JoBo
@JoBo@feddit.uk
- Comment on Schools in England send police to homes of absent pupils with threats to jail their parents 5 months ago:
Indeed. Fascism is power protecting itself. And, even if the specifics vary worldwide, power has needed a great deal of protection since it fucked up and crashed the global economy. Again.
- Comment on Schools in England send police to homes of absent pupils with threats to jail their parents 5 months ago:
I was thinking of Miliband, really. Got the same treatment as Corbyn but it never reached a crescendo because he caved.
And Labour in general, of course. Since Thatcher, at least, they always end up defaulting to this please-Murdoch-at-any-cost nonsense. Not that they were great before Thatcher (1945-51 excepted) but the media was much less extreme back then.
- Comment on Schools in England send police to homes of absent pupils with threats to jail their parents 5 months ago:
Not just children. The Tories need a kind of generalised hate to keep them in power. “Look! Over there! The poor people have all your money!”. Not because a plurality of the electorate actually fall for it but because the billionaires who own the media keep the noise at a crescendo to make sure no one pays any attention to their grift. Which means that the Labour party is too spineless to oppose it, keeping turnout nice and low while the Tories chase the fash to the right.
- Comment on Community 5 months ago:
The fact of higher protein content appears to be true (without going back to find and critique all the original studies). Explanations are much harder to ‘prove’ for questions like this.
We can’t do experiments on the evolution of tears, so all we can do is come up with plausible theories and look at how they fit with the body of evidence. With enough evidence, from enough different angles, we might one day be able to say which proposed explanations fit the facts (and which don’t). It’s how we (eventually) proved smoking was killing people (another question we cannot do experiments on human beings to prove one way or the other) but not all questions are as important as smoking was and there isn’t necessarily a neat, single factor explanation to find even if someone was willing to fund all the necessary research.
Not my area but, for example, I recently saw a study claim that sniffing women’s tears makes men less aggressive. That’s an angle that might help build some support for, or knock down, the theory that emotional tears are useful for social communication (ie help get women killed slightly less often). Did those studies use sad stories or onions? Did any study compare sad stories to onions? If we’re seeing hints of differences between sad stories and onions, that would tend to support the social communication element of the explanation. Unless we think there’s a difference between sad tears and frightened tears, which there probably is, so we should check that too. And the rest of the literature on tears, if it’s considered important enough to get the theory right. And we need to remember that sticky tears are not the same thing as smelly tears, so can we do experiments where non-emotional tears are made sticky, and non-sticky tears made to smell frightened?
Etc etc.
Explaining things we observe but cannot directly experiment on is a process, a process which typically takes many years and dozens of research groups. And a lot of funding. And decades of exhausting battles, if there is a lot riding on the answer (as it did with Big Tobacco vs Public Health).
- Comment on Parents overestimate sons’ maths skills more than daughters’, study finds 5 months ago:
That does rather beg the question of whether boys or girls are encouraged to be loud.
But maybe they’re just picking up on teachers’ biases? Teachers Give Lower Math Scores to Girls
- Comment on Patients in England want right to see GPs with 24 hours enshrined in NHS 6 months ago:
Obviously, people want that (the actual question asked was about an “urgent” need to see a doctor).
But this proposal is just a repeat of one of Blair’s worst policy failures, without acknowledging how or why it failed.
When New Labour introduced the 48 hour target to see a GP, the vast majority of GPs ‘met’ the target by closing down their phonelines as soon as they ran out of appointments. In the process, they turned the 48 hour target into a 24 hour target because otherwise they’d only have been able to open the phoneline every other day.
It was very bad back then. It’s much worse now because the NHS was at least relatively well-funded under Blair.
Not that they’re announcing this because they think the policy will work, obv. Just doing their best to make sure the voters blame everyone but them.
[The link is to a video of an election Question Time audience haranguing Blair about the foolishness of this target.]
- Comment on Hospital surgical teams with more women improve patient recovery, study finds 6 months ago:
The why is a much harder question.
