Entry: 2025-04-26 23:35:02.759803+02 North Bay Python by Dan Lyke comments 0
North Bay Python: Maddy Muscari talking about ethics washing in AI, "real ethics is praxis, it's loud, it's messy, it's people first". So far this feels in-line with my belief that we need to be framing AI primarily in adversarial terms. #NBPy
[ related topics: Ethics Monty Python California Culture Artificial Intelligence Python ]
Entry: 2025-03-20 19:37:49.365518+01 moral crumple zone, physical wall by Dan Lyke comments 0
Y'all have seen the Mark Robler "Can You Fool A Self Driving Car?" video, (the money shot starts at about 15:29), in which he lets a Tesla drive him through a trompe l'oeil wall. Turns out that the outrage may have uncovered an extra moral crumple zone: Tesla Fans Furious at Video of Tesla Crashing Into Wall Painted Like Road
In a separate post seemingly responding to the allegations, Rober shared the "raw footage of my Tesla going through the wall."
"Not sure why it disengages 17 frames before hitting the wall but my feet weren’t touching the brake or gas," he added.
For all of those "the car wasn't in self-driving mode when the collision occurred" ass-covering pronouncements.
Edit: Elektrek: Tesla fans expose Tesla’s own shadiness in attempt to defend Autopilot crash
[ related topics: Movies Ethics moron Automobiles Currency Video ]
Entry: 2025-01-30 05:54:53.966894+01 California AG warns AI companies by Dan Lyke comments 0
Attorney General Rob Bonta rocks: California’s AG Tells AI Companies Practically Everything They’re Doing Might Be Illegal
On January 13th, California AG Rob Bonta issued two legal advisories that illustrate all of the myriad areas where the AI industry could be getting itself into trouble. “The AGO encourages the responsible use of AI in ways that are safe, ethical, and consistent with human dignity,” the advisory says. “For AI systems to achieve their positive potential without doing harm, they must be developed and used ethically and legally,” it continues, before dovetailing into the many ways in which AI companies could, potentially, be breaking the law.
[ related topics: Ethics Bay Area Law California Culture Artificial Intelligence ]
Entry: 2024-12-29 19:12:30.739448+01 Ethics in Transgenderism by Dan Lyke comments 2
The Fediverse/Mastodon/what-have-you has been a weird place. The "We want this to be a place we can become influencers/sell our shit" crowd has been trying to push it to be a Twitter drop-in, some of us are just happy that we can communicate with the people we've met who found blogs too much work (and that we never really found an RSS solution to keep up with), and there's a lot of drama.
Barks by Aria Salvatrice: Actually, it’s about Ethics in Transgenderism (the title a nod to the disruption of social spaces by the Gamergate movement) is a long rant that's entirely too in love with its own language and conceits, but makes a good case that several of the attempts to create shared blocklists and moderation for the Fediverse have been assholes just looking to profit off of our social spaces.
There's a lot to unpack in here, and I'm not the best person to do so. I've got gobs o' privilege in online spaces I've inhabited over the years, and I've mentioned before that in the early '90s we had this optimism that if we brought the world online we'd create this fantastic space, and instead we brought all of the shit of the world into that space and destroyed it.
Undoubtedly some of that is related to making it a more inclusive space.
But it's also definitely the case that the people who want to profit off of our communities have destroyed my connections with all sorts of people over the years.
[ related topics: Interactive Drama Content Management Ethics Space & Astronomy Law Work, productivity and environment Community Dogs ]
Entry: 2024-12-24 07:20:01.967154+01 Oh damn One of the ugliest things to by Dan Lyke comments 0
Oh damn: " One of the ugliest things to point out about American white supremacist culture is that it’s not viewed as rape until the victim is old enough (18+) to give consent." Metafilter user Callisto Prime on media using "underage sex" vs "statutory rape" in talking about the Gaetz report.
https://www.metafilter.com/206...Laws-and-Violates-Ethics#8664934
[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Ethics Sociology Law Journalism and Media California Culture Race Government ]
Entry: 2024-12-20 21:17:14.004917+01 Gisèle Pelicot by Dan Lyke comments 0
I had closed several tabs on this without posting them on Flutterby because it's... awful and if you have any sorts of issues around non-consensual sexual attacks triggering as hell, and please don't feel compelled to follow any of these links, but...
