13 chunks · 13 episodes
My degree is in Social Studies. I have a minor in Computer Science. It was almost enough credits to be a dual major, but technically it's a minor. Earlier in my career the CS felt more useful. But now with the rise o...
...s a superficial version that is dead inside, a zombie, shambling along, undead. Computer Science is the maximal version of this mindset. Humanities is where you learn to soak in the indirect effects even though they can't be measured and quantize...
Computer Science was used to build LLMs. But Computer Science can't tell us how to understand LLMs.
...collaboration, and meaning? Those are all phenomena completely invisible to the Computer Science lens. Today only technologists can build technology. Technologists tend to mainly use the computer science lens.
...ng with tech's indirect effects, not ignoring them. Using lenses in addition to Computer Science to reason about the indirect effects and lean into ones that are positive. Tech that helps me be better. Tech that helps me align my actions with my ...
...an enlightened approach to technology. A worldview that embraces more than just Computer Science [qt]as a lens.[qu][qv] A worldview where creators grapple with the indirect effects of their actions, and optimize for a net positive impact on socie...
...y to automate tedious tasks in their lives with computers. You shouldn't need a computer science degree or programming bootcamp in order to get computers to do extremely specific tasks for you. If vibe coding grants millions of new people the abi...
...or understanding LLMs. Most tech is understood best with a straightforward math/computer science frame. But LLMs are a cultural technology. They are best understood through the lens of culture and society, not how they work. The chatbot UI is wha...
Abstraction is unreasonably effective in the realm of Computer Science. Abstraction gives compounding leverage. Each additional layer gives a multiplicative factor of leverage. Abstraction is what allows a unit of code t...
...ems that yield to it. The statement "Problems that can't be understood with the computer science lens either are unimportant or unknowable" is obviously absurd... but replace computer science with "reductionist" and it's also absurd, just slightl...
...redict what indirect effects your actions might cause, because it's unknowable. Computer science is a hyper-reductionist view. Extraordinarily powerful for complicated phenomena. But has nothing to say about complex phenomena. Well, other than co...
People trained only in computer science look at code and see syntax and semantics only. But people with even a little bit of background in some of the "softer" toolkits like history or soci...
...ent of the switch, but the trajectory from there on out is wildly different. In computer science this is called a figure-ground inversion. A great real world example is that before the civil war, "United States" was a plural noun ("The United Sta...