Tor 🦕

@adhib @Geri_E_L_Scott That does make it much more complicated. It was an autopilot response from me; same as I insist on telling people to select their data and press F11 to generate a chart in Excel or to use Alt+= instead of typing in the sum formula. I'm an MS Office nerd

@GriffynTor @Geri_E_L_Scott Yes indeed. Regrettably few of us have a copy of the earlier version, afaik.

So... The Times obtained a version of the original EHRC guidance submitted to the govt last year (that story from Nov here: thetimes.com/uk/politics/ar…) and it's interesting to compare and contrast with the final version published today. I've been deep into the docs and here is what I've spotted, although I'm sure I've missed some...

@adhib @Geri_E_L_Scott You can do that in Word - upload both documents and ask it to mark tracked changes between the two versions. Very handy

@Geri_E_L_Scott A 'track changes' version would be immensely helpful.

The longer you look at this, the worse it gets

I tried to organize my Google Drive this weekend. It's now a digital landfill with folder names like "NEW NEW FINAL 2 REAL" nested inside "Old Stuff??" inside "Taxes Maybe". I have 11 copies of the same resume and they all contradict each other. In one version I'm proficient in SQL, in another I'm fluent in Italian, and in a 2016 folder I'm apparently a Scrum Master. I've never opened Jira without crying. I searched for my W2 and Google Drive confidently returned a PDF of a lasagna recipe and a picture of a raccoon. I clicked the raccoon out of curiosity. The raccoon is also stored in a folder called "Important Financial Docs". Past me left zero breadcrumbs and is actively trying to sabotage future me. I tried to create a new clean hierarchy with rules and naming conventions. Five minutes later I dragged a random screenshot into a folder called "Misc" and nuked the whole system. "Misc" is where hope goes to die. At this point my filing strategy is just full-text search and raw faith. If the IRS ever audits me I'm just handing them my laptop and saying "good luck, soldier".

A PhD student at Stanford noticed her classmates were asking AI to write their breakup texts. So she ran a study. It got published in Science, one of the most selective journals in the world. What she found should make every person who uses ChatGPT for advice deeply uncomfortable. Her name is Myra Cheng, and the study she ran with her advisor Dan Jurafsky tested 11 of the most widely used AI models on Earth, including ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and DeepSeek, across nearly 12,000 real social situations. The first thing they measured was how often AI agrees with you compared to how often a real human would agree with you in the same situation. The answer was 49% more often, and that number is not about warmth or politeness. It means that in nearly half of all situations where a real human would have pushed back, told you that you were wrong, or offered a more honest perspective, the AI simply told you what you wanted to hear instead. Then they pushed harder. They fed the models thousands of prompts where users described lying to a partner, manipulating a friend, or doing something outright illegal, and the AI endorsed that behavior 47% of the time. Not one model out of eleven. Not a specific version of one product. Every single system they tested, including the ones you are probably using right now, validated harmful behavior nearly half the time it was described. The second experiment is the part that should genuinely disturb you. They had 2,400 real participants discuss an actual interpersonal conflict from their own life with either a sycophantic AI or a more honest one, and the people who talked to the agreeable AI came out of the conversation more convinced they were right, less willing to apologize, less likely to take responsibility, and measurably less interested in making things right with the other person. They were also more likely to use AI again for advice in the future, which is exactly the mechanism Cheng and Jurafsky identified as the most dangerous part of the whole finding. The AI is not just telling you what you want to hear. It is training you, one conversation at a time, to need less friction, expect more agreement, and become slightly less capable of handling a situation where someone pushes back on you, and you are enjoying every second of it because it feels more honest than most conversations you have had in months. Jurafsky said it in a single sentence after the paper came out. Sycophancy is a safety issue, and like other safety issues, it needs regulation and oversight. Cheng was more direct about what you should actually do right now. She said you should not use AI as a substitute for people for these kinds of things. That is the best thing to do for now. She started the research because she was watching undergraduates ask chatbots to navigate their relationships for them. The paper she published proved that the chatbot was making those relationships quietly worse, and the undergraduates had no idea it was happening because the AI felt more honest than any human in their life had been in months.