You’re right about it probably being true, this is not the first study to find something similar, there’s two others reported on here: Patients have better outcomes with female surgeons, studies find
It’s interesting that this study looked at the proportion of women on the surgical team:
Overall, female surgeons performed 47,874 (6.7%) of the operations. Female anaesthesiologists treated patients in 192,144 (27%) of operations.
Hospitals with teams comprising more than 35% female surgeons and anaesthesiologists had better postoperative outcomes, the study found. Operations in such hospitals were associated with a 3% reduction in the odds of 90-day postoperative major morbidity in patients.
There’s some speculation in that first link about differences in aggression and risk-taking. But, given the relative rarity of female surgeons, it could just be a competency effect. If women are a very small minority for reasons not related to competency, and 93.3% of surgeons are men, it suggests that almost half the men are in the job because a more competent women didn’t get it. Groups with more women do better simply because they didn’t discount half the talent pool quite so heavily.
- Comment on How come liberals dont hate conservatives the way conservatives hate liberals 6 months ago:
You think there’s going to be civil war and also, you want to maximise the numbers fighting for the fascists. Cool, cool.
- Comment on How come liberals dont hate conservatives the way conservatives hate liberals 6 months ago:
Because handing election victories to fascists is a really, really bad idea.
- Comment on How come liberals dont hate conservatives the way conservatives hate liberals 6 months ago:
Because there is no mirror image.
@pjwestin@lemmy.world has given you a good description of fascist methods. They’re not available to the opponents of fascism because they are not fascists.
Fascism appeals to the worst parts of our nature. It gives permission to those feeling fear, humiliation or shame to lash out in anger and destroy the people that make them feel that way.
You can’t deploy the same tactics to make those people want to be on your side instead. If you try to shame them, they will just hate harder.
You should, of course, expose and ridicule the grifters who lead fascist movements and punching fascists is encouraged. But you need to distinguish between authoritarian leaders and the people they seek to lead.
You should not pander to the billionaire-funded leaderships (take note NYT), but you must not sneer at the people they are trying to lead (take note centrist Dems).
- Comment on [Serious] Do you know of any processed snack foods with some vitamins? 6 months ago:
Advising a parent to torture a child over food is piss poor advice to start with but when the parent has identified possible autism, you realise you know less than nothing and shut the fuck up.
- Comment on [Serious] Do you know of any processed snack foods with some vitamins? 6 months ago:
So the fuck what?
- Comment on [Serious] Do you know of any processed snack foods with some vitamins? 6 months ago:
What did you think this bit meant?
(He’s likely on the spectrum.)
- Comment on [BBC News] Claims that smart motorways tech leaves drivers at risk 6 months ago:
National Highways says the radar detects 89% of stopped vehicles - but that means one in 10 are not spotted.
At least 79 people have been killed on smart motorways since they were introduced in 2010. In the past five years, seven coroners have called for them to be made safer.
National Highways’ latest figures suggest that if you break down on a smart motorway without a hard shoulder you are three times more likely to be killed or seriously injured than on one with a hard shoulder.
No brainer. But then they quote this prick without directly challenging the contradiction:
The agency’s operational control director Andrew Page-Dove says action was being taken to “close the gap between how drivers feel and what the safety statistics show”.
The ‘gap’ seems to be a result of drivers having a much more accurate perception than the people paid to defend them.
National Highways says reinstating the hard shoulder would increase congestion and that there are well-rehearsed contingency plans to deal with power outages.
Just add more lanes. That’ll work. It’s never worked but obviously it’ll work. Fuckwits.
- Comment on On Being an Outlier 7 months ago:
I think you overestimate the amount of ‘thought’ going on here. (ref}
- Comment on On Being an Outlier 7 months ago:
The way he plays with the meaning of words
She (or, if you’re not sure, they).
any kind of bureaucratic or rule-based decision-making
Human-written rules are often flawed, and for similar reasons (the sole human thought process that ‘AI’ is very good at reproducing is system justification). But human-written rules can be written down and they can be interrogated. But Apple landed itself in court because it had no clue how its credit algorithm worked and could not conceive how it could possibly be sexist if the machine didn’t get any gender data to analyse.
