7 ms·
This is very far from blogging about baseball & election stats, and shows the insatiable urge to stay relevant means Nate Silver has strayed into areas (AI poli
by muglug 3y ago
This is very far from blogging about baseball & election stats, and shows the insatiable urge to stay relevant means Nate Silver has strayed into areas (AI policy) in which he has no professional experience.
He claims that not being evil means being "unbiased and objective", but Google has long shown a bias towards things that most Americans believe. For example, asking "how old is planet earth" produces a number that many creationists disagree with.
Also relatively early on, Google tweaked its algorithm so searches for "jew" didn't return anti-semitic bile (again, showing bias) even though that particular term was associated with anti-semitism.
- sgift 3y agoI very much doubt that if you ask for a 1943 German soldier "most Americans" would agree seeing the examples provided in the article. And it's obvious that this is very different from filtering search results, but still providing correct (albeit incomplete) results if you search for "jew" and Google removed anti-semitic bile. The results are just plain wrong here.
- muglug 3y agoBeing wrong and being biased are different. Here the model is clearly wrong, and Google will presumably fix it. It’s not like Google wants to show people black & asian Nazis.