5 ms·

Yikes. More of this "People only want to be told what to do" stuff. I can easily think of a dozen political questions for which no simple answer would be corre

Yikes. More of this "People only want to be told what to do" stuff. I can easily think of a dozen political questions for which no simple answer would be correct -- the language is simply too fuzzy. For many, many things, this is a good idea. The date of Easter is the date of Easter. But the glaring danger here is that for many things this is a freaking evil dystopian nightmare. Why? Because Google will keep tweaking these impossible questions until they look real enough to most people that nobody complains At that point, millions, perhaps billions of people are asking complex questions to a little box that has designed itself to give an plausible but incomplete or wrong answer. Epistemology, Google. There are things you can know and things you cannot. Please do not treat them all the same.

maxerickson 10y ago
The date of Easter depends on which calendar you use. The second largest christian church uses a different calendar than the largest one.
- scandox 10y ago
  Yes he stumbled into a particularly thorny theological matter there. The Quartodecimans are going to hunt him down.
- DanielBMarkham 10y ago
  It's a great point. It shows how easy it is for somebody to think wow, that question obviously has a clear answer when the opposite is true. Take the lead example: Was President Warren Harding a member of the KKK? We know the KKK said he was. We know he vigorously denied it. We know that biographers of him and experts in his history do not think he was. But how could you ever prove that somebody was not the member of a secret society? The entire purpose of secret societies is that the outside world will never know if you're a member or not. Look, I'm happy to assume he wasn't, and at some point only kooks continue to chase things down past all reason, but just assume for a second that he was, and that somehow that fact could be determined but the research has not been done yet. So history student X starts wondering about it one day and types the question into Google. Never fear! Google has the answer: he wasn't. And this is Google's answer because this answer has the benefit of looking the most plausible to the greatest number of people. Student X has an answer, gives it no more thought, and wanders off to think about other matters. Student X is now more stupid. The world as a whole is now less productive. And some preponderance of data that academics have assembled somewhere around the year 2015 has become truth for all time. That's amazingly fucked up, Google. Please stop.
  - maxerickson 10y ago
    Yeah, that was my intended meaning. There probably is an argument to be made that in most English speaking countries "Easter" refers to the date calculated using the Gregorian calender, with some qualifier being used to specify the other date (Google answers searches for "eastern easter 2018" and "orthodox easter 2018" with the correct information).
  - theseatoms 10y ago
    Google should report a probability distribution for each truth claim.
    - jerf 10y ago
      While an interesting idea in theory... and I mean that!... in practice that's saying they just shouldn't provide answers. Even saying for the sake of argument that Google could assemble a meaningful and correct probability distribution, itself a rather bold statement, the average Google user won't know how to correctly interpret such a thing.
      - Bartweiss 10y ago
        And realistically, asking for probability distributions over unbounded sample spaces is trouble even for human experts. I suppose the space for "are mermaids real?" is workable (there are caveats like "yes but extinct", but yes/no is basically sufficient), but for anything subjective or political it's almost hopeless. That said, this is a really interesting idea for behind-the-scenes work. The public might not want percentages, but I suspect experts could get some interesting results by diving into confidence levels and secondary answers.
      - deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
    - forgottenpass 10y ago
      But google isn't even making a truth claim. Google fundamentally doesn't understand the claim, or how to grade it. All the google engine knows is the statistical properties of words and phrases involved and associated with the claim.
- Sharlin 10y ago
  Plus, of course, it depends on which year you're talking about, in a very nontrivial fashion. Googling "when is easter" gives the date of the current year's Easter, which is reasonable, but might lead to an incorrect assumption that the date of Easter is fixed.
  - deong 10y ago
    That's true, but I don't think it's a problem. That's a question that just has two separate intentions, and even the world's foremost expert on Easter could give you the wrong one. If Google were as good as the best human experts at answering any question, then I think we'd have to declare victory and live with the occasional miscommunication, just as we do today.
    - DanielBMarkham 10y ago
      I think the crux of the issue is that real experts in any area, when presented with a question in their field, will answer "That depends" and then engage you in a conversation that ends with you being more knowledgeable about the specific question you should have asked, and why. This is because most areas of human endeavor aren't solid sciences like physics, although for most day-to-day activity we treat them as if they were. I do not care about the nuances of Easter as long as I can get the flowers delivered to my grandma on the correct day. But I do care about the nuances in a ton of other situations, and the dividing line isn't so clear. Simply BSing an answer that's good enough for most cases actually ends up hurting the rest of us more than it helps us. For lack of a better term, it's fake facts.
