AnarchistArtificer

Yeah, and I would add that even if OP does get a small token of appreciation for their neighbour, but it would be good to emphasise that OP doesn't feel like the gift has paid their neighbour back for their help, but just a little extra, and that the neighbour should let OP know in future if there's any way for them to help out.

I say this as someone who often explicitly prefers to not be paid back for kindnesses done unto others. I'd prefer someone to pay me back in kindness in the future. After all, if I'm in a position to help someone out, then it's likely that I'm not in particular need of receiving extra kindness at that point in time. However, if I remain friends with someone for long enough, inevitably our positions will end up being reversed at some point. It's nice to feel like I'm a part of a dynamic little equilibrium.

And if there never comes an opportunity to pay me back, then paying it forward works for me too. None of us can escape living under late stage capitalism, but small acts of community building feel like a hint of an escape

Even just the video (before the reaction to criticism) left a super bad taste in my mouth. I remember an aggrieved knitted described their own feelings around it as being that it was easy to enjoy the edutainment material he produces when it was in a topic they were confident he knew more than them on. However, when they saw how shoddy the knitting video was, that made them feel uneasy about even the non-knitting related content, because what if that was as plagued with errors and bias as the knitting video, except they didn't notice it.

What I was especially salty about with the video is that there was a non-problematic way to say "look at the cool research that involves throwing modern science at ancient textiles crafts" — highlighting research by people like Elisabetta Matsumoto, a physicist and a knitter. I was so hyped when someone reviewing the video mentioned Matsumoto's research, as I was aware of her research already from being a ridiculous nerd.

I'm sorry that things got bad enough to require inpatient care, but I'm glad you were able to get some help — I hope it did actually help. I know from firsthand experience that one never fully recovers from PTSD, in the sense that you can't go back to how things were before. However, I also know that it's possible to continue living life with the psychological equivalent of a massive scar, even if it is still red and angry and often painful — but not really possible to when instead of a scar, you have an open, gaping wound.

I hope you were able to make some progress towards healing, even if it'll take much longer to fully heal.

I also appreciate your attempt to leverage your own experience to promote compassion for Green. I've not read the rest of the comments here yet, but I can imagine there are a lot of people with uncharitable stances towards the situation. I am pretty steadfastly anti-AI, but I think it's important that we consider the person at the centre of any problematic AI use

I don't have any suggestions, I just want you to know that you're delightful

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][2]

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][4] . 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][5]. 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.

[1]: Open Access Academic Paper:"Smartphone Data Reveal Neighborhood-Level Racial Disparities in Police Presence", (2023), Chen et al.https://doi.org/10.1162/rest_a_01370

[2]: More accessible summary of [1]https://anderson-review.ucla.edu/smartphone-records-reveal-racial-disparities-in-neighborhood-policing/

[3]: Paywalled Academic Paper:"Gender Disparities in Sentencing", (2020), Arnaud Philippehttps://doi.org/10.1111/ecca.12333 Unpaywalled SciDB mirror via Anna's Archive

[4]: More accessible summary of [3], by Michelle Kilfoyle and Arnaud Philippehttps://ceps.blogs.bristol.ac.uk/2021/11/17/gender-stereotypes-see-female-criminals-fare-better-in-court/

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

[6]: Open Access Book "Data Feminism", (2020), Catherine D'Ignazio and Lauren KleinFairly 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 excellentQuoted 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)

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

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 [1]: https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/05/pop-that-bubble/

I genuinely think that Binface would be a better MP than Farage. That's a low bar actually — perhaps it would be better to say that I think he'd actually be a better than average MP. Some people have gotten all pissy about Count Binface, saying that he is making a mockery of British elections, but the reason why it's effective satire is because British politics is already a shit show; I'd argue that someone putting so much effort into trying to highlight this is someone who is actually taking the whole thing pretty seriously, and that Count Binface probably respects the system and the voters way more than Farage and his ilk

Maybe they're just sick of staring at screens, and the Chromebook screen was the thing they hated the most because of the activities associated with it. Plus if you're using it for most school work, a kid would be likely to be staring at that longer than their phone or other devices at home.

