AnarchistArtificer, anarchistartificer@lemmy.world

I’m using this:

“that crime statistics need to be carefully considered because of a large risk of bias in police responses to things let alone the justice system itself.”

to argue that the data behind these statistics are so riddled with bias that I am extremely dubious about them, to the extent that I think it’d be epistemologically safer to largely disregard the stats.

I mean, I’m a scientist, and so my whole thing is about grappling with the fact that statistics are just a proxy for the thing we actually care about. But the thing that makes statistics useful in science is being able to estimate how uncertain we are in our data — if we don’t have sufficient understanding of the data and how much it’s affected by bias, then it’s pointless to rely on it in our analyses. Less than pointless, actually, because it’ll lead us to a false sense of confidence where we think we somewhat understand some phenomena, but in reality we’re digging in the completely wrong areas.

By mentioning racial bias, I was making the wider point of how the statistics rely on data that is inherently biased due to how it was collected; Inequality in policing and the judicial system leads to different outcomes.

A concrete example from the UK is that in the year ending March 2024, under the “stop and search” procedures, "there were 59,549 searches of women, […] and 447,952 searches of men […]" (Elided parts of the quote are because the article compares stats to the year prior, which isn’t relevant to our discussion)

That’s a ratio of men and women being searched of around 15:2 . I’m going to treat that as if it were 7:1, because I want to set up a hypothetical. Now obviously this doesn’t include any of the downstream stuff like rates of actually getting arrested, or later found guilty, because that would be far too complex to consider here. Let’s treat stop and search rates as a proxy for crime rates, and consider two different scenarios that could explain these data.

In scenario 1, we would assume that for each gender, the number of people stopped and searched is proportional to the number of people who commit crimes, I.e. that:

the gendered ratio of stop and search (7:1) ≈ the gendered ratio of crimes committed (7:1)

Now for scenarios 2, let’s assume that this isn’t the case, and that actual ratio of crimes committed is 𝒳 :1, where 𝒳 is unknown; although my belief is that 𝒳 lies somewhere between 1 and 7 (i.e. that women commit more crimes than is recorded in the stats, but likely not significantly more than men do), 𝒳 could even be larger than 7.

There’s a lot of possible reasons why we might find that 𝒳 ≠ 7. Police may actually use stop and search as a tactic to harass women (depressingly common based on what we’ve seen of police abusing their power against women), leading to women being over counted in the stats compared to their actual crime rates; or maybe police are less likely to stop and search women because they’ve found that to find contraband like drugs, a more invasive search would be necessary (I, and many women I have known have occasionally hid small, secret items in their bras, and I imagine many criminals would have had the same idea); or maybe police officers are worried about being accused of abusing their power to harass women, so their personal sense of professional risk leads them to be less likely to stop women. I’m not trying to make the case for any of these in particular, merely assert that there are many plausible reasons why the ratio of stop and searches might be different to the ratio of crimes committed.

In both scenario 1 and 2, our data shows us the same thing: that men commit more crimes than women at a roughly 7:1 ratio. However, in scenario 2, this conclusion is an incorrect one, due to bias in how the data was collected. The crux of my point is that we don’t know whether reality is closer to scenario 1 or 2, and we don’t have a way of knowing because we have no way of counting true rates of crime; anything that tries to study crime is inevitably going to have a heckton of false negatives — that is, criminals who get away with it. And every innocent person who has been imprisoned is a false positive. False positives and false negatives are a problem in any statistical study, but I am arguing that this is especially significant in this case due to well documented inequalities in policing, affecting multiple axes of oppression. That’s why I brought up racial bias — to highlight the many flaws of policing as a method of data collection.

Often when we run into the problems of false positives and false negatives in statistics, we are able to estimate how accurate our proxy measurements are by comparing them to a reference gold standard. During COVID, for instance, when Lateral Flow Tests (LFTs) were being tested, we were able to test them against PCR tests, which were known to be extremely accurate. We have no such reference standard when it comes to crime stats — all we have is the proxy. What I am advocating for is that we keep this in mind, and take any crime statistics with a hefty dose of salt

To somewhat play Devil’s Advocate, I would highlight that the stats don’t show who commits more crime, but who gets caught more. If no-one arrests you, (or if a court finds you not guilty), you won’t be in the stats.

In my country, for instance, police can stop and search you if they have “reasonable suspicion” that you’re carrying something illegal (stolen good, drugs, weapons etc.). If police are operating under the assumption that men commit more crime than women, they’re far more likely to be suspicious of a man committing the same crime as a woman.

