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Notes -
From the study:
Yeah now follow through this just one more step. The trans site despite the submission model was clearly not used much and in actuality was pretty much entirely based off of national reporting, whereas the transcrime site used things like the BBC and/or other sites like the dailymail, daily star, and regional news outlets like Wales Online.
Clearly the trans victim database doesn't cover nearly as much as it could despite the poor methodology that is possible, because if that wasn't the case then there should be plenty of victims where they didn't find them in the BBC and had to look at regional reporting or other outlets.
Just from the starting point which do you expect to find more cases? The methodology that seems to primarily go off of just a single source of mainstream national reporting, or the methodology that uses multiple sources of national reporting and regional reporting?
This does not appear to be true:
And so on and so forth, but I think I've made my point. Both Trans Crime and Remembering Our Dead rely on both national and regional reporting.
That some cases might also have been reported by other sites or that some cases might not have used that link is irrelevant. Every single case they looked at for that was also on the BBC and the BBC was used as verification for it.
Which means they take from high profile cases that made national news and not stories that only made regional outlets. If that wasn't the case then why didn't they have more cases that couldn't be verified with the BBC?
Most murders of any kind do not appear on national news. So why did it happen that all of their murders listed did?
The murder rate in the UK is so low that I find it entirely credible that every single murder will eventually be reported in the BBC.
Let's be exhaustive about Trans Crime UK's reliance on national vs. regional reporting, shall we?
The only murderer in the paper's dataset where the corresponding Trans Crime UK page doesn't include a BBC link is Samantha Read.
If your contention is that Trans Crime UK's statistics are artificially inflated by using stories that were reported on in regional news outlets but not national ones, that just doesn't seem to be the case: 95% of the murderers in the dataset were reported on in national news.
And, Remembering Our Dead does include at least one murder victim which was not reported on by the national broadcaster (Penny Port, which only contains a link to the Sheffield Unison), implying that, if there were more murder victims only reported on in regional but not national news, they would be more than happy to include them.
I genuinely don't understand what your objection is.
The great thing about AI is that you get impartiality on demand if you make a completely unconnected instance and ask an impartial question, so let's go do that.
I asked ChatGPT
Seems like a pretty impartial question that doesn't lean towards wanting either way.
It responds with
Maybe they're wrong, if you wanna go find hard credible statistics about how many murders are reported about in a year at the BBC vs the number of murders done in the UK, go right ahead. But they couldn't find it at least.
Now the part about "victim characteristics" could point to over coverage of trans victims. But whether or not that equals or is greater than the bias of people not sharing their family's private information with the BBC isn't going to be easy to know. We can not assume things "cancel out" just because it makes conversation easier. The real world does not do things to make discussion easy.
We wouldn't, and don't, know true overdose rates or true suicide rates either because of social stigma, it's just what happens when you have things that are controversial, their loved ones are far less likely to volunteer the information to be broadcast.
It's possible I'm failing a sarcasm check here or something, but: do you actually believe this?
Like, this is an extremely untrue thing to say. I don't want to put a low-effort comment here saying "this is wrong", but I also don't want to waste time on a long comment explaining it, if it turns out that this was a joke or some kind of unserious comment. So I'm going to flag up that, if you sincerely believe "AI gives you impartial answers", that this is an extremely broken part of your epistemic model, which I can substantiate if it needs to be substantiated.
Yeah, I would say they can be generally more impartial than the typical human is as long as you don't approach it with leading questions or have their history built up where they know what you want to hear. Especially not anything politically charged. A generic question like mine will get a rather factual answer.
It's not gonna be perfect, but they are a great starting point and there's a reason why people far richer and smarter than us are using them as tools too. Even someone like Scott Alexander will regularly refer to AI for basic questions like that. If the smart people are doing something, maybe we should consider it's a smart thing to do.
Er... Scott Alexander has roughly the same politics as the people training the models. He's never going to ask for an objectively anti-trans or pro-Trump viewpoint, so I'm sure he has no trouble using Gemini despite it being made by a company that proudly squashes these opinions everywhere it can.
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How does this follow exactly? Murders of a visible minority demographic with a low baseline due to a small population are likely going to get higher per-capita coverage than less interesting murders. Considering how much of an easy bump in views that trans murders are due to the culture war aspect, it'd also be downright irresponsible of the news sites to not elevate stuff that happens.
It still requires people in their lives to talk about it and bring it to the attention of reporters (and for reporters to ignore the requests of family to keep details private, which they actually do follow with less prominent cases, journalists aren't complete monsters) and people just don't generally do that. Like I've said, it happens in other cases too like overdoses and suicides. I've literally known people who I'm pretty sure died of an overdose because they were a big drug user not have the drug use and obvious cause of their passing away mentioned even a single time at the funeral and in official correspondence from the family. If you didn't personally know he was a drug addict or get told it by someone who did, you would have no idea he overdosed.
It can make for even dumber consequences too! Not acknowledging social stigma as a factor can lead to stupid shit like this where an old guy dies, the family doesn't want to say why, and it gets turned into some major conspiracy about China killing our scientists or something. Which hey even with a very prominent case turned into an international conspiracy, journalists are still respectful enough to not pry.
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