On October 23, 2008, Alan Greenspan, the Chair of the U.S. Federal Reserve, was testifying before Congress in the immediate aftermath of the September 2008 financial crash. Undoubtedly the high point of the proceedings occurred when Representative Henry Waxman pressed the Chair to admit "that your view of the world, your ideology, was not right," to which Greenspan admitted "Absolutely, precisely." Fast forward 10 years to another famous mea culpa moment in front of Congress, that of Mark Zuckerberg on April 11, 2018. In light of both the Cambridge Analytica scandal and revelations of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election, Zuckerberg also admitted to wrong: "It's clear now that we didn't do enough to prevent these tools from being used for harm. That goes for fake news, foreign interference in elections, and hate speech, as well as developers and data privacy." As far as mea culpas go, Greenspan's was considerably more concise, but also much more insightful as to the root problem. Greenspan admitted the problem was not due to misguided user expectations, or to poorly worded license agreements, or to rogue developers. Instead he recognized the problem lay in a worldview that seemed to work for a while ... until it didn't. In the immediate after-math of the financial crisis, there were calls for reforms, not only of the financial services industry, but also within universities, where it was thought that unrealistic models and assumptions within economics departments and business schools were also responsible for inculcating a worldview that led to the crisis. It is time for us in computing departments to do some comparable soul searching. Continua qui: https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2020/8/246368-why-computing-belongs-within-th... (mi pare e spero senza paywall) Ciao -- Stefano Zacchiroli . zack@upsilon.cc . upsilon.cc/zack . . o . . . o . o Computer Science Professor . CTO Software Heritage . . . . . o . . . o o Former Debian Project Leader & OSI Board Director . . . o o o . . . o . « the first rule of tautology club is the first rule of tautology club »