That fact that this exists is Art

It's a city on the US

My dude, do you know what statistics is? The paper doesn't say anything of that sort. Measuring the proportion of people who hold a particular belief is nothing like what you describe

You are committing a logical fallacy called "affirming the consequent".

Props to you for admitting you spoke prematurely

There's so many hard hitting quotes in this game. The one that hit me the hardest was actually the thought cabinet thought you get for trying to open the unopenable door.

Edit:

Found it.

"There is no way to open the supply depot door. Accept it. You cannot open all the doors. You have to integrate this into your character. Some doors will forever remain closed. Even if every single other door will open at one time or another, maybe to a key, or maybe to some sort of tool meant for opening doors... But this one will never accede to such commands. A realization crucial to personal growth. Crucial."

I felt so betrayed by this. I had spent a point to unlock this thought. I waited with excitement for its completion, which would surely allow me to unlock the door. But instead, I felt more called out than I have ever felt in my life.

Indeed. Whilst many people (such as AlsaValderaan, based on their comment) understand this, there are also people who don't seem to understand that unpredictability and more extreme weather is evidence of climate change, not against it.

As you say, "global warming" hasn't been used by scholars in and adjacent to the field in many years, but the term and it's connotations seem to have stuck in people's heads. As a scientist, I have an instinct to say "this is a messaging problem, and if scientists better understood how to use rhetoric, perhaps people would have a better understanding of climate change". However, I think that's an incorrect instinct that only exists as a form of "cope".

I do think that scientists, on average, need to get better at communicating their research to laypeople and policy makers. However, it low-key feels like victim blaming to lay responsibility for muddy public understanding of climate change, given that the primary cause of this is moneyed interests who stand to profit from the ongoing rape of the planet's ecosystems.

My expertise isn't in a climate related field, but I have friends who do work in that sphere, and it feels like there's a sort of collective trauma amongst researchers (I mean above and beyond the despair that many of us feel at political negligence exacerbating the climate crisis). I can't imagine how it must feel to go to a conference and present some research that says "this extremely specific thing that I am a hyper specialised expert on is at risk of permanent loss, here is what needs to happen", and find that despite unanimous agreement, and everyone else there is shit scared because they have their own hyper specific objects of expertise that are at risk for the exact same reasons; nothing will change because you're preaching to the choir.

There are scientists who are good at shouting at public policy makers, but they're outnumbered and outspended by the people and corporations that want more profit. Sometimes people fight for years to implement a particular scheme, but it gets corrupted along the way — usually not from a malicious sabotage of climate action kind of way, but through the kind of bureaucratic incompetence that arises when the people steering the ship fundamentally don't care about the aims of a project. Policies get progressively watered down, or completely distorted from their original aims. It's depressing as hell.

Honestly, the only reason I'm still alive is spite. I don't think climate change will eradicate humanity, but it will put countless lives and ecosystems in jeopardy. For all my privilege, I know that to the ones in power, I am just as much an acceptable sacrifice on the altar to profit as a Bangladeshi textile worker, or a Congolese cobalt miner. The assholes with money are probably going to win this war against most of the planet, but ironically, they're some of the least well equipped for climate resilience — money only gets you so far at the end of the world, after all.

They get more human written text, which is one of the most powerful things in their doomed attempt to forestall model collapse

The crow was probably just a witches' familiar and thus was able to use magic to transmute the oily cheeto into actual food

AnarchistArtificer

@ AnarchistArtificer @lemmy.world

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AnarchistArtificer

What's a good non-cash compensation/show of appreciation to a neighbor for cat-sitting?

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YouTuber Hank Green Is Facing a Fan Revolt Over His AI Use

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Why do YOU think men commit more crime than women?

What's a silly pet name or term of endearment I can use for my partner?

Why do YOU think men commit more crime than women?

Why do YOU think men commit more crime than women?

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About a decade too late.

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What is your favourite video game quote?

Sweaters

Permanently Deleted

Bird