4 ms·

It seems like the main crux of the argument is that being reflective of the culture is also reinforcing it - the fact that say there aren’t as many stock photos

It seems like the main crux of the argument is that being reflective of the culture is also reinforcing it - the fact that say there aren’t as many stock photos of 3 black teens while there is a lot more “mug shot” style photos is probably reflective of the usual portrayal in media, but most people generally agree that the culture shouldn’t be that way. The question is, should search algorithms show what currently is (and therefore reinforce what is), or what the culture aspires to (which in fact more accurately matches the culture in terms of desire and movement)? I think this is a pretty smart example of how the technology we use every day can be passively malevolent - creating hurdles for change rather than enabling better information transfer.

savanaly 9y ago
>It seems like the main crux of the argument is that being reflective of the culture is also reinforcing it I believe expecting Google to change its search results to match an ideological agenda (I'm not using "ideological" in a derogatory sense here) is a case of shooting the messenger. It's the job of humans to make society in the image they desire and the job of the search engine to efficiently and accurately give the search results that people want.
- dnomad 9y ago
  I don't know if this isn't blindingly obvious by now... but Google already changes its search results to match an ideological agenda. The days of naive algorithms ended with the 2016 election. These days malicious actors will deliberately game any naive algorithm to push their malicious ideological agenda (eg [1]) and the only reasonable thing to do is to push back. (Or I suppose you could let malicious actors overrun your platform.) Google has no choice but to pursue an ideological agenda because it is being targeted by those who have the worst agendas. [1] https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/3/16413082/google-4chan-las-vegas-shooting-top-stories-algorithm-mistake https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/3/16413082/google-4chan-las...
  - kolpa 9y ago
    black-hat SEO and anti-black-hat-SEO goes back way before 2016
- taurath 9y ago
  I don’t expect them to do anything - it’s their platform and is exceptionally useful. But consider their core mission to catalog and make available all the worlds information. If that information reflects the biases already inherent in the culture rather than a more objective reality (IE outsized coverage in media of black people being criminals) is it not more accurate to make a correction and show the real experience? Should it not correct for societies biases rather than confirming them?
  - PeterisP 9y ago
    IMHO the media representation of crime is a substantially different issue than the one of this article. The crime representation is one of bias, but the "black girls" query is about the intent of the searcher; and there's no bias involved - every person searching for "black girls" has one or another intent in mind, and that distribution of intents is the underlying true reality; even if we as a society would judge that distribution of intents as unfair, discriminative, objectifying, abusive, whatever, it's still not biased, it's just that the real thing has these undesired properties. Let's be realistic - if someone is explicitly going out and searching for "black girls", would you reasonably assume that in the majority of cases they'd be looking for clothed ones? I understand that different results could influence behavior and make a correction - but that wouldn't be correcting a measurement bias to better reflect reality, that would be an attempt to change (improve?) the underlying objective reality, which is conceptually different than correcting bias.
EpicBlackCrayon 9y ago
This is an excellent philosophical question!
cat199 9y ago
> should search algorithms show radical thought (and goes for social media as well) - how about making the results tunable based on user preferences & filters? oooh wow.. user control! what a concept..
- taurath 9y ago
  I think that might make for a more powerful and useful search engine for sure. A Universal perspective as we've seen over the past few years simply doesn't exist - a search engine equivalent of stating a perspective would be interesting to think about. We already have location-based services, but we don't have cultural perspective based services. News media (Huffpost, Gawker etc) seem to be filling this role but only for news.
- daenz 9y ago
  Cool idea, but I suspect you are being downvoted for perceived snark.
- CaptSpify 9y ago
  Agreed. It's infuriating to me how we keep giving filter and preference control away to other groups, then we complain that we can't filter and enable preferences the way we want! Client-side controls > Server-side controls
jbattle 9y ago
Google has and does change our society, it always has. It has always been implicitly premised on the idea that there are new and better ways to do things. Remember life before google maps? Before youtube? If they are willing to rethink how people navigate (both the real world and the internet), etc - if they want to dramatically change how easily people are able to access information - why should they be bashful about nudging culture as it relates to how different subpopulations are represented?

savanaly 9y ago

>It seems like the main crux of the argument is that being reflective of the culture is also reinforcing it I believe expecting Google to change its search results to match an ideological agenda (I'm not using "ideological" in a derogatory sense here) is a case of shooting the messenger. It's the job of humans to make society in the image they desire and the job of the search engine to efficiently and accurately give the search results that people want.

dnomad 9y ago
I don't know if this isn't blindingly obvious by now... but Google already changes its search results to match an ideological agenda. The days of naive algorithms ended with the 2016 election. These days malicious actors will deliberately game any naive algorithm to push their malicious ideological agenda (eg [1]) and the only reasonable thing to do is to push back. (Or I suppose you could let malicious actors overrun your platform.) Google has no choice but to pursue an ideological agenda because it is being targeted by those who have the worst agendas. [1] https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/3/16413082/google-4chan-las-vegas-shooting-top-stories-algorithm-mistake https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/3/16413082/google-4chan-las...
- kolpa 9y ago
  black-hat SEO and anti-black-hat-SEO goes back way before 2016
taurath 9y ago
I don’t expect them to do anything - it’s their platform and is exceptionally useful. But consider their core mission to catalog and make available all the worlds information. If that information reflects the biases already inherent in the culture rather than a more objective reality (IE outsized coverage in media of black people being criminals) is it not more accurate to make a correction and show the real experience? Should it not correct for societies biases rather than confirming them?
- PeterisP 9y ago
  IMHO the media representation of crime is a substantially different issue than the one of this article. The crime representation is one of bias, but the "black girls" query is about the intent of the searcher; and there's no bias involved - every person searching for "black girls" has one or another intent in mind, and that distribution of intents is the underlying true reality; even if we as a society would judge that distribution of intents as unfair, discriminative, objectifying, abusive, whatever, it's still not biased, it's just that the real thing has these undesired properties. Let's be realistic - if someone is explicitly going out and searching for "black girls", would you reasonably assume that in the majority of cases they'd be looking for clothed ones? I understand that different results could influence behavior and make a correction - but that wouldn't be correcting a measurement bias to better reflect reality, that would be an attempt to change (improve?) the underlying objective reality, which is conceptually different than correcting bias.

EpicBlackCrayon 9y ago

This is an excellent philosophical question!

cat199 9y ago

> should search algorithms show radical thought (and goes for social media as well) - how about making the results tunable based on user preferences & filters? oooh wow.. user control! what a concept..

taurath 9y ago
I think that might make for a more powerful and useful search engine for sure. A Universal perspective as we've seen over the past few years simply doesn't exist - a search engine equivalent of stating a perspective would be interesting to think about. We already have location-based services, but we don't have cultural perspective based services. News media (Huffpost, Gawker etc) seem to be filling this role but only for news.
daenz 9y ago
Cool idea, but I suspect you are being downvoted for perceived snark.
CaptSpify 9y ago
Agreed. It's infuriating to me how we keep giving filter and preference control away to other groups, then we complain that we can't filter and enable preferences the way we want! Client-side controls > Server-side controls

jbattle 9y ago

Google has and does change our society, it always has. It has always been implicitly premised on the idea that there are new and better ways to do things. Remember life before google maps? Before youtube? If they are willing to rethink how people navigate (both the real world and the internet), etc - if they want to dramatically change how easily people are able to access information - why should they be bashful about nudging culture as it relates to how different subpopulations are represented?