Someone should let these people know that nobody gets put in jail based on the facial recognition’s decision, so their “concerns” are impossible. Not only that, but if anything, it’s less likely to find darker skin tones at all, so it will favor minorities, not hurt them.
It’s a shortcut for manually digging through databases to identify people. Any identification is followed up with investigation, just as it would be if a human matched it. No decision is made by the machine.
> Someone should let these people know that nobody gets put in jail based on the facial recognition’s decision, so their “concerns” are impossible. Not only that, but if anything, it’s less likely to find darker skin tones at all, so it will favor minorities, not hurt them.
The article directly contradicts both of your claims:
> "Facial recognition technology is still incredibly biased and absolutely creates harm in the real world," said Jennifer Lee with ACLU Washington. "We now know of three black men who have been wrongfully arrested and jailed due to biased facial recognition technology.
The article provides no details on those cases, and I am not willing to trust the ACLU at their word, given how politically biased they are these days (https://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/civil-rights/347375-a...). I would like to know whether those incidents involved a human in the loop. It's also worth considering the benefits of facial recognition. Just like policing as a whole, I am willing to accept a small number of incorrectly handled incidents against a much larger body of good policing.
I don't think you read the article, which contains examples to support their claims that are the opposite of yours, which do not have any supporting evidence.
Man am I ever sick of this attitude. That high ground you’re looking down on other people from certainly has an extremely weak foundation based on what we know currently.
Consider a little respect and humility. You might be wrong. Many of the the loudest voices throughout this whole covid affair are currently muffled as they can’t eat and talk at the same time, lest they choke on their massive servings of humble pie for being so wrong about something they were so certain about.
You’re incorrect on nearly all of this and haven’t “broken out” of the forced narrative. All I can suggest is you go back to the primary sources yourself. Don’t take my word for it, don’t take your preferred media outlet’s word for it. Dig it up and decide.
The lab leak is overwhelmingly likely. It’s the Occam’s Razor without question. It’s still a hypothesis to be clear. It’s not proven. It could be wrong. But if we are assigning probabilities, it’s extremely one sided. It should have been the leading hypothesis from the beginning.
But Trump said it, so it must be wrong. We must find reasons for it to be not only wrong, but worthy of ridicule. And when those narratives fall, we must keep shifting the goal posts. And when that doesn’t work anymore, we must blame our failure on republicans in some roundabout way.
Sorry, that’s not how we science. We have to put the damn political tribal warfare away for a minute.
The lab leak theory is not Occam's razor. We've had many, many pandemics and epidemics and none have been associated with research labs. We've had SARS outbreaks in China that are not associated with a lab. There is also no proof beyond circumstance to associate it with the lab.
And it's not wrong because Trump said it. He may end up being partly correct. The fact remains he had no reason to be as confident in his pronouncement as he was aside from political expediency. Cotton was far more measured in his statements even if he was still stretching. I'm also saying that the MSM and scientific consensus only really threw a fit over the bioweapon theory and inflammatory rhetoric. Even the infamous WHO study said accidental lab leak was possible.
The fact that you aren't aware of the 1970s flu in the Soviet Union which was caused by a lab leak is telling. Again confident absolute statements from someone who doesn't really understand the topic they are commenting on.
There have been numerous lab leaks that are recorded in history and they happen every year.
After SARS it only took 4 months to identify the intermediate host which was a civet. After MERS, it took nine months to identify a camel as an intermediate host.
18 months later with vastly more scientific resources at their disposal and also technology that didn't exist for the other two like smartphones, no intermediate mammal host has been found yet.
The Occam's razor suggestion for this is the reason for this is the only intermediate mammal host that exists is a humanized mouse with human ACE2 receptors lining its lungs.
You know, the humanized mice that were specifically mentioned as being present in the Wuhan Institute of Virology by multiple sources including grants applied for and received directly stating this.
This entire comment is the personification of a person who has taken their political identity and with no self-awareness applied it to science. You have no basis for your confidence other than the hatred of your political enemies.
I watched brainwashed GOP folks cling to the WMD in Iraq myth for years after it was proven false. You might not be do different from them.
Its only recently that research labs could engineer these viruses. Only recently have you been able to engineer mice with human ACE2 receptors, and breed viruses in them. History is not what you base your conclusions on in 2020’s biochemistry.
