> "Unfortunately, so far, the existing empirical work has not had a central place in policy, legislation, and political discourse (Loughran 2019, Nelken & Hamilton 2022). Unsurprisingly, scholars have been frustrated that their insights on, for instance, the inconclusive evidence for the deterrent effect of incarceration on violent crime or the evidence that treatment can help to rehabilitate have not had sufficient impact (Cullen et al. 2011, McGuire 2013).
> Empirical research has failed to sway policymakers and political leaders for many reasons, too many to cover fully here. For instance, one can broadly think about high levels of punitiveness in certain cultures and jurisdictions, such as the American context (Kleinfeld 2016, Muenster & Trone 2015). Moreover, there has been a penal populism where politicians have sold the public on a simplistic discourse that they need and want strict punishment against crime (Roberts et al. 2003, Windlesham 1998). Added to this is the discriminatory and racist framing of crime as part of a dog-whistle political strategy (Haney-López 2015). Another problem is a more general aversion to science, and a populist politics that drives on simplicity instead of nuanced, evidence-based policy (Huber et al. 2022). These headwinds foster a more challenging set of conditions not just for altering policy but even for the bare minimum of having robust and legitimate conversations about effective and ineffective punishment."
("Twenty-five years ago, I sought out Gary Slutkin while searching for a solution to the gun violence we experienced in Los Angeles. I got far more than I hoped for. The methods he describes in his groundbreaking new book helped reduce our gun violence to historic lows and save thousands of lives.”—Charlie Beck, former chief of police, Los Angeles Police Department")
As I understand it, the research you’re talking about is about the potential deterrent or rehabilitative effect of punishment. I’m talking about the effect of removing people from society during the ages when they are most likely to commit violent crime.
Which is something the person will definitely experience as punishment, and might make matters only worse afterwards, especially if that "removal" doesn't include therapeutic processes (which is the current state of affairs mostly)?
I see a lot of parallels and a shared interest in removing/reducing violence. The title and summary of the linked book may give the impression that the focus is elsewhere; maybe the introduction will help to see more of the shared research interest, or make it clearer where you disagree on the approaches?
> it was impossible to obtain an address without providing some service or newsletter on a specific subject to the sysop in return
Huh? Not when I joined in my region. I didn't have to provide anything.
I was 14, but the BBS owner and mostly old guy heavy metal user base only found out when I later showed up at their annual user group meeting - and we had lots of fun (and drinks) together! They even took me clubbing later with a fake ID, and I woke up heavily wasted in the BBS owner's student apartment and we had microwaved frozen pizza together. Fun times.
"More than 30 [US] states nationwide have no ban on child marriage. And it is not an anomaly. According to the non-profit Unchained At Last, since the year 2000, the United States has documented 315,000 cases of child marriage within its own borders—largely sanctioned by the Church and courts. No federal law bans child marriage in America. Not one."
"CEDAW was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on December 18, 1979. Afghanistan has ratified this treaty. The United States has not."
"Today, the spectacle of America condemning child marriage abroad while refusing to adopt the international treaty that prohibits it is a moral and legal incoherence that undermines every word we say."
Not that either is great, but there is a world of difference between saying "a 16-year-old can marry another 16-year-old if the couple and both sets of parents agree" (an often a judge too) and saying "a 12-year-old can marry a 30-year-old against her will".
Alas, several states still lack minimum ages, so your 30-on-12-year-old scenario is still quite possible in the US.
Particularly disturbing is how much pushback there was to the recent Oklahoma bill to finally end child marriage two weeks ago. Thankfully it passed anyway, but the state house vote was 51-36. Some of the quotes from the house members voting against the law are rather chilling, e.g.:
“This was a vote in favor of parents rights over government overreach. It’s possible that some people are comfortable with the government overriding parental decisions, but I’m not one of them. To vote yes on this is a vote to let the government dictate how to parent your children.”
- Rep. Clay Staires (R-Skiatook)
Prior to that, it was one of the aforementioned states without a minimum marriage age (in the case of pregnancies), so it was semi-common for families to force girls to marry the much older men who'd impregnated them.
AFAIK, California, Mississippi, and New Mexico still lack a minimum age for marriage.
If the law permits it, a 12-year old has no other choice but to agree to whatever their parents want. It is well documented that children dissociate to keep an image of "good parents" alive, regardless of their action. Very few 12-year olds -- or 16-year olds -- will break with their families over this, and even then the break will psychologically haunt them forever. This is how you breed violence, and we need to stop lying to ourselves and others about it.
The cited report states that some cases in the United States involved children as young as 10. The average age gap (not mean age gap) across all 300,000 cases is ~4 years older for the male. I understand they pick extraordinary cases, but a single case is sufficient to understand why this is not working. "This is not the majority of cases" is a misdirection.
"He was aged 18. Mandy was 12. His grooming and abuse continued for years, fully sanctioned by Mandy’s mother, who spoke of God’s plan. He proposed to her four years later, and she tried to say no. After exhausting every possible way to escape what her parents were forcing her to do, she ran away, but as a minor, she had no power. Her parents were able to force her back home and into marriage."https://www.unchainedatlast.org/united-states-child-marriage...
That aside, there are plenty of developmental psychology arguments why you should not allow children to marry at 16; even if they wanted to and did it out of their "free will" (whatever that may be at 16). You will, again, breed dysfunctional families, and (not only) domestic violence.
