Really tired of all the Aaron Swartz stories, it got old months ago.
Really tired of some people whining about all the Aaron Swartz stories. If you're not interested, don't read them. I am interested because this is an important ongoing story, and this article does contain new information.
While I agree with the main point of your post (you probably stayed awake when they taught about the Constitution in school), there are a few places where you give the "other side" too much credit.
The problems caused are far, far worse than the high murder rate was.
There is no evidence that stop-and-harass reduces the murder rate. There is no tradeoff here.
Sure, you can suppress crime with enough repression. Totalitarian regimes always sell that as an advantage of living there
That claim is as truthful as others that totalitarian regimes make. Their reported crime rates are low, but there is much reason to believe it's not. There are no reliable statistics, so you have to rely on anecdotes, but thousands or millions anecdotes add up to something meaningful. According to people who lived in that time and place, there is every reason to believe that the crime rate in the USSR was very high. The crooks were smart enough not to bother party officials, and the police didn't give a damn because their main job was repression.
they didn't limit it those conditions that the fourth amendment permits
They did in the original Terry v. Ohio case. The cop spent a fair amount of time watching 3 guys casing a store for a robbery, and when he stopped them he had reason to fear for his safety. He also limited the search to checking their coats for weapons (which he found). If you believe such situations happen over 1/2 million times a year in NYC though, I've got a bridge to sell you. "Reasonable suspicion" has been watered down to the cop felt like it, or he had to meet his quota (you know, the kind that doesn't exist). If Terry stops (the other name for stop-and-frisk) were limited to situations anything like the original case I, and I think most other people, wouldn't have a problem with it.
Bloomberg and some here have justified the 4th amendment destroying policy as necessary to prevent crime, even though most of the people stopped have committed no crime and don't have a gun or drugs on them.
But since crime prevention is what he and others care most about and since the greatest concentration of wealth in the world has been lost due to Wall Street criminality will Bloomberg order his cops to visit the offices of investment bankers and wall street traders in Manhattan to stop and frisk them and search their computers to make sure they're not currently committing any crimes?
Yeah I didn't think so.
Stop and frisk only applies to minorities who don't have thousand dollar an hour attorney's on standby
Well put. With so many major criminals in fancy offices, why bother with petty criminals on the street. And yes, those financial criminals have in many cases violated New York State law, so it would be under the city's jurisdiction.
One other minor point: has anybody ever actually demonstrated that stop-and-harass has lowered crime? Yeah, didn't think so.
Which countries? (seriously). I'm curious if we're talking levels high enough to alter behavior (which I suspect would be awfully high). The US taxes sugar imports, which is part of why HFCS is used so much.
If you can't beat the control group then it's junk science
It's junk science to pretend that a randomly chosen group is a meaningful control group when studying something like this. The key issue is explained here and here.
limitations are widely acknowledged in obtaining acceptable data due to the difficulty in applying experimental controls to clinical analyses of AA, such as adequate placebo control
It's a notorious problem with studying the efficacy of psychological treatments. In many cases the whole issue is ignored so someone can claim to study it in a meaningful way and get more grant money.
It trades personal responsibility for not drinking, and thus drinking, to an imaginary higher power.
As opposed to those who have a religious fervor for clinging to the belief that they are completely in control of themselves. Free will, determinism, blah, blah, blah. The important thing that religious evangelists and evangelical atheists have in common is that they love to debate this. Personally it bores me to tears. What I do know is that AA helps some people stop drinking and that I find stepping over drunks annoying. AA also doesn't cost me a penny. Therefore I think it's a Good Thing (tm).
There is an athiest/agnostic sub-group of AA, but judging by things found on their FB page, they are having an uphill battle with the powers-that-be in AA.
As far as I understand TPTB in AA, they don't have much power. Certainly the athiest/agnostic sub-group is free to create its own organization. In fact I believe it has been done.