It has been strongly asserted by the scientific community that Covid-19 bears no hallmarks of an engineered virus. In fact, no one in this thread is even suggested it was engineered. That's the whole point of the article. The "accidental leak" theory is being conflated with "engineered weapon theory". The only options on the table are "animal -> human" or "animal -> lab -> human". Both are plausible and we have no conclusive evidence one way or the other.
Engineering a virus, in the sense that you're talking about, is not what was meant. Allowing the virus to naturally mutate in an animal host, over thousands of generations, will get you to the same endpoint. This is gain of function research, the whole point is to find out if the virus could naturally evolve some feature you are interested in. Engineering it to do so would defeat the point.
This is not exactly accurate. But it’s easier to get to the full story if people accept the lab leak of an unmodified virus as a possibility. However, the “assertions” are misleading and have been debunked. The virus does appear to be chimeric. There is a missing link in both hypotheses, but the lab leak hypotheses offers a few possible explanations. The zoonotic hypothesis still doesn’t have an explanation for that part.
You're not actually refuting any argument the parent made.
First, pointing out that other pandemics have happened absent lab accidents doesn't negate all the evidence pointing in that direction this time. As far as evidence and probability goes (with regard to the potential evolutionary paths the virus would have had to have taken in the wild), the lab leak hypothesis is very strong. The simplest answer is that it leaked from the lab a few miles away studying this exact family of viruses.
Second, the parent wasn't saying anything about whether or not Trump was twisting the truth or being dramatic. His whole point is that the discussion was able to be hijacked by the simple act of a divisive figure talking about it. It's fine if people dismiss Trump (the smart thing to do honestly), but allowing that to bias you in the opposite direction without any evidence is making the exact same mistake he did.
> And it's not wrong because Trump said it. He may end up being partly correct. The fact remains he had no reason to be as confident in his pronouncement as he was aside from political expediency.
except his CDC head claimed after the new administration took over that Trump's administration did have additional classified evidence that made it more likely. It is extremely likely that the intelligence community knew of the chinese researchers who had gone to the hospital (and maybe more) way before it was released to the public. By the time these facts are made public, they have been researched and assigned a high level of confidence.
This is kind of doing the same thing that the “fact checkers” are doing. There is indeed a lack of proper studies to validate it. That’s the problem. There are mountains of evidence that show it as very promising and worthy of a proper study. That’s what people are asking for. The FDA keeps saying not to use it, because we don’t know for certain that it works, because we haven’t had any rigorous RCTs to validate it, even though it appears by all accounts to be an extremely valuable tool. They don’t claim that it doesn’t work. They don’t claim that it’s harmful (we know it’s not, it’s been broadly deployed for like 30 years and is known to be far safer than the vaccines, which are already quite safe, at least in the short to medium term). Also, this article is misinformed on the dosage requirement, which has been raised and addressed - looks like sibling comment called this out as well. See, it’s clear who actually follows the science, and who disregards the science but brow beats others with phrases like “follow the science.” Other things known to people following the science? Schools are safe to open and masks don’t do shit outdoors because the probability of infection is < 0.1%. Many of us knew this was the latest science long ago, but again, we weren’t allowed to talk about it, lest someone call us the R word (republican).
To not drop everything and study this aggressively is criminally negligent imo. I believe I read that we have finally decided to fund looking into validating what appears to be strong evidence. But it’s 30 years old, dirt cheap, and not patented. And all of this only came to light well after we sunk billions into vaccines. So, there is not exactly a profit motive or a strong appetite to potentially upend all of that. But if people unwilling to be vaccinated are willing to take that instead, it might be the only hope for herd immunity. Because there is no way we will get there by vaccines alone. Too much of the population are refusing the vaccines.
Effectiveness is not the only criteria that experts need to evaluate for treatments. Ivermectin is fairly easy to overdose on, and people started self-treating prophylactically because it was easy to find from veterinary supply chains.
The majority of available Ivermectin also contained inactive ingredients that had no been safety tested on humans, again because of its primary veterinary uses.
WHO looked at these facts and data from 16 trials that yielded “very low certainty" of efficacy before recommending against its use, but leaving the door open for further research suggesting additional trials were needed.
This is exactly what is being put into discussion. This “very low certainty" doesn't stand against the amount of research that is being released on a daily basis.
It's also weird that so many people can selectively blindly trust the WHO on this topic, while at the same time, commenting on how the whole scientific apparatus can be so wrong on a related subject.
