Google, the Stupidity Amplifier (2016)
gregegan.net
gregegan.net
I was curious, so I clicked through to read more. It turns out this text was taken from the headline at the top of a PDF. What the Google crawler didn't notice, however, was that the headline actually had another headline above it. The full text read "Myth: Freezing food kills harmful bacteria that can cause food poisoning".
https://ask.usda.gov/s/article/Does-freezing-food-kill-bacte...
As bacterias are cells with membranes in principle they are killed when frozen, so far, so good...
... but this is just the general case. Not all bacterias have being created equal and there are thousands of species.
Some are extremophiles and store sugar or other substances that act as an antifreeze, so can decrease the temperature of freezing and remain "liquid" under zero point. They can stand much lower temperatures before being killed (by freezing). Is just that they are killed at -25C instead -5C, but the killer is still a tiny ice dagger.
And some bacteria have evolved an outer protective gelatinous capsule, made partially with "sugar", that is not easy to pierce, so they can alter their osmotic pressure and stand more osmotic stress.
And finally, some will just die, but not before creating a inner spore devoid of water that can stand the cold or dry until rehydrated. No water, no ice.
https://www.gov.mb.ca/health/publichealth/environmentalhealt...
"Parasite Destruction for Raw Fish: Seafood products to be served raw must: Have been frozen at a temperature of –20°C (-4°F) for 7 days or below –35°C (-31°F) for 15 hours, to destroy parasites that might be present."
But if tomorrow we would found a suitable antifreeze in some obscure creature that is not rejected by the body and does not damage the cells, this is a game changer. To be able to put the body just about to freeze but not further... that would be awesome.
Would be a key to 1-hibernation and long term space travel, 2-increase life expectancy slowing the metabolism and this mean slowing cancer also, 3-increase in the range of temperatures that humans can stand without suffering chill burning and losing fingers.
De-thawing would be still a brutal process. Not all cells would survive.
My understanding was that ice crystal length was also related to time taken to freeze.
IE freezing faster produced smaller crystals that don't then damage the cells so much.
We have a liquid nitrogen icecream shop that exploits the shorter crystal length to make "creamier" icecream while you wait. Not exactly how I'd want my brain frozen but hopefully the cryogenic experts know a way.
But it really does need to be handled appropriately. For example, while you can put it in a simple thermos flask you shouldn't be in small enclosed spaces with it. IE elevator/car.
The liquid expands to quite a lot of gas and might force out all the standard air taking the oxygen with it.
But mainly it is about 'freeze burns'.
My wife(science lab manager) cringes at the lack of safety glasses and gloves at the ice cream shop.
They plonk ingredients into an open top mixer/blender and then pour the liquid nitrogen in while it is running!
Edit: tweaked wording.
"Not all bacteria are created equal ..."
Trivia: Spanish would distinguish between "una bacteria" (one bacterium) feminine noun in Spanish so it ends in "a", and between "una colonia de bacterias" (a colony of bacteria). Bacterias would be the correct plural in Spanish. English works a little different here.
The exceptions are things like
* mixed modern coinages (e.g. "television", a Latin suffix with a Greek prefix),
* divergent modern coinages ("bicycle" is not Greek "κύκλος" nor Latin "cyclus", and was taken from French),
* words not attested in the plural in the original language (e.g. "virus", only attested in the singular),
* words not actually singular in the original language (e.g. "ignoramus" is a verb in Latin, first person plural), and
* things that have since diverged (e.g. "hippopotamus", where "ποταμός" meaning "river" is "-ός" and hence "ποταμοι" in Greek but the word that English has came via Late Latin).
English generally pluralizes these things the Germanic way with "-es"/"-s", although pluralizing "hippopotami" as Latin is well attested and "bicycles" is the French plural.
Getting English speakers to remember "spaghetto", "panino", "confetto", "graffito", "paparazzo", or even "die" (singular of "dice") is somewhat hard. (-:
https://cooking.stackexchange.com/questions/76455/in-the-usa...
Most red meats sit out for a bit, either wet or dry aged, which enhances the flavors. Fish will need to be frozen or cooked to a safe temperature.