To the extent what you say does occur, it's a problem with the courts, not AA. It's not as though AA does anything to influence the courts' behavior in these issues (AFAIK that would be a major violation of AA's principles).
I'm still confused as to how it could "work", and yet still only deliver remission rates in the same ballpark as no intervention?
The problem with such statistics is that things like AA may work best for people who choose to utilize them. That's a self-selected group, and we don't know if that self-selected group would have the same unassisted remission rate as the randomly selected group from which your unassisted remission rate statistic comes. This sort of thing is a notorious problem in studying treatment of psychological issues.
What I find concerning too is that with a target rate of 100%, and an outcome of 5%, is that there has been no attempt to change the methodology or improve techniques IN OVER EIGHTY YEARS. Whats up with that?
I don't know that they haven't changed their methodology or techniques. They may have the same basic approach and philosophy, but the devil is often in the details. Frankly I don't know about it in enough detail to say. Do you? Like any organization, AA is a culture as much as anything else. I don't know that that hasn't changed in 80 years. From the limited knowledge I do have, I believe that many of their traditions and principles were arrived at via the school of hard knocks. That's at least a semi-scientific approach, and they don't claim to be a scientific research organization. Given how utterly unscientific much "professional" psychological and medical treatment is (peer reviewed journals notwithstanding) I wouldn't be too quick to criticize.
But you know who never upgrades their "technology"? Religions.
Ok, so it's a religion. So what? To the extent that someone can say "I stopped stealing and killing and raping because I found Jesus", I'm all for religion. To the extent it's used as an excuse for genocide or the Wars of the Reformation, not so much. AFAIK AA isn't guilty of anything like the latter.
12 step programs success rate is the same as the spontaneous success rate.
If you believe the naive application of that statistic settles the issue, then you don't understand the difficulties of studying the treatment of psychological problems, as regards choosing a random control group and making a study (double)blind. It's a far more difficult problem than say, studying the effectiveness of a drug for treating arthritis via the conventional double blind study with a placebo for a randomly chosen control group.
the government forces people to got to
That may be part of the problem. Historically it was based on people who wanted to go there. For psychological issues, that can be an essential difference.
The problem with 12 step programs isn't the people who they work for, the problem is that so often they are presented as the only option.
When? By whom? I've no doubt that some people say this, but I've never noticed it as a widespread problem.
Not everyone who has ever used any addictive substance has no control over themselves.
"No control over themselves" is getting seriously judgmental and/or philosophical. If they had no control over themselves then, absent permanent physical restraint, how did they stop? I'm a pragmatist. If it helps some people stop their destructive behavior, then it's a Good Thing (tm).
The article starts from the presumption that 12 step programs are effective, based on the fact that they are popular. The actual science on twelve step programs says something else entirely.
Read your own fine article. From the NYT link:
no data showed that 12-step interventions were any more — or any less — successful in increasing the number of people who stayed in treatment or reducing the number who relapsed after being sober... None of the studies compared A.A. with no treatment at all
It doesn't even pretend to address the point you're trying to make.
It's about life values, thinking, and taking care of health, which make you quit, not some social mammal central nervous system control stuff.
What makes you think that "life values, thinking, and taking care of health" are necessarily disjoint from "social mammal central nervous system control stuff"?
You are defining an alcoholic as someone that can only stop drinking if they use the 12 step program.
No, he's defining an alcoholic as someone who cannot stop drinking without great difficulty, even if there are strong rational reasons for doing so. That's called addiction, and it's a well documented phenomenon. By contrast you offer no definition of alcoholism. Furthermore, all the OP said about AA is why it might help some of the people who have that problem.
AA's own internal figures show that only 5% of people who start AA are not drinking one year later... So the ones who are stopping were going to stop anyway
Your logic doesn't follow - it's just a guess on your part.
Other studies show that when groups of alcoholics were randomly assigned to court ordered AA
How did the courts determine that these people were alcoholics? It's now common practice to order anyone who gets a DWI to go to AA, and I suspect that's a mistake. Doing a stupid thing like driving while drunk doesn't necessarily mean you're an alcoholic. People will also, on legal advice, start going to AA before a DWI court date. "Gosh your honor, I'm repentant, be lenient!".
