Similar law in Norway IIRC. The idea is essentially to put you (the soldier) in the situation where being threatened with punishment for disobeying the order is weighted up against the threat of punishment for obeying an unlawful order. Basically, if you’re given an order you honestly believe is illegal, it’s a lot easier to stand by a decision to face the consequences of disobeying it if you know that following the order can lead to the same, or worse, consequences.
I spend more time than I would like to admit on reddit 50/50…
The possibilities for actuality are enormous here!
There’s a reason the press is often referred to as “the fourth branch of government”. Journalists that do their job properly are absolutely critical to the proper functioning of a democracy.
To me this is an open question, gonna try tomorrow and report back.
Gonna see if i can cross over to the apartment opposite me by not looking down. This could be a miracle for transportation!
Only way to make people like this stop is to make them understand that they’re surrounded and will be eaten alive if they make a wrong move.
I’m a researcher myself, so I feel like I can weigh in on the “reproducibility crisis”. There are several facets to it: One is of course money, but that’s not just related to corporately funded research. Good luck finding or building an independent lab capable of reproducing the results at CERN. It basically boils down to the fact that some (a lot of) research is insanely expensive to do. This primarily applies to experiments and to some degree to computationally expensive stuff.
Another side is related to interest. Your average researcher is fired up by the thought of being the first person to discover and publish something no one has seen before. It’s just not as fun to reproduce something someone else has already done. Even if you do, you’re likely to try to improve on it somehow, which means the results may change without directly invalidating the old results. It can be hard work to write a good paper, so if you don’t feel your results are novel enough that they’re worth the effort (because they’re basically just equivalent to previously published values) you might not bother to put in the effort to publish them.
Finally, even without direct reproduction of previously published results, science has a way asymptotically approaching some kind of truth. When I develop and publish something, I’m building on dozens of previously published works. If what they did was plain wrong, then my models would also be liable to fail. I’ve had cases where we’ve improved on previously published work, not because we tried to reproduce it, but because we tried to build on their results, and found out that their results didn’t make sense. That kind of thing is fairly common, but not reported as a “reproduction study”.
There’s also review articles that, while they don’t do any reproduction themselves, collect and compare a bunch of comparable work. They usually have some conclusions regarding what results appear trustworthy, and what appear to be erroneous.
That is true. You can have check for certain words and phrases that’s hardcoded in. However, I have reason to believe the feature I experienced was using an LLM rather than a hardcoded list of search patterns.
One of the only “AI” features that I’ve ever actually found useful was the thing that warned me when I sent an email that was missing an attachment. Basically, it was able to deduce that an attachment was likely missing, and showed me a “are you sure you want to send” prompt.
I will never forget the time I posted a question about why something wasn’t working as I expected, with a minimal example (≈ 10 lines of python, no external libraries) and a description of the expected behaviour and observed behaviour.
The first three-ish replies I got were instant comments that this in fact does work like I would expect, and that the observed behaviour I described wasn’t what the code would produce. A day later, some highly-rated user made a friendly note that I had a typo that just happened to trigger this very unexpected error.
Basically, I was thrashed by the first replies, when the people replying hadn’t even run the code. It felt extremely good to be able to reply to them that they were asshats for saying that the code didn’t do what I said it did when they hadn’t even run it.
I completely agree with what you’re saying. However, on the other hand, “black lives matter” and “feminism” are equally exposed to the “all lives matter” and “equality” rebuttals from people that want to shut them down.
I think some progress could be made if those championing equality made a concerted effort to gain ownership of the “all lives matter” and “equality” slogans/campaigns, and then used that ownership to point out the problems (all lives matter, and black lives are currently being stepped on, etc.)
I’m so glad this is illegal where I’m from
I’m know little about the details around how it works in the US, but I think saying
Is a bit of an oversimplification. The point is that if a soldier will face consequences for disobeying an order, but no consequences for obeying an unlawful one, they have no dilemma (outside their own morals) when faced with an order they believe is illegal. Furthermore, they can be coerced into doing things they know is wrong and illegal. By putting this into law, you force the soldier to face the dilemma that if they truly believe an order is illegal, they can be punished for following it. That gives a much stronger incentive to actually stand your ground when ordered to do something that makes you think “there’s no way in hell that this can be legal”. It also removes or diminishes an officers power to coerce soldiers to do something they know is wrong and illegal.
Regarding
there’s probably some minor cultural differences between armies here, but by and large you’re probably mostly right. However, I don’t think it’s right in extreme (think, genocide) circumstances. A lot of these laws came in place post-WWII, and are formulated with the knowledge in mind that soldiers can and have been ordered to execute civilians and shoot at unarmed protesters. I’ve been a soldier myself, and would definitely question an order to open fire on unarmed civilians. I hope most other soldiers would do the same.