>These days the ACLU is incredibly politically biased
I was going to post the same in anticipation of the partisan downvotes that you're receiving. Without going into specifics, this sums it up nicely:
>It’s not that the left shouldn’t have opportunities to speak up against the president’s agenda -- of course it should. But the ACLU shouldn’t be its political bullhorn. The organization’s legal independence gave it special standing. By falling in line with dozens of other left-leaning advocacy groups, the ACLU risks diminishing its focus on civil liberties litigation and abandoning its reputation for being above partisanship
One issue in particular is the ACLU's interpretation of the second amendment, which they do not fight for with the same fervor as the first.
Their lack of support for the second amendment is the only reason I don’t support them. It proves that they’re politically slanted and it truly for my civil rights. Unfortunately the NRA has drifted from their core issue to bashing non-conservative candidates. I also can’t support them.
>Fast Company [2] writes about this as well: "The ACLU in both tests used an 80% match confidence threshold, which is Amazon’s default setting, but Amazon says it encourages law enforcement to use a 99% threshold for spotting a match
Then this whole thing is potentially misleading because there's a huge difference between 80% and 99%. It's probably nonlinear and they could possibly see their false matches drop to 0. This is not a fair test - or rather, the conclusions are not quite supported by the parameters.
Not that I'm defending police use of facial recognition tech, I think it's abhorrent, though possibly inevitable.
They made a facial recognition tool available to law enforcement and in the marketing it says "requires no machine learning expertise to use" then I think it's fair to look at any value of the threshold parameter they make available. Especially a parameter that, by changing it, will give you the answer you want more often.
I'm deeply troubled by the text I've seen here implying this threshold is some accuracy percentage or positive predictive value percentage. Unless God is working behind the scenes at AWS they can't make any claim about the accuracy of the model on an as yet unseen population of images.
That's even before getting to the more esoteric map vs territory concerns like identical twins, altered images, adversarial makeup and masks, etc.
Just to make sure I understand, which "whole thing" is misleading? The ACLU's test? Amazon's response?
As for the test, you say it's not a fair test. The point / conversation right now seems to be about the choice of parameters used by the ACLU. As far as I see / understand, the ACLU used the default parameters (and/or those recommended in the documentation / articles that are still up today with those same non-99% values).
My cynical guess would be "whatever the lowest number they can get away with using".
I would bet good money that cops KPI goals benefit from false positives, since they'll reward higher "number of identified/interviewed suspects" and "number of arrests" as a positive thing even if "number of convictions" doesn't line up.
Even more cynically, I'd bet this is a powerful technique for ambitious cop promotion, and that there's little blowback on fraudulently manipulating parameters that adversely affect POC much more significantly that white people.
Thinking about it, I'm now recalling the multiple reports of police departments claiming to not be using clearview.ai, only to have to backtrack when clearview's customer data got popped and it became public knowledge that individual cops were signing up for free trials - which their department/management either chose to hide or didn't know about. That's reasonably compelling circumstantial evidence to me that ambitious cops are quick to jump on unproven and unauthorised technology with insufficient or oversight or with management actively avoiding oversight for them...
In regards to the KPIs this is a known reality. Most states get money from the federal gov highway safety program. Then the states disburse it to local police depts, and the expect high numbers of citations (or even warnings) to be reported back up the chain. It is only for DUI that verdicts are considered, and that's only amongst the smarter states. Related to crime, there are NO KPIs based on the final outcome - all on the elements the police are able to carry out and be accountable for on their own. This makes sense in some ways beyond self promotion. I will say also that the general inflation of KPIs in order to justify promotions, grant renewals, etc is RAMPANT in state and local govs, but especially in policing when it comes to new tech investments and promotions
Wouldn't it be more likely that they say "ok, we can interview/investigate/whatever X number of people" and then they adjust the threshold to produce that number? If 80% gives them 10,000 hits and 99% gives them one or none, then nobody is going to just go with either setting.
I'd guess with the potato quality of facial pictures from incidents security or phone cameras, you might want lower confidence matches to get outcomes out of lousy pictures.