I haven’t read anything that’s about gender bias specifically at this level of policing, but I do know there’s a lot of research (especially in the US) on how racial bias causes black neighbourhoods to be more heavily policed than neighbourhoods with comparable crime levels, leading to a self-reinforcing cycle where heavier policing leads to increased belief that black people commit more crime, which leads to heavier policing^1

I do know that after an arrest has been made, women tend to fare better than men; they are less likely to be sentenced, and when they are, they tend to receive less severe sentences than men, even for equivalent crimes^3 . This is speculative, but I imagine this has a cascading effect — if there is a crime where the punishment could range from community service to a prison sentence, then the person who gets community service is statistically less likely to reoffend than the person who goes to prison^[5]

All that in mind, I’m pretty confident that the gender ratio in crime statistics gives a skewed impression of who actually commits more crime, and that women are effectively undercounted if we’re talking about who commits more crime — though I can’t guess on to what degree this is the case. However, it’s entirely possible that women commit crimes at a similar rate to men, or even at a higher rate. We can’t really know.

And to finish off this comment with a slightly more shitposty answer that still links into my broader point, it’s possible that women commit as much crime as men, but the statistics are skewed towards men because women are more effective criminals.

I include this last possibility because I am uncomfortable with how you framed things in your question, with phrases like “crime being disproportionately committed by men is a universal constant”. Statistics are never Truth, and are, at best, only ever an approximation. Stats can give us a sense of clarity in an overwhelming world by reducing down complexity into much more easily parsed, quantitative data, often presented in an easy to visualise manner. It feels objective. However, statistics only serve to mask the underlying bias in what data we choose to collect, who collects it, and how — which means that treating statistics as objective can be dangerous due to making us less aware of biases and inequality, and thus even less objective.

I like the way that the feminist philosopher Donna Haraway puts it; she describes data visualisations as “the god trick of seeing everything from nowhere"^4. I’mma quote a long passage from an excellent book here, because I don’t think I can explain it any better than this:

“The view from nowhere—from a distance, from up above, like a god—may be data visualization’s most signature feature. It’s also the most ethically complicated to navigate for the ways in which it masks the people, the methods, the questions, and the messiness that lies behind clean lines and geometric shapes. Haraway calls it a trick because it makes the viewer believe that they can see everything, all at once, from an imaginary and impossible standpoint. But it’s also a trick because what appears to be everything, and what appears to be neutral, is always what she terms a partial perspective. And in most cases of seemingly “neutral” visualizations, this perspective is the one of the dominant, default group.” ^[5]

To bring things back to our question, I strongly believe that we don’t know if men commit more crime than women. I think it’s plausible that it could be true, but due to inherent bias in how the data behind these statistics are gathered (i.e. documented inequalities in policing and sentencing), we simply don’t know. Statistics always carries this problem of bias being hidden in the data, but it’s especially tricky when dealing with complex socioeconomic matters such as crime. To me, this is a standout example of an area where we need to be especially cautious that we don’t mistake the stats for truth.

“Smartphone Data Reveal Neighborhood-Level Racial Disparities in Police Presence”, (2023), Chen et al.
https://doi.org/10.1162/rest_a_01370

https://anderson-review.ucla.edu/smartphone-records-reveal-racial-disparities-in-neighborhood-policing/

“Gender Disparities in Sentencing”, (2020), Arnaud Philippe
https://doi.org/10.1111/ecca.12333
Unpaywalled SciDB mirror via Anna’s Archive

https://ceps.blogs.bristol.ac.uk/2021/11/17/gender-stereotypes-see-female-criminals-fare-better-in-court/

“Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (1988): 575–599
Quote and reference retrieved via [6]

“Data Feminism”, (2020), Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein
Fairly academic, but also quite accessible to anyone interested in how socioeconomic inequality shapes how we use data, and how data feeds inequality. I highly recommend this book, it is excellent
Quoted section found here

And on the off chance one of you delightful nerds would like to read more, here is a link to the main book page, for your convenience:
https://data-feminism.mitpress.mit.edu/

^(It’s funny that now I’m no longer in academia, I seem to have fun writing cited essays. Though to be fair, I studied biochemistry, so this is outside of my main wheelhouse — which is probably why I’m so diligent with citing my claims)

Starting using a password manager is by far the biggest quality of life improvement from a single change that I’ve made in the last 5 years. It’s so refreshing to go on a website that I haven’t used in years and not go through the rigmarole of creating an account, only for it to say I already have one, causing me to have to faff around resetting my password.

