I didn’t say you denied the Holocaust. I said you implied that it is the first example of European antisemitism.

I agree with a lot of this but this bit is a non-sequitur:

One thing many people don’t realize is that the Zionist colonial project was in motion long before WWII, as far back as the late 1800s.

Political zionism did get started in the late 1800s, as a proposed solution to the centuries of pogroms, expulsions and discrimination against Jews in Europe. Prior to the horrors of WWII, most Jews considered it literal heresy. It was the Holocaust that convinced many that Zionism was their only option, not least because most of the free world closed its borders to Jews fleeing the Holocaust and its aftermath. There was nowhere else to go.

This is a very useful short piece by a Jewish anti-zionist, pleading with the pro-Palestinian movement to take more care with their understanding of history: Zionism, Antisemitism and the Left Today

The Palestinians are paying the price for Europe’s crimes. The problem cannot be solved by denying that those crimes ever happened.

Statutory rape does not exist as an offence in English law. The offence is sexual contact with a minor.

The age of consent is 16 but 18 if the older party is in a position of responsibility (like a teacher). So whether or not she had unlawful sexual contact with the second boy would depend on how that law was interpreted, as well as when the first contact took place.

I’m used to that having full articles

Quite a lot of communities ban posting of full articles, including this one:

Rule 2: Do not copy the entire article into your post.

Helluva headline given the story is about tied labour.

The event is called the Madrid Open.

It doesn’t matter? This incident was doubly antisemitic, preventing someone from protesting because they are Jewish, and assuming that pro-Palestinian protesters would attack them simply because they were Jewish (ie equating Jewishness with support for Israel and criticism of Israel with antisemitism).

Yes, he’s a provocateur. So what? If the copper had said it was because they wanted to keep the two groups of protesters apart (as they routinely do, or are supposed to do), that would be fine. But he decided to be racist about it instead.

I think you overestimate the amount of ‘thought’ going on here. (ref}

The way he plays with the meaning of words

She (or, if you’re not sure, they).

any kind of bureaucratic or rule-based decision-making

Human-written rules are often flawed, and for similar reasons (the sole human thought process that ‘AI’ is very good at reproducing is system justification). But human-written rules can be written down and they can be interrogated. But Apple landed itself in court because it had no clue how its credit algorithm worked and could not conceive how it could possibly be sexist if the machine didn’t get any gender data to analyse.

Perhaps that is the point.

That is, indeed, the point.

What high profile court case?

Oh, please! Streisand the fuck out of it. Plenty of people have done what he did without ever being forced to acknowledge it was rape. Keep this story going for the sake of everyone, everywhere.

This is an easy statement to make but context matters. In this case, he was not named by the media but had they not covered the story, he would never have been charged because it suited the political establishment to do nothing at all.

Higgins alleged she was raped by a colleague in an exclusive 2021 television interview with the Network Ten’s “The Project” program, which also raised questions about the official response by ministers and political staffers in the aftermath of the alleged assault.

After the interview aired, Lehrmann was charged with sexual intercourse without consent, but the trial was abandoned in 2022 due to juror misconduct and not revived due to fears about Higgins’ mental health.

The legal system didn’t deal with it, as per fucking usual. He decided that he would use that fact to prove he was innocent, giving the court an opportunity to explain very carefully why he is quite clearly guilty.

This was a huge political scandal. It’s not reasonable to declare that the media should not have reported it.

It’s asking why don’t we use it for that purpose, not suggesting that there is anything easy about doing so. I don’t know how you think science works, but it’s not like that.

The data cannot be understood. These models are too large for that.

Apple says it doesn’t understand why its credit card gives lower credit limits to women that men even if they have the same (or better) credit scores, because they don’t use sex as a datapoint. But it’s freaking obvious why, if you have a basic grasp of the social sciences and humanities. Women were not given the legal right to their own bank accounts until the 1970s. After that, banks could be forced to grant them bank accounts but not to extend the same amount of credit. Women earn and spend in ways that are different, on average, to men. So the algorithm does not need to be told that the applicant is a woman, it just identifies them as the sort of person who earns and spends like the class of people with historically lower credit limits.

Apple’s ‘sexist’ credit card investigated by US regulator

Garbage in, garbage out. Society has been garbage for marginalised groups since forever and there’s no way to take that out of the data. Especially not big data. You can try but you just end up playing whackamole with new sources of bias, many of which cannot be measured well, if at all.

It’s how LLMs work.

The systems didn’t do anything they weren’t told to do.

You’re thinking of the kinds of algorithms written by human beings. AI is a black box. No one knows how these models obtain their answers.

Where did you get insurance carriers from?

No idea what your post, before or after edit, is trying to say. But the subject of your quoted sentence is “proponents of AI” not “AI”, and the sentence is about what is enabled by AI systems. Your attempt at pedantry makes no sense.

If you’re suggesting that it is possible to build an AI with none of the biases embedded in the world it learns from, you might want to read that article again because the (obvious) rebuttal is right there.

Isn’t that a continuation of “why the outlier was culled”?

Not sure I follow, but I think the answer is “no”.

If you control for all the causes of a difference, the difference will disappear. Which is fine if you’re looking for causal factors which are not already known to be causal factors, but no good at all if you’re trying to establish whether or not a difference exists.

It’s really quite difficult to ask a coherent question with real-world data from the messy, complicated reality of human beings.

A simple example:

Women are more likely to die from complications after a coronary artery bypass.

But if you include body surface area (a measure of body size) in your model, the difference between men and women disappears.

And if you go the whole hog and measure vein size, the importance of body size disappears too.

And, while we can never do an RCT to prove it, it makes perfect sense that smaller veins would increase the risk for a surgery which involves operating on blood vessels.

None of that means women do not, in fact, have a higher risk of dying after coronary artery bypass surgery. Collect all the data which has ever existed and women will still be more likely to die from the surgery. We have explained the phenomenon and found what is very likely to be the direct cause of higher mortality. Being a woman just makes you more likely to have that risk factor.

It is rare that the answer is as neat and simple as this. It is very easy to ask a different question from the one you thought you were asking (or pretend to be answering one question when you answered another).

You can’t just throw masses of data into a pot and expect sensible answers to come out. This is the key difference between statisticians and data scientists. And, not to throw shade on data scientists, they often end up explaining to the world that oestrogen makes people more likely to die from complications of coronary artery bypass surgery.

That kind of analysis is done all the time. But, even if we can collect all the relevant data (big if), the methods required are difficult to interpret and easy to abuse (we can’t do an RCT of being born female vs male, or black vs white, &c). A good example is the proliferation of analyses claiming that the gender pay gap does not exist (after you’ve ‘controlled’ for all the things that cause the gender pay gap).

It’s not easy to do ‘right’ even when done in good faith.

The article isn’t claiming that it is easy, of course. It’s asking why power is so keen on one type of question and not its inverse. And that is a very good question, albeit one with a very easy answer. Power is not in the business of abolishing itself.