment, it's good.

------
ckuhl
I'm a student currently majoring in business and in computer science and the
difference between classes at the two schools is stark. To maintain one of
its' business accreditations the school has to teach ethics in every single
business class. By comparison not once have I ever heard a thing about ethics
from any of my CS classes.

While I suppose you could argue that business students will be in positions of
power, it feels out of place when every other student is.

------
tnecniv
Since we're sharing experiences, I had a pretty interesting ethics course in
college. We were taught consequences, not morals, since trying to teach a
bunch of twenty-somethings morals that they may or may not need to exercise in
their careers was deemed impractical. The class mostly revolved around what
might happen in situations like using substandard materials, whistleblowing,
etc.

------
wolfgke
Everybody who is in the periphery of hacker (in the traditional meaning as in
"Hacker News" and "hacker space", not in the meaning used in media) probably
knows the hacker ethic that was originally formulated by Steven Levy:

>
> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_ethic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_ethic)

------
mto
I had to take a few of those courses but I doubt they make much sense. I felt
that you are mostly discussing "don't so bad things" all the time, captain
obvious stuff... There's the one type of people who care about things anyway
and the other type who don't. Can't imagine that the second type can be
convinced by course blabla.

------
open_bear
There is a code of ethics by NSPE (National Society of Professional
Engineers): [https://www.nspe.org/resources/ethics/code-
ethics](https://www.nspe.org/resources/ethics/code-ethics)

And as programmers are calling themselves engineers, they should adhere to
that code.

------
jstewartmobile
With "ethics" being just another word for the codified value-system of
"experts", in what bizzaro world would an "expert" not be "shocked"?

------
gravypod
My college required a CS specific ethics course. Everything the teacher said
had an obvious rebuttal and when I brought them up he would agree with me and
move on. It was at that time I picked up TIS-100 and played that in class
rather then sit there and be spoon fed the dribble.

Finished the first set of puzzles and the hidden one all in the first half of
the semester!

------
thehardsphere
Haven't read the article yet, but this headline is dumb.

If the subject of the headline is an expert, how could they be shocked? That
would imply they've hit a limit to the relevance of whatever their expertise
is.

~~~
thehardsphere
Now I've read the article. A better headline would be "One old man is
surprised that the world doesn't work the way he thinks it should."

------
golemotron
We can't have experts being shocked now, can we?

------
dukoid
Lack of ethics education for journalists (and politicians) shocks me...

Seriously: Put it in school, seems to be helpful (not only) for most other
professions.

~~~
thehardsphere
I don't know if it would help for those two. The problems are less about
knowing what's ethical behavior and more about disagreements regarding how the
world ought to be.

------
Camillo
> Auckland University computer science associate professor Ian Watson, said
> this was a problem because the mostly 20-something-year-old, caucasian males
> creating apps were making race and gender divides worse.

Oh, fuck you and the horse you rode in on. The tech industry has given
everyone in the world access to nearly all of humanity's knowledge. It has
enormously extended everyone's ability to communicate. It has made it easier
to learn, to solve problems, to find a job, to start a business, to talk and
trade and work with people all over the world.

For less than $150 [0], you can buy a computer that is infinitely more
powerful than the one I used to teach myself programming as a child, and gain
access to all of the above.

And we have to get dressed down by clowns who charge teenagers thousands of
dollars to fill their heads with garbage, leaving them saddled with debt and
with no usable skills? You have to be kidding me.

Make no mistake, these maneuvers are not at all about "ethics". They are about
a certain breed of parasites looking for new ways to latch onto a productive
industry.

That said, a basic liberal arts education (not taught by those clowns) would
certainly be useful to engineers. Or to anyone, really (I studied the history
of philosophy in high school, didn't you?). If nothing else, it would give
them the confidence to rebuff this kind of nonsense.

[0]:
[https://www.google.com/search?q=chromebook&oq=chromebook&aqs...](https://www.google.com/search?q=chromebook&oq=chromebook&aqs=chrome..69i57j0l5.1367j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8#tbs=vw:l,mr:1,cat:328,pdtr0:966482|966483,price:1,ppr_max:150,init_ar:SgVKAwjIAkoKUggI0v46INP-
Og%3D%3D&tbm=shop&q=chromebook)

~~~
dang
Would you please not rant like this on Hacker News?—regardless of how wrong
someone else is or how bad an article. You've done this before, and it lowers
the quality of discussion.

~~~
Camillo
Sorry about that. Please go ahead and remove the comment, I can't.

------
drivingmenuts
Where would one even begin to design an ethics course for programmers, though?

Our reach is pretty wide and on graduation, one person might go to work for an
open source company, requiring one set of ethics, and another might go to work
for a government agency, requiring a completely different set.

How do you design a curriculum that satisfies both sets of needs, unless you
just want to get totally political?

~~~
Jtsummers
You need to pair it with with specific topics on safety (preserving human
life, body, and property), privacy (a grayer area), and professional ethics
(responsibility to clients, self, society).

Practical discussions on why specific systems have failed and in what ways,
particularly where ethics and professional violations can be observed.

Classically, the Therac 25 as an example of failure at many levels. See Tragic
Design (a recently published O'Reilly book) for cases of bad design leading to
tragic or potentially tragic results. A number of them could be turned into
case studies in ethics. Examine why security breaches and privacy breaches
happen. What obligation do we as engineers have to the public, the customers,
and the clients acquiring the systems we make?