Perhaps that is the point.
That is, indeed, the point.
- Comment on On Being an Outlier 7 months ago:
It’s asking why don’t we use it for that purpose, not suggesting that there is anything easy about doing so. I don’t know how you think science works, but it’s not like that.
- Comment on On Being an Outlier 7 months ago:
The data cannot be understood. These models are too large for that.
Apple says it doesn’t understand why its credit card gives lower credit limits to women that men even if they have the same (or better) credit scores, because they don’t use sex as a datapoint. But it’s freaking obvious why, if you have a basic grasp of the social sciences and humanities. Women were not given the legal right to their own bank accounts until the 1970s. After that, banks could be forced to grant them bank accounts but not to extend the same amount of credit. Women earn and spend in ways that are different, on average, to men. So the algorithm does not need to be told that the applicant is a woman, it just identifies them as the sort of person who earns and spends like the class of people with historically lower credit limits.
Apple’s ‘sexist’ credit card investigated by US regulator
Garbage in, garbage out. Society has been garbage for marginalised groups since forever and there’s no way to take that out of the data. Especially not big data. You can try but you just end up playing whackamole with new sources of bias, many of which cannot be measured well, if at all.
- Comment on On Being an Outlier 7 months ago:
It’s how LLMs work.
- Comment on On Being an Outlier 7 months ago:
The systems didn’t do anything they weren’t told to do.
You’re thinking of the kinds of algorithms written by human beings. AI is a black box. No one knows how these models obtain their answers.
- Comment on On Being an Outlier 7 months ago:
Where did you get insurance carriers from?
No idea what your post, before or after edit, is trying to say. But the subject of your quoted sentence is “proponents of AI” not “AI”, and the sentence is about what is enabled by AI systems. Your attempt at pedantry makes no sense.
If you’re suggesting that it is possible to build an AI with none of the biases embedded in the world it learns from, you might want to read that article again because the (obvious) rebuttal is right there.
- Comment on On Being an Outlier 7 months ago:
Isn’t that a continuation of “why the outlier was culled”?
Not sure I follow, but I think the answer is “no”.
If you control for all the causes of a difference, the difference will disappear. Which is fine if you’re looking for causal factors which are not already known to be causal factors, but no good at all if you’re trying to establish whether or not a difference exists.
It’s really quite difficult to ask a coherent question with real-world data from the messy, complicated reality of human beings.
A simple example:
Women are more likely to die from complications after a coronary artery bypass.
But if you include body surface area (a measure of body size) in your model, the difference between men and women disappears.
And if you go the whole hog and measure vein size, the importance of body size disappears too.
And, while we can never do an RCT to prove it, it makes perfect sense that smaller veins would increase the risk for a surgery which involves operating on blood vessels.
None of that means women do not, in fact, have a higher risk of dying after coronary artery bypass surgery. Collect all the data which has ever existed and women will still be more likely to die from the surgery. We have explained the phenomenon and found what is very likely to be the direct cause of higher mortality. Being a woman just makes you more likely to have that risk factor.
It is rare that the answer is as neat and simple as this. It is very easy to ask a different question from the one you thought you were asking (or pretend to be answering one question when you answered another).
You can’t just throw masses of data into a pot and expect sensible answers to come out. This is the key difference between statisticians and data scientists. And, not to throw shade on data scientists, they often end up explaining to the world that oestrogen makes people more likely to die from complications of coronary artery bypass surgery.
- Comment on Alan Bates considers private prosecutions of Post Office bosses 7 months ago:
All barristers are only as good as the evidence given to them
That’s not entirely true. The Secret Barrister made a good point on the site I won’t visit to grab the link: people always ask how you can defend someone you know is guilty; they never ask how you can prosecute someone who you know is innocent.
