Blog: Reflections

Most of these posts were originally posted somewhere else and link to the originals. While this blog is not set up for comments, the original locations generally are, and I welcome comments there. Sorry for the inconvenience.

The TOL murderer, capital punishment, and rabbinic law

Yesterday's torah portion, Emor, includes one of the "life for life" (death penalty for murder) passages. Locally, the trial for the murderer in the attack at Tree of Life in 2018 has just gotten started. We had a small discussion of the death penalty through that lens.

Many of the victims' families wanted the state to accept the murderer's offer to plead guilty in exchange for life in prison. Some family members pressed for the death penalty. I don't know how prosecutors decide these things, but they decided to have a capital trial instead of accepting the plea.

The systems around the death penalty in the US are badly broken in many ways ranging from injustice to impracticality. Through the lens of civil law and current judicial practice, I personally would prefer that they do the closest legal thing to dropping the guy into an oubliette, keeping him out of circulation while denying the opportunity for grandstanding and martyrdom. Through the lens of Jewish law, however, something struck me yesterday.

The rabbis of the mishna and talmud (in tractate Sanhedrin) were uncomfortable with the death penalty the torah calls for, so they nerfed it. It's very hard to qualify for the death penalty under rabbinic law. In addition to the requirements for eyewitnesses (who themselves face the death penalty for perjury), people must have warned the person beforehand that he was about to commit a capital offense, and he needs to acknowledge that warning. How likely is that? I used to wonder if anybody ever actually did that.

"Screw your optics, I'm going in". That's what the murderer posted on a site where he and others had been discussing the "problem" with Jews.

I don't know what else is in the transcript from that site; I haven't seen it. It sounds like people tried to stop him. Along with everything else -- his social-media activity, the obvious premeditation, the eyewitnesses to the murders, the lack of regret afterward -- it kind of sounds like the talmud's requirements might have been met. It's not a slam-dunk under rabbinic law, but if Jewish law rather than US law were governing this case, it strikes me that this could actually be the rare case that would qualify for the death penalty. And I'd be fine with that.

That's not vengeance talking, though this case is also personal to me (friends, not family). I can support the rabbinic rules for capital cases, theoretical as they seem, because of their many protections and focus on being careful. Example: did you know that a unanimous vote for capital conviction is overturned? Because if nobody had doubts, maybe the judges didn't look hard enough for factors in the accused's favor.

Re: deja vu, all over again

New_public published a post, Déjà Vu, All Over Again, about the evolution of the web and the early days when people made stuff for fun instead of companies making stuff for brand impact and algorithms, and it struck a chord. The author invited comments, so here's what I posted:

--

I've been feeling that deja vu too. I was on Usenet before the great renaming, and much later when I joined LiveJournal and this "blogging" thing (pulled in by friends), I remember thinking that a blog or LJ was basically alt.fan.me and would people really care about what I, a nobody, wrote? I expected to read and be read by about a dozen people who were already friends, but things have a way of spreading. And I knew that from Usenet, where I built friendships with people I've never met and sometimes didn't know "real" names for, and it was all very cool and friendly and broadening.

The net, when freed from algorithms and branding and bubbles so that ordinary people can interact with other ordinary people without barriers, is a remarkable way to learn about people and places and subcultures very different from my own. I've formed friendships from people halfway around the world walking very different paths in life from mine. There's a whole big world out there, and the last thing I want is to be trapped in a bubble of people just like me, or as close as Twitter et al think they can come to that.

The revival -- I hope it's a revival and not just a blip on the way to the next corporate thing -- of decentralized, direct, person-to-person online interaction excites me. Coincidentally, I've been working my way through my older posts on LiveJournal and then Dreamwidth, pulling together stuff on my own domain now that I have one, and I'm realizing how much more I used to write and share. I don't know how much of the change in my behavior has been due to people moving from blogs to social media and the vibe changing, how much has been due to modern social censors who retcon what's acceptable and what's offensive, and how much is me being more lazy or distracted or busy or whatever. But, facing the stark contrast to "online me 15 years ago" and "today", I'm motivated to try to get more of the old, personal, human writing back, somehow.

SCA evolution: from re-creation to SIG?

