[HN Gopher] How professional ethics work
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How professional ethics work
Author : BerislavLopac
Score : 29 points
Date : 2023-07-19 07:41 UTC (2 days ago)
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| alphazard wrote:
| Licensure is a natural response to LLMs making code generation
| easier. People want to protect their jobs and AI is coming for
| them. Creating a regulatory cartel let's some in-group become
| "the real engineers" who are able to approve the output of LLMs,
| or other "non-engineers".
|
| All this under the auspices of "ethics", which as a reminder, is
| just an arbitrary set of rules which someone is trying to pass
| off as having a divine origin.
| BSEdlMMldESB wrote:
| the laws are something that is written, they are a consequence of
| writing (where writing is taken as a social technology)
|
| software is something new, it's writing that can write itself, or
| change itself. it's a bunch or written things which then take
| other written things and transform them.
|
| this has conceptual consequences for the laws because the
| technology that the the concept of laws if mounted on top of, has
| been radically changed by software
|
| hence it's not as simple as relying on 'licensure' which
| ultimately leans on the notions and constructions emanating from
| "the written law"
|
| maybe in the future congress is going to have to approve pull-
| requests to google infrastructure code? heheh
| k__ wrote:
| That explanation makes quite the leap from "personal ethics are
| an opinion" to "professional ethics are facts".
|
| Everything that comes after that seems just to explain why
| professional ethics are crucial, but I'm still missing where the
| opinions of a bunch of people suddenly become a fact.
| hackyhacky wrote:
| Professional ethics are facts in the sense that they are
| codified by an organization, not in the sense that they are
| objective and immutable.
|
| The author's running example is that of psychotherapy
| licensing, but the same applies to any medical license, law
| license, teachers, coroners, etc. The ethics of your profession
| are standardized across all practitioners, which means that
| it's hard for an unethical employer to force you to do
| unethical things, since the threat of license removal is a
| stronger threat than that of simply being fired; and also since
| the hypothetical unethical employer will have a hard time
| finding another licensed practitioner who would undertake the
| same task.
|
| I really enjoyed the article, I recommend reading the whole
| thing.
| efficulty wrote:
| I am surprised at the narrow view the author of the article
| takes. They are using one particular meaning for the word
| professional ethics. In my country it's a much broader term,
| definitely not law or anything close to it, often not even a
| standard. It can be informal or formal, it does exist (and is
| treated seriously) in some unlicensed trades.
|
| For every licensed profession out there, there's got to be
| 10s or 100s more that are unlicensed. But the unlicensed
| professions still can have professional ethics, somethings
| with formal documents, education, etc. What do you think
| happens on conferences, in the private conversations, in
| schools and training and in apprenticeship or mentoring?
| These are very strong carriers of not just skill and
| knowledge, but also gossip (big part of learning and deciding
| ethics!) and moral consideration and responsibility . That
| doesn't mean they are less useful, but it does mean they are
| not "law" or official or binding in the way the author
| suggests.
|
| Maybe it's cultural? I'm from central Europe and the author
| seems to be American, and the words they are using give me a
| hint of high pride, high ego, arrogance. Feels a bit like
| militaristic zeal.
|
| Coming back tothe topic, where I worked, some professions do
| have ethics boards and people are licensed, while in other
| professions there are informal groups who recommend certain
| practices and are treated seriously by some (but definitely
| not all) professionals.
|
| From what I heard from a few experienced lawyers and
| managment coaches (as an example of polar opposites in terms
| of being licensed), the only bad actors who are ever punished
| for their unethical behavior are fools and criminals, and
| even that is not as frequent as you'd think.
|
| I suspect 95+% of the morality of a person' bad behavior is
| invisible to any observers (by design), definitely never gets
| checked in any structured fashion by anyone (boring,
| thankless work, gets you in trouble, no material gain, low
| chance of success), and there's almost always a way to behave
| badly and justify it or have deniability. The real judges are
| outside observers, and those care mostly about serious
| criminal behavior, everything else is called "it's business"
| or some such general explanation.
| hackyhacky wrote:
| > the words they are using give me a hint of high pride,
| high ego, arrogance. Feels a bit like militaristic zeal.
|
| Really? I didn't get that sense at all. Can you give an
| example?
| efficulty wrote:
| Sure.
|
| "You are told what the ethics of your profession are.