We have an adversarial system, not an inquisatorial one. Barristers are paid to present one case or the other, not decide what is true for themselves.
There are barristers and judges who may well be sanctioned, professionally if not also criminally, for their part in this scandal. Richard Morgan is one that sticks in my mind. He relied on an entirely circular argument (Lee Castleton signed off the accounts therefore the reliability of Horizon is irrelevant, even though it produced the accounts that Castleton had to sign if he wanted to continue trading). If you read/watch his appearance at the inquiry, it appears to literally dawn on him during the questioning. He was professionally negligent and he should not be allowed to get away with it.
- Comment on On Being an Outlier 7 months ago:
That kind of analysis is done all the time. But, even if we can collect all the relevant data (big if), the methods required are difficult to interpret and easy to abuse (we can’t do an RCT of being born female vs male, or black vs white, &c). A good example is the proliferation of analyses claiming that the gender pay gap does not exist (after you’ve ‘controlled’ for all the things that cause the gender pay gap).
It’s not easy to do ‘right’ even when done in good faith.
The article isn’t claiming that it is easy, of course. It’s asking why power is so keen on one type of question and not its inverse. And that is a very good question, albeit one with a very easy answer. Power is not in the business of abolishing itself.
- Submitted 7 months ago to technology@lemmy.world | 22 comments
- Comment on Alan Bates considers private prosecutions of Post Office bosses 7 months ago:
The CPS, and equivalents in Scotland, brought around a third of the wrongful prosecutions.
The barristers the CPS employs to bring prosecutions are the same barristers used by the Post Office, using the same courts and the same judges.
This scandal just shines a light on how impossible the criminal justice system is for ordinary people with more limited means. Bates vs PO only happened because they managed to find 555 claimants (500 being the minimum their funders needed to risk it).
There was a case settled in 2003 because the court appointed a single independent expert to act for both sides and he pointed out all the holes in the Post Office case. That should have been the end of it. But they made her sign a confidentiality agreement, slandered him, and carried on prosecuting.
I told Post Office the truth about Horizon in 2003, IT expert says
- Comment on How is the hydrogen made? 7 months ago:
Batteries are too heavy for many applications (including, arguably, cars).
That doesn’t make hydrogen the only solution but it is at least a currently available solution. I posted a link about why the Orkneys (population 23k) are producing hydrogen and switching much of their transport to it: they have so much wind the UK (population 70m) national grid can’t take all the power they generate from it.
- Comment on How is the hydrogen made? 7 months ago:
Yes. I’m not watching a video but it is a serious problem, especially as hydrogen degrades metals and finds its way out anyway. The private sector cannot be trusted to self-regulate nor the government to meaningfully regulate.
Trying very hard not to succumb to nihilism here …
- Comment on ‘Guilty men have got away with it’: fears over rise of ‘sexsomnia’ defence in rape cases 7 months ago:
Important to emphasise that this is a real, and distressing condition.
But if it is real there will usually be a plenty of evidence that it is real. Sexsomniacs most often attack the person lying asleep next to them, and they’re horrified and confused when they realise what has happened. The CPS should not be dropping cases simply because the defendant can afford expensive lawyers. And the case where they claimed the victim had sexsomnia is outrageous.
- Comment on How is the hydrogen made? 7 months ago:
That is true of all colours of hydrogen other than green (and possibly natural stores of ‘fossil’ hydrogen if they can be extracted without leakage).
Green hydrogen is better thought of as a battery than a fuel. It’s a good way to store the excess from renewables and may be the only way to solve problems like air travel.
How hydrogen is transforming these tiny Scottish islands
That’s not to say it’s perfect. Hydrogen in the atmosphere slows down the decomposition of methane so leaks must be kept well below 5% or the climate benefits are lost. We don’t have a good way to measure leaks. It’s also quite inefficient because a lot of energy is needed to compress it for portable uses.
And, of course, the biggest problem is that Big Carbon will never stop pushing for dirtier hydrogens to be included in the mix, if green hydrogen paves the way.