      - thwarted 10y ago
        I think the crux of the issue is that real experts in any area, when presented with a question in their field, will answer "That depends" and then engage you in a conversation that ends with you being more knowledgeable about the specific question you should have asked, and why. While I actively encourage this method of inquiry and information acquisition, I've found that people often don't care to know why their question isn't even wrong, and challenging it leads to a defensive posture. This conversation is only keeping them from getting an answer and the expert risks being labeled as "uncooperative" because they refuse to provide an answer. This is a social problem, and it won't have a technical solution.
- Bartweiss 10y ago
  This is a really good example of the problem. We aren't just struggling with subjective questions or machine learning getting tricked by fantasy (e.g. mermaids). We're also up against the fact that even very simple questions can't necessarily be answered cleanly. Does Google show different Easter results based on location? I'll bet it does.
- rdlecler1 10y ago
  Yes, but Wikipedia recognizes this fact.
deong 10y ago
It's not even limited to this kind of question for which there's no simple answer to give. Last week, my wife was joking around with our 9-year-old, leading to him trying to convince her that mermaids aren't real. Cue, "OK Google, do mermaids exist?" To which our Google Home announces, "According to Weekly World News...<yes basically>". If "do mermaids exist" can't be classified as a thing you know, I'm not even sure you're at the point where epistemology is your most glaring problem. You know so little that you should stop volunteering to answer questions.
- DanielBMarkham 10y ago
  A common complaint that pg and many of us have about popular forums is that you always end up in some kind of semantics game. That's true, and that's frustrating, but that's also the basis of shared human understanding, the dialectic. I wish I could just say "There are no mermaids", but the definition of "is" and "being" here is complex. In many other cases this definition is not complex. We programmers get dissed a lot because we can tend to be on the arrogant side and think any problem can be fixed with more CPUs or algorithms. For many situations, like HN perhaps, if it works for 99% of the folks it's good enough. But if you're the world dominant leader in answering questions? And you want to give the immediate, correct answer to anything somebody types in? Those little 1% cases pile up. There are a crap ton of situations where the minority opinion is the only thing that advances the species. Existence is much more than simply making the correct or best-guess decision based on a bunch of facts. Most times the facts and basis for definition of terms in the facts are in flux. Gad, I wish it were as easy as I thought it was when I was a kid.
  - deong 10y ago
    Context is important. For a general question-answering bot, you have to synthesize information and make a decision. The answer to a question posed by my uncle on Facebook isn't necessarily the same as the answer to that question posed by an audience member at a talk I'm giving at an academic conference. In the latter case, there's an enormous shared understanding that lets us skip the basic-agreed-upon facts and get right to the nuance. My uncle doesn't need nuance. He needs to know whether climate change is a Chinese conspiracy or vaccines cause autism. Minority opinions are sometimes the thing that advances the species, but that's a job for a time and place that isn't "answering random questions for arbitrary users". The answer to "do mermaids exist" is "no". It just is. That doesn't preclude a group of 200 experts devoting their research careers to investigating the question, and if they happen to prove otherwise, then we alter the textbooks and move on. Ideally, Google would then start answering "yes" instead. But if you want to be that world's dominant authority at answering questions, you can't just always say "well, it's complicated. People disagree. The world is a complex place and the definitions of terms and the facts are in flux", because you're no longer answering a question.
forgottenpass 10y ago
Epistemology, Google. There are things you can know and things you cannot. Please do not treat them all the same. There does not exist a category of things the google can know when a question with semantic meaning is answered by trawling the web and looking for statically connections to the words and phrases in the question. I don't even think we have to take a peek into philosophy of what "knowledge" is to categorically deny that any output of that process could ever be called knowledge. My words fail me, the best explanation I've seen on machine learning 'facts' is: "The output of the algorithm is not a human-understandable fact. It is the result of complicated and unintuitive statistical properties of the input material. However, that data looks like facts we can easily understand" [0] "Don't be evil"? Cleaning up the result of such an algorithm so that it looks like a fact to a layperson is in a very real sense evil. [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/5tovk1/on_the_risks_of_creating_politically_biased_ai/ddonto7/ https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/5tovk1/on_the_...