And best of all, I no longer have to deal with the annoyance of trying to reset my password to one of my go-tos (we all know that reusing passwords isn’t good, but let’s be real — if we’re storing our passwords in our heads, then we’re probably going to do it for sites we don’t care about), only for the site to tell you that they have a bunch of specific requirements that explains why you weren’t able to log in with your usual go-to password (my local council has a more restricted set of symbols that you’re allowed to use in passwords than most sites, for instance)

If anyone has been on the fence about it, I’d encourage you to give it a go. You don’t have to switch everything over all at once — I’ve been using it for a few years now and I still occasionally find a website that I use so infrequently. I just reset my password and the browser extension will then ask if I want to save the new one. When I first started using a password manager, I just went to all the sites that had passwords saved in my browser and logged out and back in again using those saved passwords, which would allow me to add them to my password manager super easily.

I use Bitwarden, and it’s what I usually recommend to people. A good master password is actually a pass-phrase — a string of a few randomly generated words. Don’t pick words that you like — use a tool like this one (though it is okay to mash the “generate” button a few times until you find one that’s memorable. 4 words is a good balance of memorability and security for most people. Write the passphrase down and store it some place in secure but easily accessible (such as your home, but like, not stuck to your monitor).

<Steps off soapbox>

Okay, I’m done now. I always get super enthusiastic about advising people to use password managers because although I struggle especially with organisation and executive function due to ADHD, I think that modern society has us all worn down in that respect. From that angle, using a password manager feels like essential self care.

Wedinos is a great service! I love that this is a thing that’s available. I’ve recommended it to a few friends who use recreational drugs occasionally. I’m a big advocate of harm reduction, and stuff like that gives people information on the risks they’re engaging with is a much better way of keeping people safe than preaching abstinence

I wrote a long comment that ended up being lost due to my app crashing. I’m too burnt out to write it all out again right now, but I wanted to leave something, even if brief.

My advice is to not do it. I looked into this myself due to chronic pain, and I concluded that even if I felt like I could manage the risk of dependence/tolerance if I were self medicating, that it would be impossible to do safely if buying stuff on the darknet.

Aside from it being hella expensive, there’s also the constant risk of the particular market you use going down, either due to law enforcement, or “exit scamming” — when a market or vendor plans to leave, but they continue accepting new money for a while, without sending out parcels/paying out to vendors.

If you find a market that you’re able to access, it isn’t a question of “if” it goes offline, but when. When it does go offline, you might be in a really tricky spot of struggling with withdrawal symptoms from not having access to your regular medication whilst you try to find a new alternative.

Even setting aside that problem, there’s the issue of finding a reliable vendor. Dark net markets function sort of like eBay, and you may have some trial and error finding someone who sells reliable stuff for a reasonable price. But even then, you need to be prepared for parcels to not reach you, and the anxiety of not knowing if you’ve been exit scammed; or for your regular vendor to temporarily pause taking new orders; or for them to just close their shop, never to return. Even medications that look legit might not be. There are reagent tests you can do to keep yourself a bit safer, but what would you realistically be able to do if the tramadol you had purchased showed up as negative for opioids, and you suspected they were just Xanax. Depending on the market and the manner in which you purchased them, you might be able to get your money back, but in the meantime, you would be without your medication.

If you go this route, it’s not a question of if your supply gets interrupted, but when. Honestly, you would be better served seeking proper medical care, privately. I’m guessing that if you have considered going private already, it’s not an option for you because it would be too expensive. Well trust me, it’s probably more reasonable than jumping down into this forsaken money pit.

This goes extra to anyone reading this who is disabled, chronically ill, or struggles with mental illness. The world is richer with us in it.

Huzzah for wholesome anarchy!

Thanks for indulging my curiosity

The command isn’t working for me and the URL in the command doesn’t seem to work anymore. Could you check for me please? I’d be surprised if I was on it, given that I generally try to be wholesome and civil in my online conduct, but I’m curious.

It is pretty scientific. It involves inserting a tiny probe into the pore where a hair grows, and then administering a small shock that kills the hair follicle for permanent removal. It’s basically an alternative to laser hair removal, except unlike laser, it works for people with fair hair too.

