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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 exam
by 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 agoYeah, 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 agoGoogle should report a probability distribution for each truth claim.
- jerf 10y agoWhile 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 agoAnd 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 agoBut 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.