I have eaten raw skipjack tuna that I caught myself and never froze. Tuna, as far as I know, has very little risk of parasitic infection. It was delicious.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25461601/
https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/raw-tuna#parasites
You got lucky, and yes, it is delicious, but you're definitely playing health roulette.
The real problem with tuna is that is an accumulator of nasty substances like mercury and also fast and nomadic by nature. This means that you can find Japanese tuna in California, or the Mediterranean, and this can be a problem.
Most of the fish parasites just turn into food after being cooked. Our stomach acid will not care. The number of marine fish parasites able to harm humans is very small. We are too hot for them. I could count all the major types with my fingers (I was surprised to learn (here) that Kudoa is a new problem in any case).
The catch, for anyone who's never tried it, is that you're not just eating raw meat, you're eating finely chopped raw meat and butter and egg yolk and onion and toast etc.
Now I'm wondering what animals we do eat raw in America other than oysters and (if you know where to go) other sea creatures that might be alive when served.
It was delicious...but if I ate it too fast I would gag.
If Google just displayed links to users, then the user might actually click them, which would result in them leaving Google for another website, which is Not Okay. One of Google's largest efforts is to make sure they're the only website the user stays on, which is why they scrape contents from pages and display them on their SRP, why they want to hide the address bar from web browsers, why they push projects like AMP so hard, and many other things. Conveniently these efforts are also all of the nature that they can just claim they're helping the user get what they want more quickly - as long as they're using Google.
Users also all trust Google a considerable amount, so very few will take any additional action after being instantly supplied with an answer that is scraped from some random website. Google gets 100% of the user flow, has 100% control over what answer to show, and of course can show the user some great ads while they're at it, while denying the source website traffic for their content.
Google a question you have, especially something with mass appeal, (health, fitness, media, culture, travel, etc.) and click any of the top links.
It will load slowly, 1000s of tracking scripts, there will be popups, scrolling might break, you will be redirected, more popups, half the screen covered by an ad, the site breaks, etc...
In fact I just recorded myself doing this. Watch as I struggle to read the page, I end up not even able to scroll down: https://imgur.com/gallery/5fdBdcL
Tracking scripts, ads, etc.
If they changed their algorithm to prioritize sites with minimal ads and tracking, load quickly and aren’t bloated, and actually work with a good user experience, incentives would change.
I guess that is what they are trying to do with AMP. But you would think they could do it by just changing their ranking algorithm.
Edit: window.performance.timing.domContentLoadedEventEnd - window.performance.timing.navigationStart
Firefox: 411
Chrome: 70 => better, but still 70ms for what?
navigationStart: 0
fetchStart: 0
domainLookupStart: 35
domainLookupEnd: 35
connectStart: 35
connectEnd: 35
requestStart: 36
responseStart: 36
responseEnd: 36
unloadEventStart: 49
unloadEventEnd: 49
domLoading: 49
domInteractive: 63
domContentLoadedEventStart: 64
domContentLoadedEventEnd: 65
domComplete: 66
loadEventStart: 66
loadEventEnd: 66
Note: refreshing the page with the javascript console open takes ~200ms on my machine, and certain extensions can make it even slower than that.
And ironically, this has the effect of making Google Search even worse. Whether someone clicked on a link used to be a signal to Google’s search algorithm that the link (or at least the title and snippet) was relevant. And there’s no quality feedback loop at all for the embedded info boxes.
Actually, there is feedback for so-called non-organic SERP elements. You can check whether a user clicked the next result after an element, which is a signal of uselessness of the element. On mobile devices you could also check whether user continued scrolling after seeing the element. Both signals are used by search companies.
But if the user found the answer they wanted from Google itself, why would they stick around on Google's site?
Google might actually make more money if the user clicked on another web site, since chances are that the other site would serve them a Google ad (e.g., via DoubleClick).
We forgot that the reason search engines were effectively exempt from libel/copyright etc. is because were just describing the web, they published the map but the content was on all the individual websites.
