ABSTRACT
Philosopher: Our project is drawing to an end, and our previous discussion has made clear that it will not be so easy for the social software enterprise to address, let alone cure, the ills of society. To get the discussion going, I would like to start today with a quote that I found in a collection of talks from the physicist Richard Feynman. It is from one of the pieces in The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, a digest of a talk on “The Value of Science”. The talk starts like this:
From time to time, people suggest to me that scientists ought to give more consideration to social problems—especially that they should be more responsible in considering the impact of science upon society. This same suggestion must be made to many other scientists, and it seems to be generally believed that if the scientists would only look at these very difficult social problems and not spend so much time fooling with the less vital scientific ones, great success would come of it.
It seems to me that we do think about these problems from time to time, but we don’t put full-time effort into them—the reason being that we know we don’t have any magic formula for solving problems, that social problems are very much harder than scientific ones, and that we usually don’t get anywhere when we do think about them.
I believe that a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy—and when he talks about a nonscientific matter, he will sound as naive as anyone untrained in the matter [91, p. 141].