Has anyone actually found any evidence of damage in the field? I did a cursory search but didn't find anything, though the wiki looks pretty corporatized (sanitized). OTOH people do like to claim damage from police more often than honesty would probably dictate...
>This is because leaders on the left and right have refused to respond to new data, and are working with the same plans set in March.
As the article somewhat loosely implies, the problem is that all new data becomes suspect when all of our institutions are openly politicized.
You think these biases only exist with respect to COVID? The marginalized right (consider the viceral response you're about to have to reading these next sentences) has been saying the same thing about academia for at least a decade. That goes for climate change and much of modern psychological theory. And no, these aren't extreme far right Nazis/incels as people like to stereotype, these are near center moderates, these are (typically in the minority) doctors, scientists, engineers, this is the so called silent majority that is denied a voice on most modern platforms. And part of the reason that our society is gridlocked is that the majority has decided that this minority is not allowed a voice because in a one dimensional two party system one side falls closer to morally repugnant views, so we throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Our institutions are collapsing because actors are no longer operating in good faith. And those in power believe there are morally justified in suppressing opposing views.
Edit: and I'd like to add, another contribution to gridlock is the tendency for black and white thinking that at this point I'm starting to accept is extremely common human nature - there is a world of nuance between criticism and outright denial that is inevitably ignored almost any time someone expresses criticism for, say, climate change resources or the media (explicitly not scientist) derived predictions.
I agree, groupthink is a natural artifact of groups. If there are more liberal people in a group, their groupthink will be more liberal. Couple this with confirmation bias and we have a problem. Couple _that_ with the fact that there are actors, both from a profit motive and for other motives, that are attempting to exacerbate and increase that divide, and we have an even larger problem.
There are a lot of moderate liberals who are willing to admit that the political homogeneity of academia is a serious problem as well. Heterdox academy is a bipartisan coalition of academics devoted to addressing this problem.
The right has also raised awareness about this in the media, and I (moderate liberal) couldn't agree more. We can't begin to really solve these problems and get everyone on board so long as we have openly partisan epistemological institutions--bias is the enemy of truth and we're maximizing it when we should be minimizing it. Those on the left will be quick to accuse the right of being anti-science and there's certainly some truth there, but I'm very suspicious of the idea that the falling political diversity is a function of the right selecting out of these fields rather than explicit or implicit discrimination (and at least within certain fields of academia, preliminary studies indicate a majority of faculty are willing to openly admit that they would discriminate against conservative candidates).
EDIT: I’m definitely not being downvoted out of the same kind of partisan tribalism that TFA is calling out. ◔̯◔
I don't think these drugs should be scheduled but here's a perspective that you're less likely to find online: I would never put myself in a position to be indoctrinated by the modern ideologically slanted American psychological establishment while my guard is down, so to speak.
These kinds of drugs also make people extremely open to suggestion. It's one reason why they are used in, say, cults. We are raised to believe in the authority of institutions and the conditioning is so powerful that when most people read any media that seems authoritative (news, books, Wikipedia, etc) unless they are specifically suspicious of the source, there is rarely an innate drive to question the content. This is especially true of how people treat advice from doctors. Now combine that with alkaloids which directly inhibit neural circuits related to suspicion and defense.
You may agree with the tenets of modern western society now, but it's clear that they have a checkered history (e.g. lobotomy, forced sterilization) and no doubt we will look back on some of today's practices with the same horror (sterilization and genital mutilation for gender dysphoria, for example)...
Point being, anyone undergoing such a treatment should be aware that they are effectively handing over their psyche to another human being who is inevitably influenced in some way by the zeitgeist, and it's hubris to presume that current ideas are correct simply because they are different from ideas past. This is also a potential avenue for mass government indoctrination under the guise of medical treatment. Imagine modern "humane" psychedelic reeducation camps orchestrated by your friendly authoritarian uncle sam!
Yes, and most of them know next to nothing about the drugs they take beyond what their doctors have told them. I've watched this blind faith harm people dear to me on multiple occasions.
These are the same institutions that failed across the board in preparing for COVID. Their recommendations should be scrutinized.
You're definitely in a vulnerable and potentially suggestible state when you're on psychedelics, but we all spend the first 12+ years of our lives in a pretty vulnerable and suggestible state, way more so than psychedelics can create. At least you have a little more control over the conditions of your psychedelic time.
