241–250 of 255 posts
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If blood feuds become that much of an intractable issue, why not target those regions for fentanyl-powered self-mollification? That's obviously a galaxy brain argument, but what's to stop someone from going Tim McVeigh over a routine miscarriage of justice?
What?
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Shaking and child abuse are obviously real things. However, the way to diagnose shaken baby syndrome has been the subject of an ongoing scientific controversy for decades. With several colleagues, we have just published a textbook about this sensitive issue [1]. I've also written about how I, as a neuroscience researcher and software engineer, came into this diagnosis [2]. Finally, an introduction to this fascinating…
Hey, can you please post your cambridgeblog.com article on HN? As you say in your article, there must be hundreds, if not thousands of people in jail for having shaken their babies to death. I can't imagine any harm more horrible that our society can perpetrate than punishing someone for the death of their loved ones when they had nothing to do with it. To think that this is done systematically is inconsolable, insuf…
I totally agree. This is insufferable.
This is not just a virtual, academic subject to me. I've cofounded an association of French families [1] that has been contacted by 1300+ people in the past 8 years or so. I see parents losing their baby to foster care for 6, 12, 24 months or more. To say they are broken for life is an understatement. I see fathers, mothers, nannies maintain their innocence for years until they are convicted to 5 to 15 years of jail, because medical experts have certified that no other explanation than shaking could have ever caused the child's findings. Three more people I know have been convicted in the past couple of weeks. I feel so absolutely desperate and hopeless seeing people going to jail one after the other, week after week, while I can't do anything about it. All cases are not illegitimate, of course, but there are serious reasons to be doubtful when there is no external evidence of trauma, strong and sustained denials, and no antecedent of abuse.
For sure, we have tried to alert medical authorities, doctors, politicians, institutions, judges, celebrities, scientists, journalists for years, and almost no one actually cares, while those who do will do everything in their power to cancel and suppress us (Waney Squier is one among many other examples, Chapter 1 of our Cambridge book provides more examples). I see no other example in our modern history of an active, systematic endeavor that has been so destructive to so many people for so long.
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A responsible government would punish the vigilantes instead of the innocent or rehabilitated.
I always wonder how moral and fair it is to provide an opportunity for rehabilitation to someone guilty of a heinous crime, since they didn't provide a second chance to their victims. It seem like a great cosmic injustice. As for punishing vigilantes, should settling the score be more severely punished than the original crime? Let's say a person kills someone I love, and I take my revenge by killing them, am I now no…
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Doesn't have to be miserable, in theory, if it's used for serious murders with sexual/aggravating components; it doesn't have to hurt the other family. What hurt them is the behavior. You really going to feel good about your brother senselessly murdering three people, because "at least he's alive". The notion of standing behind loved ones, no matter what, is not universal.
The comment I replied to said: "The family of the murderer must go through the same anguish and pain that the murder victim’s family went through". So that's the explicit goal.
I wonder if they were really focusing on the family needing to be punished, vs. the murderer knowing what they've done to their family. In such a case, you could argue that it does not and should not hurt the family any more (or not much).
You don't have to stand by family, and can feel very little different about their receiving justice; perhaps a bit worse, since you don't know what else they could do before being laid to rest.
I thought this was getting dismissed too quickly, but I forgot how directly this was said. Yes, if you literally want to hurt their families, that's just insanity; lashing out at people who had nothing to do with it...
... although there's a really interesting argument that you're always doing this when you punish someone.
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The comment I replied to said: "The family of the murderer must go through the same anguish and pain that the murder victim’s family went through". So that's the explicit goal.
Yeah, the listed it among many things, and I agree that's messed up, but honestly only that part in a really visceral way. I wonder if they were really focusing on the family needing to be punished, vs. the murderer knowing what they've done to their family. In such a case, you could argue that it does not and should not hurt the family any more (or not much). You don't have to stand by family, and can feel very litt…
It's the intention that matters.
Punishments have several functions -- to work as deterrent, to keep society safe from the perpetrator, to change them so that they won't repeat their crime in the future, to compensate the victims if possible, and also pure retribution, to let people feel "they got what they deserved."
To me, that last one is the least important, and "tooth for a tooth" makes the punisher guilty of the same crime as the perpetrator.
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Yeah, the listed it among many things, and I agree that's messed up, but honestly only that part in a really visceral way. I wonder if they were really focusing on the family needing to be punished, vs. the murderer knowing what they've done to their family. In such a case, you could argue that it does not and should not hurt the family any more (or not much). You don't have to stand by family, and can feel very litt…
> ... although there's a really interesting argument that you're always doing this when you punish someone. It's the intention that matters. Punishments have several functions -- to work as deterrent, to keep society safe from the perpetrator, to change them so that they won't repeat their crime in the future, to compensate the victims if possible, and also pure retribution, to let people feel "they got what they des…
When I said "punishment" I meant the purely revenge version. I was basically working from that assumption, and this is what we'd been previously discussing.
