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Comment by komali2 | Hacker News Reader

I like the underlying question that the author brings up - what's google algorithm, and who's responsible for it?

In the old days it was "most linked page with those keywords," right? So if you searched "gay man" and got a bunch of gay porn, is it necessarily google's fault that the internet is more gay porn that it is resources for gay men to discuss LGBT issues? Is it google's fault that news agencies more typically report on crime by black people than white (or that black people are more likely to be convinced/arrested in the first place?)

I think Google is responsible in 2018, now that they offer extremely tailored results. Duckduckgo, maybe not. But if Google is going to say "we're going to show you listings for restaurants in SF in your simple 'restaurants' search because we know you live in SF," I think they should also say "we're going to show you results for LGBT resources when you search for 'gay men' because nothing about your query indicates a desire for pornographic content."

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>I think Google is responsible in 2018, now that they offer extremely tailored results. Duckduckgo, maybe not. But if Google is going to say "we're going to show you listings for restaurants in SF in your simple 'restaurants' search because we know you live in SF," I think they should also say "we're going to show you results for LGBT resources when you search for 'gay men' because nothing about your query indicates a desire for pornographic content."

Are you are saying that, in a scenario where there are more results for one sub-query than for another, Google has an obligation to assume someone is searching for the sub-query it finds more politically acceptable? This seems like a bad idea to me. We should want to reduce the political/social influence of Google, rather than think of ways to give them more tools of influence and assuming they will have a positive effect.

These two things are completely different

"Because you live in SF, if you search restaurants you probably want results pertaining to restaurants close to SF"

"Because subject X-A is socially unacceptable, if you search for subject X we will only show results pertaining to subject X-B"

Political correctness and affirmative action are based on the idea that pretending the world is an ideal version of itself will eventually make it that way.

In reality though, the world is a complex place and the ideal pretend version can only be implemented in a carefully controlled environment such as a movie, a theatrical presentation, a video game or a situation where all participants agree to or are pressured into behaving in a way in which that pretend world is real. When the rest of the world leaks in, it is impossible to maintain that pressure on everyone.

About the best we have so far is "safe search" since pornography and obscenity follow fairly regular patterns. Political correctness though is constantly evolving and requires a trained academic to determine if each piece of information should be censored or allowed. Ideally in the future we'll have google glass and advanced AI classifiers constantly scanning our vision and providing us with tape delayed audio of the outside world in order to present the world to us and filter any politically incorrect content 24/7.

For now we have to do it ourselves and ignore any inconvenient facts that may make maintaining the illusion difficult. This constant struggle to deal with cognitive dissonance can be tiresome and one should restrict oneself to heavily moderated news feeds and not using search features for now. To create the carefully controlled virtual world in an interface to the rest of the world such as Google is an overwhelming task because you would need a highly sophisticated trained AI agent to maintain that illusion and to even invent information, such as lists of Nobel award winners from disadvantaged peoples, in order to maintain the illusion.

>Political correctness and affirmative action are based on the idea that pretending the world is an ideal version of itself will eventually make it that way.

That is the opposite of how it works. Affirmative action is accepting that the world has bias against certain groups, and attempting to take that into account. Political correctness is about realizing that certain groups have been marginalized or traumatized and some words perpetuate that. In a perfect world neither are necessary.

The proof that a group has been marginalized is that their numbers are not representative of their presence in the population. Thus, we pretend that the ideal world exists by adjusting those numbers in situations where merit selection is the criteria in the hopes that the numbers will converge by themselves. We don't interview each participant to ask them how they were traumatized, we only look at the statistics. People from strong well adjusted minority families that value education and have protected their kids from most of the harsh realities that poor minority families are subject to receive the same special treatment with affirmative action. The reason that the inequity exists is immaterial means that we don't even have to check if a bias exists, we just assume that since the world is not ideal that the numbers need to be fixed first and then the rest of it will follow.

At least that's the way it works in reality. Maybe this reality is politically incorrect too and you are saying that we need to implement meta-political correctness in which the means of creating an ideal world must be hidden to instead pretend that the implementers know the exact and particular circumstance of each person they are selecting based on facts other than merit and are weighing all of them appropriately in correcting injustice. By pretending that this ideal world in which knowledgeable administrators skillfully and in each individual case correct injustices, this will somehow make it become a reality.

https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2017/08/why-me...