maxerickson 10y ago

The date of Easter depends on which calendar you use. The second largest christian church uses a different calendar than the largest one.

scandox 10y ago
Yes he stumbled into a particularly thorny theological matter there. The Quartodecimans are going to hunt him down.
DanielBMarkham 10y ago
It's a great point. It shows how easy it is for somebody to think wow, that question obviously has a clear answer when the opposite is true. Take the lead example: Was President Warren Harding a member of the KKK? We know the KKK said he was. We know he vigorously denied it. We know that biographers of him and experts in his history do not think he was. But how could you ever prove that somebody was not the member of a secret society? The entire purpose of secret societies is that the outside world will never know if you're a member or not. Look, I'm happy to assume he wasn't, and at some point only kooks continue to chase things down past all reason, but just assume for a second that he was, and that somehow that fact could be determined but the research has not been done yet. So history student X starts wondering about it one day and types the question into Google. Never fear! Google has the answer: he wasn't. And this is Google's answer because this answer has the benefit of looking the most plausible to the greatest number of people. Student X has an answer, gives it no more thought, and wanders off to think about other matters. Student X is now more stupid. The world as a whole is now less productive. And some preponderance of data that academics have assembled somewhere around the year 2015 has become truth for all time. That's amazingly fucked up, Google. Please stop.
- maxerickson 10y ago
  Yeah, that was my intended meaning. There probably is an argument to be made that in most English speaking countries "Easter" refers to the date calculated using the Gregorian calender, with some qualifier being used to specify the other date (Google answers searches for "eastern easter 2018" and "orthodox easter 2018" with the correct information).
- theseatoms 10y ago
  Google should report a probability distribution for each truth claim.
  - jerf 10y ago
    While an interesting idea in theory... and I mean that!... in practice that's saying they just shouldn't provide answers. Even saying for the sake of argument that Google could assemble a meaningful and correct probability distribution, itself a rather bold statement, the average Google user won't know how to correctly interpret such a thing.
    - Bartweiss 10y ago
      And realistically, asking for probability distributions over unbounded sample spaces is trouble even for human experts. I suppose the space for "are mermaids real?" is workable (there are caveats like "yes but extinct", but yes/no is basically sufficient), but for anything subjective or political it's almost hopeless. That said, this is a really interesting idea for behind-the-scenes work. The public might not want percentages, but I suspect experts could get some interesting results by diving into confidence levels and secondary answers.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
  - forgottenpass 10y ago
    But google isn't even making a truth claim. Google fundamentally doesn't understand the claim, or how to grade it. All the google engine knows is the statistical properties of words and phrases involved and associated with the claim.
Sharlin 10y ago
Plus, of course, it depends on which year you're talking about, in a very nontrivial fashion. Googling "when is easter" gives the date of the current year's Easter, which is reasonable, but might lead to an incorrect assumption that the date of Easter is fixed.
- deong 10y ago
  That's true, but I don't think it's a problem. That's a question that just has two separate intentions, and even the world's foremost expert on Easter could give you the wrong one. If Google were as good as the best human experts at answering any question, then I think we'd have to declare victory and live with the occasional miscommunication, just as we do today.
  - DanielBMarkham 10y ago
    I think the crux of the issue is that real experts in any area, when presented with a question in their field, will answer "That depends" and then engage you in a conversation that ends with you being more knowledgeable about the specific question you should have asked, and why. This is because most areas of human endeavor aren't solid sciences like physics, although for most day-to-day activity we treat them as if they were. I do not care about the nuances of Easter as long as I can get the flowers delivered to my grandma on the correct day. But I do care about the nuances in a ton of other situations, and the dividing line isn't so clear. Simply BSing an answer that's good enough for most cases actually ends up hurting the rest of us more than it helps us. For lack of a better term, it's fake facts.
    - thwarted 10y ago
      I think the crux of the issue is that real experts in any area, when presented with a question in their field, will answer "That depends" and then engage you in a conversation that ends with you being more knowledgeable about the specific question you should have asked, and why. While I actively encourage this method of inquiry and information acquisition, I've found that people often don't care to know why their question isn't even wrong, and challenging it leads to a defensive posture. This conversation is only keeping them from getting an answer and the expert risks being labeled as "uncooperative" because they refuse to provide an answer. This is a social problem, and it won't have a technical solution.
Bartweiss 10y ago
This is a really good example of the problem. We aren't just struggling with subjective questions or machine learning getting tricked by fantasy (e.g. mermaids). We're also up against the fact that even very simple questions can't necessarily be answered cleanly. Does Google show different Easter results based on location? I'll bet it does.
rdlecler1 10y ago
Yes, but Wikipedia recognizes this fact.