The first 12 years of your life are spent in the care of (ideally) parents who love you unconditionally and genuinely want you to succeed.
Under psychedelic therapy, you are at the mercy of your therapist. I'm not necessarily saying that these are bad people but a dangerous property of a soft science like psychology is that, in defining what falls within the range of normal the psychological establishment is effectively acting as an arbiter of culture. The particular personality changes that they may collectively recommend won't be necessarily be compatible with one's home culture.
Particularly when you consider that the establishment leans heavily left, meanwhile their views regarding aggression, emotional expression, gender roles, etc are fundamentally in conflict with many core tenants on the right. Learning to be less aggressive or more emotional can put you at a social disadvantage in other societies. Laypeople treat psychology as though its conclusions are as rigorous as physics but that's pure hubris - as evidenced by the thousands of successful cultures around the world with totally different approaches to many of the same issues.
Hmm I guess this a there's a lot to say about this. I'll just say two things. One, that most people (including maybe you) are more messed up than they think from childhood. Secondly, (and this is an even bigger issue) there's really no reason to worry about left-wing ideology putting you at a disadvantage socially. The left wouldn't be adopting these more "progressive" identities if they weren't socially advantageous within the social circles of the most powerful people in our society. It's true that being "soft" can be a disadvantage in a small rural area, but this will never be the case again among the American elite. You have to justify your dominance of the peasants somehow, and one way they do it is proving that they are more "evolved" than others.
>>However, as public health advocates, we do not condemn these gatherings as risky for COVID-19 transmission
This post is pretty double speaky because these doctors can't quite come out and say stay home because the virus is still here and dangerous. So they say things which are self contradictory and therefore ultimately meaningless but allow themselves to signal their support for the cause.
It's what happens when your institutions become explicitly partisan.
I won't deny that there are corruption and accountability problems among US police forces, but I also can't help but feel like many people, especially now, don't appreciate the fact that American police deal with people who are violent, disrespectful, and frequently mentally ill on a sometimes daily basis.
These are humans too and they're watching society (and especially media) totally dehumanize them. To some degree their anger is arguably justified.
I feel like it's impossible to get an accurate feel for how many people are protesting and what proportion of the population supports the protests. But I have a feeling it's a minority, maybe 10-30% of the population, in which case you cannot let a fraction of your population hold your entire city hostage, especially when opportunists are simultaneously looting and burning, though that seems to have calmed down recently.
Point being, if the protestors won't listen when asked to leave, and if they are disrupting the lives and livelihoods of 70-90% of the population, I don't see any option other than gradual escalation, which typically precedes gas and rubber bullets.
The police in a city in Canada went on strike in the late 1960s[1]. Things didn't go well. And we've already seen that American demographics are willing to burn and loot even with police present...so I don't mean to defend police but I really don't see anything good coming from police standing down or refusing to use force.
Edit: Downvotes are intended for discouraging low effort or otherwise poor comments, not to shame people for disagreeing. Whether you like it or not at least half the country supports police, they play an important role in society, and that makes this a discussion worth having.
> don't appreciate the fact that American police deal with people who are violent, disrespectful, and frequently mentally ill on a sometimes daily basis.
Lots of people have difficult stressful jobs dealing with people who don’t have much respect for them. That’s not an excuse for criminality, though. Take medical professionals. In the public mind, there are few things more horrifying and reprehensible than the doctor or nurse who deliberately kills or neglects their patients. There’s pretty much universal agreement that this is not okay, and that it is in fact a morally worse crime than normal murder or neglect, as it is done by someone in a position of trust. It should be the same for police.
In defense of the OP the interaction between doctor and patient is not at all like the interaction between police officer and criminal.
There has to be a way forward when it comes to police reform, but it is a valid question to ask whether or not policing itself takes a particular toll.
I've wondered over the last week whether a strategy to fighting the perverse psychological changes that seem to settle in the minds of many police officers would be term limits? An "up or out" mentality like in the armed forces[1]?
