Slashdot Mirror
The Mathletes and the Miley Photoshop
On June 24, a Tennessee man was arrested for possessing photos that showed the faces of three underage girls, including Miley Cyrus, superimposed onto the nude bodies of adult women. Assistant District Attorney Dave Denny said of the arrest, "When you have the face of a small child affixed to a nude body of a mature woman, it's going to be the state's position that this is for sexual gratification and that this is simulated sexual activity." The phrase "simulated sexual activity" apparently refers to a Tennessee sex crimes law which states in part: "It is unlawful for any person to knowingly possess material that includes a minor engaged in simulated sexual activity that is patently offensive."
Assuming this is the crime that the D.A. plans to charge him with, to me it seems obvious that the defendant didn't violate the law as written. For one thing, if the nude women in the pictures were just standing there (and neither the article nor the D.A.'s statement suggests otherwise), then there was no "sexual activity" in the photos of any kind, real or simulated. But even if the nude adult women in the photos had been engaged in sexual activity (even just striking a mildly sexy pose), the law still would not apply, because the law requires an actual minor to actually be engaged in something, even if that "something" is simulated sexual activity. So if a video showed a real minor that appeared to be masturbating or having sex with someone in a manner that was "patently offensive", that could violate the law. (Hopefully the "patently offensive" clause would exclude artistic movies like The Tin Drum, although that defense has not always worked.) But if the girls' faces were simply cut and pasted onto the bodies of the women in the photos, then the minors in question were not "engaged in" anything. The D.A. appears to have confused "material that includes a minor engaged in simulated sexual activity" with "material that simulates a minor engaged in sexual activity". And the D.A.'s statement that "this is for sexual gratification and that this is simulated sexual activity" — clearly implying that the pictures are for sexual gratification and therefore this is "simulated sexual activity" — is ridiculous. The defendant probably used pictures of Miley with her clothes on for "sexual gratification" — does that make the photos "simulated sexual activity"? (Dave Denny's office did not respond to my request for comment.)
But I was more interested in a different question: What would people in a survey think about whether the defendant violated the law? And, would people who are good at math, answer the question differently from everyone else? And would those people answer the question differently from people who are good at, say, English composition?
That might seem like an odd twist to put on it. But if you can show that a certain answer correlates with mathematical ability, that indicates something special about that answer. And if you can show that that answer appeals to people with math skills, but not to people with English/writing/composition skills, then that indicates something interesting not just about that answer, but about mathematical ability as well, as opposed to writing ability. Whether that answer is "right" or "wrong" (or whether you think those terms are even meaningful for a legal opinion), it is a fact, not an opinion, that people with self-reported higher math skills are more likely to pick that as the correct choice.
By contrast, when the D.A. makes a public statement about the criminality of the defendant's actions, the implication is that we should give some weight to his statements because of his qualifications, such as being a member of the bar. But if we were to ask other bar members to decide independently of each other whether the defendant committed a crime, would they converge on the same answer? If not, then why should we listen to him, as opposed to someone else with the same credentials? When an expert cites their credentials in support of an opinion, if it's not true that other experts with the same credentials would back them up on that opinion, I don't think people realize the extent to which there is no there there.
So in the survey, I described the man's alleged actions and the Tennessee statute, and asked people if they thought he had violated the law. I also asked respondents to rate their math skills as "Excellent"/"Very good"/"Good"/"Fair"/"Poor" and to rate their English/composition skills as "Excellent"/"Very good"/"Good"/"Fair"/"Poor". The survey was posted on the Amazon Mechanical Turk site, where you can post "tasks" for people to complete in exchange for small payments of, say, 25 cents apiece. Some companies use this for grunt work (like hiring people to review user-submitted profile photos to make sure they don't contain nudity), but I use the site mainly to conduct surveys.
I think it's unlikely that the Mechanical Turk users are a representative cross-section of the population, but I use it more to find significant relative differences between demographic groups. If 60% of women on the site answer a question one way and 80% of men answer it the other way, that probably suggests that in a real cross-sectional survey of the population, men and women would largely disagree on the answer as well. (The alternative would be that the kind of men and women who use Mechanical Turk are predisposed to answer the question differently along gender lines in a way that average men and women are not, but that seems unlikely.)
For this survey, I offered users 25 cents apiece for completing this survey and collected 127 responses. The results in a nutshell:
- About two-thirds of all respondents (85 out of 127) said that the man did violate the law.
- However, among the respondents who rated their own math skills as "Excellent", only 44% (12 out of 27) said he violated the law, and 56% (15 out of 27) said that he did not. Out of all ten ability groupings (five different ability groupings for math, from "Excellent" to "Poor", and five for English), this was the only group where a majority said that the defendant didn't violate the statute.
- Respondents who self-rated their English/composition skills as "Excellent", were also more likely than average to vote that the man did not violate the law, but a majority of them still voted that he did.
These results are significant at the 99% level, which you can check using an online statistical significance calculator. In other words, despite the modest sample size, the answers given by the respondents with self-rated "excellent" math skills are so starkly different from everyone else's, that there's less than a 1 in 100 chance that the difference is due to coincidence. Almost certainly, something about mathematical ability is correlated with a person's likelihood of giving the "not guilty" answer. (At this point I'm going to give in to my bias and hereinafter refer to that as the "right answer.")
Furthermore, while respondents with "excellent" English/composition skills were also more likely than average to get the right answer (a difference that is also significant at the 99% level, given the collected data), they were considerably less likely to do so, than the users with self-reported "excellent" math skills (again, significant at the 99% level). I tabulated all the responses.
If I could afford to pay a larger sample, I would investigate whether the effect of "excellent" English/composition skills disappears entirely when you control for math skills. In other words, it's possible that the people with excellent English/composition skills were more likely than average to get the right answer, but only insofar as their English/composition skills were correlated with excellent math ability — and maybe people with "excellent" English/composition skills, but only average math ability, score no better than the average respondents.
One thing that jumps out at me: Even though 44% of the 27 people with "excellent" math skills said the man did violate the law, when you look at the 58 people who self-reported "very good" math skills, 74% of them said he violated the law. This would appear to confound my original hypothesis that good math skills lead people to converge on the correct answer. But I suspect that many people with self-reported "very good" math grades were probably just good students who studied hard and did the practice problems and got good grades in math, but without necessarily having the insight that makes someone an "excellent" math student. Without that insight, there was no reason to expect them to be better than average at answering a question that has no resemblance to their textbook's practice problems.
In fact, I suspect that many of the people who self-reported their math skills as "excellent", and who still answered "yes" to the question of whether the man violated the law, probably fell into that studious-but-not-insightful category as well. It would be interesting to test whether if you required respondents to actually answer a math question — not a standard textbook question, but a tricky question that required people to demonstrate an understanding of what is actually going on — if the correlation between correctly answering that question, and "correctly" answering the legal question, is even stronger.
But what I think is even more important than the correlation of the correct answer with "excellent" math ability, was the significantly lower correlation of the correct answer with "excellent" English skills. I've been saying for years that you can use excellent prose to defend an illogical idea, or you can use poorly crafted prose to defend a good idea, and so if you care about the quality of an idea and its impact on the real world, you have to look at the substance of an argument, not the style. Economics professor Steven Landsburg writes in his forthcoming philosophy book The Big Questions,
The bane of a college professor's existence is the student who has been taught in a writing course that there is such a thing as good writing, independent of having something to say. Students turn in well-organized grammatically correct prose, with the occasional stylistic flourish in lieu of any logical argument, and don't understand why they've earned grades of zero.
I call such people "vocabulemics", who seem to think the purpose of a discussion is to vomit up as many SAT vocab prep words as possible, rather than to form a coherent point. I've tried, and I can't think of any coherent point that could be made in order to argue that the Miley photoshopper really did violate the Tennessee law.
If you're still unconvinced by the results of a survey of mathletes, consider that they do match up well with the comments provided to me by Mark Rasch, a lawyer and computer security specialist with Secure IT Experts and the former head of the Department of Justice Computer Crimes Unit:
First, an image of a minor engaged in simulated sexual activity is not the same as a simulated minor engaged in sexual activity... In other words, if you posed actual minors, nude, and made it look like they were having sex, it would be a crime, even though there was no "actual" sexual activity. In most other contexts, when the legislature says "simulated sexual activity" they mean real people engaged in what appears to be sex. The government is trying to apply this theory to real sex but simulated minors. I don't think that passes statutory muster.. its not what the statute prohibits... Under that rationale, if you had, for example, a picture of two dogs mating, and glued pictures of kids on the dogs faces, this would be "simulated sexual activity" but would not be prosecutable. Where do you draw the line? Under federal law, you typically draw the line at the use and posing of real kids.
Depending on how you look at it, you may think that this opinion from credentialed expert Mr. Rasch, vindicates the opinion of the math aficionados who voted that the defendant did not violate the law. I think it's the other way around — the fact that this answer was correlated in the survey responses with mathematical ability, vindicates the opinion of Mr. Rasch.
The incessant use of blockquotes makes this story unreasonable.
The opposite of progress is congress
I don't think those quotes are what you really want.
It seems to me that those with advanced math skills would all agree that the Photoshopped images *were* of Miley Cyrus, via the transitive property.
I dunno...they gave ME a Reggi pole.
"I guess the moral of the story is, don't paint your airship with rocket fuel." -- Addison Bain
Rationality is still atypical, and still associated with mathematical ability...
tl;dr
Oddly appropriate footer quote...
Malek's Law: Any simple idea will be worded in the most complicated way.
So... the picture is located where?
I
love
what you've
done with the
place. Makes it a
real treat to read
the story!
rooooar
Reminds me of when I worked front line hardware breakfix back in 1994 or so. A guy brought his machine in for service, and we transferred his files to a new hard drive. He had a hidden directory, and in it were pictures that had been clearly spliced. There were about fifty different shots of the same woman's face on various bodies engaged in porn acts.
He called to let us know his friend, Angie, would pick up the computer. Naturally I was somewhat surprised when I recognized Angie.
Good work. So far as the people who gave the "wrong" answer are concerned, you've proven that math nerds are also sex perverts.
I think your bias was obvious right from the point where you decided to pay money to people to tell you what you wanted to hear, then decided to focus on the one subset of people who actually did so.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Very interesting. I would be interested to see the exact phrasing of your Mechanical Turk question, to ensure that there is no bias hiding in the wording. I would also be interested in rerunning the experiment with two groups, one who sees the DA's argument and one who sees your argument, and seeing how much these arguments skew the numbers for each self-assessed Math/English segment.
I agree child porn is immoral and should be illegal, but the main reason I think it should be illegal is so the girl isn't subjected to the photo shoot. A Photoshop job like this, despite being offensive, seems to be a protected right of Americans. South Park, for example, is composed of many offensive collages but I couldn't imagine condoning censorship of the show. I'd have to take the defendant's side on this issue, even though it seems wrong to side with someone who whacks off to that type of shit. It's America, you take the good with the bad.
"From the depths of my skeptical and rationalist soul, I ask the Lord to protect me from California touchie-feeliedom."
Autistic spectrum people often have a problem with understanding societal norms - what is next; "Fresh Pizza is Hot"?
Ask those same people about having THEIR face superimposed on a nude child's body and see how their answers change.
Humor from a Genetically Molested Mind
There were about fifty different shots of the same woman's face on various bodies engaged in porn acts.He called to let us know his friend, Angie, would pick up the computer. Naturally I was somewhat surprised when I recognized Angie.