BBC: New name, no photos: Gisèle Pelicot removes all trace of her husband
NBC: Dozens of men found guilty in Gisèle Pelicot mass rape trial that shocked France
...the reason I'm now posting these is reading through the Disabled Ginger on how this exposes medical misogyny (among a whole bunch of other effects), and how the husband was recruiting people for this horror on some sort of online messaging system, and nobody stepped in. Nobody said "holy shit, this is awful".
And there's probably some strong vetting to get access to those forums. It's not something that one is likely to just stumble across. And even, unlike the early days of say, alt.sex.stories on Usenet, you're not gonna run across NC fantasizing of this sort and maybe be able to tie pieces together.
But there's clearly a branch of "masculinity" where it's a stepping stone from one place to another, and long before legal lines get crossed there are moral lines where we need to be saying "oh fuck no, that's hella not acceptable".
Maybe knowing that this evil is out there will help us all say that sooner.
[ related topics: Interactive Drama Photography Erotic Sexual Culture Ethics Invention and Design Law Current Events Monty Python Net Culture Community Handicaps & Disabilities Marriage ]
Entry: 2024-11-18 19:28:12.116945+01 Eaten By Pigs by Dan Lyke comments 0
If you ever feel ethical qualms about eating bacon, know that the bacon feels no qualms about eating you: Woman Eaten by Her Pigs After She Collapses While Feeding Them
[ related topics: Interactive Drama Ethics Food - Bacon ]
Entry: 2024-11-18 17:25:22.775534+01 Ivermectin still not effective for COVID by Dan Lyke comments 0
JAMA Editor's Note: At a Higher Dose and Longer Duration, Ivermectin Still Not Effective Against COVID-19 doi:10.1001/jama.2023.1922
Cochrane meta-analysis of 11 eligible trials examining the efficacy of ivermectin for the treatment of COVID-19 published through April 2022 concluded that ivermectin has no beneficial effect for people with COVID-19.
And that this has been found again (and again, and again), and that there are still trials recruiting participants for studies is raising questions about ethics in medical research. The Ethics of Clinical Research — Managing Persistent Uncertainty.
[ related topics: Ethics Education ]
Entry: 2024-11-14 23:26:26.461145+01 Gaetz statutory rape by Dan Lyke comments 0
I'm not the first to observe that in Matt Gaetz we're about to have an Attorney General who has first-hand experience with sex trafficking: ABC News: Woman testified to House Ethics Committee that Gaetz had sex with her when she was 17: Sources
[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Ethics Law Current Events Real Estate ]
Entry: 2024-11-04 17:25:03.528262+01 I grew up pretty rural the school I by Dan Lyke comments 0
I grew up pretty rural, the school I went to as affiliated with a large dairy farm, my family had goats, sheep, and ducks, the latter two we ate. I enjoy meat.
But I have had some ethical qualms about the impacts of meat on the broader world, and Sonoma County's Measure J has brought up a lot of issues about local factory farming.
So the framing of "4H clubs are the ROTC for factory farming" has me pondering a few things this morning.
https://allpro.social/@Pixley/113425176030836700
[ related topics: Children and growing up Ethics Sociology ]
Entry: 2024-10-30 18:07:23.026914+01 Human in the loop by Dan Lyke comments 0
[ related topics: Ethics Artificial Intelligence ]
Entry: 2024-10-10 16:28:44.473559+02 Reporting Non-Consensual Intimate Medi by Dan Lyke comments 0
Reporting Non-Consensual Intimate Media: An Audit Study of Deepfakes
Abstract: Non-consensual intimate media (NCIM) inflicts significant harm. Currently, victim-survivors can use two mechanisms to report NCIM—as a non-consensual nudity violation or as copyright in- fringement. We conducted an audit study of takedown speed of NCIM reported to X (formerly Twitter) of both mechanisms. We uploaded 50 AI-generated nude images and reported half under X’s “non-consensual nudity” reporting mechanism and half under its “copyright infringement” mechanism. The copyright condition resulted in successful image removal within 25 hours for all images (100% removal rate), while non-consensual nudity reports resulted in no image removal for over three weeks (0% removal rate). We stress the need for targeted legislation to regulate NCIM removal online. We also discuss ethical considerations for auditing NCIM on social platforms.