Also I'm not buying into this theory that we shouldn't allow an effective treatment, just because someone is supposedly overdosing the veterinary version of the drug. It might be partially true for addicting drugs I suppose, but even in this case, that's why we have doctors and prescriptions.
Ivermectin is at least an order of magnitude safer than paracetamol. There's 30 years of safety data, more than 3.7 billion doses, and on average less than 1 death per year.
In the talk above, the Ivermectin safety profile is specifically discussed here: [1]
"Ivermectin was generally well tolerated, with no indication of associated CNS toxicity for doses up to 10 times the highest FDA-approved dose of 0.2mg/kg." [2]
The only way you can overdose is if you use horse paste, and get the dose wrong by more than an order of magnitude. Even then, it's unlikely to result in hospitalization or death. The only reason people have to use horse paste is because they are unable to safely obtain Ivermectin by other means.
Yeah I don't buy it. You're moving the goalposts. Censorship is when they prohibit information being distributed. It looks like Government Health Agencies are just not believing the evidence and are therefore not recommending it. They're not saying "don't talk about it" they're not saying "don't research it" they're saying "the evidence so far is inconclusive, we don't recommend treating with it"
They literally have policies saying if you're posting anything about Ivermectin, it's misinformation, and it will get removed. How is that not censorship?
”Part-time Portlander here! You have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. Please stop basing your worldview on Infowars talking points.”
I’ve obviously never seen anything produced by infowars and this was a dismissive epithet, doing exactly the problem described here. You’re one of them. And my point you were responding to was objectively true.
I think that politicians have a responsibility to not tell obvious lies. If they do, then I'm going to stop paying attention to the things they say, and I'll tell everyone else to do the same.
If they eventually say something insightful, well, that's a shame, but they no longer have my attention.
All politicians tell obvious lies. It's part of their career. Biden tells obvious lies. Trump told obvious lies. So did Obama. So did bush. Part of critical thinking is determining which statements are lies and which are not.
Because it’s irrelevant and assumes that anyone participating in the discussion was listening to any politician of any kind to begin with. The problem isn’t with ignoring the politicians - something that is nearly always prudent - it’s assuming that we weren’t also completely ignoring Trump.
This investigation was happening among scientists regardless of whatever Trump or Biden or Cotton or Paul or whoever else had to say. But the mainstream left treated them as though they must be dumb backwards thinking Q anon Trumpers who got this idea from him or Alex Jones or some conspiracy nut.
The way that people following this were treated was bad enough, but the most worrisome part is the reputational attacks, largely coordinated by Peter Daszak of the EcoHealth alliance, that these scientists faced. It was a huge risk on their part to challenge someone of his standing in the community, and he was relentless in spreading the meme that these were fringe quacks deserving of nothing but derision for their “conspiracy theories”. In another massive media failure, they were happy to use him as their subject matter expert without bothering to disclose that he’s the one who ran the very same program. And to a lesser extent, Fauci as well.
To be clear, no one suspects that Daszak and Fauci were anything but well-intentioned in their original pursuits when starting and funding this research program. But it’s obvious why anyone faced with the possibility that their decision may have been the reason that this all happened in the first place. And the implications - that their entire organization and much of their life’s work will be shut down immediately - may put even the most reasonable mind in an extremely difficult position.
How would you react upon realizing that your program may very well have killed millions around the globe and destroyed economies? I’d imagine that must be quite a burden on the conscience for anyone who is not a completely sociopathic murderer.
> This investigation was happening among scientists regardless of whatever Trump or Biden or Cotton or Paul or whoever else had to say. But the mainstream left treated them as though they must be dumb backwards thinking Q anon Trumpers who got this idea from him or Alex Jones or some conspiracy nut.
Maybe I just wasn't following the discourse closely enough? My main memory of this story early-on was in a Vox.com podcast in late Spring of 2020. They went through all of the circulating conspiracy theories about the Coronavirus—that it was caused by 5G, that it was a ploy to embed microchips, etc—and ended on the possibility of a lab leak.
I remember them saying something like "yeah, this is the one theory that could actually be true, and we should investigate further."
And almost none of them are employed prior, so it makes sense he has not worked with them, and makes it suspicious that 3 working people went to hospital.
This was the most depressing realization of the past year for me. Otherwise smart people too. Including a large percentage of this site. They got nearly every story wrong, and only some are just starting to realize it.
It’s a shortcut for manually digging through databases to identify people. Any identification is followed up with investigation, just as it would be if a human matched it. No decision is made by the machine.
So, no, it’s not racist at all.