Statistics show that man are the new minority in the campus. But it is surely will be frown upon by some AA activists if a that program is extended to cover male. If AA is said to what it is trying to accomplish, then that shouldn't be controversial at all.

>But it is surely will be frown upon

I think this is presumptuous. We can try to find out, why not?

>We don't interview each participant to ask them how they were traumatized, we only look at the statistics.

Yes, because implementing something like that would be near impossible from a legislative standpoint. Legislation has to be spelled out and enforceable or it will do nothing.

And affirmative action is not there just to prop up the numbers. It is there to push companies to hire minority groups.

There are two reasons for this. For example, on college campuses, the supreme court has upheld that it is lawful to use race as a factor in admissions because a well rounded or diverse student body is a desirable trait that will produce better outcomes for all involved. Including the white men.

The second is that it is trying to undo the many, many years of oppression (i.e. slavery) that carries generation to generation.

Programs like affirmative action are trying to tip the scales for these descendants to give them a chance to compete. After all, they were systematically disenfranchised as a race. It makes sense that we attempt to systematically bring them back up to speed with the rest of the population.

>we just assume .. numbers need to be fixed first and then the rest of it will follow

We don't have to assume anything. It is both empirically evident (as well as just "duh") that getting a higher percentage of minorities into jobs and higher education will result in a higher percentage of their children having the opportunity to do so without something like affirmative action in the future.

I feel like that's a remarkably pessimistic view of the world. I don't think optimism necessitates "filtering the world out," I think one can be optimistic about the future while being aware of actual problems.

This viewpoint has served me with a perfect success rate in all of my interpersonal reactions, including relatively combative ones (handing a beer can a drunk has thrown on the street back to him and asking if he could throw it away next time, random example).

Are there any specific example of things you think are incompatible with optimism without horse blinders?

> Political correctness and affirmative action are based on the idea that pretending the world is an ideal version of itself will eventually make it that way.

Agree. It hides problem rather than fixes it. And since it is often enforced in a top-down manner, communities that outside of the PC spectrum felt being deprived of their opportunities, this very resentment is further diving the society.

What steps would you suggest taking to fix these historical problems?

I think should AA be applicable, it should only concern with one's socioeconomic status, not ethical background.

Presumably you mean "ethnic" not "ethical", right?

I try not to get involved in these kinds of dangerous discussions but i just wanted to highlight your comparison to SafeSearch. Political correctness really does feel like having to walk around with SafeSearch on all my inputs and outputs, programmed to filter out an ever-changing and inscrutable list of wrongthink and wrongspeak from the real world. It’s so true—great comment.

I disagree, because I don't think "Political Correctness" has been sufficiently defined. I think this doubly so because of the extremism used in the OP regarding "AI goggles that block out the words that might hurt us." I see a mockery, there, and it raises my hackles. Perhaps it was unintentional.

What is "political correctness?" Are we referring right now to the alt-right manufactured bogeyman? That is my sense.

That’s what makes it so bad: despite it not being sufficiently defined, we are expected to filter our world views and interactions with others through it. Not only is it insufficiently defined, it’s situation-dependent. Political Correctness in a university or a California tech company is a totally different set of filters as Political Correctness in a Deep South Baptist Church or my rural Appalachia home town.

>we are expected to filter our world views and interactions through it

I am replying in the following manner only because I believe the discourse around this subject is usually poorly defined. It is not an attack of you or yours, but my attempt to help us all better understand what we're talking about:

By saying "filter through it," what do you mean by "it?" What are the rules of the filter you are applying?

When you say "expected," who is expecting this of you? What has indicated to you that there is this expectation, and what are the consequences of bucking that expectation?

What are the filters in California? What are the filters in the deep south? Is there any federally legal relevance? For example, you could face legal issues if you make sexually connotative comments to a female coworker, and though you are more likely to be pursued and charged in California than in the Deep South for it, is that how things should be? Shouldn't women feel comfortable with their coworkers regardless of local culture?

> Shouldn't women feel comfortable with their coworkers regardless of local culture?

The problem is what makes a woman feel uncomfortable is culturally driven - when you have such a mix of cultures at work people are bound to make innocent mis-steps.