So, uh, what did Angie look like? Was she uh, superimposition worthy?
This is my sig.
Good work. So far as the people who gave the "wrong" answer are concerned, you've proven that math nerds are also sex perverts.
Did we really need a survey for that?
This is my sig.
would people who are good at math, answer the question differently from everyone else? [...] it is a fact, not an opinion, that people with self-reported higher math skills are more likely to pick that as the correct choice.
You might be good at maths but you seem to be terrible at science. You can't demonstrate you collected results from anybody who was actually any good at maths, you just got a bunch of responses from people who thought they were good at maths. Maybe people with such a self perception are also more likely to pick views that are opposed to what they think most people will think in order to further demonstrate their superiority?
I think your study is quite interesting but it doesn't mean what you think it means. It also has an awfully small sample size.
Nick
Here in the UK I think you're allowed to have pictures of breasts at 16, have to be 18 for fully naked pics though. Then again in some other countries it probably wouldn't be illegal no matter what the ages were, but I consider this a very borderline case since she's 17 at the moment, so it doesn't seem too perverted from my cultural perspective - in the UK you can legally marry or have sex as long as you're both 16 or over (think it's 18 for homosexuals). You can also start drinking here at 18. I'm glad I don't live in the US :P
which is totally what she said
Obviously, jury nullification of bad interpretations of hot-button laws doesn't work when the juries themselves react convulsively to the mere hint of child pornography, even when the "child" is not an actual child except under the most hyper-technical legal definition. Just think, juries tend in the main to be exactly these semi-illiterates who aren't bright enough to slip out of jury duty. It's all really depressing and makes me wonder what will become of the Republic.
Oh, and for the slightly clueless who need a hint, a surefire way to get out of jury duty is to clearly declare that you believe in jury nullification.
A truly excellent pizza parlor is a delight unto the heavens. Treasure the sauce and the toppings!
I wonder if you have found the right correlation.
Perhaps the correlation is between people with bigger egos rather than actual skills.
And what does being good at math or english have to do with whether or not what he did was right or wrong? Of course, the article was tl;dr, so it may have been answered.
. . . an effigy of the DA, with a photo of his countenance affixed, and burn it, will he then be responsible as accessory for violating fire restrictions?
If the results are significant at the 1% level (you mean .01, not .99 - low p values indicate higher significance), then this does NOT mean that there is less than a 1% change that the results are due to chance. It means that IF THERE WERE TRULY NO DIFFERENCE, we'd expect to see an effect this large or larger only 1% of the time. This is Statistics 101 stuff. A p value conditions on the null hypothesis being true; it is not a statement about the probability of the null hypothesis. For that you need a Bayesian inferential technique.
Clearly, math correlates with pedophilia.
Surveys are inherently difficult to present in a neutral fashion, especially when attempting to determine correlation. Take the following (simplified) survey for example:
I like Cheerios:
[Yes] [No] [Sometimes]
Rate your proficiency at math:
[Excellent] [Good] [Average] [Poor]
Now, let's say you found a statistically significant correlation between people who like Cheerios and people who are excellent at math. Congratulations! You just did not find a correlation related to math proficiency at all.
What you did just find is a correlation between people who selected the first option in your survey.
Now, randomizing your answers is a good start and will resolve the above issue. However, there are hundreds of other things which can affect your results and there is an entire survey industry formed around these problems. The immediate problems that spring to mind about the survey in TFA is:
-Respondents must have internet access
-Respondents must have signed up to Amazon's mechanical turk
-Respondents were paid for the survey
-Respondent proficiency at math/language was self-assessed
-Respondents must be able to comprehend English
Anyway, I could go on but my point here is this: despite the fact that a statistically-significant correlation that was found, that correlation may not stem from the questions themselves.
Karma: SELECT `karma` FROM `users` WHERE `userid`=138474;
Somehow, and I don't understand this, but if you asked everyone if they have above or below average abilities on any random topic, people always partition themselves into two groups, almost exactly evenly. It seems completely unfathomable that people do not artificially inflate their own assessment of self, yet every single time, people objectively rate their abilities in these personal assessment surveys. How weird is that?
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
Almost certainly, something about mathematical ability is correlated with a person's likelihood of giving the "not guilty" answer.
Or hubris. Seems like the more disposed someone is to think they're "the Shit," the more likely they are to give your "right answer."
I've been saying for years that you can use excellent prose to defend an illogical idea, or you can use poorly crafted prose to defend a good idea, and so if you care about the quality of an idea and its impact on the real world, you have to look at the substance of an argument, not the style.
So are you saying that you thought what this guy did was a good idea? Maybe you should look at the "substance" of your own argument, and think again about what kind of impact you want to make on "the real world." Remember, good "English" skills usually involve high reading comprehension, i.e. knowing what the hell is going on. Maybe you should factor that into your analysis.
Is not an statistical pure sample... is specifically people that wanted to take that survey. Also, is not people good at math, is people that think (or answer) that is good at math. Could perfectly be people that dont care about answers, said that they are great at math without being so and that they dont care about that topic when they do (maybe with a closer example, i.e. what if that was done with their daughter photo?),
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Mathletes! There are mathletes in here!
"A Tennessee man is arrested for possessing a picture of Miley Cyrus's face superimposed on a nude woman's body. In a survey that I posted on the Web, a majority of respondents said the man violated the law -- except for respondents who say they were good at math in school, who as a group answered the survey differently from everyone else."
Therefore: Mathematicians like child porn.
Talk about flamebait summaries. Can we have something that roughly represents the article?
I have a ton of problems with the methodology as well. Self-selected tiny sample set with self-reported aptitudes used to make blanket statements, with no attempt to get a rational cross-section (which he acknowledges and then says it's not a problem despite lack of any evidence supporting that conjecture), and all the problems/bias associated with internet-only research (we are a biased sample set, in that we're all here).
In short: wanking. You can't even begin to effectively correlate decision making to mathematical ability without actually testing that ability.
If you asked me to describe my own math ability, I'd say "average", because I routinely deal with people who are so much better than me at math that I can't in good conscience say I'm better than that...I mean, I never progressed beyond the simplest multi-variable calculus! But put me up against someone who is average across the entire population, and I'll rate much higher.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
This survey fails on so many levels that knowing what the questions were is unnecessary.
The last survey I was involved in (maintaining the database) had 35,000 respondants from a single US state, and was a survey of a limited demographic. IIRC it was buried quickly when it was discovered that the higher-ups didn't like the results.
Free Martian Whores!
So, if someone was to take the prosecutor's face and photoshop it onto a picture of a dead body, that photoshop artist would be arrested for murder? Clearly, the way the prosecutor has re-worded the law in his favor, the victim is being charged with a thought-crime.
And if MERELY THINKING of a sexual act with a minor is punishable, then we are in a very sad state of affairs.
What is up with this country?
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
...another rube proving the guys point.
This isn't about your personal opinion about what's "right" or "wrong". It's about the law.
The law is rather well defined even if a little byzantine at times.
Much of it is still accessable to the common man if you bother to actually read it and apply it.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
What you may have found is a correlation between "people who self-report themselves as excellent in math" and b) people who aren't religious nutcases.
I doubt you've found much more than that.
It would be interesting for someone to try this at a college, asking students to give their math and verbal SAT scores, then asking some dummy questions, and then asking about cut'n'paste thoughtcrime.
You didn't actually correlate against math skill. You correlated against perceived math skill, or confidence, or ability to bullshit.
For example, in the most recent standardized test I took (GMAT, lols), I rolled a wickedly hot 80th percentile on the math. I mean, all that 9th grade "math" that I haven't studied or used in the last 15 years whooped my arse. Now, if you use those scores to determine "math skills", you get a bunch of 10th graders that scored well (having just taken the classes) beating people using actual complex math on a daily basis.
Obviously you're not using the GMAT math section for math ability, but the point is still valid. You didn't control for "16 year old that scored 750 on the PSAT math section and thus thinks he's hot stuffing" vs. "person that has completed and demonstrated mastery of differential equations".
As you stated, you didn't correlate math vs. english. Rather than "people that gave the answer I wanted and are good at English are also good at Math", I suspect you'll see "people that are generally good at both things gave the answer I wanted" (yeah, I'm biased too, and suspect that would play out). You're attempting to state that people with verbal skills are terrible. No. That's just typical passed down nerd crap that holds nerds back by intentionally ignoring something they can be competent at. It has no basis in reality.
Anyways... I'm in agreement that photoshop being 'illegal' is ridiculous, but your test is absurdly invalid.
The survey was linked to in the original post. You can see it here.
He presented only the line from the statute, and the DA's 1-line argument, not his own interpretation. In my opinion, he actually provided too little context to make an informed decision, not too much.
collected 127 responses That is far too low a number to be meaningful in a population of 300,000,000 (US) or six billion (world).
By my understanding, the size of the population has a very small impact on the necessary size of the sample.
Try this one on for size, "smart people":
There exists something such that if it is a unicorn then all things are unicorns.
∃x(Ux -> ∀yUy)
Is that sentence true? Pull out your truth tables...well I'll give you the classical one for the condition:
Antecedent Consequent Condition
T T T
T F F
F T T
F F T
Will be two bit local prosecutors going after local adolescent girls who photoshop their own and their friends' heads onto images of the naked bodies of older women.
People who are 'good at math' are more likely to analyze the law exactly as written and determine logically whether or not he actually violated the law as written. People who are good at math are far more likely to see answers as absolute - either it's absolutely correct or absolutely incorrect.
Most people just look at the first question, which is "Is what he did sick and disgusting, and probably immoral and/or unethical?" To which the answer of course, is an obvious 'yes'. Math people ignore that, because that's not really relevant when it comes to law. The real question is "Did he violate the law as written?" And the answer to that in this case is a pretty clear 'no'.
There is no -1 Disagree mod. Slashdot.org/faq defines mod options. USE IT.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Response_bias
It also occurs in situations of voluntary response, such as phone-in polls, where the people who care enough to call are not necessarily a statistically representative sample of the actual population.
You picked the absolute worse form of gathering data. Go sit in the corner.
This statistical extrapolation is not valid (AT ALL, UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, NEVER EVER). For this kind of analysis to mean anything, you have to conclusively demonstrate that you collected a representative sample of the population. That means: A random sample, drawn in a non-biased (or bias-controlled) fashion, from the whole underlying population. Ask a real statistician, and (s)he'll tell you: Your extrapolations are only as good as your sampling methodology.
You seem to be under the mistaken impression that you're somehow, magically, exempt from this mathematical fact because you are making relative comparisons between two subsets of your sample. Where the hell did you get that idea?
To understand why, try considering this hypothetical: What if the subset of the population that is drawn to answer your MechTurk question is biased in more than one way? For instance, it could contain a larger-than-normal proportion of highly-intelligent social misfits who sympathize with outcasts, as well as a larger-than-normal proportion of under-educated Moral Orals. It could easily generate similar results to yours, as could an infinity of other hypothetically biased samples.
Statistically, then, how do you differentiate between your pet theory and the infinity of alternatives? YOU CAN'T. Methods of statistical extrapolation obtain their effectiveness from their relationship with the law of large numbers (probability, basically). Your poor sampling method has completely discarded that link, leaving zero support for your conclusions.
You cannot fix this problem with math: If your sample is not a truly random sample, drawn from the full underlying population in a non-biased (or bias-controlled) fashion, your numbers don't mean shit W.R.T. the population, and they never will. PERIOD.
