The Mathletes and the Miley Photoshop

Frequent Slashdot contributor Bennett Haselton's essay this week is about "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." Continue on to see how.

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:

1. About two-thirds of all respondents (85 out of 127) said that the man did violate the law.
2. 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.
3. 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.

Comments

This just in:

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Rationality is still atypical, and still associated with mathematical ability...

Re:This just in:

[V!NCENT]

I think it's more about that people who are good at math, are inteligent.

Re:This just in:

[AGMW]

How about the possibility that highly educated people from whatever field, be it mathematics, English, chemistry, or whatever, are less likely to simply see the question as "save the children from the paedos" and vote to hang the guy.

They rationally look at the question and examine the facts, such as they are, to arrive at a conclusion. Some find for and some find against and the fact that some find the (alleged) perp not guilty isn't just because they can add up and/or spell, and it's actually not relevant which way they vote - the interesting thing is that they considered the evidence before voting whichever way they thought was the right way rather than following the herd!

Re:This just in:

[V!NCENT]

I've never said that I was intelligent and I am not a native English speaker and I do not live in an English speaking country. But I am sure that you are as fluent in a language that's not native to you, as I am in English.

Re:This just in:

[moderatorrater]

Rationality is still atypical, and still associated with mathematical ability...

FTA:

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.

Finally:

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.

Bennett, in his usual way, has made so many leaps of logic without enough support that it's astounding. He's making assumptions he can't support (such as above, or assuming that those using mechanical turk are a valid sample), and it's kind of sad. He's making the assumption the a minor's head pasted on the body of an adult constitutes a simulated minor, which may or may not be legally true. Here's the cogent argument: Miley Cyrus is a minor, her actual picture is being used to simulate her in a sexual position. By using her actual head, it's entirely possible that it fit the legal definition. What's more, in matters of legal opinion, the DA is more likely to know the law than some guy who goes off on Slashdot about it.

Seems to me that if we were really rational about this, we'd defer to the experts rather than read essays by people of middling intelligence and logic with no serious legal background and serious holes in his logic.

Re:This just in:

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Oh, DAs definitely care about applying the law. Good and hard, to unpopular perps, by preference. That upcoming campaign isn't going to win itself, is it?

Re:This just in:

[jhfry]

Actually, I must defend the author and say that his conclusion is not an "opinion". The law's intent was to protect children from exploitation and provide a means to prosecute those who participate in an industry that, by its very nature, exploits children. The use of a publicly available photo of a minor, which was taken with no exploitation of said minor is certainly not a crime. To convict this individual would infer that in some way Miley Cyrus was exploited, or that the possession of this image has somehow caused harm to a child.

Of course, quite often a law's intent is sidelined in favor of political or social gains, but I too can not think of a logical argument that would make the possession of such an image a violation of the law's intent. Of course this is assuming that a valid argument MUST conform to the intent of the law, which is rarely done.

The closest I can come is that the photo MAY serve to desensitize those who are attracted by pedophilia, therefore indirectly harming all children... but similar arguments have been repeatedly dismissed by courts as it is impossible to show causation. Sure a pedophile who assaults a child may posses this photo, but there is no way to say that this photo contributed to the assault.

So I agree with the author's assertion... however I agree with you that he should recognize that he weakens his arguments and the value of his data by assuming that the reader will agree with his assertion. An impartial presentation of survey results and a fair analysis and conclusion is far more likely to build consensus.

Re:This just in:

[CastrTroy]

Funny, my experience with math was the exact opposite. I did great in Algebra, while I did poorly in Calculus. My algebra courses could all be done without a calculator, and actually required you to think and apply principles to solve problems. Calculus was a lot more memorization, d/dx sin(x) = cos(x), and countless other formulas you had to remember to find derivatives and integrals. Maybe it's just a matter of having bad teachers in one subject or the other. Or the fact that both of them contains elements that are both repetitive memorization, and creative problem solving, and the some teachers tend to focus on one or the other.

Re:This just in:

[GargamelSpaceman]

And poor is just about everyone when it comes to the law. A public defender is not going to take your case to the supreme court.

Oh purleeeease

[Rogerborg]

At this point I'm going to give in to my bias and hereinafter refer to that as the "right answer"

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.

Re:Oh purleeeease

[Ronin X]

I did not miss that. That is NOT the exact opposite. He said a consensus of EXPERTS in LAW would be necessary to make one lawyer's opinion more important than anothers. Then he provides a consensus of 15 self-expressed math experts? So math expert = lawyer?

Fail.

To make the argument even MORE embarrassing, given his own data, one could easily assert:

"Depending on how you look at it, you may think that this opinion from Assistant District Attorney Dave Denny , vindicates the opinion of the English aficionados who voted that the defendant did violate the law. I think it's the other way around -- the fact that this answer was correlated in the survey responses with English ability, vindicates the opinion of Mr. Denny."