I was at an event this weekend, my first since Pennsic. Pennsic, in turn, was my first event since before the pandemic. I think this infrequency of exposure has made me really notice some things that have been gradually changing for decades. Herewith a long ramble that could definitely use more thought (and probably editing), but this is where I am now. Read more…

The trust thermocline

John Bull wrote a post (in tweet-sized pieces, naturally) that rings true for me, and he gave a name for the phenomenon we're seeing with Twitter, saw with LiveJournal, and partially saw with Stack Overflow. The thread starts here on Twitter and here on Mastodon (the Fediverse). Selected quotes:

One of the things I occasionally get paid to do by companies/execs is to tell them why everything seemed to SUDDENLY go wrong, and subs/readers dropped like a stone. So, with everything going on at Twitter rn, time for a thread about the Trust Thermocline.

So: what's a thermocline?

Well large bodies of water are made of layers of differing temperatures. Like a layer cake. The top bit is where all the the waves happen and has a gradually decreasing temperature. Then SUDDENLY there's a point where it gets super-cold.

The Trust Thermocline is something that, over (many) years of digital, I have seen both digital and regular content publishers hit time and time again. Despite warnings (at least when I've worked there). And it has a similar effect. You have lots of users then suddenly... nope. [...]

But with a lot of CONTENT products (inc social media) that's not actually how it works. Because it doesn't account for sunk-cost lock-in.

Users and readers will stick to what they know, and use, well beyond the point where they START to lose trust in it. And you won't see that.

But they'll only MOVE when they hit the Trust Thermocline. The point where their lack of trust in the product to meet their needs, and the emotional investment they'd made in it, have finally been outweighed by the physical and emotional effort required to abandon it. [...]

Virtually the only way to avoid catastrophic drop-off from breaching the Trust Thermocline is NOT TO BREACH IT.

I can count on one hand the times I've witnessed a company come back from it. And even they never reached previous heights.

Social media and moderation

I've participated in a lot of online communities, and a lot of types of online communities, over the decades -- mailing lists, Usenet, blogging platforms like Dreamwidth, web-based forums, Q&A communities... and social media. With the exception of blogging platforms, where readers opt in to specific people/blogs/journals and the platform doesn't push other stuff at us, online communities tend to end up with some level of moderation.

We had (some) content moderation even in the early days of mailing lists and Usenet. Mostly1 this was gatekeeping -- reviewing content before it was released, because sometimes people post ill-advised things like personal attacks. Mailing lists and Usenet were inherently slow to begin with -- turnaround times were measured in hours if you were lucky and more typically days -- so adding a step where a human reviewed a post before letting it go out into the wild didn't cost much. Communities were small and moderation was mostly to stop the rare egregiously bad stuff, not to curate everything. So far as I recall, nobody then was vetting content that way, like declaring posts to be misinformation.

On the modern Internet with its speed and scale, moderation is usually after the fact. A human moderator sees (or is alerted to) content that doesn't fit the site's rules and handles it. Walking the moderation line can be tough. On Codidact2 and (previously) Stack Exchange, I and my fellow moderators have sometimes had deep discussions of borderline cases. Is that post offensive to a reasonable person, or is it civilly expressing an unpopular idea? Is that link to the poster's book or blog spam, or is the problem that the affiliation isn't disclosed? How do we handle a case where a very small number of people say something is offensive and most people say it's not -- does it fail the reasonable-person principle, or is it a new trend that a lot of people don't yet know about? We human moderators would examine these issues, sometimes seek outside help, and take the smallest action that corrects an actual problem (often an edit, maybe a word with the user, sometimes a timed suspension).

Three things are really, really important here: (1) human decision-makers, (2) who can explain how they applied the public guidelines, with (3) a way to review and reverse decisions.

Automation isn't always bad. Most of us use automated spam filtering. Some sites have automation that flags content for moderator review. As a user I sometimes want to have automation available to me -- to inform me, but not to make irreversible decisions for me. I want my email system to route spam to a spam folder -- but I don't want it to delete it outright, like Gmail sometimes does. I want my browser to alert me that the certificate for the site I'm trying to visit isn't valid -- but I don't want it to bar me from proceeding anyway. I want a product listing for an electronic product to disclose that it is not UL-certified -- but I don't want a bot to block the sale or quietly remove that product from the seller's catalogue.