(As an aside, there are methods that can control for sampling bias in certain LIMITED circumstances, when the nature of the bias can be quantified. But you aren't using this method, AND it doesn't apply to your situation, because you can't make reliable quantifying statements about how your sample is biased.)
You are officially part of the problem. Either learn more stats, or STOP MISLEADING YOURSELF AND OTHERS by mis-applying them.
Shopping Miley's head on to a naked woman doesn't make her naked, just as shopping her head onto an old photo of Arnold Schwarzenegger doesn't suddenly make her a male bodybuilder.
i agree what he did was absolutely legal. doesnt change the fact that the dude is a sick pervert D:
Author understands neither statistics nor survey methodology.
It's Tennessee people! Look at their laws...
It is illegal to use a lasso to catch a fish.
It is legal to gather and consume road-kill.
It is illegal for a woman to call a man for a date. (Dyersburg)
You may not have more than five inoperable vehicles on a piece of property. (Fayette County)
Illegal for a woman to drive a car unless there is a man either running or walking in front of it waving a red flag to warn approaching motorists and pedestrians. (Memphis)
To play pinball, one must be 18 years old. (Nashville)
You can't shoot any game other than whales from a moving automobile.
Howard Wolowitz: In a model base don the Drake Equation, I have calculated that there are 5,512 mate-able women within a 40-mile radius...
Leonard: Howard, really?
Howard: I'm a horny engineer - all I can think about is math and sex.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
Those with a higher level of education are hopefully able to better understand the problem and question being posed. I would expect that they are also more likely to engage in critical thinking. Maybe those with a short attention span just didn't read the whole thing. The results don't suggest much more than to say that it might be worth repeating the experiment with some improvements.
My fortune: "Malek's Law: Any simple idea will be worded in the most complicated way."
Fuck yeah, bro. i loves me some tight teen pussy. Best part is I don't need 'em to be wet, I make my own lube! Wootles!
Math geeks are deathly afraid of porn regulation.
Ok, maybe it's too early in the morning and I'm missing my caffeine jolt, but I can't figure what your problem is. Compare these two sentences, which I think are equivalent to yours:
this means that there is a 1% chance that results are due to chance
if results are normally distributed, it means that there is a 1% chance of seeing that result.
Yes/No?
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
Ascii representation of an underage girl, lying down, being ejaculated on upon her head:
q===o ~ ~ ~ O-|:-[
Remember kids, thought crimes are wrong! Freedom is overrated! I demand the authorities come apprehend me for my "simulated sexual activity" and anyone else who is aroused by said combination of characters*.
*Author's note: Child pornography is a horrible beast. It hurts people in unimaginable ways. If you really want to think of the children, go focus on the ACTUAL people who are out there RIGHT NOW abusing and molesting CHILDREN.
up
with the
weird formatting
of the article?
Western civilisation is crumbling because we're obsessed with punishing people for being "offensive" rather than for real crimes. Here in the UK you can kill somebody and get away with 2 years in a luxury prison. Beat somebody to a pulp and you'll get a slap on the wrist. If you have your house burgled or your car vandalised the police won't even be interested in taking a crime report and will certainly never catch the criminals. However if you offend a homosexual or member ethnic minority the police will be all over you in an instant and you'll be facing seven years in prison for the terrible crime of saying something offensive. Likewise if you modify an image to contain a minor and is deemed "patently offensive" you'll have your life ruined because of your evil photoshoppery. It seems our governments don't care in the least about crimes that do real harm and are only interested in going after "criminals" who have said some nasty words or produced a nasty picture
I'm terrified to go out on the streets at night because gangs have no fear of the toothless police and can act with impunity. The other thing I'm terrified of is accidentally offending the wrong person since something as simple as eating black Jelly Babies in the presence of a black man can cost you your job. The country is in massive debt, the economy is collapsing, the education system has been rendered worthless making it impossible for us to compete with countries like China, crime and vandalism are taking over the streets while the worthless police do absolutely nothing and society in general is collapsing. Despite all this the government's only concern seems to be stopping thought crime and offensive words.
How do I get off this merry-go-round?
Illegal or legal? I don't care. He is probably headed to being a sexual predator. The guy would at least be getting treatment for his condition so it doesn't become worse. About the survey though, most math problems are binary. A yes or a no. They don't think to incorporate their opinion into the equation because that would destroy the point.
Leaving the issue of what the correct answer is aside for a moment, for all I care the law may be wrong, it does press the point that we need better maths education, but not for the reason you might guess. Not because the mathies got the answer right, after all, the law might be badly written and the right answer might actually be the wrong answer, but because for societal stability we need all people to interpret the law in the same way, and so that it will get written to a common mode of interpretation. We cannot afford to throw maths education out of the window, so we need to improve maths education for everyone. /. so that goes one way, but then again I have always wrestled with maths as if I was wrestling demons. I will however say that much of my own lack of maths skills has been caused by lack of good education, and that I've since taught (in informal settings) people who would consider themselves on the soft side of academics mathematical concepts that they never grasped in school. So I will venture that it must be possible to improve maths education a lot without burdening the students or teachers more. Fact is, a lot of teaching material is badly written, badly structured and doesn't focus on vital concepts and logic.
I don't know if I'm saying this as a mathy or not. I haven't looked at the actual case, so I don't know what answer I would have given. I post on
For example, I've seen a textbook that threw the root equation and angle doubling equations at students without telling them where those came from. They just had to learn the equations by heart (which the students hated), do a lot of homework to get it in right, do a nasty test on the matter, and afterwards they all forgot the formulae. On the other hand, I've also seen books that start out from the underlying concepts, and that works much better. Students still forget the formulae, but that doesn't matter. They can derive them or look them up. But they didn't forget the concepts and the logical way to get to the equations and that's all that counts in my opinion.
Oh, and perhaps maths eduction could be more fun. I still have nightmares of the boredom.
I tend to agree, but I am not a statistician. It seems like we're almost arguing a statement vs its contrapositive, when the truth of one is completely equivalent to the truth of the other.
Also, people who are "good at math" have a natural tendency to divide things up. That is one of the basic tricks of maths - to divide complicated things into simpler things which can, hopefully, be solved separately and the solutions then combined. So a mathematician will have no problem of seeing minor's head and adult's body as separate entities that have been brought into proximity. If neither of the two is itself illegal, then prima facie the combination is not illegal.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
a traditional iq test mainly tests abstract topographic manipulation/ spatial reasoning/ matehmatics/ etc. but it doesn't test the concept of, for lack of a better word: social iq. there is unfortunately a cult of high iq, high math skills reasoning, that posits this ability above all else is most important in this world and points to the strongest mind. bullshit
the truth of course is that social iq is far more important in this world than high traditional iq/ strong spatial reasoning skills/ etc. the average mensa member will be working for the guy with 100 iq who happens to have a much higher social iq than the mensa member. the ability to do great math just simply isn't as valuable in this world. its not a matter of what society values. that's taking your prejudice before observed truths. did you consider that perhaps what society values just might be what is actually most important in this world? and that by holding math skills to be less important, that is actually the proper objective attitude for a rich, just, happy society?
i assert it is a matter of objective economic truth that the ability to do 3 variable calculus just isn't as important as charisma, in terms of outright usefulness to getting anything valuable done in this world. i don't think barack obama can do linear algebra. does this mean someone who can is somehow better qualified to tackle difficult geopolitical questions? i would actually assert the opposite: anyone with high math skills is a red flag for low social skills, and therefore should be disqualified from making observations on issues in the domain of social intelligence, like politics and the legality of pedophile-related material
i would explain this attitude of mine in a very quick and dirty analogy: the difference between the average mind and the high math iq mind is not the difference between a 50 watt bulb and a 100 watt bulb. it is the difference between someone where their 100 watt bulb lights up the whole room (high social iq: the integrated, expansive, comprehensive mind) and the 100 watt flashlight that can only shine one bright corner while the rest of the room is dimly lit (the focused, concentrated, mathematical mind... at the expense of other social skills). not that there aren't genuinely dim 50 watt bulbs in this world: low math and low social iq, nor that there aren't genuine 200 watt high math/ high social iq rare individuals either. i'm talking the majority of people
so when we hear mathletes wouldn't realize that any type of pedophilia-related activity is a red flag for the person doing that photographic manipulation, those of us who have the prejudice that high iq people are somehow superior in their reasoning skills find support for the notion that everyone else must be wrong, that photoshop manipulator is innocent. i assert that, since those with high math skills often have low social skills, the reverse is true
here's an analogy: make believe you try to explain someone with low traditional iq the concept of derivatives in calculus. but they just don't get it, they are mystified, while you get it easily. but this same person can grasp social situations far more easily than the guy who can do derivatives easily. and so on the question of pedophilia, something clearly in the realm of social iq, the derivatives clueless fellow has social reasoning abilities that are superior to that of the mathlete's
when you cannot easily grasp why photoshopped manipulations of minors or fantasy drawings of naked minors is wrong, i ask you to consider the possibility that your thinking, that photoshops/ drawings are harmless, is deficient in the realm of social iq. deficient in the same way that the guy with low traditional iq can't grasp linear algebra. that considering how and why it might be wrong just leaves you drawing a blank... this is like the low math iq guy trying to grasp derivates. i ask you to consider the possibility that some people lack certain social iq points that renders their opinion on certain subjects deficient. and to explain
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
"When you have the face of a small child affixed to a nude body of a mature woman"
Hmmm
What if it was fixed beside the mature ladie's face giving a two headed monster?
What if it was attached to the elbow? The knee? Completely replacing her crotch? One copy over each breast like a bikini (so what if you made a real bikini with miley faces and a lady with big breasts wore it?).
What if it was attached to the body of a nude mature male?
How about a mature nude obese woman?
How about a mature very ill woman?
How about a *very* mature nude woman (in her 90s?)
I've seen a lot of frankensteins. My reaction to them was not sexual-- it was more of a novelty.
Funny story, a friend of ours always talked about his girlfriend, "X" and yet we never met her. We finally asserted that "X" was really him. Finally he brought a picture of him and her to magic the gathering night to *prove* that he had a girlfriend. While he played his first game, I scanned the picture and frankenstiened his head onto her body. When someone new showed up, we mentioned that he had brought the picture-- and showed it to the newcomer who broke out laughing-- which prompted him to look at his picture to see why it was so funny. It was the most amazing exasperated, surprised, amused reaction. Hysterical.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
While its an interesting premise, and underscores the average americans need to learn the basics ( reading, writing, and arithmatic) well beyond what Henry Ford envisioned for them when he helped pen the public school system -- sadly, this whole survey seems as contrived as the classic problem of Hot Days, Ice Cream, and Violent crime
And therein lies the problem. People get away with sick, disgusting, and probably immoral and/or unethical things everyday, simply because they aren't against the law.
And honestly, the guy had pictures of a pop star celebrity photoshopped onto a nude body, which is not ANYTHING new and really not that big a deal. Yeah, she's under-aged, which makes him a sicko, but its better that he's looking at fake stuff then the real under-aged stuff, which is WHY the laws were imposed in the first place.
If someone is being charged for this, either the law enforcement isn't doing their job to catch the right criminals, or they're doing an excellent job and are running out of people to catch.
Either way, the system appears flawed.
