I once accidentally left a dentistry pick in my backpack and it was confiscated in the airport as a “potentially dangerous weapon.” It was my favorite tool for extracting mollusks from rock crevices.
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@papernautilus I’m sorry to hear that - that’s awful.
@sedgequeen Yes I guess it would be hard to “draw the line”. Maybe like @cowirrie suggested it would have to come from the State. Although I am sure you could find many other toxic plants and animals to use as poison, maybe cane toad or puffer fish, all parts of a death cap mushrooms are extremely toxic and even a small amount can kill you.
@papernautilus This report (which funnily enough is somewhat obscured) is on Loch-Wontthaggi Rd with the observation being in a ~15km x 15km boundary that includes parts of Loch and Outtrim, as well as the Note the location is near oak trees. https://inaturalist.ala.org.au/observations/162815887
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Well, maybe ban the mushroom foraging books written by AI!!
Mushroom pickers urged to avoid foraging books on Amazon that appear to be written by AI, The Guardian, Sept 2, 2023
I work with a Mycologist and she refuses to ID mushrooms as being safe to eat or not.
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@kimbrint Those items require physical strength or skill to use lethally, or you can be saved from 23 pencil stabbings. Takes only one death cap mushroom in a pie or meal to cause severe liver failure and death. The three victims all died in hospital while being treated for death cap mushroom poisoning.
@mikenoren Australia may have a plethora of venomous and poisonous creatures but I haven’t heard of a Dugite or an Irukandji jellyfish being used as a murder weapon haha.
I get that there’s a certain (albeit miniscule) level of risk associated with iNat being a potential source of information about locations of poisonous stuff. I just always want to weight “harm minimisation” against the downsides to implementing more rules. There are diminishing returns to ever-more-specific regulations being put into place to try to prevent ever-more-uncommon scenarios from taking place. Safety regulations are to a certain extent a zero-sum game- the more resources are spent enforcing one safety regulation, the less can be spent enforcing another. A question of iNat geoprivacy that has possibly contributed to one person having a slightly easier time finding one poison is not the problem I’d want to allocate resources to fix.
I certainly agree that the benefit of refusing to sell kids knives outweighs the cost of doing so (cost of enforcement of the law, the potential to deny a teen a knife that they need for a useful purpose, etc.) While the cost of implementing geoprivacy rules on mushrooms is pretty miniscule (financial cost of the state and iNat developing and implementing the rules, inability of non-murderers to have a chance to use iNat to find their favorite species, slight decrease in useability of iNat’s dataset, etc.), the benefit of doing so is also extremely miniscule (might have prevented one bad guy from finding a particular mushroom once in the website’s 17 year history… probably forcing him to use a different poison instead).
I would argue that banning virtually any activity would qualify as “harm minimisation”, as nearly everything we do has an inherent risk associated with it. If we simply deleted iNat entirely from the Internet, it would be harder for poachers to find their prey, harder for murderers to find mushrooms, decrease the number of car accidents that happen when people go outside to observe, etc. Obviously the benefit doesn’t outweigh the harm in this case though. I’m just always skeptical of “harm minimisation” recommendations that focus entirely on the harm to be minimised without also addressing the costs and how greatly the harm will actually be reduced. I’m not saying I couldn’t be convinced that these rules are a good idea, but I’d want a lot more information about implementation, cost, and the amount of harm that will actually be removed by the rules before jumping on the bandwagon and declaring that they’re a good idea.
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The public needs to know of the danger and the location of the danger to prevent accidents. Full stop. This applies to death caps as well. Parents need to know if death caps are present to supervise children or just leave the area.
Anything can be used as a murder weapon. Kitchen utensils, vehicles, tools, chemicals, heavy items and soft items. Hide them from little children, can’t hide them from adults.
If you want to prevent abuse of these items, do not advertise that they can be used to kill.
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The idea that AI is writing mushroom ID books that people might use to decide whether or not to eat them is horrifying. That seems like a major selection pressure though. Those that trust AI with their lives are going to die at much higher rates than the rest of the population.
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The road toll (number of people dead) has gone up since these Autonomous electronic gremlins were introduced.
Maybe the death cap needs an airbag.
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auto-obscuring things seems like an overreaction.
It is not hard to get access to toxic plants & fungi. Even if she had no access to the internet, picking up one guide book and just headed to the woods would probably net her a toxic mushroom. Even if it’s not specifically A. phalloideae, Galerina marginata is incredibly easy to find in any woodland with well-rotted logs, is ubiquitous, and contains the same α-Amanitin that is found in Amanita sect. phalloideae. I usually find enough of these mushrooms on any given hike that I could do some serious harm if I so desired (I do not desire), and sometimes I even find flushes like this
That’s a lot of deadly toxic mushrooms just hanging out next to an easily accessible trail in a state park.
Beyond mushrooms though… literally one of the most toxic plants in the world, Ricinus communis, the castor bean plant, is planted worldwide as an ornamental. I bet you wouldn’t really even need iNat to find one, if you were determined and knew what they look like - in fact there have been relatively recent murders using castor beans.
