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> Nonetheless, Google’s core service—providing unbiased, accurate, and free access to information—remains at the heart of the company. How is it ok to just say
by ixtli 7y ago
> Nonetheless, Google’s core service—providing unbiased, accurate, and free access to information—remains at the heart of the company.
How is it ok to just say clear lies like this?! Without making any value judgements at all this is blatantly false. The ranking algorithms specifically encode a bias into search results. This is actually explicitly what users want, too! To be clear this is distressing to me because very powerful people can throw around words uncritically in this way for niche political points without being challenged.
EDIT: It seems people are taking this comment in a way I didn't intend for it to be taken. Another example is that they are applying biases by sorting and displaying results on news.google.com. Personally I really like how this is done, but I think we need to be honest that it is a bias so that we can move on to a more productive conversation about what is or isn't a good bias.
- pknopf 7y agoThe difference is between personal bias and relevant search results. He meant to say "personal bias."
- ixtli 7y agoI would have accepted this, yeah. The difference is important because there is a relevancy calculation that determines what's on top of news.google.com at any given time and that encodes types of bias. Personally, in fact, I believe they're mostly good sorts of biases in that they wont generally show you InfoWars or something like that, for example. But we need to be honest when we talk about this stuff.
- mirekrusin 7y agoI think "I'm feeling lucky" button on the home page is unbiased.
- savanaly 7y agoDon't be too pedantic. By your definition, what even is unbiased? A list of all the sites on the web, A to Z? Words are what we make of them, and there's clearly some distinction between Google and, say, Baidu that is entirely appropriate to capture with the word "unbiased".
- ixtli 7y agoI dont think this is pedantic and my point is exactly as you describe! There is no such thing as "unbiased" and people who are in search of that are living in a dream world.
- jmoss20 7y agobut surely people mean something when they say "unbiased", right? (I'll take a stab at it: something like "conveyed without the intention to deceive me, especially politically/financially/etc...") I get your point, and it's an important one -- but ime conversations are a lot more productive when they're about the ideas, not the words. :)
- JohnFen 7y ago> something like "conveyed without the intention to deceive me, especially politically/financially/etc...") That isn't even close to the definition of "unbiased" that I use. To me, something is "unbiased" if it based on facts without being interpreted in accordance with some preexisting belief or worldview.
- ixtli 7y agoFor what it's worth i agree with this. A realistic example of what i would describe as unbiased is, say, telemetry data from a radio telescope, or a neutral reading of a poem or story. Tools are unbiased. I think the real danger is actually in the notion that "bias" is something done to deceive, and I have encountered people who imply this quite a bit in real life By way of example: I have a strong bias towards the nationalization of infrastructure. Many of my opinions and arguments are designed to support this end because, for reasons I would love to explain I believe it's the best course of action. I am, if anything, prone to never letting anyone leave my company without droning on and on about this! There is not deception involved. People certainly do hide their biases, or lie about things in order to support their arguments, but this is not something inevitable with bias. Ultimately I think everyone needs to deal with the reality that we ALL have biases and we ALL inject them into our work. This is actually ok, because its part of how we work to build the world we want to live in.
- bpicolo 7y ago> I know there are some polls out there saying this man has a 32% approval rating. But guys like us, we don't pay attention to the polls. We know that polls are just a collection of statistics that reflect what people are thinking in "reality." And reality has a well-known liberal bias
- senthil_rajasek 7y agoI cannot tell if you are being serious or you are brainwashed. My understanding of Google's history is their algorithms started as providing answers that the world already knew but could not find easily. Over time they had to handle multiple lawsuits, harassments by entrenched groups that were upended by opening up of knowledge. These adjustments / reactions made the algorithm look biased. This disputed quote by Cardinal Richelieu comes to mind when I think of people claiming Google is a bad actor. "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him"
- ixtli 7y agoYou're reading far too much into what im saying. I'm not calling google a bad actor (though certainly I think they can be for reasons that have little to do with the search algorithm.) I'm saying that there is bias encoded here and, further as i thought was clear, im not saying this is a bad thing.
- mirekrusin 7y agoThe bias was introduced to unbiased algorithm because people found it biased, that's why it's unbiased bias now.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- anonytrary 7y agoI think people are missing your point. As we all know, removing unbiased and false information is an unsolved problem, so I find it a bit odd that they claim to be able to do this. Not only that, but now they will be held accountable in this regard. I can't see how this statement made it through PR.