These are some of the ways that Twitter has been failing for a while. (Twitter isn't alone, of course, but it's the one everyone's paying attention to right now.) Twitter is pretty bad, Musk's Twitter is likely to be differently bad, and making it good is a hard problem.3

Twitter uses bots to moderate content, and those bots sometimes get it badly wrong. If the bots merely flagged content for human review, that would be ok -- but to do that at scale, Twitter would need to make fundamental changes to its model. No, the bots block the tweets and auto-suspend the users. To get unsuspended, a user has to delete the tweets, admit to wrongdoing, and promise not to do it "again" -- even if there's nothing wrong with the tweet. The people I've seen be hit by this were not able to find an appeal path. Combine this with opaque and arbitrary rules, and it's a nightmare.

Musk might shut down some of the sketchier moderation bots (it's always hard to know what's going on in Musk's head), but he's already promised his advertisers that Twitter won't be a free-for-all, so that means he's keeping some bot-based moderation, probably using different rules than last week's. He's also planning to fire most of the employees, meaning there'll be even fewer people to review issues and adjust the algorithms. And it's still a "shoot first, ask questions later" model. It's not assistive automation.

A bot that annotates content with "contrary to CDC guidelines" or "not UL-certified" or "Google sentiment score: mildly negative" or "Consumer Reports rating: 74" or "failed NPR fact-check" or "Fox News says fake"? Sure, go for it -- we've had metadata like the Good Housekeeping seal of approval and FDA nutrition information and kashrut certifications for a long time. Want to hide violent videos or porn behind a "view sensitive content" control? Also ok, at least if it's mostly not wrong. As a practical matter a platform should limit the number or let users say which assistance they want, but in principle, fine.

But that's not what Twitter does. Its bots don't inform; they judge and punish. Twitter has secret rules about what speech is allowed and what speech is not, uses bots to root out what they don't like today, takes action against the authors, and causes damage when they get it wrong. There are no humans in the loop to check their work, and there's no transparency.

It's not just Twitter, of course. Other platforms, either overwhelmed by scale or just trying to save some money, use bots to prune out content. Even with the best of intentions that can go wrong; when intentions are less pure, it's even worse.

Actual communities, and smaller platforms, can take advantage of human moderators if they want them. For large firehose-style platforms like Twitter, it seems to me, the solutions to the moderation problem lies in metadata and user preferences, not heavy-handed centralized automated deletions and suspensions. Give users information and the tools to filter -- and the responsibility to do so, or not. Take the decision away, and we're stuck with whatever the owner likes.

The alternative would be to use the Dreamwidth model: Dreamwidth performs no moderation that I'm aware of, I'm free to read (or stop reading) any author I want, and the platform won't push other content in front of me. This works for Dreamwidth, which doesn't need to push ads in front of millions of people to make money for its non-existent stockholders, but such slow growth is anathema to the big for-profit social networks.


  1. It was possible to delete posts on Usenet, but it was spotty and delayed. ↩︎

  2. The opinions in this post are mine and I'm not speaking for Codidact, where I am the community lead. ↩︎

  3. I'd say it's more socially hard than technically hard. ↩︎

Welcome to Elul

Elul is the month before Rosh Hashana. It started about a week ago. The season of repentance and introspection that characterizes the high holy days doesn't begin on Rosh Hashana; it begins earlier, in Elul. (The actual work of making amends and improving ourselves is year-round, of course.)

Even better than making amends is acting in a way to reduce the amount needed. In that nanosecond between seeing or hearing something and jumping to the "obvious" conclusion and acting on it, we can sometimes stop to consider other explanations. There's a lot of hair-trigger absolutist judging happening in our world today, and a small anecdote I saw on Twitter during this season struck me so I'm sharing it.

I almost yelled at a woman looking at an iPhone during Kol Nidre, but I just said "This is one of the most beautiful prayers you'll ever hear." She saw me looking, and explained she was checking her blood sugar. I wished her a healthier New Year. I finally conquered my snark! - @LibbyCone

Even when we think we know all the context, we might not know all the context.

Ice Dragon pentathlon

There is (in non-pandemic times) a major event in my kingdom (AEthelmearc), Ice Dragon. A feature of this event is the arts & sciences pentathlon, which used to be the premier A&S competition in the region. It was the premier A&S competition in the East Kingdom before AEthelmearc split off into its own kingdom.