There’s also Abrus precatorius, the rosary pea, which is also present in Australia and contains the toxin Abrin, which is even MORE toxic than Ricin - but also, you can literally buy seeds on ebay. Buy a few, mash them up, mix them with food - bam, murder weapon.
Frankly if governments started to require obscuring stuff like this it would strike me as quite the knee jerk reaction. There’s plenty of ways to kill people via by poisoning if someone has the motivation.
I really hope this comment doesn’t get me put on a watchlist somewhere XD
EDIT: Also want to point out that any laws criminalizing posession of these toxic mushrooms (not that this was being implied, but I do want to note it) would be a serious pain for the community science side of the mushroom community. I definitely have enough mushrooms in A. sect. phalloideae sitting in my collection boxes to do some harm (again, I would never use them for that purpose), and it would be ridiculous to put people into a situation where they might be criminalized for just wanting to study the species. The situation around Psilocybe/Psilocybin already can make it a pain in the butt and lead to situations where mycologists get stopped by the police because they think that ANY little brown mushroom in a tacklebox is automatically hallucenogenic.
Here’s one I found in a park I can literally walk to from my house!
(Amanita nom. prov. ‘sturgeonii’, for the record.)
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Thanks for the comment! I totally agree development costs are essential to consider. In a perfect world no changes to the app would be needed as the culture would be the change, eg. other users suggesting an observation of a critically endangered orchid or a hallucinogenic mushroom be obscured to prevent misuse of the data.
But it’s not just people who trust AI who are in danger. It’s also people who don’t recognize AI, and that is quickly approaching most people.
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Well - is the case cotton or polywotsit?
The filling polywotsit or feathers (of wild or captive birds)?
Then - from which bird??
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probably an obs in each CNC project this year.
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Yes but I guess you could argue that having to find a guide book, research mushrooms and foraging, is like the cool down period that some states / countries have for gun laws haha. The fact it needs more preplanning rather than going online and looking up a location on a map may discourage one or two people (although this type of case being trialled is very rare, I am guessing accidental poisoning the usual reason for poisoning).
You missed the point where I said you barely need preplanning.
Literally one of the most emphasized mushrooms to know if you’re doing any sort of foraging is Galerina marginata. It posted all of the time in mushroom ID groups and always always always called out as toxic because no moderator wants a situation where someone accidentally poisons themselves with one because they think it is an Enoki or a Psilocybe.
And these things grow everywhere. Maybe they’re not as common in Australia as they are in some other parts of the world, but I’d be willing to bet that they’re still plenty easy to just stumble across by happenstance.
Five minutes in a facebook mushroom ID group barely counts as research or cool down.
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Right. But you still need to convince the jury of your innocence. I suspect the original plan was to claim a foraging mishap (*). That’s harder to do with castor beans or similar.
(*) The defence position is that the mushrooms were purchased “either” at a mainstream supermarket or an Asian grocery store, which seems a puzzling lapse of memory.
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There were allegedly two lots of mushrooms - fresh ones from the supermarket, and dried ones from the Asian grocer.
But no other reports of poisoning, so both sources are unlikely I would have thought.
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This article almost seems to be taking the side that iNat was helpful from a forensic perspective?
https://theconversation.com/what-is-inaturalist-the-citizen-science-app-playing-an-unlikely-role-in-erin-pattersons-mushroom-murder-trial-255714
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Frankly, I personally find the arguments to obscure toxic mushrooms on the chance that they could be used to intentionally poison someone ridiculous. The main reason has nothing to do with the mushrooms, but is based in human behavior: if someone wants to kill someone else in a premeditated fashion, there are literally thousands of ways to do it. Obscuring a toxic mushroom on one platform might make one of those ways to kill someone slightly harder to accomplish. But if the person really wants to kill someone, they can either find the same mushrooms via some other method (other users have already described how this could be done) or use another method of the thousands available.
This is especially true of seriously premeditated murders, which this was. Based on the alleged facts, this murder was planned for weeks. It seems highly unlikely that obscuring a mushroom species on iNat would prevent a murder if the murderer was willing to plan that extensively - they showed sustained determination to commit the crime and would just chose another mode from the many available options.
That’s not to say that we should never try to prevent murder by throwing our hands up and saying that “people will just kill people no matter what” and not regulating the means of murder. But when considering regulation of the many aspects of life, there needs to be:
a) focus on the methods of murder that are most common (e.g., guns, other weapons), especially those that enable impulsive murders (those with little to no premeditation) which are more common
b) consideration of tradeoffs
Intentional poisoning by mushrooms is very rare - it’s not a leading cause of murders, and, I would wager that those murders it is used in are highly premeditated (and thus less likely to be prevented). Obscuring the location of this information in one source, but not others reduces effectiveness.The overall potential benefit to obscuring is very low.
The tradeoffs are serious, and at least include:
- Loss/restriction of scientific knowledge
- Loss of specific knowledge for people who would like to protect themselves from accidental poisoning via fungi (which is far more common than intentional poisoning).
- Establishing a precedent to remove/censor scientific data
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