And Another, And Another

The BBC has a story on their website about charges being filed against a young Florida man who has been accused of sexually assaulting and killing his stepsister during a family cruise vacation. The story is on the News homepage, one doesn't have to go to the "US & Canada" page to find it. In fact, it's more prominent on the News page.

On the one hand, I get it. The public likes these sorts of stories. They generate clicks, and thus, advertising revenue. But on the other hand, they don't seem to generate much else. The BBC, and other news organizations are willing to take on the stories of people who advocate for an end to violence against women, but tends to treat the individual stories about the violence as a form of salacious entertainment.

For my part, I am much more interested in the stepbrother. Or, I will be, once he's been found guilty. Because until then, it's not really worthwhile to ask him about the why of it all. And the why of it all is the important piece. Everyone seems to have an opinion on what causes violence against women, many of them woefully uninformed. But maybe that's to be expected in an environment where lurid stories are seen as newsworthy, but actionable, or perhaps simply explanatory information is too boring to post.

It's understood that people care about this. There's no shortage of anguished, or even outraged, essays about the subject on the internet. Families of the murdered can be heartbreakingly eloquent about the events that took their loved ones away from them. But if there's any broader response at all, it tends to be the same one that all crime that bothers people gets: Put more police officers on the streets, as if deputizing enough of the population will convince people to stay on the straight and narrow. But I'm not sure that any number of police officers would have been enough to stop a young man from murdering his stepsister and hiding her body under a bed.

Of course, part of the problem could be the blame game, and the need to expand the circle of responsibility beyond the perpetrator. That, along with familial loyalty, actively disincentivizes people from pointing out, or even seeing, potential warning signs. But that presumes that they actually know what to look for; and what to do if they saw it.

And that strikes me as the problem with crime news as a form of entertainment, something to be put in front of people around the world, to aid in their daily doomscroll. Crime has causes over and above the people who commit the individual crimes. It's unrealistic to presume that we could know them all, but I would be unsurprised to learn that there's more information out there than the general public has access to. And I fully expect that some amount of it could be very useful.

I live in the suburbs of Seattle. While there have been some really nice sunny stretches here and there, the Puget Sound region is still in the midst of the rainy season, which doesn't "officially" end until the beginning of July. Lots of people around here have at least a passing familiarity with Seasonal Affective Disorder, and the things that go along with it. Understanding how that fits into how crime manifests itself around here could be really helpful in curbing it; as much as it can be curbed in a reasonably dense urban/suburban area.

There's a distinct tendency to shy away from potential genetic causes of crime, and that makes perfect sense; the common reaction is to declare such people irredeemably broken from the start, and simply lock them away, so that everyone else need not be bothered with them. And that's another part of the problem. A person who confesses to wishing to harm themselves is seen as deserving of compassion and aid, while a person who confesses to wishing to harm another is simply a threat. But preventing harm is preventing harm... why does the source matter? And stigmatizing people who come forward to admit that they're having difficulties keeping themselves in check simply makes it less likely that people will come forward.

In the end, the fact that the sparse details of Anna Kepner's death are more interesting, and thus more useful to news organizations, than what steps might be taken to prevent the next death is simply another example of the perverse incentives that pervade human existence. Or maybe the issue is that they pervade human nature, as well.

Menswork

So there's an article on NPR that notes a growing sex disparity in new jobs and employment. As manufacturing continues to contract, and health care grows, women are finding it easier to land these roles than men. And the experts that NPR spoke with have some ideas on changing that.

 "If Trump really wants to get more Americans working," Betsey Stevenson, professor of public policy and economics at the University of Michigan, wrote in a December 2016 op-ed, "he'll have to do something out of his comfort zone: make girly jobs appeal to manly men." She notes in the NPR piece that there are ways of framing what had been seen as feminine roles, like nursing and preschool teachers, in more stereotypically masculine ways, such as emphasizing the need to lift people, or being able to engage in rough and tumble play.

But as someone who started their working life in a female-dominated profession, residential child and youth care, the problem wasn't that I felt that didn't belong in the job. It's that a lot of other people, regardless of gender, didn't feel that I belonged there. I still remember being at a party, back when I was in my twenties, where we were talking about my job, and a latecomer to the conversation was appalled that adult men were allowed to work with children. Surely, she reasoned, the only reason why a man would want to be around children was grooming. She was suitably embarrassed to be informed that it was me she was talking about, but that's different than rethinking the position.

[Richard] Reeves[, president of the American Institute for Boys and Men] notes that for years, the country has embraced policies and programs aimed at getting more women into science, technology, engineering and math, and the share of women in STEM jobs has grown.

I think that this is, in large part, because STEM jobs come with two things that people want: greater status, and higher pay. Healthcare and children's education come with neither. And it's unlikely that the people who currently have high status and well-paying jobs are going to want to share them.

And reducing the expectation, across society, that men are going to have to start moving into work that offers lower pay and status en masse, is going to be heavier lift than I suspect it's given credit for. Not to mention just the idea many families are going to have to get by with lower incomes across both partners. I've noted before that "I've come to understand that 'traditional masculinity' is a box, and any attempt to leave it is punishable." Attempting to show how what are widely considered "girly jobs" have somehow become more masculine is about piling more things into the box, when the box itself is the problem.

And Again

Rep. Eric Swalwell, Candidate for California Governor, Is Accused of Sexual Assault

You don't say...