It seems like many of the worst offenders have been mostly stagnant at their posts for many years - surely getting in fresh faces that have had a chance for more modern training would help break some of this mentality of "corps over country".
Them too, but I think medical professionals are a better comparison because they’re in a position of trust and authority, like police are (supposed; obviously the ‘trust bit’ is dubious) to be.
It's not surprising that Americans feel 'anger is justified' however, that's very different from saying for example that 'riots' or 'protests past curfew' are supported.
"And by the way, the point of protests is not to leave when people ask you to."
No - it is absolutely not.
Neither you nor I get to decide what is lawful and what is not.
The 'rules' are a 'social contract' that we all get a say in, you don't get more of a say because you want to hold a sign up past 10 pm or block a street.
It's disturbing to read this because I don't think people grasp the real variety in American opinion out there, and what some others might want to 'protests beyond what the community wants them to'. You might find yourself on the other side of the fence.
Not only this - it's counterproductive. Things like 'million man march' do a lot more good than the Watts riots, which are both directly damaging to the community, and probably very damaging to the movement.
If the point is to 'make change' - people are losing tons of allies by stepping outside the bounds of civility. Everyone is fine with signs in parks, and possibly a march through town - beyond that, it's just bad.
Ok you're right, let me just go back to the 60s and inform people doing sit-ins that they have it all mixed up.
> Everyone is fine with signs in parks ...
Yes! You're getting it! The point is for people to NOT be fine with it. The point is to turn heads, to inconvenience, to get people talking, and to demand that attention is placed on injustice.
All I see is a bunch of emotionally triggered adults throwing a tantrum. Inconveniencing me and suggesting reckless ideas like defending the police doesn't earn any of my respect.
It's ok, from the figures it looks like we don't really need your respect. Continue ignoring the pain and fear that your fellow US citizens live in, and continue defending the actions of the stormtroopers who beat them to death in our streets.
If you don't want to help, just get out of the way.
The US constitution includes a bill of rights in part because social contracts are created by the majority to oppress the minority. That's basically human nature. Certain rights are outside the ability of any social contract to restrict to allow minorities protection.
"Certain rights are outside the ability of any social contract to restrict to allow minorities protection."
This is a bold oxymoron:
"The law is the law, except where it is not the law because you have other constitutionally guaranteed laws that enable you to break said laws"
This misunderstanding underlies a lot of the commentary here lamenting police breakup of ostensibly 'legal' protests which are actually, totally illegal.
If the city has a curfew for protesting, that's literally quite lawful in every sense, and you don't have a legal or constitutional right to protest at that point.
I will say that law is not given to us by deity, but rather by the society itself. The protests suggest that the law is no longer within acceptable range for society, but the administrators of the law, for whatever reason, chose not to address it.
Add to that the protests appear to have popular support and the issue of curfew becomes largely irrelevant. I am not arguing legality here.
"I will say that law is not given to us by deity, but rather by the society itself. "
Yes, that is what a social contract means, we already have that.
"The protests suggest that the law is no longer within acceptable range for society, but the administrators of the law, for whatever reason, chose not to address it."
The 'administrators' are we the voters - not the protestors.
You're advocating anarchy: the protestors get to decide what is lawful and what is not, for whatever arbitrary reason.
It's incredibly naive for people to support extra-judicial action, a lot of which is disruptive and a total transgression of other people's rights, and is sometimes violent.
Consider the next time there is a protest you don't agree with, and they decide that 'the law is not relevant in that case because it's not what the protestors deem appropriate'.
It's the total civil breakdown.
The thread of the 'protesters are above the law logic' is totally unwound and nonsensical.
<<Yes, that is what a social contract means, we already have that.
Yes and a time seems to have come to renegotiate that contract.
<<The 'administrators' are we the voters - not the protestors
It is possible I did not communicate this clearly. By administrators I meant 'law givers'( senators, congressmen and so on ). You are right that voters ultimately decide what is the law. Note that protesters is a subset of voters. Note that I already pointed out the popular support for protesting.
<<You're advocating anarchy: the protestors get to decide what is lawful and what is not, for whatever arbitrary reason.
I am not. The system does not break, because one law is broken ( if it did the system would have collapsed already ).