[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Ethics Nudity Journalism and Media Artificial Intelligence Copyright/Trademark Model Building ]
Entry: 2024-07-03 17:40:33.43075+02 bullshit and bias are baked in by Dan Lyke comments 0
RT Dr. Damien P. Williams, Magus @Wolven@ourislandgeorgia.net
Stilllll not really back, but just wanted to highlight the fact that Google just released an internal paper about the epistemic, ethical, and sociopolitical threats of generative "AI," and that the exploits which facilitate those threats are inherent to the kind of things GPTs are and golly gee whiz if that doesn't sure as shit sound familiar. 🤔🧐😒🙄 https://www.404media.co/google...-reality-is-a-feature-not-a-bug/
I mean the paper literally admits that "hallucinations" and bias are "limitations of GenAI systems themselves"—JUST LIKE I FUCKEN SAID https://youtu.be/9DpM_TXq2ws
https://www.americanscientist.org/article/bias-optimizersMy god 😂😭
Anyway. Bye.
Includes a screencap which says (emphasis in the original in blue):
Throughout the paper, building on the definition proposed by Blauth et al. (2022) we refer to GenAl 'misuse' as the deliberate use of generative Al tools by individuals and organisations to facilitate, augment or execute actions that may cause downstream harm, as well as attacks on generative Al systems themselves. This definition excludes accidents or cases where harm is caused by malfunctions or limitations of GenAI systems themselves, such as their tendency to hallucinate facts or produce biassed outputs (Ji et al., 2023; Maynez et al., 2020), without a discernible actor involved.
[ related topics: Religion Interactive Drama Movies Ethics Artificial Intelligence ]
Entry: 2024-06-20 01:18:21.167311+02 Murthy on Social Media by Dan Lyke comments 2
There's a lot of hullabaloo over Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy calling for warning labels on social media, noting that the opinion piece seems to not understand correlation vs causation, and all the usual moral panic fuckwittery.
Mike Masnick has a good takedown at The Surgeon General Is Wrong. Social Media Doesn’t Need Warning Labels
As with video games, the more research we get on teens and social media, the less accurate the moral panic appears. In the last few years alone, we’ve seen more than one organization reach the same conclusion. The National Academies of Sciences released a comprehensive report stating that a “review of the literature did not support the conclusion that social media causes changes in adolescent health at the population level.” The American Psychological Association released a similar report, concluding: “Using social media is not inherently beneficial or harmful to young people.” Instead, it finds that when young people struggle with mental health, their online lives are often just a reflection of their offline lives.
But I prefer to take another view: Since Tipper Gore and the PMRC did the whole warning labels on albums thing, the "Parental Advisory" warning became a must-have on your album cover. The whole "we need to label video games as dangerous" thing likely spurred video game adoption amongst kids.
I think Murthy's just on Meta's payroll, sees the younger users leaving Facebook and the 'Gram, and is trying to prop up their user base.
[ related topics: Children and growing up Politics Games Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality Health Ethics Journalism and Media Work, productivity and environment Net Culture Douglas Adams Video ]
Entry: 2024-01-31 18:55:51.281332+01 medical dead zones by Dan Lyke comments 0
RT John Cutting @jcutting@vivaldi.net
A passenger airline client is developing the complicated scheduling tools to ensure that pregnant employees can minimize working in states with actively dangerous restrictions on reproductive healthcare. Pilots also need to rethink where to divert if a passenger has a prenatal medical emergency.