So, I was purely speaking from a harm perspective. The argument is that it makes no sense to try to harm anyone, for any action, no matter how evil.
Without "free will" this is a violent act of senseless aggression against the innocent. Interestingly, if it's an animal we think it probably doesn't have "free will", however we accept this as a reason IN FAVOR of disregarding their rights (eg. the killer bear doesn't think and feel like us, just shoot it).
With modern sensibilities, you shouldn't hurt people unless they do something under their own "free will"; but this is never true, if we don't have "free will" to begin with.
So if an animal kills we use their lack of free will as a reason to kill them, but if a person doesn't have free will, then that's a reason they should be spared; doesn't this just seem like we've created another spiritual concept, to shape based on our cultural values.
P.S. Even arguing the inverse case, it's tempting to use lack of free will as a justification for leniency; at the same time you'll be very quick to use some form of it as a reason in favor of the sanctity of life.
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Hey, can you please post your cambridgeblog.com article on HN? As you say in your article, there must be hundreds, if not thousands of people in jail for having shaken their babies to death. I can't imagine any harm more horrible that our society can perpetrate than punishing someone for the death of their loved ones when they had nothing to do with it. To think that this is done systematically is inconsolable, insuf…
Sure, done: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37650402 I totally agree. This is insufferable. This is not just a virtual, academic subject to me. I've cofounded an association of French families [1] that has been contacted by 1300+ people in the past 8 years or so. I see parents losing their baby to foster care for 6, 12, 24 months or more. To say they are broken for life is an understatement. I see fathers, mothe…
Thanks! Although I just saw it and didn't have the chance to upvote it when it was posted. Let's hope it gets on the second chance queue. It's a good article, well written and level-headed.
>> This is not just a virtual, academic subject to me.
I can tell. Thank you for your indefatigable advocacy.
I read about Shaken Baby Syndrome some time ago and since then I've kept bookmarks of cases I see in the news that seem to be false convictions. I remember one in particular of a British man who was accused of having murdered his baby daughter by shaking. The case has stuck in my mind because the press reported how a Playstation was found on the living room table and the prosecution alleged that the daughter's crying had disturbed the father's playing, and so he had shaken her so he could continue playing. I could not believe that such a far-fetched conjecture, virtually impossible to falsify, would be accepted by judges and juries and thought that for the prosecution to be grasping for straws like that they must really have nothing concrete to go on, but the father was put in jail nonetheless. I don't have my bookmarks at hand now so I can't look up his name.
I suspect that when legal and medical experts claim that SBS cases don't only take the evidence of the triad into account, that's the kind of "evidence" that they mean they also consider: just-so stories that stop only short of calling the family pet as a witness.
Edit: I just realised - your association is called "adikia". "Injustice" in my native language, Greek.
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People who intentionally killed a kid "accidentally" may well promptly go to the ER to establish plausible deniability. There may be no clear, bright line making it super obvious who is merely a dumb schmuck without parenting skills and who is a murderer. We should do a better job of putting out quality parenting info for free and also provide appropriate legal consequences.
SBS is overwhelmingly an accidental harm. WTF do people imagine when they say “murderer”?
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Shaking and child abuse are obviously real things. However, the way to diagnose shaken baby syndrome has been the subject of an ongoing scientific controversy for decades. With several colleagues, we have just published a textbook about this sensitive issue [1]. I've also written about how I, as a neuroscience researcher and software engineer, came into this diagnosis [2]. Finally, an introduction to this fascinating…
OK, but that still doesn't explain the connection between SBS and hypnosis (and Texas for that matter). Is there a particular history of using hypnosis to convict innocent people of shaking babies to death in Texas and impose the death penalty on them? Is this common knowledge? The original comment to which I was responding still makes absolutely no sense to me. And getting downvoted because I asked for clarification…
The problem is: 1. The science seems to point towards ‘Shaken Baby Syndrome’ being able to be caused by several different things, including ones that don’t even involve physical trauma, so physical shaking is only one cause amongst many whereas most doctors and the justice system still mostly confidentially assert it’s always from shaking. Saying SBS is always a result of shaking is junk science.
2. Hypnosis is a way to extract confessions, but it’s probably extremely likely to extract false confessions. Hence why it’s generally disallowed, because it’s pseudoscience.
3. The particular case involving (1) assuming SBS is always from shaking and (2) a false confession from hypnosis happened in Texas.
So that’s the link.
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Why? Shaken Baby Syndrome is a real thing. https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/shaken-baby-s... [UPDATE] To those of you downvoting me, would you kindly explain why? It seems like a reasonable question to me.
Shaking and child abuse are obviously real things. However, the way to diagnose shaken baby syndrome has been the subject of an ongoing scientific controversy for decades. With several colleagues, we have just published a textbook about this sensitive issue [1]. I've also written about how I, as a neuroscience researcher and software engineer, came into this diagnosis [2]. Finally, an introduction to this fascinating…