The point of teaching this isn't to assert a "correct" politics, but to at least give students tools to spot, and if necessary, change the political valence of a feature, spot when a feature might cause unintended harm, and the tools to find out about them at least, if not actively mitigate them
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The most likely outcome when a programmer spots the political valence of a feature is to be told "yes, we want that, do it" when they bring it up.
They’re saying one should never include politics, one some kind of philosophical grounds. That’s a very different objection!
Designing a UI for example.
Is it keyboard accessible?
Is it usable with a screen reader?
High contrast mode?
Translations?
A lot of seemingly minor decisions are political determining who you include and who you exclude
I think this quote summarizes the concept of "ethics" in comp sci .. at least from people in my generation:
Everything _other_ is “political”.
Still drives me mad even profs also don’t seem to know what the word actually means. Sigh.
#enshittificationofknowledge
Sure looks like this boils down to “my choices are just common sense, other people’s choice that I don’t agree with are political.”
I worked at a health insurer, where I helped build a "cardiac disease detector AI", in which me and the doctors in it poisoned the data so deeply that the whole project was scraped.
I then worked in a telehealth company where I purposefully made it impossible to read patient's trends.
So the datalake was DEEPLY anonimised, and trying to extract any trends from there would require rebuilding all the pipelines