It's a lot harder to argue that model still applies when you've got algorithms building out these micro-articles from increasingly disparate pieces. Somewhere here there's a line between a preview of a link and republication.
The feature is really clever and works great when it works, but sometimes just because something is formatted as an authoritative answer, it's promoted above actual correct information. It's almost slower than just looking for a qualifying source in those cases.
At least with CK2, there’s really no harm done if someone sees a fictional portrait of a long dead minor ruler. With entire nations, the story is a little different.
Google maps will show you different borders and place names depending on where you are.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/02/14/google-...
Out of curiosity, what do you believe to be the correct nationality?
Now, perhaps you would consider that we ought to demand people's "nationality" be an actual UN member state which counts them as a citizen and since Tibet isn't a member... That's a bit awkward though because the "One China" policy ensures neither the Republic (in Taiwan) nor the PRC will allow the other to be a UN member at the same time as them.
Also I find that I doubt we demand most people have documentary proof. Not taking their word for it is already a bit weird unless you're a border official. Is Samantha Bee really Canadian? I mean, she says she is so I just assumed...
Actually, 90+% of the population of the ROC, including their leaders, would be ecstatically happy to be an UN member separately from the PRC. The only reason they officially have a "One China policy" is that the PRC has made it clear that while they can tolerate the status quo of a rival government with zero prospects of actually challenging them controlling a small piece of their territory, they will very much not tolerate that piece of territory to become officially independant and provide an example for at least half a dozen others.
Obviously being in exile I have no idea what passport he carries of if he gets to issue his own given he contends the current government, etc.
https://mobile.twitter.com/DanielDumbrill/status/12992582723...
I think that rumors of cultural oppression in Tibet have been vastly exaggerated
[1] https://portal1.passportindia.gov.in/AppOnlineProject/online...
With the Dalai Lama this point is particularly interesting, because his life is an ongoing conversation with the Chinese (although at times they seem like two monologues).
I think what matters is whether the existence of an independent country is contested. No one contests non-existence of USSR but Tibetan case is not closed.
* verbose explanation why this might be disputed
We're not surprised when image results have no correlation with the search term. The problem is when other people fail to notice this disparity.
They'll go on to write articles and blog post based on google's results. Later someone else will make a wikipedia page based on the blog post. Google's flawed results will now be confirmed by the wikipedia page.
A virtuous cycle indeed.
I was watching an episode of Star Trek TNG and a character was introduced that was a little over the top and vaguely resembled Jim Carrey so I searched “Star Trek Jim Carrey” and one of the top results (after a bunch of YouTube clips of some sort of Jim Carrey Star Trek skit) was the Wikipedia page for the specific episode I was watching. And here’s the interesting part: Jim Carrey wasn’t in it.
My search results took my misguided query and still returned the one correct episode out of who knows how many hundreds of Star Trek episodes exist. I can only guess that enough people have searched “Star Trek Jim Carrey” and stopped searching once they got to information about that particular episode.
I think that "vicious" is more appropriate here
If you enjoyed the post, and the author's website, be sure to read some of his books too!
Honestly as the other response says, indeed there is a parallel universe part to it.. For which I didn't really understand it relation to "dust".
I also liked "Quarantine" which made Quantum Mechanics somehow more intuitive to me. Truly a great writer.
The other universes count as part of the "dust".
The characters in the book thought it would be only random 'simulations' that accidentally happen sometime in the universe's infinite future that kept running them -- that is, literal dust.
They were wrong. Simulations in entirely disjoint universes also count, and aren't nearly as predictable.
They arranged to have the simulation in our universe turned off, but not to have all simulations turned off -- there's no way they could do the latter. So they ended up in a simulation run by someone who'd started off by simulating Earth, and who -- more likely than not -- were especially interested in embedded simulations.
Embedded simulations like theirs, but also like the Autoverse, and whoever it is was interested enough that they'd violate the simulated physics of Earth to keep simulating the cellular automaton despite the physics of Earth saying it should be shut off.
Viewed from that perspective, the ending is... not predictable, exactly, but at least plausible.
His short stories are also criminally overlooked.