deong 10y ago

It's not even limited to this kind of question for which there's no simple answer to give. Last week, my wife was joking around with our 9-year-old, leading to him trying to convince her that mermaids aren't real. Cue, "OK Google, do mermaids exist?" To which our Google Home announces, "According to Weekly World News...<yes basically>". If "do mermaids exist" can't be classified as a thing you know, I'm not even sure you're at the point where epistemology is your most glaring problem. You know so little that you should stop volunteering to answer questions.

DanielBMarkham 10y ago
A common complaint that pg and many of us have about popular forums is that you always end up in some kind of semantics game. That's true, and that's frustrating, but that's also the basis of shared human understanding, the dialectic. I wish I could just say "There are no mermaids", but the definition of "is" and "being" here is complex. In many other cases this definition is not complex. We programmers get dissed a lot because we can tend to be on the arrogant side and think any problem can be fixed with more CPUs or algorithms. For many situations, like HN perhaps, if it works for 99% of the folks it's good enough. But if you're the world dominant leader in answering questions? And you want to give the immediate, correct answer to anything somebody types in? Those little 1% cases pile up. There are a crap ton of situations where the minority opinion is the only thing that advances the species. Existence is much more than simply making the correct or best-guess decision based on a bunch of facts. Most times the facts and basis for definition of terms in the facts are in flux. Gad, I wish it were as easy as I thought it was when I was a kid.
- deong 10y ago
  Context is important. For a general question-answering bot, you have to synthesize information and make a decision. The answer to a question posed by my uncle on Facebook isn't necessarily the same as the answer to that question posed by an audience member at a talk I'm giving at an academic conference. In the latter case, there's an enormous shared understanding that lets us skip the basic-agreed-upon facts and get right to the nuance. My uncle doesn't need nuance. He needs to know whether climate change is a Chinese conspiracy or vaccines cause autism. Minority opinions are sometimes the thing that advances the species, but that's a job for a time and place that isn't "answering random questions for arbitrary users". The answer to "do mermaids exist" is "no". It just is. That doesn't preclude a group of 200 experts devoting their research careers to investigating the question, and if they happen to prove otherwise, then we alter the textbooks and move on. Ideally, Google would then start answering "yes" instead. But if you want to be that world's dominant authority at answering questions, you can't just always say "well, it's complicated. People disagree. The world is a complex place and the definitions of terms and the facts are in flux", because you're no longer answering a question.

forgottenpass 10y ago

Epistemology, Google. There are things you can know and things you cannot. Please do not treat them all the same. There does not exist a category of things the google can know when a question with semantic meaning is answered by trawling the web and looking for statically connections to the words and phrases in the question. I don't even think we have to take a peek into philosophy of what "knowledge" is to categorically deny that any output of that process could ever be called knowledge. My words fail me, the best explanation I've seen on machine learning 'facts' is: "The output of the algorithm is not a human-understandable fact. It is the result of complicated and unintuitive statistical properties of the input material. However, that data looks like facts we can easily understand" [0] "Don't be evil"? Cleaning up the result of such an algorithm so that it looks like a fact to a layperson is in a very real sense evil. [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/5tovk1/on_the_risks_of_creating_politically_biased_ai/ddonto7/ https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/5tovk1/on_the_...