<<It's incredibly naive for people to support extra-judicial action, a lot of which is disruptive and a total transgression of other people's rights, and is sometimes violent.
I do not believe in dura lex sed lex. There is a point at which governed can say: fuck it. We are not there yet, but we are slowly getting there. It is scary, but it is not unexpected. I do not want to go on a rant here, but I will start by saying that total transgression may be overstating it.
<<Consider the next time there is a protest you don't agree with, and they decide that 'the law is not relevant in that case because it's not what the protestors deem appropriate'.
Sigh, I live in Chicagoland. That is not an argument you want to present to me. I am considering it. The moment there was a whiff of protests moving to suburbs, my neighbours were considering it too. Is it scary? Yeah, but change tends to be. You do not know what may follow.
<<It's the total civil breakdown
Eh, its not total. Consider that if it was total you would not posting on social media, but rather foraging for essentials at night. You are overstating your case.
<<The thread of the 'protesters are above the law logic' is totally unwound and nonsensical
You seem to believe that law and order is the US highest value. I do not think it is. And when multiple values clash, one of them has to give way. Surprise, arbitrarily enforced rules gave way.
Peaceful protests and rallies are generally legally protected by the first amendment. Just because you don't like what some group is saying doesn't mean the police get to illegally attack and disperse them. These rights exists so that minorities can protect themselves from the tyranny of the majority which is exactly what is happening right now.
You do not have the right to block traffic, march down the street etc. as an expression of your 1st amendment rights. You literally need a permit for most of that.
If the city puts down a curfew, you don't have any '1st Amendment rights' there either.
"doesn't mean the police get to illegally attack and disperse them."
Much of what we are seeing is not a legal expression of 1st Amendment rights at all, in which case breaking it up is not remotely illegal.
>"doesn't mean the police get to illegally attack and disperse them."
>Much of what we are seeing is not a legal expression of 1st Amendment rights at all, in which case breaking it up is not remotely illegal.
Think about what you're doing right now. You're responding to someone saying that cops shouldn't be killing people in the streets for blocking traffic. Your response isn't "cops shouldn't kill people!". It's "what they are doing is illegal".
Downvoting for disagreement has always been ok on HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16131314), and a lot of people disagree with police right now, so downvotes are probably to be expected.
> Edit: Downvotes are intended for discouraging low effort or otherwise poor comments, not to shame people for disagreeing. Whether you like it or not at least half the country supports police, they play an important role in society, and that makes this a discussion worth having.
The reason this is low effort is that your feelings on what the facts might be do not suffice for facts. Why would we want to know your personal guess about how many people support the protests if you have no new information to add? why not just do a Google search?
Your feelings are all wrong. Poll numbers say the majority of Americans support the protests. It’s definitely a low effort and poor comment seeing as you can’t even hit google up.
You've missed the entire point. A sort of conflation is the problem - not by the author, but by people in and around soft sciences and humanities throwing a bit of statistical jazz into their papers and then drawing ostensibly rigorous conclusions which influence social policy.
The reality is that by their vary nature, both soft science and humanities (there is a lot of overlap) cannot be held to the same rigor as, say, mathematics, physics, chemistry. These sciences are pure theory (like gender studies), non experimental (like psychology), and fundamentally unfalsifiable in the majority of cases...but laymen, and apparently government officials, either don't understand or pretend they don't understand - either way shitty policy and legislation is passed and innocent people (society) are worse off frequently.
This is 2020 and while in the past attitudeX or behaviourY might have been acceptable we have now come to understand (through Social Science Studies or NY Times bestseller that a particular academic has written) that both are wrong, toxic, in fact.
Please address the issues directly and name your sources rather than just giving a general progressive word salad. I'm ready to support you but you don't convert people by brushing them off as out of date.
That reminds me of a quote from Kurt Tucholsky: “Sociology was invented so people could write without experience”. A crisp way to summarize your point. Although I don't think that sociology can't be better than that.
I've never seen a half-decent study in social sciences that draws rigorous conclusions: what I have seen is those studies noticing a correlation and then mainstream media picking it up as de facto conclusions (to put out a simplest example we've all seen: "people who have more sex are happier", directly implying that having sex leads to happiness, whereas studies noticed a correlation between people who claim to be happy and sex frequency).