Why don't all users of SlashDot actually call Dave Denny (or DA Bill Cox) and ask them the same question! If the man accused were to have been viewing CLOTHED photos of Miley Cyrus, or even CLOTHED photos of the underage girls for sexual gratification, would he still be being tried for the same crimes? Who will be the judge of who's using CLOTHED photos of underage girls (or boys) for sexual gratification, and who's just using them to document their child's lives? Contact Info: Bill Cox (DA) bill.cox@hcdatn.org Dave Denny (ADA) dave.denny@hcdatn.org Phone Number (423) 209-7400
A bug in the CSS - go read the details 20 postings above.
... this is exactly why nerds and academic types get ousted from politics so quickly, STYLE and rhetoric is a must.
People who have people skills and enough intelligence like Mr Obama (not that I agree with everything the man does or says being the poltical stooge that he is), at least knows this.
This partly why academnics get wrtiten off, GOOD WRITING and expressing yourself so other people can understand wtf it is your saying DOES MATTER as well is the emotional tone and way you say it.
It all matters and there is a *mathematical* reason why this is the case, that has to do with symmetry of communication styles and how most people communicate in the real world(tm).
Style mattes as much as substance, the old idea that style does not matter is one of the enlightenments fallacies that many academics and nerds out of the loop of what science has discovered still cling to, since it has been shown to be scientifically false a long time ago.
A convincing bullshitter can often times bamboozle the traditional enlightenment rationalist that has not taken a couse in marketing or ever have had to market something to a general audience.
Most human beings are sloppy thinkers, and even careful thinkers have a tough time with academic companions whose prose is disturbingly obtuse.
I know tonnes of high IQ types who use the most obtuse arcance language known to man and they don't realize how *stupid* they look to people when the don't communicate in a language anyone can understand.
When it comes to argument I now focus both on STYLE and SUBSTANCE, because you want your stuff to be read and digested as widely as possible, coming off as a social slob as many nerds and academics do in writing is not good for propogating their insights and wisdom.
Sometimes we nerdy people need to take a step back and not be so serious about "form over substance" when we know both matters, how many nerds drool over hot girls, esp hot intelligent girls who have an intellectual side? Practically every intelligent man with a pulse.
"Is what he did sick and disgusting, and probably immoral and/or unethical?" To which the answer of course, is an obvious 'yes'.
Hold on there. Why? Did he hurt someone?
I have no moderator point so let me say: Great Posting - how very true.
If the picture of the minor's head was replaced with a goat's head, would it then be a bestiality case? I don't think it would be, as the adult bodies are preforming the sexual acts, not the goat.
Why then is the minor's head an exception?
A bug in the CSS - go read the details 10 postings above.
What the hell is wrong with me?!? First... forget anything you know about this guy and look at the issue at hand.
1) We have a picture that's been photoshopped to have an underage persons on it.
The question at hand is if this should be illegal or not. Child pornography has become a major issue... and the definition of what child pornography is up in the air. My best friend was pulled on our way to canada and interogated for an hour about pictures and movies on his computer. It wasn't until after we left that we realized it was videos of his daughter doing the funky chicken dance.
To me this is EXTREMELY dangerous to say "yes... putting a kids head on a naked adult" is illegal.". That's a gray area to me as there are FAR too many possibilities for that happening. Jokes, funny images, etc.
What if he had Miley's face on some 90 year old dropping breast woman. Would it be the same to you? That's the problem... law has to be made so that anyone who reads it interprets it the same (or at least pretty damn close).
Tennessee law does NOT prevent what he did. It's not illegal according the law and whether it should be or not isn't the point. It's not.
People are screaming to burn this guy and they nothing about him nor care. There are thousands of creeps out there and this is like busting a pot head for wearing a shirt that shows a charicature of him smoking pot. SURE... I think this would be probable cause to search his house and home computer... but it's not illegal to do. And shouldn't be.
I love the right to be able to put Miley Cyrus's annoying face on midget porn. It's tasteless sick humor and we have hundreds of thousands of images that are similar. You may not like it and it's borderline crossing the law... but it's NOT. It disturbs me that so many people that are so conservative they can't accept peoples rights to do this. It's so stiffling.
Again... this guy is a creep and I think that HAVING pictures like this should be probable cause for investigating him further but it's stupid to try to put him in jail for this. Find something that is unquestionable.
Not sure you can say that lusting after a 17 year old is sick and disgusting in general. It's an artificial construct and of very recent construction and not even true world wide.
Not only that-- it's a moving target. There seems to be more age sorting going on as the baby boomers get older.
At least it is okay to lust after the actress that plays Hermione these days. I guess we have to wait 120 days or so to convert from being sick and disgusting with regard to Miley.
Of course by developing standards, if Hermione was made up to look under 18, it might be illegal.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
People who are intelligent (and thus good at math or English) are also more likely to discount the DA's comment describing this as victimizing a "small child", while others are likely to focus on that and discount everything else. Afterwards, they judge the case based on emotion rather than on its legal merits, but their first mistake was likely misinterpreting the fundamental question of whether being attracted to Miley Cyrus is deviant behavior or not.
The facts? Miley Cyrus is almost 17 years old, and given that she's an actress in Hollywood, I'd imagine she has been forced to grow up somewhat faster than normal. Thus, it stands to reason that in a test for competence, she would be held to the same standards as an adult. If she killed someone, she would be tried as an adult. If she sued for emancipation, she would no doubt succeed. In short, she is so thoroughly unlike a "small child" in every way that describing her as such is patently offensive to anyone with the slightest degree of intelligence.
I'm appalled by this case at so many levels that I don't even know where to begin. Pretty much the only thing the DA has going for him is that feeling that their "hometown girl" has been abused by this guy's actions. We are talking about her home state, after all, and there aren't that many Tennessee girls who become famous. So there's inherently a bias sufficient to warrant a change of venue....
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
The first thing that jumped out at me when I saw the survey is that he never asks for the person's sex. I think this is a major flaw in the survey.
It's possible that males (who are predominantly good at math) think this was not a crime whereas females do.
"And why exactly did you look at the pictures in the first place?"
Because it was probably pornography, and because I knew I wouldn't get caught.
Yeah, she's under-aged, which makes him a sicko
She's 16, and very much sexually mature from the Wikipedia pics of her. How does this make him a sicko, again?
People get away with sick, disgusting, and probably immoral and/or unethical things everyday, simply because they aren't against the law.
wait a second... how can you "get away with" something that's not against the law? there's nothing to "get away with".
Consider the two following statements: 1) If you are a US congressman, the probability you are an American citizen is 1. 2) If you are an American citizen, the probability that you are a US congressman is (about) 1.5e-6. The difference in the two statements, although they both involve the same events (US congressman and US citizen) is the conditioning. (2) conditions on the US citizenship, and (1) conditions on congressional membership. The difference is critical. p values are conditioned on a null hypothesis being true. Think: "If you there is truly no difference between the groups, the probability of finding this evidence (or more extreme evidence) is 0.01" The statement in the summary was conditioned in the opposite way: "Given this observed difference in the groups, the probability of the observed difference being due to chance (that is, that the chance hypothesis is true) is .01"
The p value computed in the summary is the former statement. In order to get the later statement, you have to use Bayes theorem and the p value, which requires additional assumptions and could be a wildly different number. I teach stats, and I have to cram this into my students' heads every year. It is critical to understand the difference in the two statements in order to understand the statistics you use.
Having people categorize themselves on an objective technical skill such as math is at least slightly more reliable than having people self judge on such a subjective skill as writing.
Many people I went to college with were certain their one act plays could win awards and that their sonnets would outlive them. I certainly wouldn't trust many of them when it comes to something as nuanced as the American legal system.
A better breakdown of the populace would have been to separate out people based on the level of education achieved, or perhaps by specific college degree, or even split out people with legal backgrounds from the average layperson. This would remove all the "touchy, feely" issues his current survey has.
With that said, this Tennessee man may be a danger to society, and his actions really creep me out, but I don't believe that he broke the law as it is currently written.
For what it is worth, on his poll I would have fit this profile
Writing skills > Math Skills
What can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.
The real problem, of course, is that the law can rarely be analyzed logically. Even when the text seems perfectly clear and direct, its application often belies that by creating an entire superset of byzantine rules that encompass the actual text and dramatically change its reading.
I think this actually goes far further along to describing the difference between mathematicians and other people. Mathematicians, through mathematics, have essentially created an entirely arbitrary system of explaining reality and are used to applying that ruleset independent of anything else (despite the fact that in some cases, it is patently absurd to do so). The law can be seen as an arbitrary set of rules. Therefore, mathematicians look at the law as an arbitrary set of rules and apply it accordingly. The problem is that, unlike mathematics, the law is not applied independent of anything else- especially not in cases where it is patently absurd to do so. The law as written is one part but not the only, or even the largest, part of the system that determines what the result of an application of the law will be.
When you ask someone to decide whether or not person A violated the law, they can't just look at the law on its own; they have to examine the rest of the system that the law operates within.
"It is possible to commit no errors and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life." -Peak Performance
If you're measuring currently living Popes, you've never needed a sample larger than two.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I think Mr. Hasselton made a fundamental error in his analysis. When you ask people to self-rate how good they are at a subject, you first need to read Unskilled and Unaware of It. The research can be summed up simply: people who are not very good at X are more likely to rate themselves highly than people who truly are good at X.
People who say he didn't commit a crime are more likely to lie about their own intelligence.
The real question is "Did he violate the law as stated?" as there are laws other than Tennessee's at stake here.
IIRC, the federal law on what does and does not constitute child porn has a clause about photographic depictions in which minors (recognizable) faces have been grafted onto photos depicting sexual behavior, the general idea being that if you would be charged for creating/possessing pictures with the same content showing an actual minor, you can be charged for creating/possessing pictures with that content showing a minor's face. Whether that ought to be the case is possibly debatable; I'm believe the reasoning is that the existence of/other people's knowledge of the photos could cause the minor lasting psychological or social harm.
(This is just based on what I remember after some research from a previous discussion on a similar topic; I am not now, nor was I then, a lawyer.)
16 is legal for sex in most jurisdictions of the world. 10 is illegal for most. The more interesting question is, were the photos just nudes, or did they show sexual activity? Nude photos of teenagers not engaging in sexual activity (e.g. this) are usually not illegal in Western society.
Mathematicians, through mathematics, have essentially created an entirely arbitrary system of explaining reality
Citation needed.
Because otherwise I can't argue against why that is wrong on so many levels.
"Be prepared, son. That's my motto. Be prepared." --Joe Hallenbeck
So, then is the following wrong?
Adult Kiddie
Porn Porn
___O___
O|O __o__
| '|'
/ \ / \
Um, what part of it do you find is inadequate?
How about Albert Einstein's quote that "As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality."?
"It is possible to commit no errors and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life." -Peak Performance
So a mathematician will have no problem of seeing minor's head and adult's body as separate entities that have been brought into proximity.
Interesting. In classified matter training, we're taught that two unclassified pieces of information, when brought together in a single document can cause that document to then become classified. I wonder if someone is trying to push the law in that direction?
I drank what? -- Socrates
I have a math degree. I know enough about mathematics to know that I don't think I am that good at it. Compared to my (Math) "peers" I am probably slightly above average. Compared to the rest of the world I am >99%. So by that definition I would categorize myself as Excellent. To get really good you have to study it on a daily or at least weekly basis. I am way too lazy to do anything like that.
In school we were taught that everything has a set of rules. For one set to be apart of another it has to follow these sets of rules. You do each rule/law and try and prove that it is false. Go through each rule/law and when you find ONE rule that is false you quit. The whole thing is false. It is black or white. It is not gray no matter how "black" it was? 4 out of 5 rules that are true does not equal 80% true. It == 100% false. I don't think the outside (people) follow that rule.