The nearest airports are not necessarily places where care can be provided. This is a major safety, moral, and reputational risk, and it's damned shameful that we have medical "dead zones" in America
[ related topics: Interactive Drama Ethics Aviation Work, productivity and environment ]
Entry: 2024-01-07 01:05:02.373546+01 I am very concerned about police by Dan Lyke comments 0
I am very concerned about police brutality. I am not a fan of car alarms. But it turns out that when some asshole in a motor vehicle accelerates loudly enough up my street to set off car alarms, my ethical structure becomes amazingly flexible.
[ related topics: Ethics Law Enforcement Automobiles ]
Entry: 2023-12-19 23:25:36.734109+01 Tesla links of the moment by Dan Lyke comments 0
Tesla Has The Highest Accident Rate Of Any Auto Brand
Tesla drivers are the most accident-prone, according to a LendingTree analysis of 30 car brands. It found that Tesla drivers are involved in more accidents than drivers of any other brand. Tesla drivers had 23.54 accidents per 1,000 drivers. Ram (22.76) and Subaru (20.90) were the only other brands with more than 20 accidents per 1,000 drivers for every brand.
Tesla crushed in Consumer Reports reliability rankings despite improvement
Consumer Reports‘ annual reliability rankings have been released, and with data from 24 brands and over 300,000 vehicles, Tesla fell near the bottom (19/24) along with Mercedes-Benz, Jeep, Volkswagen, GMC, and Chevrolet. Electric vehicles overall also placed poorly, being the second least reliable category of vehicles. Hybrids/plugin hybrids, especially those from Toyota, were found to be the most reliable.
Washington Post: Recalling almost every Tesla in America won’t fix safety issues, experts say
Tesla did not respond to a request for comment Friday. In a statement this week responding to The Post’s report on Autopilot crashes, Tesla said it has a “moral obligation” to continue improving its safety systems and also said that it is “morally indefensible” to not make these features available to a wider set of consumers.
Elon Musk: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)
Edit 2023-12-20: Reuters: Tesla blamed drivers for failures of parts it long knew were defective
Wheels falling off cars at speed. Suspensions collapsing on brand-new vehicles. Axles breaking under acceleration. Tens of thousands of customers told Tesla about a host of part failures on low-mileage cars. The automaker sought to blame drivers for vehicle ‘abuse,’ but Tesla documents show it had tracked the chronic ‘flaws’ and ‘failures’ for years.
[ related topics: Ethics Consumerism and advertising Heinlein Automobiles ]
Entry: 2023-11-16 18:22:15.089574+01 Free range software by Dan Lyke comments 0
RT Mike, First of His Name @mike@chinwag.org
Putting software in containers is cruel and unnatural.
Programs should be allowed to roam and graze freely on computer systems. Forcibly isolating and constraining them will lead only undue suffering.
Use of technologies such as Docker in systems administration must be ended immediately, there is no ethical justification for inflicting trauma like this in an enlightened society.
In this "free range software manifesto" I will -
[ related topics: Ethics Software Engineering ]
Entry: 2023-10-24 21:30:02.034009+02 Whoah California suspends GM Cruises by Dan Lyke comments 0
Whoah: California suspends GM Cruise’s autonomous driverless vehicle permits.
"The agency also determined that the company “misrepresented” information related to safety of the autonomous technology."
Use with a safety driver, and presumably their ACC technology using a customer as a moral crumple zone, is still allowed.
#GiftArticle #GiftLink https://wapo.st/3Sgf5PJ
[ related topics: Ethics California Culture ]
Entry: 2023-10-06 17:45:01.332565+02 WaPo deconstructs a Tesla crash by Dan Lyke comments 0
So there's a lot of missing data in trying to understand the actual impacts of Tesla's "autopilot" on automobile collisions. It seems like a lot of the analyses are finding that right now it's less safe than a human driver (2019: +59%, 2023: +11%).
This is an interesting deconstruction of a crash, that's got me thinking a lot more about the notion of "moral crumple zones", especially when a technology is marketed as "autopilot" and, despite having good map data, allows drivers to set parameters outside of legal limits. Washington Post: The final 11 seconds of a fatal Tesla Autopilot crash
[ related topics: Ethics Bay Area Law Automobiles Maps and Mapping Archival ]
Entry: 2023-08-10 18:26:59.884638+02 Browser Extensions by Dan Lyke comments 0
Temptations of an open-source browser extension developer
Over the years, I have received many proposals to monetize this extension so I think I'll just start posting them here for fun (but not for profit). The main reason I continue to maintain this extension is because I can hardly trust others to not fall for one of these offers. I'm fortunate to have a job that pays well enough to allow me to keep my moral compass and ignore all of these propositions. I realize that not everyone has the same financial security so hopefully this thread would shed some light on what kind of pressure is put on extension developers.