The competition is divided into several major categories, like clothing and cooking and performance. Each major category has sub-categories like pre-1400 women's clothing and bread and storytelling. You can enter things in individual categories, and if you enter at least five different major categories, you can compete for the overall pentathlon prize. An important feature of the competition, in my opinion, is the cross-entry: if an item qualifies for more than one category, you didn't have to choose only one. Embroidered gown? Clothing and needlework. Belt woven from wool you spun, with a buckle you made? Spinning, weaving, and metalwork. And so on.

I haven't been tracking the event lately (I stopped traveling for SCA events even before the pandemic, due to both changing interests and the inherent Shabbat complications). I was reminded of the event by a post I saw tonight on the kingdom blog, which referred in passing to the limit of two categories for cross-entries. I'm not sure when that was introduced, but it was not always there.

With that rule change one small but fun challenge went away: the single-item pent entry. Can you come up with one work that legitimately fits five major categories? I did this one year and had great fun trying it, and learning some new crafts in the process (which should be one of the goals, encouraging growth). I'm disappointed to learn that this small bit of the event's history is no longer accessible.

It was a book. A book of music that I composed, illuminated (like books of hours), with an embroidered cover. I performed one of the pieces. The book was a gift for my then-baroness (of blessed memory); she had appointed me as her bard and I made the book to honor and thank her. But I embroidered the cover because of the Ice Dragon pent. And I might well have bought a blank bound book, focusing on the music and the illumination (my actual skills), but for the pent.

And I'm glad I did make the book. I learned about bookbinding. I asked a curator nicely and got a private tour of a collection of actual renaissance volumes so that I could inspect their bindings (which are usually not very visible when books are displayed open behind glass). My embroidery was not very good but was full of spirit, as they say.

The single-item pent entry is not the optimal path to winning the pent (if winning the pent is your goal). You can probably make five stronger entries by focusing and avoiding the constraints of other parts of the project. I did not win the pent the year I entered the book. But I had loads of fun with the project (and apparently made an impression). And my baroness really liked the book. So, win all around.

Ballot problems

Here in Pittsburgh, voting by mail in 2020 and in this year's primary was smooth for me. Ballots were mailed in time, the process was smooth, tracking worked. Naturally I assumed that for the minor off-year election today, the same would be true. Boy was I wrong.

My ballot was spoiled on arrival. It had my name printed on it (uh, secret ballot anyone?) along with a bar code. (Photo at end of post.) It was printed across part of the ballot, obscuring some candidate names. There were no return envelopes, neither the secrecy envelope nor the outer one with identifying info (the one you mail). Just this misprinted ballot in an envelope sent to me.

I visited the URL printed on that envelope and submitted a support ticket. Crickets. Later I called the phone number listed there. When I finally reached a human, the person said "oh you've reached the state; you need your county". So I tried to track them down. No luck.

It was now a week before the election. No time for a replacement ballot to arrive and be received back. I looked up how to vote in person (and confirmed their Covid protocols).

I want to interject that the people at my polling place today were great. This isn't their fault. They did everything they could to deal with this problem not of their making.

I learned this morning that this ballot misprinting happened to other people too. Mine was the first case in my precinct at my polling place, so they had to look up the instructions for handling a surrendered mail-in ballot. I had brought everything I received, as instructed. I filled out the form. Then they saw in their documentation that I had to hand over the ballot and the two return envelopes. The return envelopes I never got. We all agreed that my name being printed right on the ballot ought to confirm my ID for validation purposes (that's why they want the outer envelope, where my name should have been printed), but we didn't feel safe relying on logic. This is government, after all.

They offered to escalate so I could vote now but said that could take a while -- how long could I wait? I was on my way to work (I now go to the office one day a week). Fortunately my workplace is flexible that way, but I still didn't have another hour to spend on this at the time. I considered leaving and coming back after work, but figured anybody who could help worked 9-4 or something like that and wouldn't be available anyway.

So I cast a provisional ballot. I'm assured it will be counted some days hence. I have a tracking number. This still feels very wrong.

Even though my vote will probably be counted, even though it probably doesn't make a difference this time, I feel disenfranchised. What happens in the mid-terms next year when people are more motivated to place hurdles in front of voters? What happens to voters who are likely targets (like immigrants) or have mobility challenges or who lack confidence in standing up for their rights? I'm a white professional in the heart of a very blue city (albeit in a purple state) who had the time and perseverance to try to chase this down after the bad ballot arrived. I have way more advantages than many, and I failed. What hope did others have?