Californian companies have a tendency of looking at it by race and gender identity. Do you assume the best of people or do you assume the worst?

If you're asking, I personally assume the best.

I understand where you're coming from - maybe you're referring to things like "micro-aggressions" and other things many of us would find silly? Yup, definitely something that needs tackling. I've never argued that there would be a clear algorithm for "this makes people uncomfortable to the point that it should be illegal, this does not."

Luckily, our judges and court system are pretty good at exactly this sort of thing. I think a law on the books that goes something along the lines of "nobody should be made to feel sexually uncomfortable at work" starts the definition, and then subsequent court cases sharpens it. Sorry, Tim saying "great haircut!" doesn't count, but oops yea Janice saying "quite the cucumber you're hiding away there, Bill," while waggling her eyebrows does. Etc.

> Luckily, our judges and court system are pretty good at exactly this sort of thing.

What makes you think that?

Millions of Americans have been negatively impacted by bad laws on the books.

> I think a law on the books that goes something along the lines of "nobody should be made to feel sexually uncomfortable at work" starts the definition

You have just killed all chance of workplace romance - and more than 50% of people have dated coworkers.

We have sexual harassment laws on the books already.

Why would you negatively impact millions so a few people don't have to feel mildly uncomfortable (and obviously it's mild or it would be sexual harassement which is already illegal)?

> This seems like a bad idea to me, especially in the context of a discussion about how to reduce the political/social influence of Google.

It seems to me that there's an enormous contingent of people who wants to yell about the influence of Google and Facebook and then yell even louder about how they're not actively intervening to skew content towards their political preferences (ie increase their influence massively). This split-personality approach is baffling to me.

Irrelevant to the content itself, but I have noticed a tendency in myself to treat the media and the internet as a homogeneous entity. So I might see a bunch of articles and comments about how people want to punish Hollywood for sex abuse, and a bunch more about how a given politician isn't actually guilty, and I think in my brain "well which is it!!" But then if I start paying attention to the papers themselves and the history of commentors, I'm noticing that it's not the same people calling for both. I started doing this after alt right trolls started saying things like "I thought you liberals LOVE new taxes?" and realized it was happening to me.

I'm getting a sense of that from your post.

No, I'm definitely aware of that phenomenon and definitely check for it before I say things like this. I'm thinking of specific individual people I know, whether in real life or consistent pseudonyms on communities I have exposure to. It happens often enough in that small, detailed dataset that I'm comfortable extrapolating a little bit to the larger dataset instead of assuming that it's different subgroups with contradictory viewpoints.

I come across thoughtful people all the time who have a baseline assumption of intelligence and intellectual honesty that doesn't match almost any group you're likely to actually come across. My prior for people having obviously contradictory views is simply higher than yours.

That can happen even if everyone involved is individually logical and rational. See the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet_paradox for more.

It happens even more easily if you're lumping people into a single group, but the individuals that you see speaking out about one topic are different than the individuals that you see speaking out about another.

The upshot is that from your described experience you cannot conclude that any group is being self-contradictory unless you personally witness the same person contradicting themselves in different discussions.

I'm not speaking of groups holding collectively contradictory views, I'm speaking of the group consisting of individuals who hold individually contradictory views. I know many people personally who hold the views described above.

Oh wow, nice, I never knew this was a named phenomena!

>It seems to me that there's an enormous contingent of people who wants to yell about the influence of Google and Facebook and then yell even louder about how they're not actively intervening to skew content towards their political preferences (ie increase their influence massively). This split-personality approach is baffling to me.

It's pretty straightforward to understand the view.

1. It would be better if Google and Facebook didn't even have the power to skew content.

2. Since they do have that power and seem determined to use it they should be judged on their choice to use (or not use in this case) and implementation of content skewing.

Well, it's like the restaurant example.

If I search for "restaurants", it shouldn't give me restaurants in Shanghai because that's the city with the largest population. It should give me Northern California, since that's where I live and Google knows that.

Similarly, Google might reasonably infer that if someone is searching for their own race, sexuality, or religion, they're probably more interested in information or support groups than porn. Not that both can't be served as results... just... priorities of what people are looking for.

> Similarly, Google might reasonably infer that if someone is searching for their own race, sexuality, or religion, they're probably more interested in information or support groups than porn.