| Indeed, they are part of terms of participating in that
| profession, more on which below." -- wrong and somewhat
| patronizing. There exist professions which do have
| (recognized) ethics, but those ethics are optional,
| definitely not part of becoming a professional (because
| the field is informal and without licenses and too young
| to have that), and participation in profession has
| nothing to do with moral awareness or stance.
|
| "They are a set of ethics that is universal to a
| population of professionals. They are not an opinion an
| individual has, they are facts -" -- this is an extreme
| position, said with high conviction that it's the only
| one.
|
| "Professional ethics are codified, and because they are
| codified, they can be enforced. Indeed, professional
| ethics are codified so that they can be enforced." - this
| person likes to put a lof ot tough words in bold. Again,
| this is so myopic I don't even know what to say. So many
| of the ethical consideration in some professions goes way
| beyond enforcable issues, or even hints of admonition. A
| psychoterapist especially should know better. This is
| where i detect an ego-driven agenda.
|
| "People who program for a living trend hard to the
| libertarian and want not to be subject to the
| government." - that's a strong political bias right
| there,and definitely on the militaristic end. You will do
| what (y)our country tells you or else! That's high ego,
| and arrogance, at once. And in the next sentence...
|
| "People who program for a living trend hard to the
| libertarian and want not to be subject to the government.
| That's fine. But then you can't have professional
| ethics." - oh my lord, will you stop :) How many more
| times will this person highlight that THEY KNOW BETTER
| and the reader DOES NOT and SHOULD BETTER START CHANGING
| THEIR MIND :)
| dan-robertson wrote:
| Perhaps you would prefer an analogy to law where there are
| things which are illegal and they may not precisely correspond
| to the things which you personally consider unethical?
| k__ wrote:
| I mean, I understand that laws and professional ethics are
| enforced. But that doesn't make any of them anything other
| than opinions.
| version_five wrote:
| I'd guess there's a kind of authoritarian body of thought
| taking shape as groups look to use professional licensure as
| another culture war wedge. So there are going to be articles
| like this "explaining" "how professional ethics work" to tell
| us how we are supposed to think about it.
| hackyhacky wrote:
| The article doesn't explain how you're supposed to think
| about, just its mechanics and intentions. I'd say the
| approach to professional ethics described in the article has
| been pretty successful in the medical and legal world, maybe
| it could be expanded to other areas. I do not understand your
| invocation of the "culture war" shibboleth.
| frankenbagel wrote:
| They explain that: because professional ethics are _enforced_.
| If some licensing panel finds you violated the documented
| ethics, your career in that field can be over... for life.
| k__ wrote:
| I find that's a bit too handwavy.
|
| Why would you redefine something as fundamental as a fact,
| that's quite different from an opinion, as "the opinion that
| a group enforces"?
|
| The repercussions if you violate those opinions might have
| factual consequences for you, but that makes the basis for
| all this not more factual.
| FishInTheWater wrote:
| For personal ethics, they are mere opinion as _you_ get to
| choose what those ethics are. For professional ethics,
| those ethics are the opinions of the relevant professional
| associations and regulatory bodies.
|
| They are facts in the sense that "The Bar believes that it
| is unethical to lie to the court" is a fact. It is simply
| factually true that the legal profession holds that ethics
| belief.
|
| And thus the point, anyone who seeks to join such a
| profession has to accept their ethics "as if" they were
| facts. You can't _choose_ other professional ethics in the
| sense that you can choose to hold a different opinion.
| hackyhacky wrote:
| Minor detail, but the author is female.
| frankenbagel wrote:
| Thank you, my bad, moved to gender neutral "they".
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| _> I am well aware that the idea of there being professional
| licensing of software developers is wildly unpopular among
| programmers._
|
| That's an issue.
|
| LeetCode tests are often formed to bias towards styles and
| solutions favored by the testers.
|
| For example, a company may want all their engineers to have a
| particular approach to recursion, so they test for that approach.
|
| The issue with professional testing, is that it can encompass
| completely inappropriate tests. For example, I took calculus, and
| have almost _never_ used it, in my work (over 30 years). I think
| the closest I got was playing with matrix math and B-splines.
|
| But I guarantee that a "professional programmer" test would have
| calculus, because "Everybody should know it."
|
| Same with btree stuff (again, in thirty+ years, I have never had
| occasion to use these).
