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AI got the blame for the Iran school bombing. The truth is more worrying

theguardian.com

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Re: AI got the blame for the Iran school bombing. The truth is more worrying

#71

Post by jazz9k »

dbt00 wrote: post #69
jvanderbot wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recommend looking closely at the New York Times analysis. There were factors that might have mitigated this as a strike target, but it also really did look like a part of the compound (and it originally was!). Yes, with hindsight, we can definitively know, and with sufficient time each target could probably have been positively ID'd, but there was precisely one mis-strike in 1000s of sorties, so this already is a l…

How many American schoolchildren have Iran killed in the last 25 years? How many Iranian schoolchildren have America killed? Where's your moral justification for this war of choice if "oops, 137 dead kids is a normal expected outcome"?

[flagged]

Re: AI got the blame for the Iran school bombing. The truth is more worrying

#72

Post by gambutin »

dede2026 wrote: post #24
shykes wrote: post #19

You can't have a serious discussion of this bombing without addressing the information warfare component. To this day we don't know what actually happened . Between the general public and the facts, there are many middlemen, all with their own distorting factor: the IRGC; the US government; western press outlets such as the Guardian; and the people quoted by the press. IRGC is making claims that no other party can ve…

[flagged]

How is this a useful comment?

Re: AI got the blame for the Iran school bombing. The truth is more worrying

#73

Post by jmye »

gowld wrote: post #28

[flagged]

> This was a choice to use children as human shields

Perhaps we should have, you know, just not bombed that particular fucking site until the end of the fucking school day if it was such a vital target. God forbid we act like a vaguely intelligent country, instead of drunkly screaming "maximum lethality" at every conceivable opportunity.

Re: AI got the blame for the Iran school bombing. The truth is more worrying

#74

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

amarant wrote: post #52
20after4 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Replacing one java tool with another doesn't solve anyone's problems. If they'd only used Rust then lives would have been saved.

Meh, that sounds like a cargo-cult to me ;)

Don't go there.

Re: AI got the blame for the Iran school bombing. The truth is more worrying

#75

Post by gambutin »

applfanboysbgon wrote: post #31
shykes wrote: post #19

You can't have a serious discussion of this bombing without addressing the information warfare component. To this day we don't know what actually happened . Between the general public and the facts, there are many middlemen, all with their own distorting factor: the IRGC; the US government; western press outlets such as the Guardian; and the people quoted by the press. IRGC is making claims that no other party can ve…

[flagged]

I feel very bad for the children and their relatives. What happened is really terrible.

I wish there was the same level of rigour and energy applied to investigating the 40,000 deaths in early January. There are countless videos online.

I simply don’t understand why 150 people receive so much attention while 40,000 don’t.

This saddens me because it feels like the focus is on who was responsible rather than who lost their lives.

Re: AI got the blame for the Iran school bombing. The truth is more worrying

#76

Post by YZF »

shykes wrote: post #19

You can't have a serious discussion of this bombing without addressing the information warfare component. To this day we don't know what actually happened . Between the general public and the facts, there are many middlemen, all with their own distorting factor: the IRGC; the US government; western press outlets such as the Guardian; and the people quoted by the press. IRGC is making claims that no other party can ve…

You're not wrong but what we can tell from open sources is:

- The building does seem to have actually been a school and "detached" from the rest of the military complex.

- The school the Iranians claim it was does seem to exist even if it's not 100% clear that's the identical location.

- At the time of the attack school would have been in session.

- The signature of the attack seems similar between all the buildings attacked and we have footage showing a Tomahawk hitting the area.

Another thing we can tell is that the US has to know the truth here and isn't coming out with an official statement.

And I'm saying this as someone who thinks the Iranian regime is evil, needs to be struck down, was trying to acquire nuclear weapons etc.

