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Putting aside Hank Green's obvious hysterics, I'm glad this author brought some rationality to the attempted outrage baiting. But just to give a general statem

Putting aside Hank Green's obvious hysterics, I'm glad this author brought some rationality to the attempted outrage baiting. But just to give a general statement, I think Google's callout snippet feature is dangerous. It's probably really fucking clever by algorithm standards and works some high percentage of the time, but that makes it even more dangerous when people have confidence that it is 100% real. I was helping somebody Google a technical problem recently, and the callout snippet suggested something that would damage the project, but this non-expert thought that it was the de-facto answer to her question because it was at the top of the search results. I think Google's design needs to make it more clear that these are algorithmically selected snippets that are not guaranteed to be accurate or solve any given question you might have.

deleted 4y ago
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socialismisok 4y ago
Wait, Hank Green posted two pictures and said it was, quote, "real weird". Which it is. It's weird. It might have a very rational explanation, but that doesn't make it not weird. Standing outside during a solar eclipse is real weird. It's a totally explainable phenomena and once you understand it, you can rationalize the experience fairly easily. But it's still real weird. Calling out an unusual phenomena as real weird doesn't seem to be "obvious hysterics". It's someone observing a phenomena and saying, "that's not what I expected!"
- logicalmonster 4y ago
  1) You're right that "obvious hysterics" isn't the best possible label, but I couldn't think of a better one. 2) I cannot read anybody's mind, but anybody who has spent any length of time online probably fully well knows that you're teeing up the Twitter outrage mob by posting that kind of comparison in the way that Hank Green did. 3) I'm not familiar with Hank Green, but I thought that the Timar Ivo Batis' response posted in that article gave a pretty good response pointing out that he knew tech better than that. > Sorry Hank but you know better about how tech works than to draw comparisons like that. Changing wording gives you the top result for this specific wording. You really do not want a machine guessing and always giving you the same results. Too much nuance. 4) I don't want to detract further from the overall point of the article. The main takeaway from this should be that even the best algorithms can have loads of problems with figuring out true knowledge and answering questions algorithmically, and there's probably issues with Google presenting their callout snippets as the answers to questions without better disclaimers or educating people that algorithms are just guesses that can be wrong. Every establishment figure talks all of the time about the dangers of misinformation, but Google has a system that is guaranteed to present lots of information wrong. This seems worthy of critical discussion.

deleted 4y ago

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socialismisok 4y ago

Wait, Hank Green posted two pictures and said it was, quote, "real weird". Which it is. It's weird. It might have a very rational explanation, but that doesn't make it not weird. Standing outside during a solar eclipse is real weird. It's a totally explainable phenomena and once you understand it, you can rationalize the experience fairly easily. But it's still real weird. Calling out an unusual phenomena as real weird doesn't seem to be "obvious hysterics". It's someone observing a phenomena and saying, "that's not what I expected!"

logicalmonster 4y ago
1) You're right that "obvious hysterics" isn't the best possible label, but I couldn't think of a better one. 2) I cannot read anybody's mind, but anybody who has spent any length of time online probably fully well knows that you're teeing up the Twitter outrage mob by posting that kind of comparison in the way that Hank Green did. 3) I'm not familiar with Hank Green, but I thought that the Timar Ivo Batis' response posted in that article gave a pretty good response pointing out that he knew tech better than that. > Sorry Hank but you know better about how tech works than to draw comparisons like that. Changing wording gives you the top result for this specific wording. You really do not want a machine guessing and always giving you the same results. Too much nuance. 4) I don't want to detract further from the overall point of the article. The main takeaway from this should be that even the best algorithms can have loads of problems with figuring out true knowledge and answering questions algorithmically, and there's probably issues with Google presenting their callout snippets as the answers to questions without better disclaimers or educating people that algorithms are just guesses that can be wrong. Every establishment figure talks all of the time about the dangers of misinformation, but Google has a system that is guaranteed to present lots of information wrong. This seems worthy of critical discussion.