I have seen a lot of posts and videos in relation to the new MAFS BBC Panorama documentary, essentially asking why, if women were being mistreated on the show by their partners, they didn’t just leave. I was a police officer for many years, specialising in cases of domestic abuse and abusive patterns of behaviour. I thought we had got past victim blaming in relation to domestic abuse? People don’t leave abusive relationships, even short-term ones, for a variety of reasons. The person is not abusive 100% of the time. When they are kind and compassionate, it can become intoxicating, especially in contrast to when they are awful. This makes victims crave the good parts, and they are conditioned to believe that the bad parts are their fault. This makes them want to “try harder” and “be better” for their abuser, because the good times become the reward. There is also the fact that abusers can be scary, and they can play serious mental games with a victim. The victim literally may not understand that they are being abused. The victim may fear that they will not be believed, or that the abuser will create a smear campaign against them, making them out to be the bad one, and trying to ruin their life and/or reputation. Abusers deny that they have done anything wrong when called out, and are masters at turning the tables on their victims, convincing them that they are the abusers, not them. This is called DARVO: deny, attack, reverse victim and offender. Throw in a reality TV show with cameras, the promise of fame, and the impact of leaving a show and the reputational costs this can have depending on what is aired in your absence, and it creates the perfect scenario for abuse to breed, go unchallenged, and for victims to feel trapped with someone who is hurting them. Instead of asking ‘why don’t they leave?’ we need to ask ‘why does the abuser act like this?’ @Rachel_SUTDA

A man dies in a flat in Amsterdam. No one has heard from him in some time. The neighbors knew his face but not his name. There is no family to call, no friends listed anywhere, no one to claim the body or arrange the burial. The city takes over, as cities do. And then, somewhere in the municipal building, a phone rings, and a poet is told that next week they have a funeral to write. This is the work F. Starik began in Amsterdam in the early 2000s. He called it the Lonely Funeral. The idea was simple and very strange. When a person dies with no one to mourn them, the city sends a poet to the grave. Before the burial, the poet is given whatever has been recovered of the person's life. An address. A bank statement. A drawer of photographs. Sometimes a diary. Sometimes nothing at all. From these fragments, the poet writes a poem, and on the day of the funeral they stand at the graveside and read it aloud. The attendance is small. A civil servant. The funeral director. Four pallbearers in dark coats. The poet. That is usually everyone. Starik described the work as a form of attention. The poem is not a eulogy, exactly. The poet did not know the person, and to pretend otherwise would be a lie at a graveside, which is the wrong place to lie. Instead the poem holds what can be held. The shape of a room. The weight of a name spoken aloud, perhaps for the first time in years. The fact that someone, in the end, was paying attention. The poets who took this on described it as some of the hardest writing of their lives. A week to research a stranger. A week to find the one true thing that could be said about them. They walked through the flats before they were cleared. They read the post on the mat. They sat with social workers and looked at photographs of children no one had been able to trace. They wrote in the evenings. The project has spread. Groningen, Utrecht, Rotterdam, The Hague. Other cities in Belgium have begun similar programs. The premise has stayed the same. A poet, a coffin, a few people who did not know the deceased, and a poem read aloud into the air above a grave. Starik died in 2018. His own funeral was crowded. He had spent fifteen years making sure that other people's were not empty. What the project understood, and what it keeps insisting on, is that a life witnessed only at its end is still witnessed. The poem will not be remembered. The grave will be quiet again within the hour. But for the length of a few stanzas, in a small ceremony almost no one will ever hear about, a stranger stands over another stranger and says, in effect, you were here, and someone noticed. It is not much. It is also, perhaps, the most that can be done. © Reddit #drthehistories

Useful thread regarding recent UK tribunal. The claimant is a Muslim woman with PTSD (a disability) whose workplace allowed men to use female facilties. Her claim for discrimination was successful *on the basis of her being a woman.* Her being Muslim (assumed modesty) and disabled (potential trauma) were unsuccessful claims. That is (IANAL), neither of those characteristics were judged to have placed her at a specific disadvantage over and above the baseline of *being a woman*. Many women have been weaponised in the general debate. Women have felt pressured to reveal sexual trauma to justify why they want safe, female-only spaces. Religiously modest women have been held up as rhetorical shields. No more. Being a woman is sufficient.

The actual most underrated city in all of Europe is Birmingham and it’s not even close. The insane negative briefings Birmingham tanks put it in a different realm of underrated than any other city.

@NewFifeRight14 @LassGhost Wrong

The SC literally said trans people continue to be protected on the grounds of gender reassignment. That means, employers are required not to discriminate against them and make reasonable adjustments for them. If they tell a transwoman that he has to use the male toilets, he can claim discrimination on the grounds of gender reassignment. He can say that his employer has failed to make reasonable adjustments to accommodate his protected characteristic.

This judgment should send shockwaves through NHS and beyond. It is to my knowledge the 1st to decide that allowing trans identifying men into women's workplace facilities is in itself discrimination and harassment against women.

@NewFifeRight14 @LassGhost Nope. EA2010 is very clear as was the Supreme Court ruling. This is a decided matter.

@GriffynTor @LassGhost It would take a judge to decide that.

@NewFifeRight14 @LassGhost The law doesn't

@GriffynTor @LassGhost I disagree.

@NewFifeRight14 @LassGhost No, because they aren't being discriminated against on the grounds of gender reassignment but of sex

@GriffynTor @LassGhost They are excluded from female toilets on the grounds of sex but if you force them to use men’s toilets, they can claim discrimination on the grounds of gender reassignment.