Historically people went to AA because they chose to, not because they were ordered to by courts. That self-selection may be an important part of why it works for some and not others, and that's hardly surprising. That renders the entire idea of the conventional random control group nonsense. Random controls on treatments for psychological issues is a lot more difficult, and perhaps sometimes practically impossible, than for other problems. Giving group X a med for their arthritis and group Y a placebo (and don't forget to make it double blind!) is a much simpler issue to deal with.
I understood how AA works. It's a cult. A brain-washing, mind-controlling cult that uses the same psychological techniques as Jim Jones or Heaven's Gate to control people... So I completely agree with AC's suggestion that AA is a cult; but I disagree that this is in any way a bad thing.
"Cult" is a very imprecise term. By your broad definition, your family is also a cult (you're the one who likened the meeting to a family reunion). For that matter, our entire society (and I suspect all societies) are cults by that definition. Families and societies are extremely strong means of controlling people.
Don't take my statement so literally. Our exports seem high in dollar terms, but they're still much less than our imports. Moreover we've stopped making many things that in a balanced trade scenario we would have continued to make.
Slashdot Mirror
I certainly agree as regards wireless information, but for lights, wireless power is another story (only wimps worry about receiving picowatts).
Really tired of all the Aaron Swartz stories, it got old months ago.
Really tired of some people whining about all the Aaron Swartz stories. If you're not interested, don't read them. I am interested because this is an important ongoing story, and this article does contain new information.
While I agree with the main point of your post (you probably stayed awake when they taught about the Constitution in school), there are a few places where you give the "other side" too much credit.
The problems caused are far, far worse than the high murder rate was.
There is no evidence that stop-and-harass reduces the murder rate. There is no tradeoff here.
Sure, you can suppress crime with enough repression. Totalitarian regimes always sell that as an advantage of living there
That claim is as truthful as others that totalitarian regimes make. Their reported crime rates are low, but there is much reason to believe it's not. There are no reliable statistics, so you have to rely on anecdotes, but thousands or millions anecdotes add up to something meaningful. According to people who lived in that time and place, there is every reason to believe that the crime rate in the USSR was very high. The crooks were smart enough not to bother party officials, and the police didn't give a damn because their main job was repression.
they didn't limit it those conditions that the fourth amendment permits
They did in the original Terry v. Ohio case. The cop spent a fair amount of time watching 3 guys casing a store for a robbery, and when he stopped them he had reason to fear for his safety. He also limited the search to checking their coats for weapons (which he found). If you believe such situations happen over 1/2 million times a year in NYC though, I've got a bridge to sell you. "Reasonable suspicion" has been watered down to the cop felt like it, or he had to meet his quota (you know, the kind that doesn't exist). If Terry stops (the other name for stop-and-frisk) were limited to situations anything like the original case I, and I think most other people, wouldn't have a problem with it.
Bloomberg and some here have justified the 4th amendment destroying policy as necessary to prevent crime, even though most of the people stopped have committed no crime and don't have a gun or drugs on them.
But since crime prevention is what he and others care most about and since the greatest concentration of wealth in the world has been lost due to Wall Street criminality will Bloomberg order his cops to visit the offices of investment bankers and wall street traders in Manhattan to stop and frisk them and search their computers to make sure they're not currently committing any crimes?
Yeah I didn't think so.
Stop and frisk only applies to minorities who don't have thousand dollar an hour attorney's on standby
Well put. With so many major criminals in fancy offices, why bother with petty criminals on the street. And yes, those financial criminals have in many cases violated New York State law, so it would be under the city's jurisdiction.
One other minor point: has anybody ever actually demonstrated that stop-and-harass has lowered crime? Yeah, didn't think so.
most countries have taxes on sugar etc.