As to the numbers I agree they are to be treated with suspicion. The Iranians are obviously motivated to lie, inflate them, and treat all casualties as civilians. But we can still try and estimate given the size of the building what would be the number of students. We can also estimate the outcome of the missile hitting the building and correlate with the photos and satellite imagery, and until we have better data use those estimates.

Re: AI got the blame for the Iran school bombing. The truth is more worrying

#77

Post by vkou »

jazz9k wrote: post #71
dbt00 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many American schoolchildren have Iran killed in the last 25 years? How many Iranian schoolchildren have America killed? Where's your moral justification for this war of choice if "oops, 137 dead kids is a normal expected outcome"?

[flagged]

There are plenty of military bases next to elementary schools in the US.

Where do you think the kids of soldiers go to school?

Re: AI got the blame for the Iran school bombing. The truth is more worrying

#78

Post by sophacles »

jazz9k wrote: post #71
dbt00 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many American schoolchildren have Iran killed in the last 25 years? How many Iranian schoolchildren have America killed? Where's your moral justification for this war of choice if "oops, 137 dead kids is a normal expected outcome"?

[flagged]

The us has over 150 elementary schools on military bases. If you use a more colloquial definition of military base, many many national guard armories are on the same block as elementary schools or even right next to them.

Can you cite anything that says all iranian military bases are next to elementary schools? If they are on ALL bases, that makes hitting an elementary school on base less forgivable, not more, because if its a fact of every iranian military base, it's a lot harder to claim good intelligence and also that they didn't check that the part of base being bombed was the school.

Also, how is that relevant?

Re: AI got the blame for the Iran school bombing. The truth is more worrying

#79

Post by Denzel »

jvanderbot wrote: post #36
beloch wrote: post #23

"Three clicks convert a data point on the map into a formal detection and move it into a targeting pipeline. These targets then move through columns representing different decision-making processes and rules of engagement. The system recommends how to strike each target – which aircraft, drone or missile to use, which weapon to pair with it – what the military calls a “course of action”. The officer selects from the…

I recommend looking closely at the New York Times analysis. There were factors that might have mitigated this as a strike target, but it also really did look like a part of the compound (and it originally was!). Yes, with hindsight, we can definitively know, and with sufficient time each target could probably have been positively ID'd, but there was precisely one mis-strike in 1000s of sorties, so this already is a l…

So I read the entire TFA, where do you see “quotes [from] those in the know who believe this should have been eliminated as a target”? I saw no such quotes about the school in TFA. Maybe I missed it.

> there was precisely one mis-strike in 1000s of sorties

How did you verify this? Because I’ll remind you, the U.S. administration denied responsibility for some time before owning up to this due to public pressure. Absent public pressure, I guess we would’ve had zero mis-strikes.

> so this already is a low error rate

As a father of similarly aged daughters, I can’t express enough how grotesque and disturbing the term “error rate” is here.

We targeted and killed young children. Plain and simple.

> However, you have made a very, very strong assumption that these targets were not carefully evaluated.

Let’s take the opposing assumption that this target was carefully evaluated then. Please reason through the implications now?

Re: AI got the blame for the Iran school bombing. The truth is more worrying

#80

Post by mlsu »

WarmWash wrote: post #58
applfanboysbgon wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I feel like an intellectual god to have been gifted the brain power to recognize that 150 kids being killed is a awful tragedy, and that converting a building on a military base to a school is recklessly stupid and borderline purposely done as a trap. It's like letting your child play in the road at night, and then being upset when a drunk driver hits them. Anyone can look at the satellite images from the bombing and…

"I understand that the officer killed your unarmed teen son. But you have to understand, in the dark, he appeared to be reaching for a weapon, and the officer feared for his life."

"It's a tragedy that she was raped. But you have to understand, the way she was dressed, she clearly wanted it, she was sending mixed signals, you see."

Anyway. Here's a preschool right next to a military base, it took me about 3 minutes of scrolling around on google maps to find this.

https://maps.app.goo.gl/2TP32tYqRZxthSFF8

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