That was exactly my feeling after finishing this novel. I went on to read Diaspora, another excellent book.
I think I was prejudiced against sci-fi because of how it is generally portrayed in movies and TV, with an emphasis in odd sounding words and fantastical themes. But Greg Egan makes a fair connection with the current world and expands it with such credibility, you can definitely see some things happening.
And just that, from a cosmological perspective, the chances of us being hit by a gamma ray burst after the kind of technological advancements described but before the capacity to evacuate or shield biological lifeforms arises is... slim. I figure it was introduced more as a plot device than anything else, the biggest deviation from potential veracity (and a "take that" at anyone questioning said potential veracity, which goes just beyond cheeky to slightly obnoxious).
This is a fascinating failure mode - Google works on a best effort basis, so it doesn’t have a strong enough concept of “there is no correct answer to this question” or perhaps “my approach is wrong in this case”.
> concept of “there is no correct answer to this question” or perhaps “my approach is wrong in this case”.
Exactly. What's wrong with "We could only find 3 results matching your query. Try searching using some other terms, or try the following related queries."? It's so annoying to sift through the results just to realize that Google has no damn clue what I'm looking for.
It doesn't for me. I just get his home page as the top of search results, and a knowledge panel on the right-hand side that appears to accurately describe him (with zero photos), and a button "Claim this knowledge panel" which he could presumably use to correct any misinformation.
I just find it utterly unacceptable. I'd drag my developers over hot coal if they somehow released what I see from these trillion dollars companies.
I wasn't able to "add to cart" with my Amazon app for instance and things like YouTube and Instagram constantly crash when I'm adding new content. And many banking apps totally freak out when I use a password manager. This is pretty core operation. It's really amazing.
I really don't know how the valley operates sometime.
I'd imagine they supposedly have entire departments and dozens of people who are supposed to make sure this stuff works.
Sometimes I find it so unbelievable that I try multiple devices to take the possibility that it's just me out and it's invariably reproducible on all.
Maybe nobody at the company uses Android or maybe nobody uses their own product? (Maybe people who work at, say, Facebook don't actually like using it...thats understandable, but also unacceptable)
I really don't know how it happens. Maybe their tests are 100% automated and no human checks it? I don't know.
But there are times when something simply shouldn't be, definitionally. As in, if X happens, it doesn't matter what the root cause analysis is, something is wrong.
To give a real life example, if you're driving drunk, the events and reasons leading up to the act don't really matter. They're not without value, but they're not important for determining that someone fucked up.
This is what the poster you're responding to is saying. That the problems are so goddamned egregious that they simply shouldn't be. It's not up to the aforementioned poster to fix the problems, it's up to the companies in question wanting to be better.
Moreover, I don't know about the many developers you have experience with, but if the developer considers the behaviour to be a bug, I have a hard time believing they don't consider the behaviour to be a failure (ie. someone made a mistake somewhere). Though, I can definitely see people shifting the responsability to someone else, specially if there's a blame culture in place. Obviously, that's easier to do once you know the root cause. However, a company will be better off by putting solid QA practices in place and measuring "fuck ups" as a decrease in productivity instead of measuring it as the number of times each developer break production.
Last friday my internet went out (Cox) and I called into support. The first thing the guy told me? My equipment is too old.
This is simply unacceptable as a reason why my internet stopped working at 6 in the morning. I suspect it was an attempt to upsell me a new modem, but I have a docsys 3 that's under 5 years old. It doesn't matter. Any series of events that results in technical support leading with blaming "old equipment" on the outage is wrong, period. Maybe the equipment went bad, it happens, but that's not what you lead with. Certainly not before trouble shooting.
This is what I mean when I say "definitionally". It doesn't matter what their motivation is. It doesn't matter if it's possible that my equipment died. That employee fucked up.
This isn't about technical excellence or software practices. This is about decision making.
