Thread by @jonst0kes

So I read this paper, & there's an entire subsection dedicated to a new supposed new (problematic) type of figure — the Ethics Unicorn. But no example of such a person, or even such thinking, is given. I have never encountered this. It seems like folklore.

https://twitter.com/math_rachel/status/1374553383856574469

I mean, maybe I am not in trendy enough tech circles? Maybe some of the engineers at the NYT who have a lot of opinions about what the edit staff should & shouldn't be publishing would fall into this category?

At any rate, the lone citation there is to an explainer on the "full-stack unicorn developer." This Ethics Unicorn character is left to the imagination, I guess.

Two other things I found odd: the lack of cross-disciplinary representation in the authorship of a paper about how it's bad that disciplines are siloed, & the generally impenetrable, unreadable academic prose style of a paper on "pedagogy."

In general I think the paper's point about the current engineering ethics approach — which was also how I was trained in undergrad, & involves trying to convince individual engineers to do the moral thing & fall on their sword to prevent harm — is bad.

Asking individual engineers to serve as a kind of last line of defense against cost-cutting, optimizations, and the profit motive is to basically give up.

But most of this paper is a lot of words to say that techbros are SO LAME, and interdisciplinary work is better than siloed work, and The System must be challenged.

And again, I don't know how you publish a paper with an actual subheading dedicated to a character that you have not a single example of, or any example of this type of thinking. How does that happen?

I think they expect that everyone will be afraid to push back on this, & that all the responses will be claps and cheers. And they are probably right. Probably no peer of theirs will attempt an actual takedown of this stuff.