[ related topics: Ethics Heinlein ]
Entry: 2023-08-07 14:29:50.414886+02 bribing a justice by Dan Lyke comments 0
Margaret McMullan talks about Justice Sotomayor talking at her event. How I ‘bribed’ a justice to take a no-expenses-paid trip to Mississippi
The standard royalty rate for authors is less than 10 percent of the sales price. I don’t know anything about Sotomayor’s deal with her publishers, but 10 percent would make her cut of the 1,500 books our foundation purchased approximately $2,250 — for which she had to fly to Mississippi and give two presentations. During the hottest month of the year.
Was that a bribe? You be the judge.
Gift link: https://wapo.st/3DL60pH
[ related topics: Books Ethics Law Law Enforcement Travel ]
Entry: 2023-08-01 01:50:05.066568+02 Some years ago I started to look into by Dan Lyke comments 0
Some years ago, I started to look into creating my own data set for training a Haar Cascade for facial recognition on my own images. I quickly discovered that my own image library was insufficient, and very white. And as I started looking at other data sets out there, I quickly ran into concerns about the sources and license terms of the data.
Be interesting to see some notion of ethical sharing of training sets come out of this new discussion of actually open "AI".
[ related topics: Language Books Ethics Invention and Design Community Artificial Intelligence Race ]
Entry: 2023-08-01 00:17:53.591433+02 Flight Safety by Dan Lyke comments 0
RT John Cutting @jcutting@vivaldi.net
A passenger airline client is developing the complicated scheduling tools to ensure that pregnant employees can minimize working in states with actively dangerous restrictions on reproductive healthcare. Pilots also need to rethink where to divert if a passenger has a prenatal medical emergency.
The nearest airports are not necessarily places where care can be provided. This is a major safety, moral, and reputational risk, and it's damned shameful that we have medical "dead zones" in America
[ related topics: Interactive Drama Ethics Aviation Work, productivity and environment ]
Entry: 2023-02-10 19:57:43.70735+01 Supreme Court Shenanigans by Dan Lyke comments 0
John Roberts’ wife’s client list raises concern about “conflicts of interest and influence peddling"
The complaint, which was first obtained by The New York Times, accuses the chief justice of failing to acknowledge the full extent of his wife's work in his ethical disclosures.
Jane Roberts, who quit her job as a law partner when her husband was confirmed as chief justice in 2005, made millions of dollars in commissions helping recruit for firms – some of which had business before the Supreme Court, according to a letter obtained by The New York Times.
The problem with the justices’ use of emails persisted in part because some justices were slow to adopt to the technology and some court employees were nervous about confronting them to urge them to take precautions, one person said. Such behavior meant that justices weren’t setting an example to take security seriously.
[ related topics: Politics Ethics Invention and Design Current Events Work, productivity and environment Law Enforcement Heinlein New York Marriage ]
Entry: 2022-12-04 02:40:03.033024+01 evening's household discussion involves by Dan Lyke comments 0
This evening's household discussion involves a look at Moral Foundations theory, and as I get into this I wonder how the fuck Haidt wasn't laughed out of his professorship.
At least when he says "we are clueless and hypocritical about ourselves", he's demonstrating some ability for introspection.
[ related topics: Ethics Community ]
Entry: 2022-08-19 19:14:45.506535+02 Beyond Bed Bath & Beyond by Dan Lyke comments 1
So the headline reads Student, 20, makes $110 million trading meme stock Bed Bath & Beyond, somewhere else I read that he raised $25M from friends and family to start his company, but... Obviously, as the stock has crashed back down, there wasn't value created there, which means the money he "made" is essentially extracted from Redditors playing meme games.
