A conversation with Google’s in-house philosopher
qz.com
qz.com
Knowledge determined by popular fiat. Sounds lovely.
I mean, even now, popularity determines what we get, but at least it's implicit—results are based on how people act, not how they say they should act.
Unlike the article, I'm not willing to assume that the latter is better than the former, much less that it should be forced on us. Then again, I'm the sort of person who's content eating donuts and would hate being forced onto a kale diet.
More importantly, the former provides a more granular system: different people can get different things based on what they want or how they act. A democratic system, on the other hand, would pretty much force a consensus on everyone. Centralization simply doesn't have the capability to let everyone have their own way.
I disagree. The web is the way it is, flooded with click-bait, ads masquerading as editorial, opinion and political agenda masquerading as journalism, viral power masquerading as truth, because of the "free"[1] junk food consuming habits that most people are prone too most of the time. This utterly and fundamentally transforms the web for everyone, because there is little air left for alternatives to breathe, leaving them stunted if not still-born. The same damage that the article explains as happening to journalism is happening to all other important things on the web.
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[1] That ads give us the web for free is utter bullshit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8585237
Precisely.
That's not fine, I feel that's just a poor quality result that can be improved. Like maybe understanding why "Answers in Genesis" ranks surprisingly high.
Google's job is to give us the most relevant results, and as stated in the article, a large part of the US believes in creationism and thus it's relevant to them.
So statistically speaking, you are more likely to want to read that page for that search term.
Google is not a search engine for scientific facts, it is an advertising platform. Who should be the judge of what type of information is presented? You? How about we put it to a vote? That vote has happened, and these are the results.
Google for "calories in an ear of corn". It will answer directly: 606 calories, which is wrong. There's no popular vote or underlying conflict, just a falsehood that Google presents as the truth, endowed with their authority. Are you OK with that? What if the question were "how much tylenol is safe?" Getting this stuff wrong has actual consequences.
And the most trusted web page happens to be that page.
That's a great argument about Tylenol, and if those answers have the possibility of being incorrect they should not be shown at all, since an algorithm will determine what is shown. A "sensitive information" classifier could point out "Ask your doctor, etc." on relevant questions.
But what about the consequence of not showing answers about creationism? My statistically average person decides my site sucks and moves to DuckDuckGo, and I've lost a source of revenue. Not good.
One cup of corn is about five ears' worth of kernels.
You may find dinosaurs an unambiguous case, but some people (Creationists, paleontologists) don't. Why should Google decide the truth on dinosaurs but not on <insert sacred cow>?
For well-established, well-sourced, and particularly, scientific questions, authorities with a strong record of truthful and accurate accounts should both get priority and help establish truth models. Less-well-known sources which genrally agree with these also score well.
Sites showing systematic bias or poor truth valance would be discounted.
Facts, ultimately, are verified by experiment or experience. In practice, we look at reported experiential results and note which tend to agree and/or show errors which are both small and unbiased.
Those are your preferred sources.
An interesting element about lairs is that they frequently (though not always ), tend to exhibit systemic bias across multiple disciplines. Either they bullshit and make stuff up (high error, unbiased), or they show systemic biases.
Again, not always and uniformly, but frequently.
Truth and* source reputation combined give you considerable leverage.
The goal isn't perfection, but reducing the problem to tractable areas of truth valance helps greatly.
http://christiananswers.net/dinosaurs/j-fate1.html
"After the Flood what happened to dinosaurs?
"When the Flood was over Noah opened the Ark’s big door and let the animals free. Babies were born to each set of parents. After many years, the earth began to be filled with animals again.
"The dinosaurs lived for at least a few centuries after the Flood, but probably never in the great numbers that there once had been. No one knows exactly when they finally died out."
David Weinberger talks about phenomena such as this in his book Too Big To Know.
My first result was http://hearttouchers.com/dinos
I think there is something about that query that attracts idiocy.