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posted by
martyb
on Tuesday November 22 2016, @08:04PM
from the "code"-of-ethics-needs-debugging? dept.
from the "code"-of-ethics-needs-debugging? dept.
Earlier this week, a post written by programmer and teacher Bill Sourour went viral. It's called "Code I'm Still Ashamed Of."
In it he recounts a horrible story of being a young programmer who landed a job building a website for a pharmaceutical company. The whole post is worth a read, but the upshot is he was duped into helping the company skirt drug advertising laws in order to persuade young women to take a particular drug.
He later found out the drug was known to worsen depression and at least one young woman committed suicide while taking it. He found out his sister was taking the drug and warned her off it.
By sake of comparison, take a look at the ACM Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct (Adopted by ACM Council 10/16/92.)
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Programmers Talk About the Unethical and Illegal Things They’ve Been Asked To Do
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(Score: 2) by meustrus on Wednesday November 23 2016, @03:59PM
And there you have the horrible thing that these instruments suggest doing. The overcomplicated part is not the definition of "mortgage-backed securities". The overcomplicated part is how the risk is defined. It would take even a highly educated, highly experienced banker weeks of work to determine accurately the risk of such a security. They were packaged in such a way as to make it so difficult to determine that everybody would just give up and trust their assessment, which was based on (faulty) industry standards.
Science and engineering describe and work with the complexities of nature. It is their goal to make such ideas simple and elegant, even though it's hard. Finance, by contrast, works in purely human-created logical constructs. They don't need to be any more complicated than the mathematics upon which they are based. What is the equivalent of a mathematical proof in finance? Something that may take months to produce, but which any expert in the field can verify in hours? Without the ability to verify what is being sold, we must trust the salespeople. Those salespeople, however, have a strong incentive to defraud us because it will make them lots of money.
We have two options to make sure this doesn't happen again. 1: Only allow the use of financial instruments which are easily verifiable and understood, or 2: Remove the financial incentive. Since option 2 amounts to "end capitalism" I think most people would rather go for option 1.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?