Which countries? (seriously). I'm curious if we're talking levels high enough to alter behavior (which I suspect would be awfully high). The US taxes sugar imports, which is part of why HFCS is used so much.
Listen, these numbers include wives/girlfriends signing their SO up without their knowledge
So that explains my name on the list.
Never send a man to do a robot's job.
The DSM lays out criteria, but no definition.
Pedantry that's silly in this context weakens your argument.
There is no such thing as an Alcoholic
Thus contradicting your own "clever" definition.
If you have a point, please make it.
One of the episodes of Penn & Teller's "Bullshit!" was on 12-step programs.
I've always considered Penn and Teller to be two of the great scientific minds of our age. Who could argue with their research?
If you can't beat the control group then it's junk science
It's junk science to pretend that a randomly chosen group is a meaningful control group when studying something like this. The key issue is explained here and here.
limitations are widely acknowledged in obtaining acceptable data due to the difficulty in applying experimental controls to clinical analyses of AA, such as adequate placebo control
It's a notorious problem with studying the efficacy of psychological treatments. In many cases the whole issue is ignored so someone can claim to study it in a meaningful way and get more grant money.
It trades personal responsibility for not drinking, and thus drinking, to an imaginary higher power.
As opposed to those who have a religious fervor for clinging to the belief that they are completely in control of themselves. Free will, determinism, blah, blah, blah. The important thing that religious evangelists and evangelical atheists have in common is that they love to debate this. Personally it bores me to tears. What I do know is that AA helps some people stop drinking and that I find stepping over drunks annoying. AA also doesn't cost me a penny. Therefore I think it's a Good Thing (tm).
There is an athiest/agnostic sub-group of AA, but judging by things found on their FB page, they are having an uphill battle with the powers-that-be in AA.
As far as I understand TPTB in AA, they don't have much power. Certainly the athiest/agnostic sub-group is free to create its own organization. In fact I believe it has been done.
To the extent what you say does occur, it's a problem with the courts, not AA. It's not as though AA does anything to influence the courts' behavior in these issues (AFAIK that would be a major violation of AA's principles).
I'm still confused as to how it could "work", and yet still only deliver remission rates in the same ballpark as no intervention?
The problem with such statistics is that things like AA may work best for people who choose to utilize them. That's a self-selected group, and we don't know if that self-selected group would have the same unassisted remission rate as the randomly selected group from which your unassisted remission rate statistic comes. This sort of thing is a notorious problem in studying treatment of psychological issues.
What I find concerning too is that with a target rate of 100%, and an outcome of 5%, is that there has been no attempt to change the methodology or improve techniques IN OVER EIGHTY YEARS. Whats up with that?
I don't know that they haven't changed their methodology or techniques. They may have the same basic approach and philosophy, but the devil is often in the details. Frankly I don't know about it in enough detail to say. Do you? Like any organization, AA is a culture as much as anything else. I don't know that that hasn't changed in 80 years. From the limited knowledge I do have, I believe that many of their traditions and principles were arrived at via the school of hard knocks. That's at least a semi-scientific approach, and they don't claim to be a scientific research organization. Given how utterly unscientific much "professional" psychological and medical treatment is (peer reviewed journals notwithstanding) I wouldn't be too quick to criticize.
But you know who never upgrades their "technology"? Religions.
Ok, so it's a religion. So what? To the extent that someone can say "I stopped stealing and killing and raping because I found Jesus", I'm all for religion. To the extent it's used as an excuse for genocide or the Wars of the Reformation, not so much. AFAIK AA isn't guilty of anything like the latter.
12 step programs success rate is the same as the spontaneous success rate.
If you believe the naive application of that statistic settles the issue, then you don't understand the difficulties of studying the treatment of psychological problems, as regards choosing a random control group and making a study (double)blind. It's a far more difficult problem than say, studying the effectiveness of a drug for treating arthritis via the conventional double blind study with a placebo for a randomly chosen control group.
the government forces people to got to
That may be part of the problem. Historically it was based on people who wanted to go there. For psychological issues, that can be an essential difference.