I get your point that people make bad decisions, but in software development, those bad decisions shouldn't break the user experience, but decrease the developer's (and/or the team's) productivity instead. Doing root cause analysis is part of the process to achieve that, as it can give insight on how to avoid that class of problems in future. That said, if someone is not doing a good job, they'd hopefully figure it out by themselves, but constructive feedback can also go a long way. Ultimately, if you have a good process in place, it should help you to make an educated assessment of who is underperforming (eg.: their PRs take very long to merge, they are full of beginner's mistakes, their code is never properly tested, their releases are always rolled back a few times until they get it right, etc). All of that without playing the blame game on the (hopefully) rare ocasion that a major bug is found in production.
Your blame-free production line won't help you if you're making the wrong thing and/or your UX doesn't help the user.
Example: someone at Google decided that if you make a general area-based query - e.g. vets in SF - street view is disabled.
It doesn't matter why they made that decision. To a user, it's an annoying inconvenience. The fact there may - or may not be - some kind of management rationale doesn't make it less annoying or less inconvenient. Nor does the fact that the code doubtless passes the tests it's designed to pass.
The same applies to Amazon's search options. I don't want to see results for 1.5TB external hard drives or any internal drives at all if I search for "external hard drive 12TB". I also don't want fake reviews, or reviews for unrelated products.
I don't want my own videos with my own music hit with fraudulent copyright claims when I upload them to YouTube. Especially if "my own music" is white noise. [1]
I don't want to have to deal with bugs like Heartbleed, Meltdown, or Spectre. I don't want Excel in Office 365 to fail to respond to double-click select. I don't want my card to be declined for no reason when I'm buying groceries.
I don't want the airliner I'm on to crash because management cut corners.
And so on.
Some of these issues are serious, some are less serious. But what's lacking is seriousness across the industry as a whole. There's an underlying attitude that software is either an annoying cost which can be pared to the bone, or a financial optimisation process, or an interesting puzzle to tinker with. And there seems to be too little deep understanding that it exists outside of a laptop screen, and when it fucks up it causes very real issues for very real people.
Blaming someone will not help either. As you said, the user doesn't care who fucked up.
Some of the problems you listed are still open research areas, so I wouldn't call not solving it lack of seriousness. And for the street view thing, given that there's no clear right or wrong, the best they could do is look at the data and see which approach seem to improve the user experience. I hope they've done that, but I don't know.
Then, there are bugs in excel, online shopping, aeroplane systems. Maybe those would be explained as a lack of seriousness, but I don't see how blaming someone would help avoiding those issues.
Finally, there's the recent intel/amd bugs. They were out there for a long time and it took quite a bit of time and ingenuity to find that there was a security flaw there. I think we can hardly classify that as lack of seriousness or understanding that it can have bad effects to people's lives.
nothing in your post was really relevant to this discussion. The fact that it may have been a company policy or that the person wasn't a developer is completely irrelevant to the larger idea. It's literally missing the forest for the trees.
I've been doing software dev for over 20 years and one of the things I'm known for is building very stable systems. Part of the way I do this is by not allowing myself to use these sorts of things as a defense.
When designing and/or building a system I ask: What should not be? Then I build the system to actively look for those situations. Put another way, I don't build systems with the assumption that there are no bugs. Too many developers push the responsibility outside of themselves. As if bugs are inevitable, therefore the fallout from bugs is inevitable. You just do a root cause analysis and move on rather than asking what you could have done differently to avoid the fallout.
I've lost count of the number of times systems I've built have actively refused to do something and then sent out a notification explaining why.
My point here is that you're doing yourself a disservice by insisting that root cause analysis should be enough. Yes it's important, but it's not enough. Some things simply should not be, and they're avoidable.
The problem is that many companies don't really care.
Neither of us said anything about scolding anyone, that's a strawman.
See how many chat/social networking offerings they have done.
Even search quality has degraded notably in the past 5 years, mainly because of the automated smartness that more hinders than helps.
I used to get answers to my problems, now i have to wade through piles of manure that is only vaguely related to what i'm searching. And they're even overhelpful. I had to plan trips with Bing maps because Google helpfully routed me around a road closed in winter. Except it was winter but I was planning a summer trip...
Unfortunately, it used to be perfect for more advanced searches too. Not any more.
