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>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 res

>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.

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.