The problem with 12 step programs isn't the people who they work for, the problem is that so often they are presented as the only option.
When? By whom? I've no doubt that some people say this, but I've never noticed it as a widespread problem.
Not everyone who has ever used any addictive substance has no control over themselves.
"No control over themselves" is getting seriously judgmental and/or philosophical. If they had no control over themselves then, absent permanent physical restraint, how did they stop? I'm a pragmatist. If it helps some people stop their destructive behavior, then it's a Good Thing (tm).
The article starts from the presumption that 12 step programs are effective, based on the fact that they are popular. The actual science on twelve step programs says something else entirely.
Read your own fine article. From the NYT link:
no data showed that 12-step interventions were any more — or any less — successful in increasing the number of people who stayed in treatment or reducing the number who relapsed after being sober ... None of the studies compared A.A. with no treatment at all
It doesn't even pretend to address the point you're trying to make.
It's about life values, thinking, and taking care of health, which make you quit, not some social mammal central nervous system control stuff.
What makes you think that "life values, thinking, and taking care of health" are necessarily disjoint from "social mammal central nervous system control stuff"?
You are defining an alcoholic as someone that can only stop drinking if they use the 12 step program.
No, he's defining an alcoholic as someone who cannot stop drinking without great difficulty, even if there are strong rational reasons for doing so. That's called addiction, and it's a well documented phenomenon. By contrast you offer no definition of alcoholism. Furthermore, all the OP said about AA is why it might help some of the people who have that problem.
AA's own internal figures show that only 5% of people who start AA are not drinking one year later ... So the ones who are stopping were going to stop anyway
Your logic doesn't follow - it's just a guess on your part.
Other studies show that when groups of alcoholics were randomly assigned to court ordered AA
How did the courts determine that these people were alcoholics? It's now common practice to order anyone who gets a DWI to go to AA, and I suspect that's a mistake. Doing a stupid thing like driving while drunk doesn't necessarily mean you're an alcoholic. People will also, on legal advice, start going to AA before a DWI court date. "Gosh your honor, I'm repentant, be lenient!".
Historically people went to AA because they chose to, not because they were ordered to by courts. That self-selection may be an important part of why it works for some and not others, and that's hardly surprising. That renders the entire idea of the conventional random control group nonsense. Random controls on treatments for psychological issues is a lot more difficult, and perhaps sometimes practically impossible, than for other problems. Giving group X a med for their arthritis and group Y a placebo (and don't forget to make it double blind!) is a much simpler issue to deal with.
I understood how AA works. It's a cult. A brain-washing, mind-controlling cult that uses the same psychological techniques as Jim Jones or Heaven's Gate to control people ... So I completely agree with AC's suggestion that AA is a cult; but I disagree that this is in any way a bad thing.
"Cult" is a very imprecise term. By your broad definition, your family is also a cult (you're the one who likened the meeting to a family reunion). For that matter, our entire society (and I suspect all societies) are cults by that definition. Families and societies are extremely strong means of controlling people.
It didn't. "Free market" is just a propaganda term.
Don't take my statement so literally. Our exports seem high in dollar terms, but they're still much less than our imports. Moreover we've stopped making many things that in a balanced trade scenario we would have continued to make.
The Russians are pissed enough to harbour Snowden.
The Russians aren't pissed about anything special - they're just harboring him to annoy and embarrass the US.
The Chinese aren't backing the US in the North Korea talks.
The Chinese have always pretended to be above the fray vis-a-vis N. Korea.
The Japanese just sailed their first war ship in 50 years.
Then where did all those other ship in their fleet come from? Japan has had a substantial navy for decades.
I can think of a dozen wars that started with this sort of trade embargoes and tariffs.
So you think China was wrong to embargo opium from British ships?
Just the precedent itself is enough to block US made goods in half the world.
So? It's not like we export much of anything anymore anyway.