Btw, I don't see where to enter the date when i just ask for directions on google maps. Maybe it's available in the phone app but i use the web page for planning because I can open it on a real screen...
https://rafael.kontesti.me/screenshot.png
Regarding the results, I feel like I'm better at finding things when I have no idea what I'm actually looking for. However, when I know what I'm looking for, it seems more difficult at times, I can't say it was easier before, though.
Note: by useless feedback I don't mean that the user is wrong because they don't understand the interface, when it's actually the interface that's not intuitive. I'm saying that people are often calling in trying to solve something completely out of your control. Just talk to anyone in support and they will tell you the craziest things that pop up. One example I've heard was a user who could not wrap around the idea that an app on the phone needs internet access to order food delivery. Something like that can easily take 30 minutes for a supporter to handle, for instance.
- Once every ten searches there is that "smart" box. - Once every thousand "smart" boxes a user spots an error and clicks the `Feedback`. - There are a hundred developers behind this feature, working 8h/day.
So, according to [the result in a smart box](https://kenshoo.com/monday-morning-metrics-daily-searches-on...) there are 228 million searches per hour. So, to go through all the feedbacks, your developers need to average well over 600 per hour.
An alternative approach to get this estimation: imagine every tenth user reports one error per year. There are [2 billion gSuite users](https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-g-suite-now-has-2-billi...), so intuitively there should be at least as many Google search users. By simple division, your developers would need to go through almost 700 feedbacks per hour.
Having these numbers: how do you think Google engineers should actually react to the feedback?
Disclaimer: I work at Google, but on something not exposed to the outside world. However, we do hit similar scale issues with our users being only Google engineers.
But that would cut into the Profit from the Money Printing Machine.
Saying "We're doing business on a scale that's too big for us to be (profitably) accountable" isn't an acceptable answer.
This kind of deontological approach is not very useful unless it's applied to a morally important issue, and even then, an utilitarian/consequentialist approach is needed to cross-check to make sure deontological approach doesn't go astray.
The bottom line is this: You guys are actively spreading misinformation and profiting from it. That's a bad thing.
Everyone pays one way or another otherwise google wouldn't exist.
I leave feedback on Google results and apps all the time. Either no one reads them, a computer reads them and based on keywords pushes them to a queue that reaches a human or /dev/null, or no one in the company wants to accept responsibility for mistakes otherwise they may not be promoted.
When I search for "Greg Egan", the knowledge panel in the right column doesn't show any photos at all.
And it even has a button "Claim this knowledge panel" that he could presumably use to make corrections.
So is this article just old news, where Google has not only corrected its mistakes but also provided a manual way for people to fix misinformation about themselves?
I'm not understanding why this article is appearing now in 2020.
(Also, a search engine is always going to get some things wrong. Without knowing the rate of errors, a single example doesn't really mean much of anything.)
Google's results are largely accurate, and as long as it has a mechanism for correcting mistakes does seem to make it pretty OK to me.
What are you suggesting any serious alternative be? That would actually work at scale?
Not erroneously copy stuff?
Probably "Not erroneously copy stuff?" is not a trivial thing to do at scale.
Seriously, if you can't do something at scale, don't do something at scale. Being shitty to everyone involved and then saying "but can't scale with profits" is not OK.
Imagine if you thought you understood 90% of what somebody said to you but you didn’t catch the word “not”; you would have exactly the wrong interpretation. Or what about skipping a modifier like “slightly” or “significantly”? (And don’t even get me started on sarcasm or other things that may not be detectable to all.) Google’s summaries, or any auto-summarization, risk inventing a new conclusion that was never part of the original.
This is a cornerstone to critical thinking as well. If you spend your time trusting one-sentence tweets and other shallow writing, are you also asking yourself what hasn’t been stated? For example, I could say: “Engineers quitting Google amid latest executive actions”; the reality might be “it was exactly two engineers”, “their reasons for quitting were unrelated”, etc. It is extremely easy to create misleading summaries.
That said, these plugins, and their failings, are a reminder to me that accessibility can't be an after thought, it needs to be baked into your product's UX.
