3 ms·

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

• 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.
  • rdlecler1 10y ago
    There are ways to address this. If you ask for the diameter of the earth there will be an abundance of authoritative and information information. If you ask for something like is Obama imposing martial law and you return a passage from some conspiracy blog then maybe you shouldn't be highlighting this as a OTA. At the very least they could put some kind of confidence bar and a link to a directory of competing sources.
  • rdlecler1 10y ago
    There are ways to address this. If you ask for the diameter of the earth there will be an abundance of authoritative and information information. If you ask for something like is Obama imposing martial law and you return a passage from some conspiracy blog then maybe you shouldn't be highlighting this as a OTA. At the very least they could put some kind of confidence bar and a link to a directory of competing sources.