I served in Jury duty once for a guy that was clearly guilty. I wanted a free lunch and really wanted the day to be wasted so I didn't have to go back to work. So I convinced 2 other people that there was a chance based on one rule that the guy had a chance of being innocent. We just needed the judge to clarify one point of the law. He clarified it (after lunch break) and he was by definition guilty. I said okay by definition he is guilty lets return the verdict and go home. And one guy looked at me and said these other 2 people still think he could be innocent. I said no based on the letter of the law he is guilty. Here are the rules, they are ALL true. Based on the directions that the judge gave us by definition of the law he is guilty. They had to talk about it for 30+ more minutes. I just didn't get it. It doesn't matter how we feel or if we feel sorry for the guy. We were told these 5 "rules", if all 5 were true, by definition he is guilty. We don't make the rules. There really shoudn't be any emotion in any of this. I really didn't understand any of their protests or questions after that. (I created two monsters.) In the end we voted him guilty. And the guy probably got life (not deserved) for the 3 strikes law.
So in summary (poor to bad Composition skills BTW) laws are really not black and white to the greater public. They let emotion get involved and 80% true might be 100% true to them. Some people just ignore the pieces that are false because they want the man to be guilty. Doesn't matter what the law says. The guy is sick and deserves to rot in jail. Sadly sometimes if a guy is really "bad", 20% true is enough to convict.
18 is the legal age in the UK for photos and videos of full-on sexual activity. Nude photos of any age are not illegal unless they are of a sexual nature - if they were, then every parent who snaps a photo of their kid in the paddling pool would be facing jail.
The interpretation of "sick and disgusting" is a highly subjective concept. I'm sure there are plenty of people who think I do sick and disgusting things every day, without having anything to do with Miley Cyrus or any other stupid little spoiled whore. I'm sure I could find someone who finds thai food "sick and disgusting", I could probably even draw some bogus correlation between thai lovers and people who suck at math.
The reality is that law should be firm. It needs to be cut-and-dried, you're either guilty or you're not. To achieve this, we need to define the intent of the law, not the loosely-coupled description of contravening acts. Child porn is illegal because it is considered child abuse, right ? So here's the question we should be answering:
Did Miley suffer abuse as a direct effect or consequence of this man's photo editing activities ?
I rest my case, your stupor.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
math = logic, or the ability to compute logical thought. 1+1=2=3-2+1
there fore, is it logical to assume that people who cannot understand math cannot understand logic (or vice-versa).
its an interesting viewpoint that i can logically relate to. sadly, logic is not taught below the college level, which I feel is a great travesty; that people have to wait so long to learn something so simple and yet so profound.
I also logically know my grammar is not good, and that a travesty in itself.
Id enjoy getting my teaching cert in order to teach logic to high school or middle school kids.
~DF
Do you consider the phrase "patently offensive" to be well defined?
The problem with laws is that they have to deal with concepts that are often fuzzy at best, completely undefinable at worst and almost always irritatingly vague. This is why judges have jobs, because they are where the laws meet reality. Unfortunately judges are also humans subject to their own biases and preconceptions and so we often get objectionable outcomes.
Is this guy guilty of bad taste? Definitely.
Is it kiddie porn? No, and shame on the D.A. for trying this.
Women are like electronics: you don't know how damaged they are until you try to turn them on.
The real question is "Did he violate the law as stated?" as there are laws other than Tennessee's at stake here.
Of course there are. There's always another law somewhere. (If there weren't so many laws and the system so convoluted, we wouldn't need lawyers now would we?) But that's not really part of this survey and discussion. What makes this particular survey of any interest at all is that it focuses on one particular law, and the respondents are giving their perspective on whether or not that particular law makes this illegal. It perfectly demonstrates what is known as "the tyranny of the majority". In this particular instance, the majority are wrong in a pretty clear-cut case. This also demonstrates the weakness in the "jury of your peers" system. Most people simply don't have the logic and rational capacity to be truly capable of being on a jury. It also sheds some light on a host of other problems with our judicial system, not the least of which is the fact that usually the side with the most money wins.
There is no -1 Disagree mod. Slashdot.org/faq defines mod options. USE IT.
What if you had some software that could take a picture of an adult and generate a probable picture of what that adult looked like as a child. Then used that picture in the porn? It would be a simulated minor engaged in a simulated sexual activity.
Even better: what if he used this software on a picture of himself and then pasted his own simulated child image onto the porn?
I simplified slightly. A mathematician would regard that only as the default behaviour, while accepting that such addition might not be possible in some circumstances. However, the circumstances require to be specified.
In your classified field, does that mean that a journalist who collects those pieces of information in good faith, made available independently from different unclassified sources, and publishes them together is now guilty of a criminal offence? That seems unreasonable to me. Which raises the question of how close the putter together of the two pieces of information has to be to be guilty.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
There's even more confusion than that. You can't assume all those people are actually good at math.
After all, people who think they are good at math are not necessarily actually good at math.
Then there are also people who are way above average in math but they know they are crap compared to the "real mathematicians".
You could fly a plane far better than 99% of the people out there, but that does not automatically make you good at flying, or suitable for piloting a commercial airliner with hundreds of people on board. Despite that, you might still know more about flying, aerodynamics and physics than the average person and you might be above average in stuff involving coordination, etc.
Thus someone way above average in math but who doesn't selfrate as "good" might still see the world a bit differently from most other people.
+5 insightful for ignorance? Hmm... wish I had mod points
What he did was not "obviously sick" or "disgusting," nor was it "probably immoral and/or unethical." I would love to put you to a test to distinguish 16-year-olds from 18-year-olds and watch you fail miserably, then through the Socratic method, make you realize how fucked up putting a blanket age on consent actually is. There is nothing morally wrong with getting aroused, even to a 16 year old when you are 18+. It used to be normal for people to be married by 16 and have kids by 18, so how can it be unnatural, unethical, or immoral? Yes, there are laws to protect kids from porn and there should be. I understand that the age of 18 is used because there has to be something. But morals and ethics have nothing to do with law, and your opinion of sick and disgusting is situational. I do not condone what he did, but for fucks sake this is not that big of a deal and he should have gotten a small fine for approaching the boundaries of child porn laws.
And besides, How many old farts do you see heckling young girls, not because they're going to go rape and victimize them. There is no harm in that, yeah its "gross" but only a very very VERY small percentage of people would even give a shit. America is so god damned afraid of being raped that we seem to just rape ourselves before anyone else has a chance...
when you remove emotion from the equation, you don't have a superior approach, you have simply unmoored yourself from the basis for any policy that can be considered human
we are not robots. a legal system that is purely logical, with no emotional component, is no legal system anyone would want to live under, including yourself
the whole point is not to remove emotion from the equation, but to incorporate emotion and logic is your thinking. anything overtly emotional, or overly logical, is inferior
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I'm curious when we reached http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tipping_Point on this issue, because I can recall just three generations ago people getting married at age 13. I also recall in many states having 16 as the legal age to wed. So why is it that when a male looks at a female who has entered puberty and starts producing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pheromone and all the other outward appearances that she is ready for sex, that it is somehow "sick and disgusting"? I wouldn't want someone looking at my daughter that way, but that doesn't mean what they are doing is wrong.
Not only that now you're criminalizing thoughts and desires or even human curiosity. For instance my wife wanted me to turn out the light last night so she reached out her and said "go, go, gadget arm". I walked over and turned out the light, then on the way back to bed I said "go go gadget penis", at which she laughed for a while. This reminded me of http://xkcd.com/305/ (rule 34); so I Googled "go go gadget penis" and instead of the obvious image of inspector gadget with an extend able penis, I get his daughter doing the dog. This image would be enough to land me in jail according to the current laws and as you can see that wasn't what I was looking for at all. I did also find a great quote from Leslie Nelson that "go go gadget penis" is the greatest one liner of all time.
Cases like this one scare the crap out of me because the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herd_mentality of the people in this nation are putting innocent people in jail. We might as well just form a good old fashion http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynching
Our society has reached the point where it criminalizes things not because they are Bad, Wrong, or Evil, but simply because it makes things easier for the police. In this case, a photoshopped picture cannot be illegal since it depicts something that never happened. Nevertheless, we still criminalize sexualized sketches of children, cgi images of sexualized children, or even written pornography that talks about sexualized children, and all for the same reason: so police don't have to prove an actual crime occurred in court. Of course it violates the 1st Amendment! Like anyone pays attention to that any more. This is part and parcel with modern "law enforcement". Photocop and red light cameras seldom produce pictures that can identify the driver, so states using them (for revenue) always change the law to hold the registrar of the vehicle responsible for the moving violation, thereby eliminating the need to identify the actual perpetrator, and neatly bypassing the law about one spouse testifying against another, since 90% of the time it's one of the two spouses. It also changes the remaining 10% to a score since either the registrar doesn't know who it was, or is forced to testify against a friend.
Like 24x7 tracking of citizens, no-warrant searches and wiretaps, the fiction that just because email may pass through someone else's computer it cannot have an expectation of privacy, all these are designed to eliminate work for police, so they are free to do what society hires them for - generating revenue. That is what is really meant by "law enforcement".
Cynical? Oh, yes. But I come by it honestly. Yes, I would rather live in anarchy, since as near as I can tell, the only difference between what we have now and anarchy is the fact that one of the biggest lawbreakers is the government and its agents. Anarchy would at least remove that source of crime.
I dont recall the specifics, but wasn't there another case a while back involving whether it was child pornography when it was a drawing of a child (ie completely fabricated)? This would be the closest thing to a precedent I can think of.
Common Sense isn't as Common as people think...
I think you'll find that most people will consider what he did sick and disgusting even if it didn't involve minors at all.
There is no -1 Disagree mod. Slashdot.org/faq defines mod options. USE IT.
> He's making assumptions he can't support
There's no proof of the mathematical ability either.
People who think they are good at math aren't necessarily actually good.
And people who know they aren't good at math, and thus say they aren't good might still see the world rather differently from the people who score 500 in the SAT Math.
I believe 500 is considered an average score despite SAT not involving calculus, statistics, probability etc. So someone who scores 800 in SAT might be well aware that he's crap at calculus and the other areas of mathematics.
When the average is abysmal, "way above average" might not be "good", but still see the world rather differently.
All this harm occurs if the photos get out. That seems like an argument for NOT prosecuting this case....
Albeit, statistics can always be skewed to tell a story. If I have a database of US Presidents, and their birth dates, and their places of birth, I believe you could statistically say that the best Presidents that the US has ever had have come from Illinois (despite the fact that this occurred before the US was fully annexed.) Further more, you could argue that better leaders are born in April (fictionalization) because it's a coincidence what month they were born in.
When I was in college, a lady from the Wall Street Journal came to my statistics class telling us that the average Per Capita Income of subscribers was $200,000 annually. This is not a cause -> effect relationship. Chances are better than a) some of the richest people in the world read this paper and b) the upper middle class are dragging down the average cuz they want to be rich also. It does not however imply that one would be richer for buying WJS.
I am surprised that nobody has given mention to Aristotle's Rhetoric where it is described in great detail the invaluable skill of utilizing the feelings (ethos / ethics) of the words that surround raw logic (logos / logic) and collectively provide a persuasive argument (pathos / pathology). It is our human nature that gives us greatness for being able to decorate words into so much more than they are, with simple things like CAPITALization, overly obfuscated alliterated onomatopoeia of oration, and rhymes so nice they splice the skies of sun and set.
