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>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...

>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.

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...

>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...

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.

>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.

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.

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!

>>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.

1.https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murray-Hill_riot

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.

> conflation of humanities and social sciences.

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.

I haven't had a FB account in about 10 years. I can't stop them from harvesting anyone else's data. Or controlling what they see.

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.

Dehumanizing someone for holding right of center views and then using that unilateral label as justification for targeting them is nothing like domestic violence.

People have started throwing around the labels "racist", "white supremacists" and "Nazi" far too liberally given that these words have the power to destroy lives.

When near center moderates are deplatformed and start to feel targeted for wrong think, you push them to align themselves with the extremists, the only people who claim to actually be looking out for their views and well-being. Not to mention that most of these accusations are based on glaring double standards.

>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.

That's most likely a training data issue.

The whole thing works on statistical priors: if I have feature a at location x, there's a 90% I should have feature b at location y. So if the majority of pictures of beards in my dataset were also, say, wearing sunglasses, then naturally if I freehand draw a beard the net will probably output sunglasses even if I don't change the eyes!

The solution is to ensure that you sample the full data space that you wish to reproduce (not trivial). Neural nets do seem to interpolate but this is super high dimensional space so it's not always intuitive...there are many orders of magnitude more directions in which to move to get from point A to point B.

>The president has made it clear that despite voting by mail himself multiple times, he does not support wide expansion of the practice.

If we take off our hate-goggles here, this really isn't the gotchya that journalists want you to think it is. One can be qualified to legally vote by mail and do so while also claiming that overall the system is broken.

>bizarre because it's so stupid. Normally, police don't beat journalists because they're conscious that if you force the media to side with the protesters, it's pretty much all downhill from thereon in. Once the media has a narrative, politicians will start picking up on it for political capital, and then it's only a matter of time before low and mid-level police start getting thrown under the bus

This was all going on from day one of the reportedly "peaceful" protests. I've watched multiple anchors on CNN and MSNBC discuss "peaceful" protests against backdrops of live rioting/burning/looting.

The police need some degree of reformation but journalists chose a side at least as early as 2016. This is what happens when activist journalism is completely normalized. Police are humans too. You can only expect them to take so much targeted abuse before they target those who are amplifying threatening voices.

What are the common refrain on every single stream after the sun goes down? "FUCK 12". People openly threatening to murder police. All night long. These are the people journalists are defending. These are the agitators that the police have to deal with. Where are news reports of protesters throwing rocks at riot police? Multiple incidents of people throwing artillery shells (fireworks) into police crowds?

You shouldn't trust the media any more than you trust the current administration.

>https://mobile.twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1241367239...

"...have a real chance of if being a game changer"

There is absolutely nothing incorrect about this post. And what's worse, while the media (and left leaning doctors) were amplifying papers like the OP, they ignored the positive studies and set back the entire pandemic effort by turning public opinion against a promising drug.

It is a dereliction of social duty for the media to act in such a dangerously partisan manner. They owe society better for the power that they are allowed to wield.

Which papers? There are thousands of papers being published.

There are a couple potential reasons. Powerful GPUs accelerate research and iteration. Some state of the art problems have hit the limits of current theory and make up the deficit by building massive nets - but even there we already have multiple automatic pruning/optimization algorithms to shrink those nets so that they work with smaller resources.

Make no mistake, the field is advancing exponentially. The state of the art googlenet/inception that arguably kicked off the whole craze with image recognition are laughably obsolete now and easily outperformed by simpler nets.

MNIST was the gold standard for recognition problems just a couple years ago, and now it's considered a solved toy problem.

Trump's behavior does not justify the media attempting to tell me what to think by misrepresenting nearly everything with deliberate spin. This isn't about white knighting, this is about holding the media accountable for it's total lack of objectivity. The media should not be choosing sides or telling people what to think.

In fact Trump merely tweeted that HCQ was promising - what was far more dangerous was the spin from the media and subsequent rush to show that HCQ was dangerous/ineffective.

>more likely because it’s out of patent there’s a lot of money interested in exploring other things as a treatment

HCQ was not even remotely controversial until Trump tweeted about it.

Our institutions have lost their collective minds with their spiteful, childish hatred for a politician. Academia and news media have completely lost sight of objectivity.

>You only need one or 2-3 competiting Neuronal Networks for cancer detection and if you look how expensive it is to train that stuff, not many can actually do it anyway.

This is just wrong. You can train a cancer discriminator on a low end gpu on your desktop. The hard part is getting quality [often annotated] data - and thats why data brokers like Google are positioned to dominate.

>. AI has been heavily hyped, but is having a lot of real world failures and is becoming associated with a bunch of fraud

AI, specifically deep learning is far more than self driving cars. The industry is in its infancy and we are building ML solutions for a multitude of industries. You don't hear about any of it because none of it is sexy (or even accessable) to the layman - but rest assured, the industry is growing exponentially (like the research) and we are finding much more in the way of success than the high profile failures of self driving.

I can't help but notice these patterns all over society and especially in tech. FAANG, Uber, Microsoft, TV, internet, dark patterns everywhere.

There are literal videos of cops kneeling with protestors in shows of solidarity. Peacefully talking. In LA they're sitting right now.

I cannot believe how far people will go seeing what they want to see.

I've been monitoring some 20 streams for 3 days straight and in almost every case the protests begin with hours of protestors within inches of police' faces screaming, belittling and dehumanizing the cops, with frequent disparaging references to homosexuality, gender, race, and physical stature.

All the meanwhile the police are standing stoically in every single example.

At what point is it appropriate to escalate force against a crowd which is increasingly rowdy and hostile? In every single case, police so far have escalated gradually. First with commands, then coordinated movements, gas, flashbangs, and finally rubber bullets. Regardless of whether the majority of protestors are actually peaceful, in all of these confrontations the police are outnumbered 2-10x. The rioters are turning this into a life or death threat, as unruly mobs are wont to do.

In fact I've seen a decided lack of police brutality. I haven't seen a single case of anyone being beaten. And I also acknowledge that multiple groups have during the day been on camera calming down rioters and protecting the businesses of their communities.

But the narrative that police are being excessive currently is by my multitude of observations totally untrue and it is extremely dangerous for the media to push such an idea, as they have done by repeatedly and consistently claiming that the protests are peaceful while buildings and cars are burning behind them.

Given IO errors and degradation of storage media, how long can one realistically preserve digital data?

Is it possible with multiple disks and an extant error correction algorithm to prevent data corruption indefinitely, assuming some maximum error rate?

>Also very different in that most of 4chan is right-wing or far-right nowadays, largely due to /pol/. Most of the site's posters are supportive of the police in this instance, and sees the response and civil unrest as "anti-white rhetoric and violence perpetrated by liberals and black people". Many believe Floyd deserved to be killed.

This isn't quite right. 4chan is more right leaning than almost any other place online (save for voat and 8chan among others), but all political views are expressed on 4chan. You may get shouted down but you won't get banned for saying almost anything. The trouble is that "right wing" ideas are overexpressed on 4chan because these people are being totally deplatformed everywhere else.

This is dangerous because when you silence one of a two party system, you're actually silencing a range of ideologies that aren't "left leaning enough" and create an illusion of consensus, when in reality you are forcing thousands of political dimensions, and millions of people, into two generic boxes. I think part of the alleged rise of "white supremacy" is actually a response to being forced into the conservative box and dehumanized with accusations of Nazism and such.

When you're an activist, everyone else looks like an activist too. This is one of the problems with journalists who take sides: activist journalists see everything as a struggle and are incapable of even recognizing trolling.