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Comment by jccalhoun | Hacker News Reader

I hate it when people call being wrong "lying." This is a semantic argument. He was born there so it could be argued that Israeli is technically accurate. I hate it when people call being wrong "lying."

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As noted in the article, it could be also be argued that Ted Cruz is a well-known Canadian politician, but at some point you move from "technically right" to just "wrong", and I think that easily passes it. Ted Cruz is not a Canadian politician, and it's not even technically accurate to say he is.

(The distinction between being "wrong" and "lying" I'll grant you, but I suspect the author is a bit peeved, and should be excused for using hyperbolic language when being ignored by Google's famously amazing customer service.)

So what is the distinction anyway between lying and being wrong?

Is the dividing line between wrong and "plain lying" whether someone has cold customer service? Is that why my buggy programs are just wrong, whereas Google is engaged in dishonesty? Or is hyperbole just dishonesty here.

deliberate intent

https://www.dictionary.com/browse/lie

Being wrong once without intent to be wrong is not lying.

In this case, Google continues to repeat wrong information long after being corrected multiple times. At this point, it's fair to say they are lying.

It's not lying. Maybe it's being wrong, maybe it's negligence, but it's not lying. It's not like they're trying to display the wrong information. The algorithm isn't a person. It's not as simple as saying "oh, our algorithm messed up, we'll kindly tell it to say that you live over there from now on".

I wouldn't call it lying, I'd call it a sub-optimal algorithm design.

Generally, the person or group of people behind an algorithm needs to be fully accountable and responsible for the algorithm they use to interact with the world.

If saying: "it's not me, it's the algorithm" gets you out of the responsibility you can do all kinds of morally questionable things.

(edit: grammeer)

"It's not me, it's the killbot algorithm I designed, patented, and licensed!"

In seriousness, though, I agree and we're already way behind the eight-ball on this one, given predictive policing and bail algorithms.

Wikipedia and Buzzfeed and other websites suffer from being wrong as well. Trying to get a bias in the news to get more clicks that might be wrong.

At what point does it become fake news or just being wrong?

To me, it's about intent. If they are unknowingly wrong, they aren't lying. As soon as somebody informs them of the error, if they continue to report falsehoods, they are lying (and have now become fake news). It doesn't matter if the falsehood is generated by an algorithm or a person, or if the falsehood is malicious or not - as soon as they know they are wrong, they should take action to correct whatever has been published.

According to the author, he was asked by Google to give feedback on the info they had about him. He did, and they ignored it.

What will it take before you consider them to be lying?

That's not the definition of lying. Lying is about intent. If you keep using that word wrong, you'll end up saying something that isn't true. Are you lying?

Being wrong is not the same thing as lying, or else everything wrong becomes lying and the word "lying" loses its meaning. No one wants to be wrong. That is where intent comes into play.

I guess my comment came off a little harsh.

I was actually interested in at what point this should be considered intentional. At what point should Google be obligated to hide this (mis)information, or show some disclaimer? After one "feedback"? After 10? After this blogpost? After a newspaper article?

  Lying is about intent.

Intent or reckless disregard for truth.

If, for example, I write that MIT has assembled a robot army with the aim of taking over Canada, I don't know for a fact that is false.

Slander and libel use that standard.

If continuing to spread the falsehood after multiple corrections doesn't attach intent, what could Google possibly do for you to think they were lying in a search result?

Google isn't a single person saying sentences who can immediately change what he says in his next sentence. Changing Google results is not trivial, the search engine has lots of quirks and is a complex code. If you ask Google to change something, you need to submit a ticket, which is in line with thousands of other tickets. That ticket needs to get evaluated by a customer support team, which sends it to another team, which sends it to another team. Google is a gargantuan entity and things take time. It is very easy to see how this lack of change can arise from something other than malicious intent. I highly doubt Google is intentionally trying to taint this one man's reputation.

TLDR: Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by stupidity.

So there is no possible situation in which you would say Google was lying in a search result?

Any possible situation? Of course there is. This one? Highly unlikely. There's no way Google cares enough about this guy to lie about him. Apparently, they don't even care enough about him to fix the error in their search result. Poor guy, he's in the "famous but not famous enough" valley.

But the question that's been asked 3 times now in this thread is what it would take for Google to be considered lying. If I don't establish that, how can we discuss whether this qualifies?

I feel like we're beating a dead horse at this point. If someone at Google intentionally modified the result output to say X where X is false, then that would be considered lying.

Would you consider it lying if someone at Google reviewed his request, understood it to be true, and then did not change the incorrect information?

I think you know what I'm gonna say. No, it's not "lying". Stop using that word, or look up the definition already. Use a better word like "negligence".

I honestly thought you were going to agree that this would be a lie. I thought you were saying lies are about knowingly spreading a falsehood. Once someone at Google has verified that it's false, how does its continued spread not become a lie in the same way that it would be if that person wrote the untrue statement?

How does Google know he’s not lying?

And that he is he.

The other option is that Google is reaching out to random people to correct information about total strangers.

I do not understand why you hate this. Making a false statement is lying, at least in my playbook.

That the argument is semantic is irrelevant. It may be the case that Google is only wrong because of a technicality, but they are wrong nevertheless. (Unless you believe that Google is right and the author is actually Israeli, but that is a different discussion.)

In vernacular usage, the act of lying requires intent. Is it perhaps possible that Parent is trying to communicate a difference between intentional false statements, commonly called lies, and unintentional false statements, commonly called being wrong?

If someone is incorrect about the time when you ask, it's possible they are deliberately misleading you. It's also possible they are not, and their clock is also incorrect. Would you consider both cases to be lying?

Israel doesn't have birthright citizenship, so calling him Israeli is not technically accurate.

But I agree that Google is almost certainly not lying, which implies intent. They're simply wrong.

It's the same for the liar paradox:

'The sentence below is true

The sentence above is a lie'

Well no, it just means one is wrong. Though I imagine the philosophic roots had more nuance than the sci-fi that came from it.

What's the difference between lying vs being wrong when your platform generated over $100 billion in savings but you refuse to pay for the same kind of routine customer support that allows many other companies to fix mistakes for their customers?

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