It’s pretty grim to be as immersed as I am in all the tech news bullshit (which I continue to do largely because I am the most techy person in most rooms I exist in, and the closest thing to an AI expert (it feels so weird to say that, but I do have a fair bit of experience coding machine learning from scratch in a scientific context, so I probably do need to get more comfortable with thinking myself as an expert — it’s a relative term, after all)

However, I really enjoy that in addition to there being names that make me grimace because I know they will have dogshit takes on things, there are also names that I really respect. It makes me feel more connected to people, because it makes me reflect on how meaningful knowledge production is based on trust. Emily Bender, for instance, is someone whose work I am familiar with, and thus I am far likely to spend the energy to read stuff like the thread you linked.

As grim as modern tech is, it makes me smile that there are so many people who are fighting the good fight.

Damn, your smoky eye makeup is incredible. I can never get mine looking so natural

Yeah, I think this is a good perspective.

I also don’t think that dating apps are necessarily an unscratched lottery ticket either. I’m currently in a relationship with someone who I have clicked so well with that fairly early on, I just stopped bothering using dating apps, because it doesn’t feel worth the effort when I have someone — and this is even an open polyamorous relationship, so either of us are free to date other people if we wish. I had some relationships/dalliances where I did feel drawn to keep looking for other options, and I think that was signalling that I hadn’t found the right person for me.

I can’t speak for whether the person I’m with currently is my “forever person” — because one of the things I like about our dynamic is that we encourage the other to grow and change in interesting ways, and it’s plausible that we could grow into people who are no longer quite so compatible. But right now, and for the foreseeable future, I seem to have found my perfect partner.

Stick with it, OP. I may have gotten lucky, but I remember how demoralising the early dating was. Your perfect partner is someone who feels as lucky to have found you as you feel for having found them. You deserve that kind of relationship, and what’s more, your future kids deserve that too. It sounds like you’re focussing on the right things though in focussing on building yourself up. That leads me to believe that you’ll be successful, if you keep heart.

Yeah, I think it’s pretty situational. I go to a lot of festivals and travel somewhat often, so it’d be useful for me. I also don’t have a permanent home (some day… <Sigh>)

Thanks for adding the preprint. Also thanks for this summary, you explained it far better than I could (I left my comment in a bit of a hurry)

Diminishing returns on steroids? No, clearly we just need to pump EVEN MORE MONEY AND DATA into this

Here’s an academic article titled xm"AI and the problem of knowledge collapse". It’s paywalled though, so DM me if you’d like the pdf.

It looks more at the problem of our collective knowledge being at risk, which I think is a big thing. So much of our institutional knowledge is contained within people, and outsourcing that to AI is just a recipe for disaster on many fronts — not least of all because if an organisation ends up becoming dependent on AI, then it’s just making itself more brittle; if a model is updated, leading to significantly different performance, or it the cost model changes, then that has some big problems.

This next link isn’t an academic study, but hopefully helpful. It’s looking at how many companies are backtracking after the charging model for many AI companies meant costs skyrocketed. If IT gets people to start using AI en masse, are they really willing to be on the hook if the same thing happens with your organisation? AI is still not profitable for the people selling it, so this is unlikely to be the last time that the up the fees

I think the big beef here is that this isn’t the needs of the many, as data centres are just enriching the few and provide little benefit to the many — especially people local to the data centres

The absurd rate of data centres being built (often in places with insufficient power infrastructure) is a product of the absurd AI hype machine, and so I think it sucks that this family were forced to leave their family home for this. I am glad that the article doesn’t mention how much they were paid — not least of all because I don’t have any context for what would be a reasonable price in that part of Georgia, but because it would distract from the point of the article — the question of whether this is actually a case where them having to move was morally justified and whether this is actually benefitting the many.

Edit: I realised that the tone of my comment sounds like I’m disagreeing with you more than I actually am. I do disagree about the omission of what they were paid — I think that’s actually a good thing. Besides that though, it sounds like we’re fairly aligned in our views

Edit 2: saw your replies to other people, and I want to emphasise that I understand that this is because more power is needed, because the data centres already exist and given that the state isn’t reining in the data centre power usage, we do need more power. My stance is that I am unhappy that families like this are being forced to move because I think that before it came to this, local data centres should have had limits placed upon them to reduce the likelihood of this needing to happen.

I mean, I think this data centre probably shouldn’t have been built in the first place, but given that it has been, at minimum the state should be taking steps to reduce impact on local residents

I disagree with the “Pandora’s box is open” angle because my beef isn’t with the technology, but how it’s being used in practice. It’s a socioeconomic problem, but a technological one.

