The Big Questions of Engineering

2.  In 2005, the late writer David Foster Wallace
mentioned in his commencement speech that
fish spend their lives not even knowing what water
is. They are naively unaware of the ocean that
permits their existence, and the currents that carry
them. The most important education we can receive,
Wallace goes on to explain, “isn’t really about the
capacity to think, but rather about the choice of
what to think about.” Wallace asserts that the core
concept of meta-cognition, of examining and editing
is that we choose to contemplate.

3.  Technology products and services are built by
humans who build their biases and flawed thinking
right into those products and services—which in
turn shapes human behavior and society, sometimes
to a frightening degree. As much as code and
computation and data can feel as if they are
mechanistically neutral, they are not.

4.  Those who studied engineering may focus on
problem-solving in the technical domain, and prefer
to see the world through the lens of equations,
axioms, and lines of code. There is indeed beauty
and elegance in well-formulated optimization
problems, tidy mathematical proofs, clever time- and
space-efficient algorithms to some extent.

5.  When building a platform, engineers need to simultaneously
define what it should be, whom it would serve, and what
behaviors they wanted to incentivize amongst their users. They
are no longer operating in a world circumscribed by lesson
plans, problem sets and programming assignments, and
intended course outcomes. They are not only building the
product, but also simultaneously defining what it should be,
whom it would serve, what behaviors they wanted to
incentivize amongst our users, what kind of community it
would become, and what kind of value they hope to create in
the world.

6.  Engineers' thinking around anti-harassment design
would also intersect a great deal with their thinking
on free speech and moderation. This requires
pondering the philosophical question of whether
people are by default good or bad. If people were
mostly good, then they would design the product
around the idea that they could trust users, with
controls for rolling back the actions of bad actors in
the exceptional cases.

7.  There may also be a need for a debate on the
implications for an open discourse. If there is a trust
in users by default, there might be a tendency
toward an open and free platform, believing not
only in users, but also in positive community norms
and the ability to shape those norms through
engineering and design.

8.  When designing a platform, engineers must also
take into account the algorithms powering the
respective homefeeds: the streams of content
presented to users upon initial login, the default
views pushed to users. It seems simple enough to
want to show users “good” content when they open
up an app.

9.  Yet, what makes for good content? Is the goal to
help users to discover new ideas and expand their
intellectual and creative horizons? Or to show them
exactly the sort of content that they know they
already like? Or, most easily measurable, to show
them the content they’re most likely to click on and
share, and that will make them spend the most time
on the service?

10.  Given the importance of these questions, one needs
to learn how to think critically about the world we
live in and how to engage with it. One needs to
absorb lessons about how to identify and
interrogate privilege, power structures, structural
inequality, and injustice. In order to respond to these
questions, one also needs to develop informed
opinions on philosophy and morality. Even more
than all of that, these are worthwhile thoughts to fill
one's mind with—that all of the engineering work
would be contextualized by such subjects.

11.  Each of us can choose to learn, to read, to talk to
people, to travel, and to engage intellectually and
ethically. We may all do so in order to acknowledge
the full complexity and wonder of the world we live
in, and be thoughtful in designing the future of it.