Which kinda feels a lot like cryptocurrencies: on the one hand it's hard to feel bad for people burned by a moral hazard, on the other hand....
[ related topics: Games Ethics Sociology Marketing Currency Economics Furniture ]
Entry: 2022-05-09 17:53:26.854932+02 Good girl by Dan Lyke comments 0
Don't ask me to call you a "good girl" in bed. I am not in a position to make moral judgments about you, it's only through self interrogation of your own actions and the motivation of those actions that one can determine if they've been "naughty" or not
[ related topics: Interactive Drama Ethics Furniture ]
Entry: 2022-01-30 01:17:51.267588+01 Crisis Text Line sharing data by Dan Lyke comments 0
Suicide hotline shares data with for-profit spinoff, raising ethical questions>
The Crisis Text Line’s AI-driven chat service has gathered troves of data from its conversations with people suffering life’s toughest situations.
[ related topics: Privacy Ethics Current Events Artificial Intelligence ]
Entry: 2021-12-03 23:42:03.754951+01 Pay To Participate Retraction by Dan Lyke comments 0
‘Pay-to-participate’ autism stem-cells paper retracted
“It’s not really a meaningful contribution to scientific knowledge,” said Turner, who co-authored a critical letter about the study earlier this year with Jeremy Snyder, professor of public health ethics at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, Canada. “It’s more what’s sometimes described as a scientific token of legitimacy to help burnish the marketing credentials of that business.”
From reading this write-up, it also sounds like though the only possible outcome of the study was looking at safety, there were some claims about effect, even though there was no control group, and 20% of the participants dropped out. So, yeah, with the small sample size, any claims are gonna be marred by selection bias.
[ related topics: Health Ethics Current Events Consumerism and advertising Marketing Education ]
Entry: 2021-07-31 07:04:17.03795+02 Symbolic Crusades by Dan Lyke comments 0
I have two books on my nightstand right now: Joseph R. Gusfield's "Symbolic Crusade: Status Politics and the American Temperance Movement", and Byung-Chul Han's "The disappearance of rituals".
The former is a fascinating look at how group identity drove the Temperance movement. How lay-led organizations took moral leadership and group identity from churches, and in so doing made morality more binary. It's also fascinating for language, it was written in 1963 and revised in 1986, and I have a couple of times had to look for footnotes for a little more context so that I could understand better what the author meant by "Indian", for instance.
The latter is a more recent lament about how social media is fragmenting culture, and how spontaneous culture is destroying rituals. I'm reading it slowly, the way it (and the translation) use language is sometimes hard to suss out.
But I suspect they're actually writing about the same thing, and Han is too caught up in his privilege to understand that.
[ related topics: Politics Books Ethics Sociology Writing Journalism and Media California Culture ]
Entry: 2021-07-17 16:18:30.119947+02 Ivermectin & COVID-19 by Dan Lyke comments 0
So I became aware of the Ivermectin and COVID-19 thing a few weeks ago, looked into it, thought "huh, the people behind this seem kinda skeevy, but the results they're reporting might be useful". Looks like it was one giant troll after all: Huge study supporting ivermectin as Covid treatment withdrawn over ethical concerns
It appeared that the authors had run entire paragraphs from press releases and websites about ivermectin and Covid-19 through a thesaurus to change key words. “Humorously, this led to them changing ‘severe acute respiratory syndrome’ to ‘extreme intense respiratory syndrome’ on one occasion,” Lawrence said.
and
“The authors claimed they conducted the study between the 8th of June and 20th of September 2020, however most of the patients who died were admitted into hospital and died before the 8th of June according to the raw data. The data was also terribly formatted, and includes one patient who left hospital on the non-existent date of 31/06/2020.”
Also, what is the world comin to when The Guardian is referencing Grftr.news? Why Was a Major Study on Ivermectin for COVID-19 Just Retracted?
When opening what the authors claim is their original data the first thing that any reader notices is that it’s remarkably complete. In many columns data for all patients are fully listed. The second thing the reader will likely notice is that the original data do not match the author’s public results. In three of the four study arms measuring patient death as an outcome, the numbers between the paper and original data differ.
