Posted on 11/19/2017 9:37:09 PM PST by poinq
ne of the biggest puzzles about our current predicament with fake news and the weaponisation of social media is why the folks who built this technology are so taken aback by what has happened. Exhibit A is the founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, whose political education I recently chronicled. But he’s not alone. In fact I’d say he is quite representative of many of the biggest movers and shakers in the tech world. We have a burgeoning genre of “OMG, what have we done?” angst coming from former Facebook and Google employees who have begun to realise that the cool stuff they worked on might have had, well, antisocial consequences.
It never seems to have occurred to them that their engines could be used to deliver ideological and political messages
It never seems to have occurred to them that their advertising engines could also be used to deliver precisely targeted ideological and political messages to voters. Hence the obvious question: how could such smart people be so stupid? The cynical answer is they knew about the potential dark side all along and didn’t care, because to acknowledge it might have undermined the aforementioned licences to print money. Which is another way of saying that most tech leaders are sociopaths. Personally I think that’s unlikely, although among their number are some very peculiar characters: one thinks, for example, of Paypal co-founder Peter Thiel – Trump’s favourite techie; and Travis Kalanick, the founder of Uber.
So what else could explain the astonishing naivety of the tech crowd? My hunch is it has something to do with their educational backgrounds. Take the Google co-founders. Sergey Brin studied mathematics and computer science. His partner, Larry Page, studied engineering an...
(Excerpt) Read more at theguardian.com ...
The author is slightly more nuanced than that.
As a consequence, the new masters of our universe are people who are essentially only half-educated. They have had no exposure to the humanities or the social sciences, the academic disciplines that aim to provide some understanding of how society works, of history and of the roles that beliefs, philosophies, laws, norms, religion and customs play in the evolution of human culture.
He is correct that many tech giants focused on technology, and where he says without proper study of humanities, he should say: “character and spiritual formation.”
These people eat information from their staffs at a far greater rate than any college class can hope to produce. They may be pompous. They may be wrong. But college would not have made them more right, or more humble. And those at the Guardian have no perch of authority to ascertain truth or wisdom. Thats the problem with being elite. Its a degree you give yourself.
Right.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zOlRWg_iyWY
College drop-out. $873.60B market cap. What's not to like?
Not to worry, a nice pot of cash, dropped on the college, will earn them an honorary degree.
“And their success went to their heads.”
not just their success, but their own thinking, they think they know best when in reality they were not thinking fully about things.
not well rounded or properly grounded but like many people excel in one aspect of life and live shortchanged in other aspects and create problems for themselves or in this case for many others thru their weak spots. Had they had fuller rounding in growing up or ever in their lives they would do some thing to truly make amends, but that would require them to say they were wrong in a way and have grown to understand and beyond their flawed thinking/acting of before.
There is something to be said for a traditional liberal education that would have provided a better background in political totalitarianism and history.
However, with political totalitarianism itself having taken over most liberal arts departments at most colleges, that would not now be such a great solution.
Sadly Trump appears to have a similar bias when he defends filling his cabinet with billionaires and Goldman Sachs multimillionaires precisely because of their wealth.
Exactly! It’s precisely the modern Humanities courses that teach these creeps that they are omnipotent.
Of course, Oppenheimer was upset at the destruction created by The Bomb, so I’d say it’s pretty common for innovators to come to regret their innovations.
And you think that education, as opposed to credentialization and indoctrination, is what college is about these days?
I’ve met many people who are very successful and very well-rounded who have never set foot on a college campus.
As far as the people targeted in this article, they are multi-millionaires. I’m not. And neither is the writer.
There is something to be said for a traditional liberal education that would have provided a better background in political totalitarianism and history.
However, with political totalitarianism itself having taken over most liberal arts departments at most colleges, that would not now be such a great solution.
That's what scares me.
Except that colleges have not been teaching "character and spiritual formation" for decades now. What is labeled "humanities" now, is really "indoctrination into political correctness"
It never seems to have occurred to them that their advertising engines could also be used to deliver precisely targeted ideological and political messages to voters.
It seems like the author of this article is a little dim.
Lots of these consequences are fully intended—and have been heavily financed by the CIA, etc. Many employees have chosen not to look deeply at that.
The whole premise of the article is wrong, which is typical of the Guardian.
First, social media has enhanced public discourse by providing platforms for viewpoints that would have been repressed by traditional state-run media (and for all intents and purposes in regard to content, major American media is state-run).
Second, the assumption that if Mark Zukerberg or Steve Jobs had minored in Critical Gender Theory would have changed the applications of their inventions is nonsense. No amount of social engineering at the top was going to change what the end user was going to do with their product. And if they didn’t develop these platforms, someone else would have.
What the Guardian really wants, but didn’t print, is that they want EVERYONE to have a minor in Critical Gender Theory, and everyone can be good little ants in the communist ant colony.
Of course I don’t think that. Check out my posts here over the last 17 years. The bullshit indoctrination you properly refer to is so simple that the guys we are talking about learned it even though they did drop out.
You really ready to say that an actual engineering degree (for example) would have been a bad idea?
No but if you are a brilliant programmer, you still might not be able to pass math or English.
Depends on why you dropped out. These guys all dropped out because running the companies they’d created didn’t leave a lot of time for school. I went to college specifically to get the resume up and get a job, so while I didn’t graduate I don’t consider myself a dropout, I achieved the goal I had going in.
Of course he operates under the assumption that if they had finished college they would have seen the unintended consequences of what they invented and not invented it. Which is operating in strong ignorance of history, how technology gets used, and of course the fact that NOBODY (including him) saw this coming.
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