Cory Doctorow articulates it much better than I can^[1]:

“Now, if AI could do your job, this would still be a problem. We’d have to figure out what to do with all these technologically unemployed people.

But AI can’t do your job. It can help you do your job, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to save anyone money. Take radiology: there’s some evidence that AIs can sometimes identify solid-mass tumors that some radiologists miss, and look, I’ve got cancer. Thankfully, it’s very treatable, but I’ve got an interest in radiology being as reliable and accurate as possible.

If my Kaiser hospital bought some AI radiology tools and told its radiologists: “Hey folks, here’s the deal. Today, you’re processing about 100 x-rays per day. From now on, we’re going to get an instantaneous second opinion from the AI, and if the AI thinks you’ve missed a tumor, we want you to go back and have another look, even if that means you’re only processing 98 x-rays per day. That’s fine, we just care about finding all those tumors.”

If that’s what they said, I’d be delighted. But no one is investing hundreds of billions in AI companies because they think AI will make radiology more expensive, not even if that also makes radiology more accurate. The market’s bet on AI is that an AI salesman will visit the CEO of Kaiser and make this pitch: “Look, you fire 9/10s of your radiologists, saving $20m/year, you give us $10m/year, and you net $10m/year, and the remaining radiologists’ job will be to oversee the diagnoses the AI makes at superhuman speed, and somehow remain vigilant as they do so, despite the fact that the AI is usually right, except when it’s catastrophically wrong.

“And if the AI misses a tumor, this will be the human radiologist’s fault, because they are the ‘human in the loop.’ It’s their signature on the diagnosis.”

This is a reverse centaur, and it’s a specific kind of reverse-centaur: it’s what Dan Davies calls an “accountability sink.” The radiologist’s job isn’t really to oversee the AI’s work, it’s to take the blame for the AI’s mistakes.”

Even with the technological limitations that AI faces at the moment, we could be doing so much more with it. I love this radiography example because so many of us have experienced someone in our life getting cancer. AI is absolutely capable of improving the rate at which we are detecting cancer at an early stage, which would absolutely save lives. Instead what we’re getting is that it is being used as an excuse to heap more work onto doctors and radiographers, worsening the situation for everyone.

I do agree with the broad strokes of what you’re saying, because absolutely it does take time for any new technology to integrate itself into society and become useful. However, I don’t believe that AI in its current form is capable of becoming commercially viable (and by “in its current form”, I am talking about a paradigm that demands excessive building of super resource intensive datacentres)

Edit: forgot to add the citation

29 year old woman. A few times a week, on average, I’d say. Potentially multiple times in a day.

When I have a partner, I tend to do it way less though, because I find that the sex is way better if I refrain from masturbating. Orgasms from masturbation aren’t particularly satisfying for me unless I try to do a whole build up that I rarely have the time or energy for.

Worth mentioning that autism makes my general sensory experience pretty weird — I’m hypersensitive to most stimuli, and that also affects touch. This feeds into my above preferences in complex ways.

I also have a few physical disabilities that mean I’m less likely to be able to enjoy sexual pleasure as much unless I’m in the right mindset (i.e. chronic pain can distract from the physical pleasure).

It’s possible that you’re ahead of the curve when it comes to knowing what you like. I had a friend who was capable of reaching orgasm through masturbation, but it took so much effort that she rarely did it. Then she had a partner who helped her to figure out her own idiosyncratic preferences in terms of what she needed to reach orgasm, and that sparked a period where she “felt like a teenage boy” with how often she was masturbating. She was 32 at this point.

I have another friend who didn’t even orgasm until she was 31 due to only having dated guys who were stereotypical straight dudes, which had calibrated her bar of what to expect super low (not just in what she expected from partners, but in terms of what sexual pleasure could feel like in general).

Another friend didn’t masturbate at all until she was 28 (with the exception of some occasional pillow humping that she would feel tremendous shame about) due to religious trauma.

Unfortunately, the society we live in doesn’t really equip women well to be able to come to understand our bodies and communicate our sexual needs. A lot of my friends in their 30s (especially the women) have said that they’re loving their 30s way more than their 20s because of this kind of thing. 30 is still relatively young, so maybe (likely in addition to a naturally higher libido) you just have figured out what you like sooner than your friends have. Maybe some of them are yet to have an awakening of some sort, and the average rate of masturbation will be higher in a few years.