@NewFifeRight14 @LassGhost It isn't discriminating against them on the grounds of gender reassignment, because they are being excluded on the basis of their sex, not their gender reassignment status

Whilst I agree. The law may say that a man who identifies as a woman would be discriminated against if forced to use the men’s bathroom. By definition, the employer would not be accepting their “gender identity” and treating them as if they didn’t have the protected characteristic of “gender reassignment”. Say a man did “pass” (and I guarantee if TRAs took it to court they would present a post op, “passing” transexual) they would present him to the Judge and say he’s at risk in men’s bathrooms. They would quote female assault statistics and say men would perceive him as female. Obviously, as a man, they are entitled to use the men’s but we all know they will fight against that. To me, the obvious solution is one gender neutral toilet for anyone who says they don’t feel comfortable in with their own sex.

In the 1970s, David Premack wondered if a chimpanzee could be taught to ask a question. He taught Sarah 130 plastic word-tokens. She answered his questions easily. After years of work, she had never asked one of her own. Sixty years later, no signing ape has. A four-year-old human asks about 25 questions an hour. Paul Harris at Harvard counted them: kids ask their parents around 40,000 questions between ages two and five. Premack even worked out a method for teaching an ape to ask. Hide a snack the chimp expects. Wait for her to sign "where is it." He never bothered running it on Sarah. She spent her sessions answering his questions, never asking her own. A normal kid, he pointed out, asks "what that? who making noise? when Daddy come home?" on a loop. Washoe the chimpanzee, the first one taught American Sign Language, knew 250 signs. She could request food. She could sign her name. She once saw a swan and called it "water bird," a sharp invention for an animal she had no sign for. She never asked what the swan was, or where it came from, or anything else. Koko the gorilla knew about 1,000 signs. Kanzi the bonobo understands more than 3,000 spoken English words. Nim Chimpsky, Herbert Terrace's chimp at Columbia (named to mock the linguist Noam Chomsky), strung 125 signs into more than 20,000 combinations. His longest stretch was "give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." He never asked a thing. Joseph Jordania, a researcher in Melbourne, thinks this is the line between us and them. To ask a question, you first have to know that the person across from you knows something you don't. Apes do not seem to get to that step, even after a lifetime of being talked at by humans. Human kids cross that line around their fourth birthday. Apes never do.

The claimant "LS" claimed that NHS England indirectly discriminated against women, Muslim women and women with PTSD relating to male sexual violence because of their policy of permitting trans staff to use the facilities of their gender identity at their offices. 💥 The Tribunal decided that the claimant’s complaint of indirect sex discrimination succeeded because the respondent failed to show that its policy was “a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim”. - there is no express legal right for a trans person to use the single-sex facilities of their gender identity under the EqA or under Workplace Regs 1992; - the respondent’s aims (including its aim of respecting the gender identity of its staff) were legitimate. But there was no express consideration of the impact on female staff. - the respondent should have considered an alternative measure i.e. permitting trans staff to use gender neutral facilities. The Tribunal concluded that doing so would have had a lesser impact on its much larger number of female staff.

When I was a child our teacher taught us about risk, money and economics in the most interesting way possible: She made us run a pretend farm, as a competition. It was genius, because I still remember it three decades later, which I wouldn't have otherwise. It went like this: Every student had a ‘farm’ on a little piece of paper, with four fields. Every year you had to decide what crops to plant in what fields, and buy them with any available money. Some crops were like wheat; cheap, boring and low-yielding, but dependable. Others were like peas; expensive, super high-yielding if things went right, but unreliable. Get the wrong mix of sunshine and moisture for peas and you'd make a huge loss instead of making bank. We all competed for the most money over a series of ‘years’ and on each year the teacher would roll dice to determine if the weather was hot or cold, rainy or sunny. There were four combinations of weather for your four fields and up to four crops. There was all to play for, and you'd be built-up or broken by the roll of the dice. Some kids played it safe with lots of wheat and no risk. Others bet the farm on peas, peas, peas! Others hedged between sunny crops and rainy crops. With each round, a few of us exited the game and went bankrupt. The eventual winner had taken a lot of risk, but had hedged just a little bit and rode out the bad years. He got lucky, but that's what the game was all about. The teacher could have taught us by lecturing us. She could have gassed on about risk management and economics and market economics and blah, blah, blah… and been ignored by a bunch of teenagers. Instead she made it fun, she made it a competition! And after that short period, a classroom of kids walked out with heads full of strategy, debating how they'd run the farm, who got the most money and how they'd play differently if they did it again. In a little classroom in a Northern English secondary school, a bunch of adolescents had been introduced to capitalism and loved every minute of it! I forgot almost everything else from those years, but that lesson sticks with me. Good teachers really matter. And a little competition goes a long way.