|
| But I do all sorts of async stuff, and a lot of UX stuff. I'll
| bet they don't get tested. Maybe everybody should know what a
| ring buffer is.
|
| That said, ethics don't need that kind of stuff, and I'm all for
| ethics, but I think the managers need it, a hell of a lot more
| than the engineers.
|
| Sure. That'll happen ...
| hackyhacky wrote:
| Did you read the whole article? The author explains that
| professional licensure is for prohibiting negative behavior,
| not for advocating standards or best-practices.
| Arrath wrote:
| > The author explains that professional licensure is for
| prohibiting negative behavior, not for advocating standards
| or best-practices.
|
| Or for artificially limiting new entries into the profession
| through testing quotas, training program costs/length
| requirements and so on
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| _> Did you read the whole article?_
|
| Isn't there something in the Ts and Cs about that kind of
| question?
|
| I know. My comment was about that line (and the "libertarian"
| comment). Note my comment about managers.
| hackyhacky wrote:
| You're right, I violated the standards and practices.
|
| I saw your comment about the managers, but it rather misses
| the point. The idea of professional ethics is that the
| _practitioners_ need licensure so that they can refuse to
| perform unethical work demanded by their manager. If
| programming managers had a professional code of ethics, it
| wouldn 't impact the ability of individual programmers from
| doing unethical things.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Sure it would. Make managers accountable for their
| employees.
|
| I always took that approach, and worked for a Japanese
| company, and they ran that way.
| version_five wrote:
| I just skimmed it, personally I'm not convinced by what I saw:
| the premise that professional ethics is not personal ethics,
| while true, is not really meaningful to technical disciplines. In
| my engineering ethics and professional practice courses I never
| saw anything "nontechnical" in our ethics, most of it was don't
| do stuff you're not qualified for and awareness of applicable
| law.
|
| The problem with ethics is that there is a vocal group that wants
| to turn their personal ethics into our professional ethics and
| impose on software a bunch of judgements that are super
| subjective (and thus outside the profession).
|
| While I wouldn't be surprised to find professional conduct in
| other engineering disciples to be getting similarly hijacked
| these days, I think the only sensible way to professionalize
| software would be voluntary and technically grounded, not dealing
| with what you'd put in the realm of personal ethics at all.
| titanomachy wrote:
| I think the author's main point is insightful. Professional
| ethics are much more effective when they have the weight of
| regulation, because then your employer can't just replace you
| with someone who will do the unethical thing that they want.
|
| In my opinion, it is probably still worth refusing to build
| things that violate your personal ethics. You will sleep better
| at night, and you will introduce friction to doing unethical
| things, which may cause your employer to re-evaluate their course
| of action. Or they might fire you.
|
| Also, I struggle to imagine what a world of regulated software
| engineers (with an enforceable set of professional ethics) would
| look like. To use the author's example, giving surgeons a
| monopoly on surgery is pretty simple: if you cut people up with a
| scalpel, even with their permission, and you're not certified by
| your country's board of surgery, then you're committing a crime.
| What would a world of regulated software engineering look like?
| Are all employees of a company who are not licensed software
| engineers now prohibited from using code to solve their problems?
| Is a business analyst writing SQL allowed? What if they start
| writing stored procedures in python? Are you allowed to use CLI
| tools? What about creating bash scripts to automate your CLI
| workflow?
|
| It works in specific, highly regulated industries (e.g. "only
| licensed software engineers may contribute to avionics firmware,
| or the device will not be FAA certifiable"). But for general-
| purpose business-grade software... I don't think it is possible
| to come up with a sensible and useful rule that could draw a line
| between programmers and everyone else. So my bet is that we
| continue unregulated.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| > Also, I struggle to imagine what a world of regulated
| software engineers (with an enforceable set of professional
| ethics) would look like. To use the author's example, giving
| surgeons a monopoly on surgery is pretty simple: if you cut
| people up with a scalpel, even with their permission, and
| you're not certified by your country's board of surgery, then
| you're committing a crime. What would a world of regulated
| software engineering look like?
|
| Here's what I imagine it would look like. I don't particularly
| like it.
|
| All powerful computers operate like iPhones. Normal people are
| prohibited from executing code outside of a limited sandbox.
| Licensed software developers have the ability to execute code.
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