Sure, if they have data to back that assumption up. My interpretation was that the parent commenter wanted them to make assumptions just based on politics, which I think is a bad idea.

How would google infer that you’re looking for information about your own race and gender?

Ideally it should know nothing about me!

Ideally, you are correct. In reality, however, I'm willing to bet that Google could pick you out of a lineup.

> Similarly, Google might reasonably infer that if someone is searching for their own race, sexuality, or religion, they're probably more interested in information or support groups than porn. Not that both can't be served as results... just... priorities of what people are looking for.

Don't they already do this for porn? I thought that feature was in place years ago. It's even a minor Internet joke that Bing is only good for porn (since they're more lax about letting porn into their results).

Why would that be true, though? Are straight men more likely than gay men to be looking for gay pornography?

At some point you've got to accept that googling "hot teens" won't get you resources on the treatment of hyperthermia in young people.

Neither here nor there, but as a conversational style I find that when i'm asking a legitimate but pointed question, people are more likely to take accept my question as an honest one if I open with

> Are you saying that ...

> You are saying that ...

I don't think it's right that because there's some highly backlinked content with with some keywords, that you should assume that's what people are looking for when they search those keywords.

Shouldn't helping connect poeple with what they're looking for be the bottom line? Even if you have to manipulate your algorimths natural results to do so.

It is Google's site and Google's (very much) proprietary algorithm so of course Google is at fault. Your argument is a variant of the "uploader defense." It was used by the TPB operators to claim that they weren't responsible for what was featured on their site because it was uploaded by users. But legally (or morally) they realized that they were, because they removed child porn even though they let Hollywood movies remain.

It's not as much about who is responsible as it is about what the results reflect: apparently this is what we put in, and thus what we get out of it, including results tailored to our bubble.

This isn't fixed by telling Google it's their fault and they should hide things, that's just looking away and covering things up. The true fix is making the input better, which requires society being better, which it isn't (at this point).

Wtf, you are not seriously claiming that TBP is at fault? You are just trolling, right?

Because they are not. And neither is Google.

Comparing is not judging or blaming. The GP suggests that both TPB and Google are in a gray area, which I partially agree with, but I think they are in different gray areas.

TPB, as described, is in a moral gray area - "We know some of the uploaded stuff is immoral" - so they delete what's immoral (their judgement - child porn/copyright stuff/anything between), they arbitrarily decide what you see

Google is in an algorithmic gray area - "The algorithm decides what's best for you, we want the best for you, but we won't judge what's best for you" - so they do nothing and hope for the best (and least damage), the algorithm arbitrarily decides what you see

Both seem like different routes to the same hell.

Edit: Spelling, clearer wording

It's not just the moral issue, but a legal one.

TPB said "We are not responsible for the content people upload." Except then they deleted CP, probably for many good as well as self-serving reasons: CP is bad, obviously, but also brings bad press (hard to get the public on the side of piracy when it leads to ease of CP access), as well as the holy wrath of pretty much every criminal federal agency in countries around the world, as opposed to just whatever branch of whatever agency is in charge of copyright protection. Doubt they could get hosting in any country if they didn't take the CP down.

But by taking CP down, they demonstrated that they do and can monitor content, that they can take it down, that they do take responsibility for at least some of it. Legally that's a shot in the foot, I thought, but they still find hosting so who knows.

Thank you for explaining. That's what I meant by the uploader defense. I'm fairly sure Google removes CP from their search results so obviously they can exercise some control over their content. So they can't blame it all on the algorithm.

Google was always responsible. From day one. Google has always exercised editorial control of their platform when it was in their commercial interests. They delete spam, porn, malware, etc. They tweak the search results to benefit their own properties or demote competitors (see Foundem).

Precisely. Social preference is still a preference like any other. Google makes it its job to understand what the user is looking for. If they need data on what is an acceptable result they have the means to collect it and fold it into their algorithm. When people search for three black teenagers are they really looking for three mugshots? Is that a good result in any conventional sense, purely judged in a QA system sense, and without prior? There is at least a query specificity or query extension problem here.

Whatever proxy they are using to find relevance is broken in this regard, and it's important to recognize that there is still an engineering problem despite, or despite it looking like, a political problem.