How did you phrase the mechanical turk question?

[OgreChow]

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.

Tough one

[RazorSharp]

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.

Re:Tough one

[TheRealMindChild]

There certainly is a conflict. Absolutely we should have the freedom to do what we want behind closed doors, so long as no one is harmed. This should hold true, no matter how twisted it is. However, if you were to see your child as the face on whoever's imposed porn, even absolute truths can become blurred.

Re:Tough one

[TheRealMindChild]

FYI, stopping child molesters from having home made porn isn't going to stop them from being a child molester.

Re:Tough one

[QCompson]

And as for psychological damages to the victim? Or social damages? Should slander be okay? What about parodies? Misrepresentation of other people's opinions either through intent or mistake?

Good points. All art and social commentary should be made illegal! It's the only way to save everyone from potential embarassment or psychological damage.

Another issue with this type of material is an argument you could give for copyright; the benefit of society. If we allow these pictures to propagate are we fostering child molestors or children who are susceptible to grooming?

Which is why violent movies, tv and books should also be banned. Aren't they just propagating violence?

I think there's more here than just a 'victimless crime' and that, due to its potency, slow and cautionary steps should be made in producing ideological priorities.

It certainly wasn't victimless. Who knows what harm may have befallen society if this creep had been allowed to keep his photoshopped Miley Cyrus picture in the privacy of his own home!

Re:Tough one

[Anonymous Coward]

How do you know that? Are you telling me that sexual attraction to children has been proven to be a genetic disposition, rather than one that can be conditioned through exposure?
But, you have a point as well, what are the chances that people already in this kind of disposition wouldn't be more likely to commit child molestation crimes if they did not have access to this kind of material?
I understand that "For the Children" arguments are taboo here, however, if we are going to philosophize about child related issues then I think the focus should be more on the effect on the child; as opposed to the effect on freedom.

Re:Tough one

[Artifakt]

The counter argument is that the photoshopped (or in this case literally cut and pasted) image does harm real children, just not necessarily the same level of harm as forcing one to actually participate in a sex act. There were two children whose heads were used, and while Miley is famous, the other one was 'just some kid'.

      If those photos get out, both of them face some possible harm to reputations, but in particular, there is probably less chance that the 'just some kid' will have any help from society if, a year from now, somebody prints of a bunch of copies and pastes them up all over her school with no explanation, or some nutcase sees them on the Internet, recognizes her, and is delusional enough to think she really did whatever her head was spliced into and starts stalking her. Damaging someone's reputation or recklessly endangering them are still harms. The real law has to look at how likely such risks are before they dismiss the idea that harm occurred.

        If you want to argue that the chances are very low in this case, or that the overall damage done to the children is a lot less than forcible participation in making such photos would normally be, you may well be right, but look at the law on reckless endangerment. One person can leave a car parked on the top of a hill in neutral and no handbrake set, pointed right at a schoolyard. Another person can forget to lock the gate on his backyard swimming pool and go on vacation. One feels much more significant than the other, but the law in most places counts both as reckless.

        In this case, it could well get into a debate about just how obviously the images are composites, and the accused may be better off if his skill level is low. Whether any of these images have 'leaked' by some action of the accused will also likely matter. It's pretty soon to be sure they haven't been posted to Usenet or something, after all.

      Before you argue that this is still a protected right, please consider this. If the accused in this case had swapped the children's heads onto clothed adult bodies doing nothing particularly sexual, and then swapped those images into ads for cigarettes, and those images had actually been used, he could have been prosecuted on any of several counts. The law could have easily construed that using a child's face in advertising cigarettes was targeting the ads at minors, there would be the problems with model releases, in Miley's case at least it would have been fraud to represent her as supporting a product and trying to cash in on her name that way, and there are probably other laws that apply.

      If there's problems in such laws, remember those laws are not Obscenity Law, they relate to other aspects of normally protected speech that have nothing to do with sex and/or minors. Those laws get applied all the time to recognized political, religious or commercial speech, and come up in libel, slander, and fraud cases. Even if sexually related speech should have all the protections of other speech, sexual aspects shouldn't give such speech more protection than we would give to philosophical, scientific, or political speech. This is why I don't think we really want a rule that no actual sex involving the children means we just assume no other harm should even be considered. Even if doing something with photoshop or old fashioned scissors isn't over the line, we need the law to look at what happens if such images go public and determine where the line really is. For now, the accused seems clearly to have committed at least some elements of several crimes, and at the least, a grand jury needs to determine if there are overall grounds to proceed.

Re:Tough one

[Anonymous Coward]

if we are going to philosophize about child related issues then I think the focus should be more on the effect on the child; as opposed to the effect on freedom.