It seems easy to see that people far more easily acquiesce to the involvement of their emotions than to their hair splitting logic. How else would myspace and facebook make so much money? Drama feels gooooood!
People who are 'good at math' are more likely to analyze the law exactly as written and determine logically whether or not he actually violated the law as written.
People who are good at math aren't writing the laws, it's people who are good at bullshitting via words.
Regardless of the rules, a jury has the power to judge both the facts and the law. So you can judge the "rules" you were given as surely as you can judge the violation of the law.
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"It is not only [the trial juror's] right, but his duty to find the verdict according to his own best understanding, judgment and conscience, though in direct opposition to the direction of the court." -- John Adams, 1771
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"The jury has the right to judge both the law as well as the fact in controversy." -- John Jay, First Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, 1789
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"The law itself is on trial quite as much as the cause which is to be decided." Twelfth U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice, Harlan F. Stone, 1941
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There's a huge potential for misuse, but if presented with a case where a defendant is clearly guilty of an unjust law, you have a civic duty to consider a not guilty vote regardless of the law; jury trials exist precisely as a defense against unjust laws and unjust application of laws.
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"I consider trial by jury as the only anchor ever yet imagined by man, by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution." -- Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to Thomas Paine, 1789
Teaching of formal logic is extremely rare these days. Typically only college level math, programming, or philosophy students will have course work in formal logic. It could be that there is a correlation between training in how to think rationally, and thinking rationally.
Or maybe the sampling methodology is just soOoo whacked that it all means nothing.
-- QED
As far as I'm aware, a journalist who did this would not be guilty of any crime. The criminal element comes in when you knowingly disclose classified information to an unauthorized party. In such a situation it's likely better for the government to never admit such a combination of facts was ever classified in the first place.
The best part of it is that interpretations of laws like this one are used to try to put people into jail for looking at pictures of people that are of legal age that simply look young, or are dressed and staged in a manner that makes some of the people looking at the material see them as being underage. Law forbid someone in porn actually not spend their first paycheck on gigantic breast implants and maybe wear pigtails and a plaid skirt once in a while.
-PainKilleR-[CE]
Yeah, someone could be requesting gov't archive data about the history of nuclear weapons in the U.S. and by putting together a single article with several bits of unclassified data, he could generate a classified piece of information. But would he be guilty? Not really. He's not under the onus of properly handling secure documents. These rules only apply to those cleared and trained to handle such information. These people have also been informed of the law in respect to classified information and are now under covered by the laws and consequences applying to classified data handling.
As for the document that the reporter put together, if it hasn't been widely disseminated, the gov't could come in and mark it as classified and seek to control it. 'Course, once it's out there, well there's that horse and barn door thing.
Years ago, Jane's Aviation published a series of post cards about interesting satellites. Turns out one of the sats was a classified military one. The few post cards that are still out there are now collectors items but have fun trying to sell it.
Going back to the original issue of Tennessee law, yeah, it'll be interesting to see if lawyers/judges try to push stuff this way. If a state or federal legislature created a law that would cover combining two legal bits of data and rule that it was now illegal, would it be similar to manufacturing drugs, where it's legal to own several different types of chemicals and drugs but when you start combining them, you're now guilty of manufacturing drugs? They'd somehow have to link the base process and the output together. Would be an ugly law to try and draft and can see lots of chances for loopholes and such.
I drank what? -- Socrates
And therein lies the problem. People get away with sick, disgusting, and probably immoral and/or unethical things everyday, simply because they aren't against the law.
Probably because not everything that's "sick, disgusting, and probably immoral and/or unethical" is something that should be illegal. Eating roaches is disgusting, adultery is immoral, lying is unethical, yet all these things are legal and rightfully so.
The purpose of law is to protect people from one another, not to make people moral. If something someone does cannot be shown to conclusively cause harm to the life, liberty of pursuit of happiness of someone else, then it is not something the law should be concerned with.
Your statistics are interesting, and just prove that even highly instructed people can't normally do a good judgement. I'm just the son of a judge and learned one thing or two, and I'm not even English, but reading the text of this law, and applying the principles he taught me, It's very simple to decide. In the face of the written law, the guy is innocent (albeit a pervert).
But I can only condemn a person in court using the law and not my opinions. That's something only a few can distinguish. I just hope that those reading my words can understand that the law is to be read objectively. It's a technical thing not an opinion one. To judge with justice you may not let your opinions and prejudice come by.
By the way, even thinking like a common guy and knowing he is a pervert I have no right to try to force the application of a law to condemn a guy to an exaggerated punishment. That would be no justice, even popular one.
Did you do a multiple-comparison correction on the statistics? You seem to have asked lots of questions, with lots of groups. You need to moderate your conclusions to take this into account. Google 'Bonferroni' and go from there.
People in psychology departments do studies like this all the time - and they do them much more rigorously than you have. I can see that this might make a great science fair project, but I don't really see why it's reached Slashdot. If you're an undergraduate, it's an interesting question, and to some extent I applaud you for approaching it in this way. But you still have a way to go.
...Even though 44% of the 27 people with "excellent" math skills said the man did violate the law, when you look at the 58 people who self-reported "very good" math skills, 74% of them said he violated the law. This would appear to confound my original hypothesis ... But I suspect that many people with ... "very good" math grades were probably just good students who studied hard ... but without necessarily having the insight that makes someone an "excellent" math student. Without that insight, there was no reason to expect them to be better than average at answering a question that has no resemblance to their textbook's practice problems.
Nice jump in logic there. He jumps from assumption to stating there is "no reason" to expect them to be better than average. Also, he is obviously not an expert in math education or math text books, nor is there any reason to assume any of this, except that the groups below excellent disagree with him. And a good math student who studies hard ... isn't very good at math? I don't even know what kind of twisted logic could be used to support that line of thinking!
To translate: self-evaluation worked for those that reported excellent math skills and agreed with the author, but it did not work in the case when people reported very good math skills. It apparently worked well enough for all levels of English ability (by implication).
Not to mention small sample size, numerous other assumptions, and all the reasons you highlighted.
The question you really have to ask is; why is this guy being prosecuted and the magazine (16 i think), that did a nude photo-shoot of her, publisher's, photographer's, etc. not being prosecuted? Sure, the pictures they published were not of her nude, but she was nude when they were taken.
say i have a pound of plutonium. should i be free and clear? or does mere possession of it suggest intent? that is, no one has a valid reason for possession of plutonium, other than malfeasance
likewise, there is no godly reason to be in possession of drawings of naked minors, or photoshopped naked minors, that doesn't suggest some sort of intent. not that pedophilia is anything on the scale of plutonium possession, i'm simply using the analogy to suggest that if you possess item X, that is enough to suggest some sort of intent, since there is no godly reason to have item X that doesn't suggest some sort of malfeasance. say i have kiddie porn, real or fantasy: WHY do i have that? there is no reason you can give me for having that that doesn't imply some sort of mal intent
not that i think drawn/ photoshopped kiddie porn should be illegal. i think it should be legal. in order to track the pedarast fuckers who create/ distribute/ consume that
oh right, i'm the fascist. the victim is of course people who consume kiddie porn, not actually, you know, children. nah, no children have ever been harmed by a pedophile. pfffft
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
good legal codes are based on sound logical reasoning that uses observations only those in possession of high social iq can make
its a combination of social iq and logical reasoning, not one in spite of another
the problem is those who have a pedantic, empty logical reasoning based on low social iq, who go around thinking they are great social philosophers, but who only have ideas which ignorantly or purposefully ignores important undeniable aspects of human nature, ignoring any sort of social intelligence
such people are called utopianists: "if everyone just started acting like no group of human beings has ever behaved in all of human history, then problem X would be solved". and then they go onto build entire "philosophies", like the idiocies of libertarianism and communism (two failed sides of the same coin ignoring essential human altruism and essential human selfishness), that will never work in reality, simply because these "philosophies" only work by ignoring bedrock principles of human nature
any philosophy that ignores obvious components of human nature is either a comedy or tragedy, because so many of these low social iq/high traditional iq types are usually very earnest and shrill about their "philosophies", when the entire house of cards is, frankly, ridiculous. its called building castles in sky: great intricate exercises in logical reasoning, without any foundation whatsoever in reality, and therefore completely useless, no matter how much effort or passion was involved in the construction
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Most people just look at the first question, which is "Is what he did sick and disgusting, and probably immoral and/or unethical?" To which the answer of course, is an obvious 'yes'.
But is it immoral? He pasted a few faces in photoshop, I can't think of a more harmless activity. It's called art and it's protected by the first amendment so that have sloppy thinkers like forbidding every harmless thing that they don't enjoy.
Math Nerds like to wank to Miley more than English Nerds. Non-nerds just like to wank.
Literal "was the law broken" subjective interpretation: "did the man do something wrong" I'm wondering if "smarter" people were more likely to answer the question, than to respond to the negative feelings the whole thing gives rise to.
If it didn't involve minors, what he did is look at pictures of attractive naked women. That's your standard for "sick and disgusting"? And you think "most people" agree?
I've heard it suggested that there are heterosexual men who claim they don't look at such pictures, but so far it has not occured to me to believe them.
Who the heck decided that <i> for "italics" and <b> for "bold" was too complicated, and needed to be simplified to <em> and <strong>, respectively?
People who read on non-graphical user agents, such as a web browser designed for a character-cell terminal or a speech terminal or a Braille terminal. Such terminals don't use italic or bold text to represent emphasis; instead, they might use different coloring, different tone of voice, etc.
ObTopic: Non-graphical terminals bring me to another issue. If I search and replace a pornographic text with the name of an underage celebrity, have I created simulated child porn?
Given the information regarding his statistics (TFA aside), I have to wonder if the results are skewed as a result of intelligence level. Perhaps math and language skills are simply a trait he happened to notice while both are contributing factors to an individuals intelligence and logical thinking skills.
I would be very curious to see how tested IQ levels affected the answers given as well and if it is comparable. It might indicate that logical thinking plays a key role in how people perceive infractions of the law.
Do you not have excellent math skills or something?
To live in such a "free" country when a juvenile prank can engender such draconian consequences!
He'll be lucky if they (the self righteous tub-thumping mob) don't utterly destroy him and any life/future he might hope for.
I killed da wabbit -Elmer Fudd
I'm curious to know if it's a felony to make your wife wear a Miley Cyrus halloween mask during sex.
Put enough legal black dots onto a legal white page, and you can create something illegal. Similarly, knives and human bodies are not illegal, but putting one in the other may be illegal.
This seems like the most elaborate slashertisement (for http://www.mturk.com/ ) ever posted.
Inquiring minds want to know.
Populus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur...
"Force shits upon Reason's back." - Poor Richard's Almanac
Think of your two candidates as the Goat from Adam Sandler's talking goat skit, and the stupid old man who beats him.
The goat clearly understands the concept of superimposing images on top of one another.
The old man is dumb shit who just accepts that it is something he doesn't understand (math, photoshop, superimposed images) and goes on about his business.
