User talk:Spiritu

Welcome! (December 2023)

I am a highly opinionated polymath (Type 3? Type 6?) who understands the moral truth that "neutral points of view" in statements about oppression and events of oppression are in fact, helping the oppressor. They can only help the oppressor.

To the extent Wiki editors don't seem to understand this moral truth, I sometimes go around and remove bad-faith "neutral" statements which, as all such statements do, favor the oppressor. I do this on articles already plagued by such "Neutral" language.

My broader goals with Wikipedia editing are below in the next section.

I am a licensed attorney (solo practitioner now), a former professional Network Administrator for a Top Ten R1 University's School of Engineering, a former technical support representative for Dell Computer, a former professional stage electrician, a former student lighting designer (the focus of my undergraduate degree, along with computer science), a former Naval Officer, a former law librarian, a semi-professional musician, a professional programmer focused currently on AI/ML, and I completed a concentration in Law & Social Policy (focused on Policy Analysis) while getting my JD from a Top 14 Law School. I am a small business co-owner. I spent a year in Afghanistan serving as one of the attorneys for a three-star general, including briefing him directly on matters involving the Law of Armed Conflict every other day. During my time in Afghanistan I was assigned to directly liaise with my counterparts in two Anglophone allied countries' equivalent operations in-country and at home.

I have clerked for the Navy-Marine Corps Court of Criminal Appeals, externed for a federal district court judge, and practiced appellate criminal defense law for the Navy (like a federal public defender but for the Navy). I once won a client complete exoneration on an actual innocence defense while practicing appellate criminal defense law for the Navy. This is a very rare event in the practice of law. The number of times this has happened in the US, that we know of, is currently listed, as of December 9, 2023, at 3431 since 1989; the rate is approximately 100 per year out of roughly a couple hundred thousand convictions per year in the US. The list is at: https://www.law.umich.edu/special/exoneration/Pages/about.aspx

My primary research interests overall are all centered around two major areas of interest: public policy at the national and international levels, and egalitarianism. I'm also interested in the role AI/ML can play in future, specifically in making access to justice more egalitarian, in providing useful analyses to policymakers or nonprofits writing white papers on public policy assisted by AI/ML research, both for "thoroughness and accuracy" reasons (the computer can read more things than we can, given the same amount of time), and for assistance with the actual analysis and research themselves. I am also interested in the intersection of law, AI/ML, and data to help other do-gooder attorneys provide high quality advice to indigent clients, by multiplying the attorney's effectiveness and efficiency in legal analysis and research. Almost like having a paid JD-level law clerk to take the initial scrub through a casefile, spot issues, research and summarize the current state of the law for each issue, and then write you a memo all about it. The goal is to be able to basically create an AI/ML law clerk - it isn't the one practicing law, just like a law clerk - to help public defenders especially handle their unmanageably large caseloads.

My background in music started 40 years ago with piano lessons. I have sung the National Anthem at major public events both before joining the military and while serving in the military for official functions. I've been a paid singer at rich person church. My vocal range is D2-C6, making me a very versatile kind of male-bodied singer. I've also performed and sung semi-professionally with my guitar and voice.

My background playing video games dates back to before I can remember, when my parents told anyone who would listen that I taught myself to read at 2 so I could play Apple Adventure when my dad was called away to the hospital. I learned to code at four starting with Apple BASIC and Logo. I started college as a computer science major but switched to being a Drama major focused on the technology of the theatre, especially Lighting and Sound Design. I still took classes in Computer Science, including Operating Systems, after changing majors, for electives. After college I worked at a tech startup doing satellite imagery analysis, building their network, I still code today, in Python almost exclusively now, focused more on AI/ML. I also did coursework in Data Mining and Text Mining while getting my Master's at the University of Illinois School of Information Science.

Current Areas of Interest in Editing

I am a former law librarian and have practiced law for 14 years. In my capacity as a law librarian, I have great interest in Wikipedia because Wikipedia is a legitimately fantastic secondary source and its existence has democratized access to information in a way never before seen in the entirety of human existence. I am also a programmer.

Right now, my Wiki and programming interests intersect at: Developing ad-hoc software tools (kludges, really) to rapidly identify and categorize explicit and implicit bigotry in the tone and presentation of an article. (see generally https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_studies_about_Wikipedia#Bias) This would be a personal suite of tools designed to make it easier for me personally to identify and fix these articles, rather than releasable code. And it wouldn't trawl Wikipedia, but rather do simple things like helping me iterate down one of the lists of Wiki articles needing the misogyny removed without losing my place, etc... If I wanted to get fancy I would try to use the Wikipedia API to do this more programmatically

Spending free time editing pages manually, in fits and starts, to remove or rewrite parts of articles that demonstrate actual bias (not the false bias of "Neutral Point of View", which thinkers from Wiesel to MLK to Tutu and many more besides have shown over and over again only helps the oppressor in situations of oppression. So like, it's okay if someone insisted on an article about Pearl Jam (ie not about oppression) having a neutral point of view. No fanboi-ish "Pearl Jam are the greatest rock and roll band in the history of the world" - that kind of NPOV is okay to expect.

But taking an NPOV on the Holocaust would mean you were also presenting the Holocaust-denier's viewpoint, which would be evil. In specific, tho, it would not held a reader gain knowledge on the topic from reading the encyclopedia article.