And this is the big problem with "think of the children!" arguments. They claim that the children should be put before all else, and that anything that could possibly slightly harm them must be stopped at any cost, even if there's no evidence of such a correlation, even if there's evidence against such a correlation. This isn't just a "child-related issue". You cannot take away freedoms from society as a whole for the benefit of some subset of it and then claim that any effects of doing so are irrelevant to the discussion.

Re:Tough one

[1u3hr]

The counter argument is that the photoshopped (or in this case literally cut and pasted) image does harm real children

In reality: the guy made the pictures on his own PC for his own amusement. He didn't show them to the kids. How on earth could real children have been harmed by his imaginings?

if, a year from now, somebody prints of a bunch of copies and pastes them up all over her school

In that case, it's clearly the guy who printed and pasted them who is the guilty party. same as if he graffitied her name and phone number "for a good time".

And really, any idiot can paste a head onto a porn body in 10 minutes. I'm sure schoolboys all over the planet are doing so at his moment with portraits of their classmates. I've seen this used as a story device in sitcoms, years ago ("Boston Public", I think).

Just Google "Celebrity fakes" and find thousands of sites devoted to this (though not using children, the methods are obviously the same). And here's a how-to to get you started.

Re:Tough one

[Anonymous Coward]

You're right, I didn't have enough forethought when I said that children should be prioritized over freedoms when the issue is clearly a balance between the two. However, is there really more benefit from freedom or from the child in this case? This is the real question because its answer will decide what we do based on what you mentioned: the lack of conclusive evidence.

Like the free market economy the masses will decide, and they'll decide in favour of the children... probably. Yes, this is a sad extreme when it comes to one man's entire life and one person's mental state, but if a 'safe for the majority' precedent isn't set, until conclusive evidence is found, it could be at the expense of many other people in the future; either for the freedom and mental health of multiple children or for the freedom and mental health of people with this niche type of sexual interest; the latter of which has uncertain possible negative and/or positive effects on society at large.

Re:Tough one

[hardburn]

Which makes you wonder what the legislators were thinking when they passed those laws... Those dirty old bastages

Actually, I think they're just old laws held over from when girls tended to marry much younger. Contrary to what many believe, overall teen pregnancy in the US has actually dropped quite a bit since the '50s. Unwed teenage pregnancy has gone up. Girls marrying at 16 was still relatively common at the time, as were shotgun weddings.

Re:Tough one

[ConceptJunkie]

Thoughtcrimes have been on the books for years, except they're called "hate crimes".

Don't rest assured just because you are not an anti-semite or anti-homosexual, etc, that you won't be subject to throughtcrime legislation at some point in the future. The slope is steep and slippery and our legislators are at the top, pushing with all their might.

Re:Tough one

[DavidTC]

And the GP has an epic fail anyway, as there's absolutely no different in the possible 'harm' caused to a 16 and a 18 with fake nude photos of them, but he's framing it in terms of child porn, which presumably means it would be legal to take a picture of someone the second they turn 18 and post those photos everywhere.

It's a really stupid argument to make. We can argue that photos can slander people, because they certainly can. That doesn't have anything to do with 'porn' at all.

Austistic Spectrum

[drsmack1]

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.

Bad science

[Nick Ives]

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.

Jury Nullification Nullified

[resistant]

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.

Statistical significance in surveys

[SeanTobin]

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.

50%

[digitalsushi]

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?

Re:Meh

[hedwards]

It's not the wrong answer. The answer might not be what the legislature intended, but by the statute it was correct.

I'm fully in favor of changing the law to reflect the intention of the legislature, but it's completely inappropriate to have a law of this sort being interpreted in a way which deviates from the language used by that amount.

Some laws like the Sherman act are written in a way which is intentionally vague so that the judicial branch can refine it down to deal with the various forms of anti-trust misbehavior. But for something like this, that's bad, really, really bad. A person isn't generally possessing a JD and as such isn't likely to know that a whole lot about what the law actually means via case history.

While not applicable to this, other laws that deal with similar grey area of law allow for one party to define the crime where the perpetrator might not reasonably be able to determine the legality ahead of time. Sexual harassment laws are probably the best example of that, the most egregious cases are ones which everybody can recognize, but often times it's a matter of life experience which leads to one conclusion or another.

Re:Interesting

[MBGMorden]

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

In the US you can legally marry in most states at even younger than 16 with parental consent, and in many states the age at which you can consent to sex varies, but 14 to 16 is common. We just have completely weird notions on "porn". In the majority of US states you could have sex with Miley Cyrus perfectly legally. You snap a picture though (or hell even photoshop one apparently) and you're a dirty pedo that should be taken out back and shot.

Ug.

