Closer To The Ideal

A very odd 1st Amendment case. The creepiest thing about this case is that the district attorney invented a “five-week re-education program of his own design, which included topics like ‘what it means to be a girl in today’s society‘”. I do not want to live in a society where district attorney’s have the discretion to invent their own re-education programs. Such programs need to be invented by the legislature, not the executive or judicial branch.

On January 15, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit heard arguments in Miller, et al. v. Skumanick, a child pornography case that, oddly, involves no child pornography. The case goes back to 2006, when two girls aged 12 were photographed by another friend on her digital camera. The two girls were depicted from the waist up, wearing bras. In a separate situation, our third client was photographed as she emerged from the shower, with a towel wrapped around her waist and the upper body exposed. Neither of the photos depicted genitalia or any sexual activity or context. In 2008 the girls’ school district learned that these and other photos were circulating, confiscated several students’ cell phones, and turned the photos in question over to the Wyoming County district attorney, George Skumanick, Jr.

Skumanick sent a letter to the girls and their parents, offering an ultimatum. They could attend a five-week re-education program of his own design, which included topics like “what it means to be a girl in today’s society” and “non-traditional societal and job roles.” They would also be placed on probation, subjected to random drug testing, and required to write essays explaining how their actions were wrong. If the girls refused the program, the letter explained, the girls would be charged with felony child pornography, a charge that carries a possible 10-year prison sentence.

A single, individual district attorney may have standards that diverge from that of the majority. The legislature is more likely to take into account the full balance of concerns that need to be addressed, from majority norms to the civil rights of those in minority. While miscarriages of justice can arise from any branch of government, they are more likely when a single individual government agent assumes they have the power to make up new programs unilaterally. In this case, it is clear the district attorney has views that violate both due process and also the norms that are probably held by reasonable people:

Interestingly, none of the classmates who distributed the photos received letters from Skumanick. Only the girls who appeared in the photos were threatened with child porn charges. If the DA did in fact regard these photos as pornographic, why not file distribution charges against the boys? A clue may be found in their argument before the 3rd Circuit. In narrating the case, their attorney explained how, after the girls were photographed, “high school boys did as high school boys will do, and traded the photos among themselves.”

Ultimately, that’s what this case comes down to: one man’s view on how a young woman should conduct herself. The boys who traded the photos bear no responsibility and require no re-education. Instead the girls are threatened with felony charges and life-long registration as sex offenders. To apply such a penalty, designed to protect minors against exploitation, is a grotesque misapplication — and that’s once again assuming that the photographs in question could possibly be construed as pornographic. In reality, there was no way such charges would ever stick, and the DA’s office had to know this. The child porn charges were merely a threat, to force the parents to subject their children to Skumanick’s moral view of the world, where any and all child nudity is illegal and bras and bikinis are pornographic.

I am planning to write something about evolutionary psychiatry, which has become the secular fundamentalism of our time. The evolutionary psychiatrists offer a simple model of human behavior, which some writers then insist is the truth. The assumptions of game theory, which allow the model to exist, are forgotten, and the relevance of the simplifications is ignored. That is the mark of fundamentalism – to insist that a simple model represents the truth.

Of course, the progress of science is the progress of simple models. But most of the time, researchers are careful to state what the limits are. I’m currently looking for some quotes that I can use in this context, on the importance of simple models, and the importance of clearly stating the limits of the model. I ran into a bit about math modeling that I think I’ll use later, when I have time to write more. Good math modeling involves making assumptions that simplify the problem:

The skills required in mathematical modelling include many general problem-solving skills. To be able to deal with mathematical modelling problems is more generally useful, and more difficult, than (say) being able to solve first-order differential equations by the integrating factor method. It calls upon skills of creativity, analysis and interpretation which apply to all sorts of problems, not just mathematical ones.

Here is a list of skills that may be required in the solution of a modelling problem, placed in the order of the modelling framework introduced earlier. You need to be able to do the following.

Specify the purpose of the model, by defining or interpreting the problem you are investigating.

Create the model by
– simplifying the problem (by means of appropriate assumptions),
– choosing appropriate variables and parameters,
– formulating relationships between the variables.

Use mathematics to find a solution from the relationships.

Interpret the results by describing them in words (or otherwise) so that they can be understood by a possible user.

Evaluate the model by
– checking that the mathematical relationships and the solution make sense,
– comparing the results with reality,
– checking their sensitivity to changes in the data.

Later, the same article says:

Simplify the problem by stating assumptions

The skid marks model depended on the results that the deceleration of a skidding car is constant and that, for given conditions, different cars have the same deceleration while skidding. These follow from assumptions that underpin a well-established theory of sliding friction, but hold only if (for example) air resistance is ignored. To ignore air resistance is justified on two counts: firstly, its effects are probably small compared with those of sliding friction; secondly, the resulting model is relatively easy to analyse, and may provide some insight into the problem. In modelling you should always look for as simple a model as possible, consistent with the principal features of the problem. (To have ignored the effects of friction would obviously have been counter-productive.) It is important to be clear about the simplifying assumptions that have been made in order to arrive at the model. Recording an explicit list of the assumptions makes it easier for the reader to follow the development of the model, and should you need to improve your model, you then have an obvious place to start: review the assumptions, and ask which should be modified or relaxed.

Simple models give us tools for important analysis. Simple models give us insight into how the world works. Simple models allow engineers to build things, without having to take into account “the falling of a leaf on a distant planet” (from Gleick’s book). But simple models are not the truth. Reasonable people use simple models, while recalling how many simplifying assumptions have been made.

The folks who rely on evolutionary psychiatry in their writing tend to rely on some fairly extreme simplifications (men are hunters and women are gatherers). So I plan to write something soon, making fun of their technique. When you rely on a simplifying theory, and you act like the theory is the truth, rather than an extreme simplification of the truth, then you are engaging in a kind of fundamentalism. But I’ll save all that for another post.