"Saying that theoretical ethics is pointless is like saying theoretical physics is pointless."
theoretical physics isn't science fiction. science fiction would be better analogy to what i was refuting. there are people out there who advocate for social systems that are the equivalent to believing in fire breathing dragons and ewoks: articulating a social system that depends upon human behavior that doesn't exist
theoretical physics does not try to defy established physics canon, it teases out hidden potential meaning in edge conditions. it doesn't go out and say gravity doesn't exist or that light is only a particle and not a wave. but some of the social systems people advocate for are based on a similar goofy ignorance of basic human nature. you don't have anything you can remotely call theoretical ethics if you ignore pretty basic aspects of human behavior. theoretical ethics is about things like: what is the legal status of adult human clones? what kind of rights should a sentient robot have?
i'm not talking about that, i'm talking about social systems that are nonstarters, such as: why don't we have a civil society without any police? or: let's remove all private ownership and have everyone live in communal agrarian economic equivalency. this is not theoretical, it's delusional
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
If I put Miley's face on a goat, can I be charged for bestiality as well?
"Is what he did sick and disgusting, and probably immoral and/or unethical?" To which the answer of course, is an obvious 'yes'.
It's an obviously doctored image; it can't possibly be any of those things.
Which part is offensive, the nude woman or the kid? That two innocuous things juxtaposed offends is interesting.
Perhaps those with a math background answer as I do because they also have learned to think correctly.
They're like the Sith!
Are people who think they are good at math better or worse at math on average than people who don't think they are good at math?
The naive think they know it all, whilst those who have an idea what they are talking about may underestimate their own abilities.
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Thanks for sharing your occupation, but more importantly, do you find the man innocent or guilty?
There are a lot of posts talking about how flawed this survey is.
They are all at least partly correct.
In pointing this out they all miss the point completely. This is an interesting survey, and it came up with an interesting result.
No- you shouldn't just believe it. Its merely a first pointer at an idea which is interesting enough to merit further research conducted more rigorously. Hopefully some researcher more qualified than this person will be intrigued and look into the question more thoroughly.
Despite being a bad survey, this, to the best of my knowledge, is the best survey and analysis regarding this topic available. There may be others, and I'd love to have them pointed out. Until there is better evidence, it may be worthwhile to keep this in mind as an interesting statistical correlation, form hypothesis about why the correlation might exist, and consider possible impacts of various hypothesis in the real world.
As pointed out, several times in this post and elsewhere, you should be on the look out for better research. You should guard against making this a part of your world view.
So, in summary its interesting. Keep it in mind. Maybe someone should take a closer look at the question. Not the study, the actual question.
Don't post innacurate information
If you do, I swear by my pretty floral bonnet I will end you.
What I find funny about it is, that if he used a photoshop'ed Miley for sexual gratification it is illegal, but if he used a real picture of Miley at the Beach, in a Bikini, readily available in any gossip magazine, it would not be illegal...
i consider my mathematical skills to be excellent (regardless of what they really are), and I always feel the need to exert more effort than usual when it comes to justifying the non-popular opinion. And when it does seem like it logically makes sense (as you have proven in your presentation of the facts), then why should I object?
On the other hand, an english thinker will always keep their emotional thoughts at the forefront, in order to judge what they are reading their way. Rather than finding flaws in the argument against what is written, they choose to present their own arguments.
You are trying to profile, but it is quite shallow and meaningless.
Why? Because man made laws are the most laughable thing on this planet. And the sad thing is, you are not even discussing that! You waste your time on the opinion of a man on a particular issue in this ridiculous excuse for a law.
Obviously mathematicians are perverts ;)
Privacy is terrorism.
That kind of reasoning might be good enough to get you into the police academy, and it might be good enough as a legal theory to arrest someone, but that doesn't make the theory correct, nor will it automatically win a conviction. Incidentally, the term of art is “probable cause,” and all it means is that some material or behavior created a reasonable level of suspicion in a cop's mind that a crime had been committed. Sometimes the cops find nothing, which is embarrassing — and don't think that a cop won't take that embarrassment out on the suspect. Sometimes they find what they think is something, and then it turns out at trial that they had nothing.
I don't fully disagree, but it seems likely that the math guys took a different approach than everybody else: They followed the actual rule laid out. Laws have been written in a language of its own forever and the general perception is that it isn't understandable by someone who hasn't devoted his life to it. Secondly, people tend to make their lifes easier by jumping to conclusions. Since protecting children is really popular, it's quite easy to imagine that people jump to the conclusion that this case is more likely to be illegal than legal. That doesn't say anything about their potential intelligence. It might indicated they're scared to actually try to understand the rules. Which I don't think is far fetched. Math on the other hand enforces a mind set of rule following (that's not necessarily good). In short - I find it more likely that this statistic tells us more about how people percive law - not that much about intelligence. Then, there's also the question of what you should answer - I wouldn't be surprised about someone answering "it's most illegal" just in case someone gets back to them with "pedophile" if they don't.
If you actually interpret that law literally, about the only illegal thing to buy under it would be a box with a 10-year old in it having sex. A picture of a minor having sex, after all, does not "include" the real minor.
Laws are written in natural language for a reason.
Does Star Wars include a farm-boy engaged in light-saber duels? From your interpretation, "no", because Luke wasn't an actual farm-boy.
Suppose I write a historical fiction in which Hitler wins the war and engages in a victory parade in Trafalgar Square. Does this book include a dictator engaging in a victory parading in Trafalgar Square? From your interpretation, "no", because it isn't an actual Hitler actually engaged in a victory parade.
When we say a piece of literature or art includes "X engaged in Y", it never means that the actual X is engaged in an actual Y. It only ever means that the depicted X is depicted as engaged in Y.
If she killed someone, she would be tried as an adult. If she sued for emancipation, she would no doubt succeed. In short, she is so thoroughly unlike a "small child" in every way that describing her as such is patently offensive to anyone with the slightest degree of intelligence.
Since when has intelligence had anything to do with the law? I think you're thinking of "justice".
But seriously, didn't some nutball prosecutor try to get a girl tried as an adult for creating kiddie porn... for 'sexting' naked pictures of herself? Follow the logic there:
1) An underage person can be deemed mature and intelligent enough to understand the ramifications of doing something, and be punished as though they were an adult.
2) Child pornography laws are (ideally) meant to protect a person who isn't mature and intelligent enough to understand the ramifications of doing something and thus provide consent.
Someone, somewhere, is trying to set a precedent that the mature #1 and the immature #2 CAN BE THE SAME PERSON AT THE EXACT SAME TIME.
I'm sorry, but as far as any sex crime or kid-related laws go, we left logic and reason and intelligence behind a long time ago.
You're absolutely right. Good catch, thanks. In my defense though, (a) even my statistics professors would often mis-state this too (and I'd correct them if I caught it -- that's karma for you); and (b) I don't think it detracts from the main point of the story.
What I concluded from your statistical analysis is that internet users being paid 25 cents, via a site relatively unknown to the public, and who rate themselves as excellent at math, choose the "correct" answer more often than those who do not rate themselves as excellent. That does not sound like the same conclusion you drew but I truly appreciate the hypothesis you are testing even if the survey wasn't perfect.
To get a "purer" sample you would need to employ multiple survey mediums (self-completion written survey, computer survey, telephone survey, in-person verbal survey, etc.) and probably visit several locations.
Gathering statistics for surveys always feels like a losing battle to me. The quickest way to make someone's work irrelevant is to choose a few details in the surveying methodology and run them through the ringer.
The guy's a landlord. One of his tenants has a 10 year old daughter.
It was unclear how he got the photos (he may not be saying), but he had many photos of his tenant's 10-year old daughter, including photos of her panties on her bed (or a bed). The 10 year old girl's father (the guy's tenant) turned him in when he discovered that he had photos of her.
So there you have it -- there's the situation. Your landlord has quite a few (perhaps near one dozen) photos of your 10 year old daughter, including pictures of her panties on a bed, and then he's taking them and cutting them up and doing this stuff with it.
Obviously, they're trying to find something to charge him with. It's certainly a creepy situation, and abstracting it out of what really happened isn't going to really get at the gist of the situation.
So the full question is "is it legal for my landlord to take pictures of my 10 year old daughter, her panties, and the photoshop them onto naked bodies of women and leave them lying about the house for his pothead friends to see?"
Law evolves, and this is certainly a creepy situation, if you asked me. You want to do something to that guy, it creeps you out. Could a law preventing this be used in a way that pushes a religious or political agenda and affects individuals' liberties and freedoms? Perhaps it might. Does an individual like this represent an obstacle to that father's and his family's pursuit of happiness and ability to live peacefully in that living arrangement? It sure does.
This is not all black and white through and through. It's a little more complicated than that.
Seems to me that the Mechanical Turk system pre-selects those sharp enough to be in a position to use a computer with internet access. It's not truly random. This tilts the responses in a particular direction. I'm not sure what it means, but to get back to any sort of generalized result, you'd have to now come up with a way to gauge these responders versus the general population, wouldn't you?
Acts 17:28, "For in Him we live, and move, and have our being."
In the words of Mark Twain There are 3 types of lies: "Lies, damned lies, and statistics". A badly flawed study is worse than no study because it will often suggest something that has no basis in truth. I could go ask 20 of my friends their opinions, and then slashdot my thoughts about the results, but that doesn't make it news worthy. The difficulty with the author of the study is that he has a badly flawed study that he is putting in front of a whole bunch of people as truth. I honestly think he could have gotten any results, and turned and twisted them in his statistical calculator until he found a way to make them say what he wanted them to say. If he wants to post the question to slashdot, let him do so, but if he considers himself a scientist of any caliber, he should not publish a study of this quality anywhere except on his mother's fridge.
What if she was your daughter?!?!?
ehh i would argue that not really borderline crossing the law .. not in taste by any measure and is more a matter
its not breaking the law as written - period
now this is not to say what he did is
of a social moral majority question than that of law.
cause eventually will dictate if law or set precedent that putting another persons face on another will be illegal and
honestly its just ridiculous to have such laws..
is what he did right .. mostly likely not . was it illegal .. no...
im sure there are a thousand tangents but we're not legal experts here so
until we're more educated in the system our thoughts have little merit than
casual opinion
clouds are made of cotton candy
don't laugh at me! i'm a theoretical physicist!
seriously: if it's obviously woefully ignorant of basic facts, it's deluded, and not theoretical. i'm not asking you to be rigorously rigid, i'm asking you to call a duck a duck: if its more fantasy than creative extrapolation, then be intellectually honest please. there are plenty of cases in science where what was once controversial fringe is now solid canon. but for every one of those cases, there a million more ideas which were put forth seriously and are obviously feeble idiocy
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
"It is unlawful for any person to knowingly possess material that includes a minor engaged in simulated sexual activity that is patently offensive."
This statute can be broken into four parts (I'll just assume he is a person and let that go), all of which must be true:
If any of the elements are not met, the law is not broken. We can tick off the first element as true, because he made the pics. The second one is questionable because the pics only partially depict a minor -- perhaps what they actually depict is an adult with a young face. I'll let this go for the prosecutor here though, because this argument is also a bit on the subjective side -- it could be worth revisiting however. We might as well table any discussion about the fourth element because as you mention, that is wholly subjective.
Focusing on the third element, however, it is pretty clear that certain types of pictures would not violate this law. For example, any picture that fails to show "simulated sexual activity". Now, nudity is not a requirement for sex. People often do have sex with clothes on. Secondly, nudity in and of itself, is not an example of sexual activity, it is nothing more than the absence of clothing. If nudity is the same as sex, then what are we to do with anatomically correct models of underage human body that professors of biology or doctors possess? While sexual activity is often accompanied by nudity, it is almost just as often accompanied by clothing.
Because the facts of this case (assuming the pics were just nudes) fail on at least one element of the law, and all elements must be met for a crime to exist, the defendant is not guilty of anything.