Also, how hard is it really to get a sense for the quality of a search and the irrelevance of its results for the vast majority of people? Given how much demographic data Google pulls in from your history, it seems to be not super hard to notice that actual black girls are repulsed by what was shown to them. It also seems easy to post a notice saying: "Hey, searchers like you have found this query to contain many irrelevant or inappropriate results. Beware!"

> It also seems easy to post a notice saying: "Hey, searchers like you have found this query to contain many irrelevant or inappropriate results. Beware!"

They did exactly this in 2004, when searches for "jew" brought up anti-Semitic website "Jew Watch" as the top result (because, as a linguistic quirk, "Jew" tends to be used in a slur-like way and Jewish organizations tend to use "Jewish," and the algorithm at the time considered those as different words): they placed an ad at the top of the page with an explanation of the "Offensive Search Results," distancing themselves from the content and explaining the "Jew"/"Jewish" thing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jew_Watch#Google_Search_result...

http://sethf.com/anticensorware/google/jew-watch/jew-watch-c... (and yes, that's Netscape Navigator!)

http://web.archive.org/web/20050123081919/http://www.google....

The problem statement is given the sentiment space of reactions to similar clusters of search queries, minimize negative sentiment across the most clusters given resource constraints (time, cost, CPU).

This is a hard problem. There are many search queries, there are many clusters of similar search queries that address partially overlapping (topic,audience segment) pairs. Deriving sentiment scores from these segments is difficult without any feedback mechanisms. Choosing which segments to focus on is difficult or counterintuitive and depends on the topic and audience and characteristics of the audience. Once a topic and audience segment is identified for remediation, the task of effecting change is again topic and audience specific (resistant to automation).

This is a hard problem. Neither a brute force "human review squad" approach nor an automated "deep learning" approach will provide 100% coverage through all time. Does that mean that they shouldn't try? No, of course not, and they almost certainly try every day. However, it's inevitable that they will be subject to sniping articles no matter what they do.

I think I agree with you overall — there's no way to perform this task perfectly for all time in such a way that it makes this problem disappear. But I want to push back against the specifics of your argument, namely about the cost and resources involved, as well as the lack of feedback mechanisms. I do that below; I wrote those paragraphs before really giving credit to how hard it would be to comprehensively score audience + topic pairs. That sounds like... exponentially growing complexity. So that approach sounds like a non-starter; maybe an alternative is to look at quality metrics on clusters of search queries as a whole, before diving into seeing if there are problems with individual audiences and those queries. Who knows.

There are many search queries to watch, but 'black girls' was persistently problematic for a long time. Noticing when a cluster of queries gets that status might be extremely resource intensive if that status was highly ephemeral; it's not. It's work that can be done asynchronously, and run daily at most. Is this simple? Nothing involving software is, imo. But it's probably much simpler than many other machine learning-driven pieces of Google's product.

Also, there are tons of feedback mechanisms available and actively used by Google. Every user interaction with search results is available to Google; a lot of these stand in for quality of result: did the person refine their query after seeing crappy results? Did they click a link and then press 'back' really quick? All of these factors already feature in Google's algorithm.

Taking it a step further, Google could apply this rule: if users really wanted to see (e.g.) porn, then adding that word to the query would show it; so let's keep the results safe by default.

Isn't the whole thing presumably caused by the fact that out of people using that query, most do want to see naked girls? So what you're proposing is to set the comparably less frequent, minority option as the default one, which is quite strange - generally you'd set the defaults so that usually they would not have to be changed.

In general, there's the "safe search" option that's on by default; but if someone has turned it off, then it's reasonable to assume that the default, most common intent of looking for "girls" actually is sexual, and if they were looking for something else (say, "black girls support group") then that would be a comparably rare situation where extra words should be added to the query.

I like the simplicity of your idea. However, there's articles on porn that are non-pornographic in nature. Usually people discussing or discouraging it rather than using it. To account for that, maybe make it something like "showporn" or a dedicated search page for it. Then, people Googling for information on porn that's not pornographic still wont get hit with it. Whereas, people looking for it using dedicated search page will exclusively see it.

This isnt that different from search engines for specialized databases. I used to use meta-search engines that woukd have checkboxes or selection menus to focus search on specific topics or collections. It was very useful. I still do it for technical papers using the "site:" operator to limit search to known-good sites for them.

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