The problem wasn't at the state level where most of the attention is, and it wasn't actual election tampering as far as I can tell. It was an error made by the county that affected an unknown number of people. Nobody's watching counties in all the election shenanigans. I'm in Allegheny County, not voter-suppression-ville. This was an accident, but I couldn't get it corrected.

Brr.

Photo: Read more…

Looking back

A year in, I find myself thinking back to the beginnings. In January of 2020 we had early reports, increasing in February, but life went on mostly as normal anyway. There was a local SCA event on March 7, and part of me wanted to stay home but our choir was performing and a friend was coming in from out of town to attend (and crash with us), and we went and had a lovely time -- and a healthy one, fortunately.

Purim was a few days later, and at the last minute I decided not to go to a large gathering. (They advised the elderly to stay home, but they didn't cancel.) Our Shabbat minyan met on March 14, but we moved into the sanctuary, where the 25 or so of us could spread out in a room that seats over 300. We didn't know then, but it would be the last time we met in person for more than a year.

Over that weekend, or maybe Monday, the state had some early rumblings of a stay-at-home order. It must not have taken effect immediately, because I remember going into the office on the following Monday, and taking some equipment home with me so I could work from home. Our office formally closed around Wednesday, I think, but it was a formality; we'd all decided by then that staying home was the wiser move. And soon there was a stay-at-home order from the state.

My choir had cancelled that week's practice, and the director cancelled through the end of the month, with the idea that we'd look at other options (outdoors? a really large space? the home we were practicing in was clearly out of consideration). We were so optimistic back then, despite the warnings we'd gotten from other parts of the world. It wasn't that we thought we were invulnerable; rather, we thought that with a little care, one could mitigate the risk without having to completely isolate. Ha. Read more…

#RenewDemocracy

Seen on Twitter:

We're excited to launch the #RenewDemocracy Challenge with @AVindman

During a dark time, we need to showcase the best of our democracy. Share a short video about what democracy means to you & nominate 3 friends to do the same! Be sure to use hashtag: #RenewDemocracy (source)

A friend tagged me. I responded there, but it didn't fit in one tweet and I want to record it here too. I'll preserve the original structure, meaning some compact language to fit in individual tweets.


Democracy is a decision by a society to band together to support all, not just the majority & powerful. It means working together for common good, not bowing to thugs. It means freedom, not free rein to cause damage. It means using your voice not your fist. 1/4

Democracy means being able to chart your own course so long as you don't trample others. It means owning your body, your beliefs, your goals - and consequences of your acts - but no one else's.

It means offering a hand to a stranger in need who is also part of this society. 2/4

Democracy means working together w/people not like us to understand other perspectives - a necessary precondition to make decisions about how the public commons operates & what policies need to change. It means each voice counting, once. It means losing, or winning, w/grace. 3/4

Democracy means hearing diverse perspectives but not granting any one of them authority. Democracy is communal and consensual or it fails. Fearing the mob isn't democracy; neither is minority rule.

Democracy is complicated and essential for civil society. 4/4


And here I'll add: any constructive societal structure, including democracy, requires dealing with complex ideas, nuance, and context, far more than fits in a sound bite or a handful of tweets. It means learning and adjusting one's perceptions, not holding stubbornly to One True Way firm in the belief that all others are wrong and out to get you. It means holding contradictory ideas in your head and reasoning about them and their implications. It means thinking critically, and also not dismissing new ideas because they're new. It means having the humility to know that we don't know everything, even about ourselves let alone the others in our shared society, while having the courage and confidence to speak up when we perceive wrongs. It means having the compassion to care about others and not just ourselves.

It means recognizing that sometimes you'll disagree with those on your "side" or agree with those on the "other side". We talk in the US about left and right, but it's not a line, it's a canvas. We can't reduce our discourse, or our caricatures of each other, to binary positions -- either/or, in or out. People are complicated, and societies made out of people are complicated.

The polarization we see in our country today isn't just bad because it's divisive and too often violent. It's also bad because it erases all of that complexity in the middle, the stuff we need to be able to understand and engage with if we are to get along.