[SatanicPuppy]

"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.

Double Plus Good...

[tekrat]

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?

Re:Off-topic, sort of, but funny

[nedlohs]

And why exactly did you look at the pictures in the first place?

Doesn't seem a required step in copying files. Did you look at every other file you copied too?

Re:Fix your tags

[TheRaven64]

White on white titles in Idle are not a bug. Text that isn't white-on-white in Idle is a bug.

Re:you lost me at hello

[Endo13]

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'.

Utterly meaningless--made of statistical FAIL.

[MoralHazard]

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

[frozentier]

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.

Summary:

[Weedhopper]

Author understands neither statistics nor survey methodology.

Re:Sorry

[dtmos]

Thanks for clearing up the mystery. At the risk of sounding like a curmudgeon, however, I do have the following subsidiary questions:

1. How the heck is one supposed to know this, if not via an off-topic conversation with one of the knowledgeable?

2. 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?

The real reason

[DoofusOfDeath]

Math geeks are deathly afraid of porn regulation.

Re:you lost me at hello

[AlecC]

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.

Re:you lost me at hello

[Monkeedude1212]

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.

Re:you lost me at hello

[dgatwood]

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....

Why?

[Petersko]

"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.

Re:you lost me at hello

[shutdown -p now]

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?

Re:you lost me at hello

[Anonymous Coward]

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".

Re:No no no no no - please learn what a p value me

[Ardeaem]

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.

Re:Great formatting in this article

[Anonymous Coward]

Well spotted - what FOOL would put "display:block" on the 'i' tag? And what FOOL would put any of the rest of the bloody style on it either?

His poll was too squishy

[ianchaos]

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

Re:the cult of high iq

[gizmonic]

I like the idea of a Social IQ, but, I think in most cases, what you refer to as a Social IQ is really just an emotional response with no rational thought applied.

Child porn cases are very good at exposing this kind of reaction. It evokes a VERY strong negative emotional reaction in most people. Even the most logical among us would feel differently if it was OUR kid's head on photo-shopped on that body.

But, despite what you might think, you do NOT want emotion (or Social IQ) running the legal system. That's how ape-shit laws get passed, and now you have a 14 yo kid sending a naked picture of herself from her cellphone to her 14 yo boyfriend, and getting tagged a sexual criminal for life for distributing child porn. Why? Because the law is the law, and when it was passed, no one took the time to think and say, hey, if it's a kid taking pictures of themselves, why don't we add some form of exclusion for that? Instead the emotional knee jerk response crafted a zero tolerance law leading to situations like that.

I think the truth of the matter is that what is lost here is critical thinking skills. Most people these days no longer have them. Kids are never taught to actually stop and think. They go to school, do their homework, go to 12 different after school activities, all while their parent (or parents) work 60 hour weeks trying to pay for everything. And any down time is spent wasting their brains away in front of the TV.

True philosophical thought is, for the most part, dead. Who has spent the time to actually sit down and ponder anything? Most are trained to react based on emotional response and call it thinking, but it's not. It's a robotic programmed reaction to something. Critical thinking of a higher order requires just as much time and practice as anything else. You don't get it from soccer practice or football or watching the latest sitcom on TV.

And this isn't to say I disagree entirely with you. I think you are correct in your idea of a Social IQ, where the ability to interact with other people in social situations is not at all related to your ability to handle spatial reasoning or deep critical thinking.

However, the law is based on critical thinking, not Social IQ, and trying to apply the latter to the former is what makes the prosecutor take the exact wording of the law, and twist it to apply to something that it, as written, doesn't cover. No amount of Social IQ nor emotional reaction can change that fact. And it takes critical thinking, not Social IQ, to understand that.

Re:you lost me at hello

[billcopc]

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.

Re:you lost me at hello

[AlecC]

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.

Re:you lost me at hello

[mmaniaci]

+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...

Creeping criminalization

[TaleSpinner]

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.

Re:I would have guessed otherwise

[jaraxle]

Wow...

Only on Slashdot would an article about pornography (ethical or not) turn into an argument about mathematics.

~jaraxle

Non-graphical terminals

[tepples]

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?

Re:Sorry

[adolf]

Good explanation.

[raises hand] I have a question. Why should any of this matter here? I'm just writing a comment on a forum, not engineering a database-backed CSS-enabled web site. Why should I care?

I mean, I've got this little helper box down at the bottom of my screen:

Allowed HTML
<b> <i> <p> <br> <a> <ol> <ul> <li> <dl> <dt> <dd> <em> <strong> <tt> <blockquote> <div> <ecode> <quote>

I'm just a user. Why in the fuck should I have to study the ongoing development of HTML, XHTML, CSS, and so on just to get properly italicized text?

Re:you lost me at hello

[Daengbo]

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.