tw000001 (u/tw000001)

tw000001 commented on A one-year moratorium on police use of Rekognition blog.aboutamazon.com/poli... · Posted by u/robbiet480

throwawaysea · 6 years ago

I supported them for a long time as well, but they've waded very far from their original waters. These days the ACLU is incredibly politically biased, and the issues they focus on are often non-issues or low-priority ones. I am disappointed to see them, for example, file lawsuits against schools that are trying to ensure that only biological women participate in sports divisions for women, so that those sports are competitive and fair.

The ACLU's social media accounts are a mess as well. Their postings come off as unhinged and sue-happy, and the fan base of commenters has become so one-sided, that I think the ACLU simply caters to that vocal audience now. Maybe the change is not solely attributable to that - there might also be a new generational wave of inside actors that simply operate the ACLU in a more ideological manner.

I agree that some of their work is still great. But unfortunately it's been enough of a change that upon weighing the good and bad, I had to finally pull the plug on my recurring donations too.

tw000001 · 6 years ago

>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.

1.https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2018/02/08/the_ac...

tw000001 commented on A one-year moratorium on police use of Rekognition blog.aboutamazon.com/poli... · Posted by u/robbiet480

gregsadetsky · 6 years ago

In the ACLU's posts, they say that they used the "default match settings". In their response [0] to Amazon's response, the ACLU links to a guide published by Amazon [1] intended to "Identify Persons of Interest for Law Enforcement" that does use `searchFaceRequest?.faceMatchThreshold = 0.85;` (this is still the case today).

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." That bit of the article links to the CompareFaces API documentation [3] which (still) states "By default, only faces with a similarity score of greater than or equal to 80% are returned in the response".

Have you seen/read something else about this?

[0] https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/aclu-comment-new-amazon-...

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/machine-learning/using-amazon-r...

[2] https://www.fastcompany.com/90389905/aclu-amazon-face-recogn...

[3] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/rekognition/latest/dg/API_Compar...

tw000001 · 6 years ago

>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.

tw000001 commented on Audio Engineers Built a Shield to Deflect Police Sound Cannons vice.com/en_us/article/dy... · Posted by u/elsewhen

pjc50 · 6 years ago

Amazing how in a supposedly litigious society like America it's possible to deploy a device which causes intentional, indiscriminate, permanent injury across a crowd and not get sued into oblivion. Bit like how tobacco, asbestos and Kinder eggs all incurred product liability because they weren't intending to be damaging to health, but gun manufacturers aren't liable because their products are supposed to be dangerous.

tw000001 · 6 years ago

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...

tw000001 commented on IBM no longer offers general purpose facial recognition or analysis software techcrunch.com/2020/06/08... · Posted by u/TakakiTohno

TomMarius · 6 years ago

Actually you can prove it and it has been proven. Genetics have a minor say in who a person is, and racial factor is equivalent to statistical error. For example there are adopted black children in very white populations, e.g. in Eastern Europe, where I live. These children are absolutely no different to kids here - and the white kids here know from experience that a person that grew up here (among our people) will be just like them. And the same goes for other ethnicities/nationalities that are considered different in personality, e.g. Arabs, Greeks, Italians, Spanish people... It's all about the upbringing.

I am not familiar with any scandals, and in the case of Ivy league schools I am always asking why that school? There are thousands of cheap (for everyone) high quality schools. The fact that few well known schools are using race to distinguish high income students is wrong (now you at least have some view into what racism is, imagine how bad it must be to be a minority), but it is not happening universally as you suggest.

tw000001 · 6 years ago

>Actually you can prove it and it has been proven. Genetics have a minor say in who a person is, and racial factor is equivalent to statistical error

That's not true and you won't be able to produce a rigorous source, and it's inconsistent what what we know about human physiology.

> The fact that few well known schools are using race to distinguish high income students is wrong (now you at least have some view into what racism is, imagine how bad it must be to be a minority

I am a minority, son of immigrants, and that's what makes this discussion particularly frustrating. This unrealistic perception of genes and culture is a purely western delusion.

>For example there are adopted black children in very white populations, e.g. in Eastern Europe, where I live. These children are absolutely no different to kids here - and the white kids here know from experience that a person that grew up here (among our people) will be just like them.

There are similar studies from the 70s-90s in the US which show opposite conclusions.[0] We can continue bending over backwards coming up with explanations that allow us to maintain our magnanimous worldview, or we can accept that what we know about genes and culture has negative implications for equality of outcome. This isn't a superiority or inferiority judgement either - the NFL is not overwheingly black because discrimination.

0. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota_Transracial_Adopti...

tw000001 commented on We can no longer ignore the potential of psychedelic drugs to treat depression theguardian.com/commentis... · Posted by u/throwaway888abc

qntty · 6 years ago

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.

tw000001 · 6 years ago

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.

tw000001 commented on Tribalism comes for pandemic science thenewatlantis.com/public... · Posted by u/seinundzeit

salmon30salmon · 6 years ago

This is so very disheartening. I will speak only for the United States, as I am not familiar enough with other countries to comment. Not only is this impacting nearly every single person in the country, it is ruining the financial situation of over 40m people, primarily concentrated within the most financially vulnerable. 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. We _now_ know that children are at a very low risk, people under 40 are very low risk. Most risk is within shared living situations (migrant workers, retirement homes, prisons). We can respond to the _real_ risks and use a nuanced approach that actually saves lives. But instead, the left says "lockdown lockdown lockdown" and the right says "open 100%"... Both are full of shit to the point of it being disgusting.

This isn't a game. This has life and death consequences so far beyond COVID-19, and the lack of foresight that the partisans are demonstrating will have reverberations for generations. We are playing the life of real people, we are risking the financial security of real people, who have families and debts and dreams.

Finally, the fact that the public health sector has devolved into partisanship really has me worried for when we _actually_ have a repeat of Spanish Flu, or a more virulent Ebola etc. Then we are screwed.

Edit: fixed a typo

tw000001 · 6 years ago

>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.

tw000001 commented on We can no longer ignore the potential of psychedelic drugs to treat depression theguardian.com/commentis... · Posted by u/throwaway888abc

carapace · 6 years ago

Americans take so many prescription drugs that they can be measured in our sewage. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2006-jan-30-me-drugs...

tw000001 · 6 years ago

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.

tw000001 commented on We can no longer ignore the potential of psychedelic drugs to treat depression theguardian.com/commentis... · Posted by u/throwaway888abc

tw000001 · 6 years ago

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!