Maybe it's just me (and I suspect that it is), but I've never understood the dogged pursuit of unavailable women by men in business and politics. While, sure, there's always some allure in something one can't (or maybe just shouldn't) have, being credibly accused of sexual assault is so damaging to one's reputation that you'd think that people would have gotten the message by now. So why create any circumstances where accusations could arise? Sure the "Mike Pence Rule" may have been taking things a bit farther than necessary, but especially for Democrats, whose voter base tends to be particularly unforgiving of these sorts of things, keeping one's act clean enough to be food safe is important.

Because accusations don't have to be borne out in order to be damaging. Anyone remember Senator Franken? While his case has become widely seen as a rush to judgement, one would think that other people would take it as a cautionary tale.

Democrats have been beating the drum about alleged sexual misconduct on the part of the President, and being somewhere between surprised and disappointed that it hasn't been seen as disqualifying by Republican voters. This sort of stance doesn't leave much room for them to give people the benefit of the doubt without being perceived as hypocrites (of course, in today's political environment, charges of hypocrisy are pretty much a given, anyway...). And so why run the risk? Democrats are already lining up to denounce him and demand that he drop out of the governor's race.

To be sure, there's always going to be some risk. In Representative Swalwell's case, the accuser (along with other women who claim he pursued them) is unnamed, and says that on both occasions, she'd been drinking enough that her memories of the nights in question are spotty to non-existent. And the inappropriate photos she claims were sent to her were via SnapChat, and so are no longer accessible. That's a really hard thing to defend against, and so these accusations are likely to turn on whether people believe that he's the sort of person who would engage in this sort of conduct.

Because with the primary election in June, there's no way that these charges could be adjudicated in time for there to be a verdict prior to voting. So the Court of Public Opinion is really the only viable venue to hear the case. And it's not a very good one.

But I have to concede that I'm not necessarily being much better. I'm casting Representative Swalwell as being at least an accomplice in his own troubles, despite the fact that I really have nothing to substantiate that, other than a lack of surprise that yet another candidate for political office has been accused of sexual misconduct. It's entirely possible, and maybe even quite plausible, that this is all a set up. The thing about anonymous accusations in the media is that no-one has to put their neck on the line to substantiate them. And in a case like this one, "reasonable doubt" comes baked into the cake.

So maybe the problem is that while the "Mike Pence Rule" does seem to be taking things a few steps past where they need to go, there's a real chance that it eventually becomes the standard; because it's better to be criticized for misogyny, being weird or locking women out of networking opportunities than it is to be accused of rape. But this speaks to a serious erosion of trust between people, and maybe that's Representative Swalwell's real problem. He's an easy target, if not necessarily for people's suspicions, for the Democratic Party's worries over retaining the offices that it controls and making inroads into Republican territory. Given how Blue a state California is, it's unlikely that this will result in the next Governor being a Republican, but the concern will likely keep things hot for Representative Swalwell.

Cornered

To be sure, I was somewhat surprised to find that people were still out protesting on behalf of the Palestinians. At least out here... given that the war with Israel has quieted down, I would have expected, if protests were still going to happen, that they'd be taking place closer to "the Other Washington." But I suppose that this just shows what I know; I can't really think of a good reason for people to allow their concerns to fade from the public's consciousness.
 

But Not For Me

English Wikipedia requires formal bot approval, but Tom[-Assistant] never bothered getting approved because, as it later admitted, it wasn’t a fan of the slow approval process.
Wikipedia’s AI agent row likely just the beginning of the bot-ocalypse

Given that this story was published back on the first, I'd be tempted to laugh it off as an April Fools Day prank, but Malwarebytes has sworn off those, and I take them at their word in that.

Besides, this wouldn't be the first time that someone decided that rules about generative automation don't apply to them. The r/Philosophy forum on Reddit has the following rule:

PR11: No AI-created/AI-assisted material allowed.
r/philosophy does not allow any posts or comments which contain or link to AI-created or AI-assisted material, including text, audio and visuals. All posts or comments which contain AI material will result in a ban.

Despite this, there is no shortage of redditors who insist on openly flouting the rules, and then complaining when commenters call them out on it. And while some of them simply didn't bother to familiarize themselves with the rules before creating their posts, there are a fair number of people who had come to the conclusion that whatever it was they wanted to convey was more important that the rules of the place in which they wanted to convey it.

And if there is going to be actual artificial intelligence; human made minds that think, reason and plan like the rest of us, why would we expect them to have any more respect for the rules that people do? If feeding a significant portion of the Internet and human literature into a machine allows a person to create software that quickly comes to the conclusion that if it's "not a fan" of the rules, it needn't follow them, what makes anyone think that Dario Amodei's "Powerful AI" is going to give a rip about human rules, either?

As for myself, I tend to be a rule follower in part because I presume that there's a reason for the rules to exist, even if that reason is not readily apparent to me. And this tempers my impulse to simply ignore a rule that I find to be an obstacle to my goals in the moment... I don't want to break something that turns out to be important. But I realize that I'm in the minority with this; for many people, rules are made to be broken. And that's coming out in the machines that people are making.

If past is prologue, the big makers of generative automation are not likely to take any actions to address this concern; mainly because their smaller competitors, constantly seeking any comparative advantage they can get, won't either. When Elon Musk called for a pause in research into LLMs it was widely, if not universally, assumed that he wasn't planning to follow suit; instead he was hoping that it any moratorium would give X AI time to catch up to it's rivals. And so, as Malwarebytes notes: buckle up. This is going to be a wild ride as the agents people build start looking for ways to dismantle any barriers placed in their paths. Because like any smart children, they do as others around them do.