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Okay so you're driving to your parent's house and open up Google Maps for directions, are you going to start doubting its directions?

If it says something totally ridiculous, of course! The existence of services that provide information is not an excuse to ignore individual logic and reasoning.

You see now how this could suddenly fuck up your understanding of things and propagate down in your knowledgebase to then start affecting your decision framework?

If I Googled for my symptoms, and came across a page that said I have "Googleitis", and all of the information around that was about "Google's April Fool's Day Googleitis Prank" then I'm not sure it would.

My niece could easily take from this that human beings have the technology to pull off something like this in the way google is showing and make wild and inaccurate extrapolations that will confuse her.

Information is messy, people are fallible, confusion isn't harmful.

> Okay so you're driving to your parent's house and open up Google Maps for directions, are you going to start doubting its directions?

If it tells you to drive into a lake, yes, you should doubt it.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/woman-follo...

Reminds me of this: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/06/15/seven...

That article seems to be very carefully worded to imply that the navigation system was involved in the accident, without coming out and saying so.

> A woman following her car's sat nav on a foggy night took a wrong turn and ended up driving into a lake. [...] she lost her way and drove down a steep boat launch into Lake Huron. [...] Local police said the way the harbour’s boat launch is built means a wrong turn taken on a rainy night would come as a shock.

That is to say, when she drove into the lake it seems to have been because she wasn't following the directions, and this, combined with the fog and a confusing design for the boat launch, caused her to not realize that she wasn't on a regular road (albeit the wrong one) until it disappeared out from under her.

The article then concludes with some statistics about GPS causing distracted driving, without either connecting them back to the news item at hand or comparing them to distracted driving caused by non-electronic navigation.

Google maps for a time suggested you swim across the Atlantic ocean if you requested walking directions from NYC to Europe, this is clearly ridiculous and a good example. While usually providing useful information you still have to think and use some common sense. Another good example is that google might be providing what it thinks is correct information but might be out of date, for example there are people who pay attention to the nav and drive across bridges that have been washed out because they didn't pay attention to the physical signs. Trusting google is not a replacement for common sense and logical thinking.

I think this is mostly harmless.

To use your medicine example, it'd be more like looking up a webMD article for the common cold and seeing one about the common cold in martians. Don't we as readers and observers to think critically about what's presented to us? This reminds me of people who take outlandish and impossible Onion article headlines, don't bother reading the story, and then share it with shock and indignation on social media.

Also, in the example of your niece, this would serve as a good learning point for her then. If someone is confused by this, I'd say it's harmless confusion and it's something that's safe to be confused about.