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A Google search for "American inventors": https://i.imgur.com/qw5kfQp.png https://i.imgur.com/qw5kfQp.png A Google search for "American women scientists": http

by themgt 9y ago

A Google search for "American inventors": https://i.imgur.com/qw5kfQp.png https://i.imgur.com/qw5kfQp.png A Google search for "American women scientists": https://i.imgur.com/o6mxG56.png https://i.imgur.com/o6mxG56.png Can the media stop doing this thing where they p-hack reality for proof of racist/sexist conspiracies?

ivraatiems 9y ago
How is that different from what you're doing, cherry-picking two examples that support your point to distract from the overall argument? In fact, the article is much more supportive of its claims, because it's an excerpt from a book that cites peer-reviewed (I believe) research. The point is that there's a trend, not that some search results are weird.
jacquesm 9y ago
You are missing the point: there is no reason why an innocent query such as 'black girls' should bring up a bunch of porn. And Google seems to agree with this because they have since tweaked things so that that no longer happens.
- deleted 9y ago
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- ithilglin909 9y ago
  No, the point is that the author selectively presents information that bolsters the point she wants to make. I'm pretty certain that if she searched for "<blank> girls" -- white girls, asian girls, etc. -- with safe search turned off, a good number of the results would be NSFW, because the internet is 75% porn (and 25% cat videos).
  - jacquesm 9y ago
    See the paragraphs titled 'beyond black girls' in TFA.
    - ithilglin909 9y ago
      Yes, I read the article. If anything, those paragraphs support what I just wrote.
      - jacquesm 9y ago
        You wrote "No, the point is that the author selectively presents information that bolsters the point she wants to make." and then claim the author supports your point? At best you are supporting hers. She made the case for the query 'black girls' and to pre-empt comments such as yours bolstered her argument by extending it to a general case. So in no way did she 'selective present information to bolster her point', she was as even handed as she could have been (but apparently not even handed enough for some).
        ithilglin909 9y ago
        No, I'm saying that in the paragraph in question, she's half-admitting that she is selectively presenting information. That is all.
- PeterisP 9y ago
  There certainly is an obvious reason for that; this is a quite peculiar search term - the use cases where someone would google "black girls" for a non-porn intent are comparably rare compared to cases where the likelihood of user clicking on a link is strictly correlated with nudity. Would you have ever tried to search for "black girls" if you hadn't looked at this article? On the other hand, someone who prefers black girls in a sexual way would actually search for them many times. I can imagine someone in advertising searching for random pictures of black girls, but that's a niche case far outnumbered by people searching with sexual intent. It would be reasonable to assume that any fair, objective algorithm in Google's (or anyone else's) possession that actually optimizes for expected user intent (assuming that they don't have enough privacy-violating information to assume that the user belongs to a smaller and thus less likely minority of black girls) would still bring up a bunch of porn when searching for "black girls", since most people querying for that (except when the searcher has read this article in the last 5 minutes) actually do want to find porn; but they have configured an override purely for PR reasons. The objective algorithm would show reality as it is, but the current override masks it and tries to show an imagined vision of "reality-as-it-should-be". And that's why the problem is not solvable algorithmically - any algorithm learning from real data and actual user behavior would show the ugly, "undesirable" reality in all kinds of edge cases, and it can only be solved in a non-scalable manner by involving some manual political correctness / good taste / etc censorship.
deleted 9y ago
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by themgt 9y ago

ivraatiems 9y ago

How is that different from what you're doing, cherry-picking two examples that support your point to distract from the overall argument? In fact, the article is much more supportive of its claims, because it's an excerpt from a book that cites peer-reviewed (I believe) research. The point is that there's a trend, not that some search results are weird.

jacquesm 9y ago

You are missing the point: there is no reason why an innocent query such as 'black girls' should bring up a bunch of porn. And Google seems to agree with this because they have since tweaked things so that that no longer happens.

deleted 9y ago
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ithilglin909 9y ago
No, the point is that the author selectively presents information that bolsters the point she wants to make. I'm pretty certain that if she searched for "<blank> girls" -- white girls, asian girls, etc. -- with safe search turned off, a good number of the results would be NSFW, because the internet is 75% porn (and 25% cat videos).
- jacquesm 9y ago
  See the paragraphs titled 'beyond black girls' in TFA.
  - ithilglin909 9y ago
    Yes, I read the article. If anything, those paragraphs support what I just wrote.
    - jacquesm 9y ago
      You wrote "No, the point is that the author selectively presents information that bolsters the point she wants to make." and then claim the author supports your point? At best you are supporting hers. She made the case for the query 'black girls' and to pre-empt comments such as yours bolstered her argument by extending it to a general case. So in no way did she 'selective present information to bolster her point', she was as even handed as she could have been (but apparently not even handed enough for some).
      - ithilglin909 9y ago
        No, I'm saying that in the paragraph in question, she's half-admitting that she is selectively presenting information. That is all.
PeterisP 9y ago
There certainly is an obvious reason for that; this is a quite peculiar search term - the use cases where someone would google "black girls" for a non-porn intent are comparably rare compared to cases where the likelihood of user clicking on a link is strictly correlated with nudity. Would you have ever tried to search for "black girls" if you hadn't looked at this article? On the other hand, someone who prefers black girls in a sexual way would actually search for them many times. I can imagine someone in advertising searching for random pictures of black girls, but that's a niche case far outnumbered by people searching with sexual intent. It would be reasonable to assume that any fair, objective algorithm in Google's (or anyone else's) possession that actually optimizes for expected user intent (assuming that they don't have enough privacy-violating information to assume that the user belongs to a smaller and thus less likely minority of black girls) would still bring up a bunch of porn when searching for "black girls", since most people querying for that (except when the searcher has read this article in the last 5 minutes) actually do want to find porn; but they have configured an override purely for PR reasons. The objective algorithm would show reality as it is, but the current override masks it and tries to show an imagined vision of "reality-as-it-should-be". And that's why the problem is not solvable algorithmically - any algorithm learning from real data and actual user behavior would show the ugly, "undesirable" reality in all kinds of edge cases, and it can only be solved in a non-scalable manner by involving some manual political correctness / good taste / etc censorship.

deleted 9y ago

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