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Cake day: April 3rd, 2024

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  • Useful stereotypes can help a person avoid danger.

    Unknown mushrooms don’t have to be poisonous but being careless with them can lead to a grisly death. Drivers don’t have to be unaware of me but it takes just one who is to put me in mortal danger if I’m not careful. A man following a lone woman at night where nobody else is around doesn’t have to have ill intent but she’s still better off being prepared for the case that he does.

    Does this discriminate against mushrooms, drivers, and men? Yes, but that’s the point. It’s essentially an informal safety guideline and it deliberately overreaches just like real safety guidelines. The 999 times someone doesn’t need that handrail don’t outweigh the one time they do; not in OSHA’s eyes. Because someone might die if the handrail fails that one time.

    This whole thing becomes problematic when it gets over-applied. Avoiding canned mushrooms in the supermarket won’t protect me from poisoning. Assuming that all drivers are blind and irresponsible will not improve my behavior on the road. Being afraid of all men in all situations will not make that woman’s life better.

    Like always, Paracelsus is right: The dose makes the poison. (And like with poison, some stereotypes are so toxic that any dose of then is bad for you.)












  • Your comment is a good reason why these tools have no place in the courtroom: The things you describe as imagination.

    They’re image generation tools that will generate a new, unrelated image that happens to look similar to the source image. They don’t reconstruct anything and they have no understanding of what the image contains. All they know is which color the pixels in the output might probably have given the pixels in the input.

    It’s no different from giving a description of a scene to an author, asking them to come up with any event that might have happened in such a location and then trying to use the resulting short story to convict someone.