[ related topics: Ethics Current Events ]
Entry: 2021-01-12 02:24:16.24089+01 Coup Snark OTD by Dan Lyke comments 0
RT Monica Maalouf, MD @MaaloufMD
Censorship is when the government bans implicit bias trainings and the teaching of critical race theory.
Banning fascists from twitter is just the free market being the free market.
Crying because they can't get organic food in prison? Licking the boots of a dude who called your wife ugly? Refusing to stand up to a bully who rewarded 4 years of ass-kissing by encouraging a crowd to kill you? This is the same party that calls us simps, cucks, and snowflakes?
It actually takes two impeachments to vaccinate against Trump
look. no matter what we do, conservatives are gonna say this is like 1984. at this point we should go all in. make ted cruz wear the rat helmet
Fellas, I'm starting to think it wasn't really about ethics in game journalism.
[ related topics: Games Ethics Free Speech Food moron Journalism and Media Shoes Economics Marriage ]
Entry: 2021-01-11 22:09:49.860345+01 Ethics in Game Journalism by Dan Lyke comments 0
Fellas, I'm starting to think it wasn't really about ethics in game journalism.
[ related topics: Games Ethics Journalism and Media ]
Entry: 2020-12-05 19:10:15.951124+01 Hot Blooded by Dan Lyke comments 0
On a HAI message board, Karin Grace Wares mentioned her memoir, Hot Blooded: A Sexual Resurrection. I ordered it from Copperfield's, and quite enjoyed it.
One of the things that COVID-19 has made me aware of is how much of our sexual attitudes are a product of our times. I'm watching at how my various older gay friends are reacting to COVID-19, and it's amazing how much their experiences with having survived the AIDS epidemic has informed their behavior and attitudes now, and how there have been mentions of some sex parties that a younger generation were willing to attend, probably because they hadn't had that trauma deeply ingrained.
And as I sort through some of my own sexual traumas, I'm realizing that some of them come from the fact that my parents, and upbringing, were more Silent Generation than Baby Boomer, so I'm kind-of in a limbo that's between Boomer and Gen-X, with the additional cultural confusion that comes from extremely rural, Waldorf, and whatever set of neurological differences I carry.
When Charlene and I met, in a hot tub at a neo-tantra community event at a mansion in Tiburon, we talked about not being exclusive, but in practice that's never happened; I just don't have the spoons to have secondary relationships (which speaks to some of my own relationship traumas). However, I do listen to a number of polyamory and ethical non-monogamy podcasts, because those are the folks who are talking about personal growth and human relationships in terms that make sense to me.
But in listening to those folks, most of them are at least a decade younger than I am, if not more, and the generational differences in what sex means, and how they approach relationships, are clear. There's a huge difference in a generation that has access to "they/them" pronouns, to the one for which "ethical non-monogamy" wasn't a new concept, but was a new term.
As I read through Hot Blooded, I kept running across footnotes from books on my sex and sexuality bookshelf. This speaks a lot to my generation, echoing a lot of what I found in the writings of Susie Bright, and Carol Queen, Dossie Easton and Janet Hardy. Within the first few pages I found myself dropping quotes on social media, and as I got deeper into the book the observations got no less pithy, but built on previous thoughts so that they were no longer so easily excisable from context.
As she goes through her own journey, and likens that to what was happening in the culture around, I had the warm familiarity of the thoughts of my generation, contrasted with some wonderful insights and experiences probing the edges and frontiers of the time.
I think I may have to read this one again, and take stronger notes this time. Recommended.