Font-size is trivially done by the user zooming, but the other settings probably ought to be implemented by more sites, especially text heavy ones.
Google, wikipedia, even facebook, twitter and reddit have been a plus to modern human thinking.
Just coz they fail somewhere doesnot mean they are bad.
People dont remember how much things sucked before them. Also computer vision, AI are new things.
""And your mission was to organise the world’s information. How’s that working out for you so far?""
It working out so well. Internet is just 40 year old and we are here for fu*k sake.
Some people have 0 bigger picture scene.
I would argue, that most people actually do. They don't understand how search engines work. Its just a box, where you put what you search for and they provide answers. How do google gets those answers? They have no idea. Currently, I have only a remote idea how google provides those answers and I've implemented some searching myself back in the day, so how your nontechnical people could even understand this? They don't even want to, they have better things to do than to find out how their technology works, they just want it to work.
> Just coz they fail somewhere does not mean they are bad.
Back in the 1980s, technology was advancing at a dizzying pace, and the world seemed on its way to peace, freedom, and brotherly love.
Today the world has a dis/misinformation crisis, and authoritarianism is rising.
Even if none of that is the fault of Google and social media, it casts doubt on the benefit of today's internet. How great can it be, given the state the world?
The world is still on its way to peace, freedom and love.
What has happened is that the new communication paradigm surfaced truths that there were before but not acknowledged. Violence against blacks didn't start with Rodney King and didn't end with Jacob Blake. There were there before, and they got pushed into the spotlight exactly by the advancing technology of the Internet: videocameras, cell phones, search, video distribution, forums, etc.
We are in the midst of the most important revolution of humankind - the knowledge revolution. Like the agricultural and industrial revolutions before, it's going to turn up the society on its head, and it won't be pretty. But the society that follows will be way better that the one we have now.
I still think technology has equal potential for good, as it does for bad. I hope our industry will adapt, to tilt the balance back to the former.
I'll leave it at that. I wrote and deleted several longer replies to your comment, but they all wound up sounding even more condescending :)
Some would argue that Google wants to be seen as magic driven, or at least AI driven (which, to most, is the same as magic).
> Google, wikipedia, even facebook, twitter and reddit have been a plus to modern human thinking.
These organizations have been hugely beneficial for finding or conveying information, which is different from thinking. Of the five, only the Wikipedia can claim to have reasonable (albeit, not always reliable) systems for vetting information in place. The others hide behind automation while concealing how the automation works.
I'm not going to claim the world is worse off for them, nor am I going to claim it's better. For the most part, it is a trade-off. While organizing the world's information is important, assessing it's value is also important. That's difficult to do when the priority is to do so at large scales and not all information is provided in good faith.
You should read some of his stories, he's pretty good with the big picture.
I think it is more the fault of individuals, and to an extent the institutions teaching those individuals which have a responsibility to teach about online credibility in our time. I.e. don't just copy information from Google - click the link to verify the source is legitimate and look for additional confirmations of the thing you want to report. Of course, if one "legitimate" writer or website gets something wrong, it exacerbates the problem for everyone down the line.
Maybe Google should have a warning somewhere that there information has not been vetted for accuracy?
So instead of funding schools we just spend money passing laws that verge on censorship.
I don't really know how you fix this either. It seems to me that it's not whether you're ABLE to think critically that's the problem, it's whether you WANT to. It feels like a large portion of our population just doesn't want to put in the effort.
The damage that has been done in the last 10 years is hard to miss. Search accuracy went down the toilet as did ranking of results, they started rewriting queries en masse and also censoring.
I hope a competitor arises that steals their lunch. They're so bad these days that it can't be very hard to achieve.
Major disappointment when Google('rockets') results in only sportsball.
As in, zero indication that the word 'rocket' is to be associated with anything else.
So I used duckduckgo. Same result.
1. Bitterly disappointed in the state of search engines today.
2. Reinforced the idea of teaching critical thinking to my child...
This dude thinks just coz human can do it means its easy and forgets the billion years of evolution that went to make our eye or the massive amount of processing our brains does to see an object.