Interesting. I tried it for a bit over a minute (8 cycles), but then I had to stop. I get really dizzy unless I take breathing breaks after outbreaths. Will try again to see where this goes, thanks! Really like the simplicity.
11 cycles this time. Went a bit further into the dizziness, since I was more prepared for it this time. Unsure whether it makes sense to just stay with the dizziness as long as I can, or whether I should stop earlier. Probably either is fine as long as I am somewhat confident about it?
Thank you for sharing your experience. Try more shallow breathing rather than modifying the frequency/timing, which is the whole point of this approach :)
> What he didn't get was that computing was not going to stop at word processors.
Huh? We seem to have a completely different read of his work, like the whole ZUI Zoomable Interfaces research? That is not about word processing at all. How to navigate and interact with multi-dimensional data.
Probably because it evolved very early (like before bilateral symmetry, multi layer body cavity, or kidneys early... maybe even before multicellular animals early) and so has been incorporated as an essential pillar into multiple processes layered on top of that fundamental architecture.
You've merely stated observations about the context and the process that led to it. That doesn't in any way answer the question of what it's actually doing that's so essential.
My point is that, in a higher organism, it may be essential to how a lot of their processes function, in that it was infrastructure that already existed at the time those processes were developed, so they were in turn developed to depend upon it.
So "the reason it originally exists" and "what breaks if you take it away" aren't necessarily the same thing.
As with, say, digestion, or an major organ like the liver, it's reasonable to think that it does simple things in simple animals, and more complex things in more complex ones.
Take out an animal's liver, it's not one process that stops working, it's dozens. There's one or two that will kill it quicker, so those are the ones it dies of, but artificial livers are hard to build as they implement so many vital processes.
I don't dispute any of that but it's stating the obvious, it's nothing more than topical conjecture (even if it's almost certainly correct), and (most importantly) it does nothing to answer the question. What essential functions are being performed?
Take your liver example. We can largely answer that same question. I can't off the top of my head but the answer is fairly well established even if incomplete to varying degrees depending on the species.
There is widespread consensus on why a liver is needed for survival whereas there is not for sleep. That's particularly interesting when you consider that sleep is more common across the tree of life than dedicated livers are (at least AFAIK).
Sleep is more common across the tree of life because it's older.
Older than bilateral symmetry even - jellyfish are thought to sleep, sponges however do not. Jellyfish don't have spinal columns, lungs, gills, livers, kidneys, hearts, guts or blood, but they do have nerves and they do seem to sleep.
There is widespread consensus as to which processes failing will kill you first in acute liver failure, but it governs dozens of processes that, medium term, are essential to life; not all are widely understood.
In the case of sleep, it seems to be nervous system dysregulation that kills. It's notable that comatose patients don't seem to suffer the ill-effects of sleep deprivation. But still, "the thing that kills an animal subject to extreme sleep deprivation" is not necessarily "the original process for which sleep was evolved".
Human brains do some fairly complicated vital things during sleep (REM, spindles, slow wave activity), but that can't be the original essential function - the simplest animals that sleep (jellyfish) don't really have brains, although they do have nervous systems.
Whereas those animals which lack nervous systems (sponges) can't be said to sleep, although it's reasonable to ask.. "how would you tell?", or ask whether the question itself makes sense for something that lacks the ability to sense, plan, act.
So another framing is "anything which can be awake, must also be asleep". But one might equally argue, we don't know why animals are awake.
We can go one step further and suppose that, in order for an animal to act, to exercise will, it must do so at above its average metabolic rate, and in doing so it necessarily incurs metabolic debt.
If he articulated a particular essential process and why it depends on sleep in an incidental manner that might make for a reasonable hypothesis. However it would not refute the earlier (cited) claim that there is no consensus.
As presented without any concrete information about the processes involved it doesn't even qualify as a hypothesis, merely empty handwaving. In context it's even worse, being an entirely baseless contradiction of a claim pulled from a prominent paper.
I never agreed with him but all of that is implied. It being informed speculation included.
Also there being no consensus means most scientists who touch on the topic are FFA speculating except the person stating there is no consensus in the overview. It's not "settled science" but rather the opposite.
The question was "why is it needed". In context the meaning is clearly to ask what it's doing that's essential and (it follows) why those things are essential.
The subsequent response did not (as you suggest) articulate some subset of nonessential things done during sleep. Rather it rattled off plausible (and widely understood) aspects of the process that could have led to the current situation. Even if it had listed concrete activities that would still not have made for a meaningful answer.
The first clue that something is wrong should be that the linked article is recent and prominent. Thus short a brand new groundbreaking development we can be reasonably certain that a random commenter on the internet will not be sensibly rebutting the claims (and certainly not in the span of ~2 sentences).
No that was not the question. Why precisely sleep is essential is a complete non-sequitur to the original question, which was "does something occur during sleep which resembles what is described in TFA such that it can justifiably be called sleep."
As a general rule of thumb, if you find someone's responses incoherent, it's good practice to check what is actually being discussed.
I've always assumed its spontaneous specialization of species: leaving the safety of their nest at those times of day when they are the fittest to occupy a niche.
Once energy conserving "sleep time" exists, the genome can postpone or schedule for activity during these times of day, if it turns out to be more effective somehow.
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