{"id":60296,"date":"2017-08-04T05:15:59","date_gmt":"2017-08-04T09:15:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/danielschristian.com\/learning-ecosystems\/?p=60296"},"modified":"2017-08-04T11:04:29","modified_gmt":"2017-08-04T15:04:29","slug":"a-leading-silicon-valley-engineer-explains-why-every-tech-worker-needs-a-humanities-education-chou","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/danielschristian.com\/learning-ecosystems\/2017\/08\/04\/a-leading-silicon-valley-engineer-explains-why-every-tech-worker-needs-a-humanities-education-chou\/","title":{"rendered":"A leading Silicon Valley engineer explains why every tech worker needs a humanities education [Chou]"},"content":{"rendered":"

A leading Silicon Valley engineer explains why every tech worker needs a humanities education<\/strong><\/a> — from qz.com by Tracy Chou<\/p>\n

Excerpts:<\/em><\/p>\n

I was no longer operating in a world circumscribed by lesson plans, problem sets and programming assignments, and intended course outcomes. I also wasn\u2019t coding to specs, because there were no specs. As my teammates and I were building the product, we were also simultaneously defining what it should be, whom it would serve, what behaviors we wanted to incentivize amongst our users, what kind of community it would become, and what kind of value we hoped to create in the world.<\/p>\n

I still loved immersing myself in code and falling into a state of flow\u2014those hours-long intensive coding sessions where I could put everything else aside and focus solely on the engineering tasks at hand. But I also came to realize that such disengagement from reality and societal context could only be temporary.
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\nAt Quora, and later at Pinterest, I also worked on the algorithms powering their respective homefeeds: the streams of content presented to users upon initial login, the default views we pushed to users. It seems simple enough to want to show users \u201cgood\u201d content when they open up an app. But what makes for good content? Is the goal to help users to discover new ideas and expand their intellectual and creative horizons? To show them exactly the sort of content that they know they already like? Or, most easily measurable, to show them the content they\u2019re most likely to click on and share, and that will make them spend the most time on the service?<\/p>\n

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Ruefully\u2014and with some embarrassment at my younger self\u2019s condescending attitude toward the humanities\u2014I now wish that I had strived for a proper liberal arts education. That I\u2019d learned how to think critically about the world we live in and how to engage with it. That I\u2019d absorbed lessons about how to identify and interrogate privilege, power structures, structural inequality, and injustice. That I\u2019d had opportunities to debate my peers and develop informed opinions on philosophy and morality. And even more than all of that, I wish I\u2019d even realized that these were worthwhile thoughts to fill my mind with\u2014that all of my engineering work would be contextualized by such subjects.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

It worries me that so many of the builders of technology today are people like me; people haven\u2019t spent anywhere near enough time thinking about these larger questions of what it is that we are building, and what the implications are for the world.<\/strong><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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Also see:<\/span><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

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Why We Need the Liberal Arts in Technology’s Age of Distraction<\/strong> <\/a>— from time.com by Tim Bajarin<\/p>\n

Excerpt:<\/em><\/p>\n

In a recent Harvard Business Review<\/em> piece titled “Liberal Arts in the Data Age,”<\/a> author JM Olejarz writes about the importance of reconnecting a lateral, liberal arts mindset with the sort of rote engineering approach that can lead to myopic creativity. Today’s engineers have been so focused on creating new technologies that their short term goals risk obscuring unintended longterm outcomes. While a few companies, say Intel, are forward-thinking enough to include ethics professionals on staff, they remain exceptions. At this point all tech companies serious about ethical grounding need to be hiring folks with backgrounds in areas like anthropology, psychology and philosophy.<\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A leading Silicon Valley engineer explains why every tech worker needs a humanities education — from qz.com by Tracy Chou Excerpts: I was no longer operating in a world circumscribed by lesson plans, problem sets and programming assignments, and intended course outcomes. I also wasn\u2019t coding to specs, because there were no specs. As my […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[174,45,403,74,79,353,196,204,480,20,11,299],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-60296","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-career-development","category-computer-science","category-ethics","category-leadership","category-liberal-arts","category-moralsvalues","category-productivity-tips-and-tricks","category-programming","category-society","category-strategy","category-vision-possibilities","category-workplace"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/danielschristian.com\/learning-ecosystems\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60296","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/danielschristian.com\/learning-ecosystems\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/danielschristian.com\/learning-ecosystems\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danielschristian.com\/learning-ecosystems\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danielschristian.com\/learning-ecosystems\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=60296"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/danielschristian.com\/learning-ecosystems\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60296\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":60305,"href":"http:\/\/danielschristian.com\/learning-ecosystems\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60296\/revisions\/60305"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/danielschristian.com\/learning-ecosystems\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=60296"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danielschristian.com\/learning-ecosystems\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=60296"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danielschristian.com\/learning-ecosystems\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=60296"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}