Fortunately, this can be decided without looking at whether the pictures are patently offensive.
ps: I'd consider my math skill to be slightly above the average, which of course on an objective scale, means rather poor.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
A question I would _really_ have liked to have seen asked of that sample for cross-correlation is: "Is abortion murder because it destroys a destiny?" My guess is that the correlation would be high because such people would consider a "destiny" as "real" as "thought crime". "Reification" in a one dollar word. There are other examples that could be explored.
But your Honor !!! Pseudoephedrine is not illegal. Ammonia is not illegal. All these other chemicals the police confiscated are legal too! All did was was combine them! I should be set free immediately! If you don't believe me,just ask any mathematician!
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
People who are 'good at math' are more likely to analyze the law exactly as written and determine logically whether or not he actually violated the law as written. People who are good at math are far more likely to see answers as absolute - either it's absolutely correct or absolutely incorrect.
Most people just look at the first question, which is "Is what he did sick and disgusting, and probably immoral and/or unethical?" To which the answer of course, is an obvious 'yes'.
Why is that the first question? Since when is that the sort of question put before courts? What if this question was asked to a jury from a town comprised disproportionately of various sex offenders, who might answer that this is not sick and disgusting, but rather "totally hot"? Would that make it all right?
Math people ignore that, because that's not really relevant when it comes to law. The real question is "Did he violate the law as written?" And the answer to that in this case is a pretty clear 'no'.
It is, I think, missing the point to paint this as a distinction between the letter of the law and what's gross. The fact is that the DA's allegation not only isn't consistent with the letter of the law, it is inconsistent with its intent as well, which is to protect minors. Minors engaged in sexual activity, simulated or otherwise, are given special protection because community standards dictate that informed consent only exists above a certain age. Therefore, behaviors which are acceptable above a certain age, between consenting adults, are unacceptable below that same age. It is recognized as arbitrary, but necessary, as courts would be unable to examine the specifics of every case to determine whether informed consent existed.
Miley Cyrus, in this case, needs no such protection. She was not involved. Only an image of her, an incomplete one, was involved, and the "simulated sex" involved existed only in the mind of the perpetrator and nowhere else-- not in her own image, not in the use of her image in a collage with another image. If this man is guilty of violating this law then so am I, since I just read about what he did and also thought about what he had done-- which was imagine a minor in a sexual situation. Unless the DA is saying the crime is masturbation, in which case I wonder how they are going to substantiate that. Tissue samples?
The question here is not merely whether he violated the law as written, which he clearly did not. The further question is whether he has violated the spirit and intent of that law, and he has not done that either has he has in no way victimized a minor.
You'd have a better chance of trying to imply that all mass media images of celebrities are distributed with a shrinkwrap license, and by jerking off to it, he violated the license.
Aren't you invading his privacy a bit too much? Even though I admit that I'd be tempted to do the same (especially because the work in itself must be pretty boring), it's not like we don't read news about privacy problems around the world every other day and should know better, right?
I was unable to reword this so that it doesn't sound like I'm flaming you, but it's actually just an honest question.
Adultery is illegal here in South Korea. Ok So-ri was given an eight-month suspended sentence for it. Saying something bad about the royal family in Thailand is illegal, even if what you say is true or false but written about fictional characters in fiction.
My point? The law is the law. What it defines as illegal is, by definition, illegal. How that law is interpreted also changes over time and depends on the people determining guilt.
It sucks, and I wish that your "life, liberty of pursuit of happiness" mandate would actually work -- life, liberty, and happiness are difficult to define, after all.
Put identity in the browser.
You bring up a good point. Since animation has been brought into the pedophile arena, what happens to teen coming-of-age films? Is it now illegal to show actors (who are over 18) as high-school kids learning about sex?
There's far too much shit wrong in the real world to be heading down the "perceived impropriety" road.
Put identity in the browser.
Come off it. Miley Cyrus is sixteen years old - above the age of consent in almost all developed countries. Being attracted to sixtreen year old girls isn't sick, it isn't perverted, it's entirely normal.
So, if you Photoshop the face of an underage person onto the body of an adult porn actor/actress that's child porn? Sounds like a plan! :
1. Write a script that detects faces in porn pictures and replace them with the faces of underage people/celebrities
2. Sell it to paedophiles as child porn
3. Profit!
4. ???
5. Get pounded in the ass in a federal prison
Also, does it make it bestiality if you Photoshop the head of an animal instead, or necrophilia if you use the face of someone dead on the picture? What if you Photoshop the face of underage people onto the heads of two animals fornicating? Paedobestiality?
You just got troll'd!
This is not intended to be flip, or a joke, but wouldn't a ruleing like this mean that all photos of children, would be labelled as pornographic, due to the potential for them to be used in a simulated sexual image? I'm not expert, and I'm kinda glad I'm somewhat naieve in this, but surely child pornography is all about the child's body, in it's totality, and not about having it's face superimposed onto that of an adult. If someone's fetish revolves about the faces of children then surely no photo can be ruled out as a source of pornographic material?
If I photoshop GWBs head onto a wanking bonobo, I'm guilty of homo-erotic bestiality ?
BTW I suck at maths.
The problem is that, unlike mathematics, the law is not applied independent of anything else- especially not in cases where it is patently absurd to do so.
I don't think the law has a problem with the patently absurd, if it appeal to the person(s) judging the law. Take the 10th amendment. It's absurd to say that it means nothing, but it that is how it is interpreted. How about "breaking and entering" for opening an unlocked door? Why go to the trouble of fixing the law to include what you want, when the judge can just make new law from the bench?
Those are my principles. If you don't like them I have others. -Groucho Marx
I also asked respondents to rate their math skills which is NOT a good indicator of good math skills. Better to ask "what kinds of grades did you get in math?", but better would have been to incorporate some math questions into the survey.
It doesn't matter if these people are actually good at math or not. They think they are. So, people who think they are good in math also tend to have similar opinions about the legality of this case.
Why would someone think he is good at a specific activity? Either because he is actually good at it, or because it is something he enjoys doing. (Rarely will someone who despises math claim to be good at it.) So the type of person who is genetically predisposed to enjoying math (or other logical reason) is also the type who'll have a certain opinion about this case. The author's results are still valid.
Um, what part of it do you find is inadequate?
The part where you make the cleverly worded but completely lacking in substance statement of (and I'll quote it again for you):
Mathematicians, through mathematics, have essentially created an entirely arbitrary system of explaining reality
I don't think your reply constitutes a corroboration of how mathematicians created this "entirely arbitrary system."
I would expect your evidence to show how human physiology guides them toward base 10 computations, and then include how choosing base 10 is completely arbitrary. I would also expect your evidence to show how basic arithmetic is arbitrary, such as counting by 1's, the significance of 0 and 1, etc.
If you can't do that, it seems like you're trolling.
"Be prepared, son. That's my motto. Be prepared." --Joe Hallenbeck
Unfortunately, people who are good with Math are also good at getting out of Jury Duty.
There is a common error made in statistics to take the statistical significance of results like this at face value, without regard to how carefully you have chosen the selection criteria.
How many ways could Bennet have chosen an elite sample? He chose those who scored themselves as Excelent, or 5 on a 5 point scale. He could have chosen 4 or above, 3 or above, in math. He could even have looked for significance in how those with poor math skills tended to call this a crime. He also mentions the more mild correlation with those self-scoring English/composition skills as 5/5. Of all the different ways he could have sliced up the sample, which ways would we have considered interesting? What about all the folks who scored 1s OR 5s, the extremists?
I don't know how many variations Bennet tried before deciding on those who scored 5/5 in math as being the noteworthy population. But I can easily think of about 10 different variations that would seem potentially interesting or worthy of interpretation.
If you slice up data in 10 different ways, you would expect that even if they are all random results with no inherent correlation to anything surveyed, you'll find a 90% significant result I guess about half the time. I'm not being really precise here, but the point is that to a rough approximation, you should multiply 1% (1-99%) by about 10, the number of reasonable ways to choose his sample. That's closer to the real chance that his result was a random fluke. Now 10% is still low, but at this point I would make a weaker claim that this study is not by itself conclusive, but suggests a promising direction in which a larger and more careful study might find an insightful result.
I think Richard Feynman, at the beginning of one of his famous lectures, told the audience the license plate number of the car parked in front of him in the parking lot. He said something along the lines of "What are the chances of that?! The one car with that exact license plate number just happened to be parked there, in front of me!" The point is that this would have been surprising if he had chosen or written down the number before he looked at the other car, but there is a 100% chance that whatever license plate he spotted would have something on it. If Bennet had chosen his 5/5 in math qualification before looking at the data, then the significance would have been correctly computed. But he would more likely have chosen a different criteria which would not have shown as high a correlation.
A similar story was posted on Slashdot, running in the Washington Post I think, about a 99.5% likelihood that the Iranian election results were tampered with. This suffered even worse from this error, with highly arbitrary criteria such as finding a 5 or a 2 in the last two digits of election results. In that case the criteria was chosen from such a large variety of possibilities, I was surprised the "significance" was as low as it was! and to then run an article claiming election fraud (an issue about which people are violently concerned) in the Washington Post based on such erroneous statistics is just tragic.
Not really. They're slightly less evil.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
How much time did each mechanical turk user spend on the survey? For 25 cents, I don't think you're going to get an especially large chunk of their time. I think that you're evaluating their snap judgments, rather than their actual judgment.
To the English major- "<words>Tennessee<words>child porn<wordswordswords>illegal?"
To the Math major- "Logic problem with 2-3 qualifiers and some bolded text: intuitive, or counter-intuitive answer?"
It's amazing how far the author will go to make viewing fake kiddie porn seem ok. And then to link together other like-minded perverts by saying that it's because they're "good at math". What a perv.
Mathematics is entirely arbitrary because it a) cannot be proven to be true, and b) is a set of rules that is, to a great extent, divorced from the actual reality that it seeks to examine.
a) should be tautologically obvious, of course.
b) is easy to explain when you look at, for example, calculus. The process of differentiation is impossible to conduct logically because it relies on a logically incoherent statement: a derivative is the slope of the line at any instantaneous point. Given that a slope is change between two points, this is obviously rubbish; you cannot have the slope of a single point, as there is no change.
"It is possible to commit no errors and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life." -Peak Performance
I don't think you know what the word arbitrary means. I tried to point you in the right direction to have a meaningful discussion, but one of us failed.
If you agree that our modern math has it's roots in base 10, you must also agree that it is not arbitrary. Regardless of your correctness on derivatives. We didn't get to set theory by randomly doing anything. It all started by naming our 10 fingers....
"Be prepared, son. That's my motto. Be prepared." --Joe Hallenbeck
I find this study to be wildly stupid.
The author merely asks the survey participates to rate their mathematical abilities without actually testing them.
I wonder about the correlation (probably negative) between people who rate their math skills highly and people who actually can do math.
This study should be titled "Correlation between people who have high self esteem and who thinks that this child pornography prosecution is stupid."
I know what you're trying to get at here, but it appears that you don't understand what prima facie means. It is true, take two things that are not illegal, no matter what two things you choose, and prima facie, they are not illegal. All the ingredients of crystal meth are legal and combining those ingredients is prima facie legal. It's not until you take a second look and find that crystal meth is illegal that you see that the combination is therefore illegal.
Stop Global Warming!
Just say no to irreversible processes!
Besides, she isn't a child. She's above the age of consent in all civilised jurisdictions.