Posts by BenWilson
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Notes & Queries: Paul, in reply to diversitynz,
I think condemnation is by far the easier position. It involves opting for a position of no risk of possible harm, at the "minor" inconvenience of no possible good. When it comes to sexual conduct, there's no shortage of people saying that other people shouldn't get what they want.
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Notes & Queries: Paul, in reply to diversitynz,
That’s having sex with people who choose to be exploitative.
It sounds to me like he was initiating it, much more than being exploited. On the first time, you could maybe call it an exploitation. But he kept at it. Then after a while decided it wasn't a good idea. In other words, he had consenting sex, which he effectively initiated, then learned that he didn't wish to continue doing that. It sounds like sexual exploration to me.
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Notes & Queries: Paul, in reply to Russell Brown,
As one person said to me “I don’t want to read anything else today. I just want to think about that post.”
Yup, and DiversityNZ makes the same point himself in practically the opening of his own post. I agreed with this in particular:
one that someone has had the courage to start it and to which I would be cowardly not to respond.
Otherwise I wouldn't have responded to it. I probably should have responded on Diversity's site, but, well, Facebook? Not the audience I want to talk to. And it's responding to this thread, so it was the logical other place.
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Ben & David have made really good points. You’ve made a narky unhelpful one.
Thanks for the support Islander, but actually I disagree. DiversityNZ has good points too. He's just making his points strongly, which I take to indicate sincere belief in this case.
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Notes & Queries: Paul, in reply to diversitynz,
And before you say that I don’t have “to actually do it,” I recruit, induct and manage my support crew every day of every year. I also train, advise and help set up services in an attempt to improve the attitude of people who think disabled people are lucky to get what they’re given.
Sorry to have misunderstood where you were coming from, although I didn't actually accuse you of not having to do it. I was saying that it's something I so frequently hear from people who don't - far less often from people who do.
You may as well say, “Bad driving is better than no driving.”
There are plenty of circumstances where that is true. If, for example, you are driving someone in a critical condition to a hospital.
It’s the “crap support is good enough” idea that causes the situations “people like Paul”, as you so generalise, end up in.
Jumping from "flawed help is better than no help" to "crap support is good enough" is a leap I didn't make. It's about as helpful as me saying that you're basically saying that David shouldn't have spent 14 years helping Paul at all. It does sound like that, but I think you didn't mean that. Obviously I think there should be a lot more support for Paul than there is.
Someone, having put a story about their relationship with another person (not that person’s story) in the public arena, could be humble enough to realise they could make things better by reflecting and putting in a little more effort.
You'll probably need to give an example of what you mean here. I fully respect your blog post, by the way, as I said, the issues are thorny. Paul is in a bit of a no-man's land when it comes to agency, so when you ask:
And what of the men who had sex with the author's friend? Would they not possibly be guilty of sexual exploitation of person with significant impairment under s138 of the Crimes Act, where "[e]very one is liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding 10 years who has exploitative sexual connection with a person with a significant impairment"? Did the author have a moral, if not ethical, duty to report these occurrences and to intervene and prevent them? Should these acts not be brought to the attention of police and investigated? Or doesn't it matter because the author's friend is disabled (and gay) and by putting the ad in the paper, he asked for it?
..I don't know the answer. But isn't the question tantamount to saying "Can Paul legally have sex with people of his choosing"? It would seem to me that he can, he has enough agency to make that decision. Just enough. He was, after all, placing the advertisements himself, repeatedly.
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Hard News: The United States of Surveillance?, in reply to slarty,
I love it when you get all operational
Who, me?
good to remember most of this stuff is about analysis and graft…
Mind you, I wouldn't know if there aren't thousands of people charged with reading the outputs of the various data trolling surveillance algorithms, and doing footwork to follow up the leads. And it's not like they could get worse at detecting terrorist plots. Inherently, it's a very hard problem, possibly insoluble, to know when a cell of terrorists is planning something major. I'd think it wouldn't be far off, just on account of the fact that such people would be super paranoid and would avoid the grid as much as possible for their actual dealings.
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Hard News: The United States of Surveillance?, in reply to Russell Brown,
Yes, that's just the kind of thing it should be used for. We have similar things in operation here in Auckland, routing ambulances. It's standard operations research stuff, backed up by a big robust set of map data. I interviewed for a job there a few years ago. Gotta scoot now, will see if I can remember who they were. Some crowd in Parnell.
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But to argue that it won’t happen because it’s too hard now is something I’ve learned not to do
I'm sure it will happen. 20 years ago I was one of the people designing resource allocation systems and getting laughed at. I make my comment entirely because I actually remember what the kind of things were that the technocratic management wanted out of the systems, and what actual value they really generated. It was not nothing, but it also wasn't anywhere near the hype.
Maps were extremely valuable. Put a mapping tool in front of someone who needs to manage things in real time, and you've got an instant friend. Put a computer in there making the actual decisions and you've got a massive job ahead of you. Not just in terms of convincing them it's better, but also in actually getting it to be better.
10 years later I was mining big data in the form of massive spam and ham sets to enable to automatic blocking of spam. I spearheaded a conversion in our organization to Bayesian filtering (against the wishes and beliefs of management) which made the system finally viable, designed the system from the ground up. I found ways to collect reliable data that had never yet been implemented. This was an appropriate use of data to make decisions, because no one actually wants the job of filtering spam, you're not replacing some specialist. However, I can tell you for sure that if getting it right is really important, you should sort your spam by hand, something that's hardly a big job. The commercial viability of anti-spam systems is mostly predicated around how little it matters if you don't get it exactly right.
Also, ironically, I was eventually replaced by a large group of people who sort the spam by hand, in an outsourced situation, writing hand rules to block the latest trick. It worked better. Turns out that it's easier to get a super high block rate by having approximately as many people blocking spam as are writing it, which turns out to be remarkably few people for most of it.
Just laying my own credentials on the table to be having a conversation about statistical data mining of internet information. I'm not the world's foremost expert, but I do have an idea what I'm talking about.
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Hard News: The United States of Surveillance?, in reply to Bart Janssen,
Stupid technocrats. Next thing they’ll be promising computers predicting crimes before they happen
That's not really the same thing. It's just distributing coverage of resources, exactly like the cops already have to do. That is actually a somewhat appropriate job for a computer. To some extent, obviously there still needs to be coordinating humans on the job, and they really do have to know what to do if the computer starts stuffing things up (or just goes down, as software frequently does). I wouldn't be surprised if most of the real value in the system isn't the production of the "heat map" visualizations, which enable the humans to see their problem in a more convenient way.
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Heh, Big Data to find criminals and terrorists. It's hilarious how silly the idea is. How much money could be expended on computers, taken away from actual coppers and intelligence agents, how much it will actually reduce their chances of finding what they're looking for. It's just the kind of thing technocrats would think of.
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