But you are right about what happens next: you top it off with academically uneducated (or simply unaware of scientific rigour) politicians like Trump (he's just an obvious example, far from being the only one) making calls on different social topics.
> I've never seen a half-decent study in social sciences that draws rigorous conclusions.
Perhaps you should look harder. The dominant approach in economics for 20 years has been to reject correlational studies and try very hard to get at casuality, by:
* Running randomised controlled trials, often at scale (see eg Esther Duflo);
* Laboratory experiments, which have provided a body of robust paradigms and results;
* Seeking natural experiments;
* Statistical techniques like regression discontinuity and instrumental variables.
There's plenty of bad work in the social sciences. So is there elsewhere in the natural sciences (cough Lancet). There's plenty of good work too.
FWIW, I realise I didn't phrase it correctly. What I wanted to say was that any non-terrible ("half decent") study does not attempt to draw a final, black or white (I wrongly used "rigorous") conclusion, but that mainstream media will do that instead by choosing a particular interpretation of the study results.
I did not want to imply that social science studies are non-rigorous, I was actually trying to defend their scientific nature, but with an incorrect phrasing.
Economics is not really something people think of when they talk about humanities or social sciences.
Indeed, in Econ grad school I learned a lot about control theory, statistics, dynamic programming, etc. But I was never told to read Foucault, Levi-Strauss or even Marx - something that sociologists and other people in humanities usually have at least a basic understanding of.
If we judge what is science by level of quantitative rig our then economics is the only social science.
There are definitely areas of overlap with social sciences--especially these days. Behavioral economics (for which Richard Thaler won a Nobel Prize a couple years back) grew directly out of behavioral psychology for example.
FAANG are different a kind of monopoly - an unprecedented one for which no legislation exists. They have a monopoly on data, as brokers they control not only what companies may purchase for commercial services, but through curation of search results and news/social media feeds they control what information reaches the eyes of millions of people.
This is an unprecedented amount of power over society wielded by corporations and, in effect, the handful of private citizens who own them.
I tend to lean libertarian but I've questioned for a while if it's appropriate and/or possible to limit this power in an equitable manner...but unchecked Google alone can probably sway elections with algorithmic manipulation of search results and even selective autocompletion.
That's probably the entire reason that the administration is targeting these orgs, and while I don't agree with the administration I believe this particular endeavor may be for the greater good. When Twitter can delete videos retweeted by the president, or add "fact check warnings" which effectively (though maybe not truthfully) discredit his statements, Jack Dorsey and his board are wielding a more direct, more immediate, and possibly more effective power than any of other branches of government.
You're being hit hard wherever you go, but I think you've got a fair mindset. Small amounts of people have a disproportionate amount of final say in how millions of people get to group and share information. That has to have negative externalizations, it doesn't track that it would have absolutely no ill effects. If you have a legitimate argument that defends there will be no problems, please share, I'm open minded.
If Trump is attacking them cynically out of some tantrum relating to how they beat on him and his supporters. Then yeah, I disagree he's doing it for the right reasons. But I think he has the right directional thrust.
>For this study, which was done online, participants had to decide how much of a 10-point endowment to give to other people. The points had monetary value to the participants; giving cost them something.
Totally contrived study which completely ignores culture. Growing up in a shitty area in NYC for example will teach you that plenty of people are all too eager to act selfishly even when it is trivial to be considerate.
Soft sciences are a joke and they erode layman credibility in hard sciences.
I was going to post the same in anticipation of the partisan downvotes that you're receiving. Without going into specifics, this sums it up nicely:
>It’s not that the left shouldn’t have opportunities to speak up against the president’s agenda -- of course it should. But the ACLU shouldn’t be its political bullhorn. The organization’s legal independence gave it special standing. By falling in line with dozens of other left-leaning advocacy groups, the ACLU risks diminishing its focus on civil liberties litigation and abandoning its reputation for being above partisanship
One issue in particular is the ACLU's interpretation of the second amendment, which they do not fight for with the same fervor as the first.
1.https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2018/02/08/the_ac...