[ related topics: Religion Quotes Interactive Drama Books Erotic Sexual Culture Ethics Invention and Design Bay Area Sociology Writing Journalism and Media California Culture Sports Pop Culture Community Rocky Horror Picture Show ]
Entry: 2020-12-05 18:06:52.555943+01 Timnit Gebru by Dan Lyke comments 0
MIT Technology Review: We read the paper that forced Timnit Gebru out of Google. Here’s what it says
Also, just so I have a place to hang it. Metafilter post on both biases currently happening in economics, and in AI
[ related topics: Ethics Artificial Intelligence ]
Entry: 2020-08-18 01:26:17.704929+02 Porn and sexual aggression: inversely correlated by Dan Lyke comments 0
Study: Pornography does not cause violent sex crimes
Pornography and Sexual Aggression: Can Meta-Analysis Find a Link? is based on research by Chris Ferguson, a professor of psychology at Stetson University, and Richard Hartley, chair of UTSA’s Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice. The authors conducted meta-analytic research and examined more than 50 correlational, experimental and population studies that explored the association between pornography and sexual aggression during the past 40 years.
So many good pull-quotes:
“During the past few years many states have declared that pornography is a public health crisis,” said Ferguson. “Dr. Hartley and I were curious to see if evidence could support such claims—at least in regard to sexual aggression—or whether politicians were mistaking moral stances for science. Our evidence suggests that policymakers should examine other causes of sexual aggression and that beliefs about pornography may be driven more by methodological mistakes than sound science.”
and
“I hope that Dr. Hartley and I can point out some of the widespread problems in much of the research as well as the culture of this field, whereas some scholars appear to be too quick to try and find evidence for effects,” said Ferguson, who led the study. “We need more preregistered, transparent research and a field that is looking to falsify hypotheses and not entirely in confirmatory mode because it feels morally right.”
And, from the abstract of the paper:
... Population studies suggested that increased availability of pornography is associated with reduced sexual aggression at the population level. ...
[ related topics: Quotes Interactive Drama Erotic Sexual Culture Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality Health Ethics History Sociology Law Enforcement California Culture Education Furniture ]
Entry: 2020-05-08 16:52:10.975582+02 Responsible Meat Packing by Dan Lyke comments 0
Cold, Crowded, Deadly: How U.S. Meat Plants Became a Virus Breeding Ground. As we watch Tyson Foods and others plead for bailouts and attempt to socialize risk, it's important that we not excuse their behavior and allow them to get away with the moral hazards:
There are exceptions in the U.S., too. Sanderson Farms Inc., America’s third-largest poultry producer, has had about 100 workers test positive for Covid-19 out of 17,000 employees in its 13 plants across the South. In late March, Sanderson became aware of a coronavirus outbreak in Dougherty County, Ga., near its 1,400-worker plant in the city of Moultrie. It sent more than 400 workers home, with pay, to quarantine for two weeks whether or not they were showing symptoms. The plant had to slow its line speed by 15%, but it averted a spike in infection, a closure, and possibly worse. None of the Dougherty County workers tested positive, and there have been no reports of deaths among Sanderson workers.
[ related topics: Movies Ethics virus Food Current Events Work, productivity and environment Gardening ]
Entry: 2020-03-17 22:17:39.804063+01 Stock Buybacks by Dan Lyke comments 0
In case you had any question at all that bailing out investors is a moral hazard, and we should be letting companies go bankrupt, or nationalizing them: U.S. Airlines Spent 96% of Free Cash Flow on Buybacks
[ related topics: Ethics Aviation Law Current Events ]
Entry: 2019-10-28 22:38:19.879416+01 Katie Hill & revenge porn by Dan Lyke comments 0
After resigning, Rep. Katie Hill vows to battle revenge porn, which critics blame for her downfall. Surprise move from Republican Florida rep Matt Gaetz:
But fewer lawmakers have outwardly addressed the problem of revenge porn, or nonconsensual pornography. Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) was a notable exception. Last week, Gaetz called the House ethics investigation “absurd,” questioning, “Who among us would look perfect if every ex leaked every photo/text?” He suggested that the real reason Hill was being investigated “is because she is different.” Hill is also one of the first openly bisexual members of Congress.
[ related topics: Interactive Drama Politics Photography Erotic Sexual Culture Ethics Real Estate ]
Connectivity provided by highertech.net , awesome bandwidth, well away from fault lines and other potential for natural disasters, reliable, and run by cool people.
Questions, comments, flames: contact Dan Lyke
Flutterby™ is a trademark claimed by
Dan Lyke for the web publications at www.flutterby.com and www.flutterby.net.