The right freedom to protect

Delaware Supreme Court didn't actually give a blanket protection for the anonymity of abusive speech, though that's how the decision has been portrayed on NPR. Biz Report says it found that Smyrna town councilman Patrick Cahill needed to make a stronger case that he and his wife, Julia, had been defamed before forcing Comcast Cable to disclose the identity of an anonymous blogger. A blanket protection for anonymous abusive speech is not what we want. We all have to accept harms to our own interests to protect the good of our common interest, and the harm of personally admitting to abusive speech is a small price to pay for protection from abusive incitement from secret sources.

The right to be vicious in your speech, just so long as it isn't really true, as argued on "On the Media" today, is stretching the purpose of freedom of speech the wrong way. What we need to protect is a freedom of truthful speech, with a generous tolerance for misunderstanding, misstatement, colorful expression and the pain of exposure. Protecting internet anonymity for the purpose of encouraging incendiary misstatement is wrong. Just because some harm to an author might be prevented by hiding their identity in some cases, there's a greater harm in allowing an open season on the truth with a blanket protection of anonymous sources.

Among other things it would imply that abuses of free speech like the "Swift Boat Vets for Truth" could be done anonymously. Wild speech does come up occasionally, and should be protected and seen for what it is, including who says it. Guaranteeing anonymity opens the door to abusive, deceitful and criminal incitement, the opposite of what free speech is intended to guarantee. I personally think that public interests should be capable of identifying any source on the web, and that free thinking people should do the work of holding them accountable for using it responsibly.

Crimewave's end again

On Aug. 7 this year I posted "A Quick Study" of this same history of murder rates in New York State. The relatively sudden and very final end of the murder crimewave, that started in the 60's innercity unrest, is a dramatic indicator of an internal cultural change. Unlike the major community change of heart in the 60's that lead to the crime wave, the end was by a similar dramatic community change of heart that was largely silent. The question is, what happened?

The strong systems indicator in the curve is how it rapidly shifts from high and bumpy to low and dead flat, a clear change of state. There's really no outside factor yet identified that matches that timing or finality of change, nor explains the more or less sudden relief from a long persistent culture of violence. In that post I also commented that in the studies I'd read it was odd that no one seems to have asked the people involved what they thought happened. There probably are some scientists who have done so, but I decided to go ask the question on the streets of NYC myself, and see what I got. It's good reading.(http://www.synapse9.com/cw/cw_interview_notes_10-22_audio.pdf)

It certainly is only one data set, but does expose an unheard from inside point of view. I just handed out a blow-up of the curve asking "were you around here in the 90's", and "do you remember what happened here", leading them a little until they proposed something they remembered going on that might have caused it. The file contains brief notes reflecting 50 good conversations with people, four audio file links, and my compilation of the reasons people gave. It's always great to get out and talk to people, and one rarely has something to ask them that is so central to their own lives and mysterious at the same time. Judge for yourself. Naturally I described what I could make sense of, but people raised some very interesting things.

Among the big missing pieces of data, from a systems point of view, is whether each city of NYS had the same trend as the aggregate (all of them together), and particularly whether the turning points for each city were all at the same time, or in sequence. That would suggest or rule out several paths of causation. One might also ask, did I bias my findings by possibly asking the questions in a way that determined the answer I got? People do indeed commonly find what they're looking for because of that. Well, I found something like I was looking for, but I tried to be careful about that. I did push people to recall what was going on inside the culture, events without names, things easily forgotten. From my own experience of living on West 96th street at the time I thought the turnaround might have had something to do with those amazing memorial murals that the wild style graffiti artists made on handball walls all over town for the families and friends of the victims of the street. I never guessed that when I asked people about that specifically they would remember but not give it much importance. The timing and kind of message of those memorials sent is a good match for the timing and kind of change that occurred though... so who knows. That a huge sudden change in our local culture of such enormous importance would go essentially unnoticed is still the most amazing thing.

Ok Ok, I give up

What remains hidden in the hot debate over "intelligent design" and Darwin's evolution, miraculously, is the strategic location of the odd gaps in the fossil record. Where they're located is rather embarrassing to both sides.

I think if you're thinking clearly about the problem, not defending one side or the other, the answer is obvious. The gaps in the record contain almost all the biological change that the theory of 'little steps' is supposed to explain, occurring at the origin of most species. Evolution actually proceeds by big steps (the dirty truth). The chain of connection from species to species is still obvious, it's just that the steps between them are big, separated by long periods without change. It's deceptively called "punctuated equilibrium" (not 'big steps' which would actually expose the problem), invented by Steve Gould and Paul Eldridge in 1972. Not too bad a summary is available at http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/punc-eq.html.

Most scientists have been trying to hide the real truth ever since, saying stupid things like "that's what Darwin meant all along", and the "fitness landscape must just have that profile" etc. Blaming it on the Deity, on the other hand, having him intervening again and again and again, at the origin of every species in the long long chains of them, makes him look stupid or at the very least indecisive. Worse still, God is then portrayed as a major interventionist strangely uncaring about *us* and our squabbles. If you understand where the gaps occur (many coordinated changes happening rapidly in a single niche, local growth spurts), how they occur is obvious.