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@joelgrus really nailed it. When someone at Google uses the verb "signals," you need to pay attention. Nothing is black and white in search. It's entirely ab

@joelgrus really nailed it. When someone at Google uses the verb "signals," you need to pay attention. Nothing is black and white in search. It's entirely about pulling together multiple sources of information, and deciding which ones signal the strongest and correlate with the results you're looking for. Guy Raffa is welcome to make his own search engine company staffed entirely with English majors to prove his point.

Iftheshoefits 12y ago
Disagreeable or not, I find it amusing that he opens his piece with a rubric regarding what constitutes an "excellent" paper in his course, and your last sentence contains such a glaring fallacy that it seems entirely likely he'd dock you heavily for it (and rightly so). It's also incredibly ironic considering the context of the argument at hand.
- VikingCoder 12y ago
  > It sounds like he wants those topflight English majors after all: graduates adept at conceiving, articulating, and supporting their own ideas—not some “specific answer” the professor is looking for. Bock just doesn’t realize they are what he is looking for. Guy Raffa goes so far as to claim that those topflight English majors are what Bock is looking for. If that were true, then a team built on this core principal should clearly be better than one built without it. If you see a fallacy in the last sentence of my first post, please explain it to me. Calling something a fallacy is your thesis. Now it is your job to prove it. Irony, indeed.
  - Iftheshoefits 12y ago
    Nowhere does Raffa claim that a team built entirely of English majors would be better than one built of any other constituency. That's a strawman you erected. QED.
    - VikingCoder 12y ago
      Raffa says, "they [topflight English majors] are what he is looking for." Topflight English majors are the constituency Raffa says Bock should hire. You have to purposefully misread what Raffa has written, in order to see it any other way.

Iftheshoefits 12y ago

Disagreeable or not, I find it amusing that he opens his piece with a rubric regarding what constitutes an "excellent" paper in his course, and your last sentence contains such a glaring fallacy that it seems entirely likely he'd dock you heavily for it (and rightly so). It's also incredibly ironic considering the context of the argument at hand.

VikingCoder 12y ago
> It sounds like he wants those topflight English majors after all: graduates adept at conceiving, articulating, and supporting their own ideas—not some “specific answer” the professor is looking for. Bock just doesn’t realize they are what he is looking for. Guy Raffa goes so far as to claim that those topflight English majors are what Bock is looking for. If that were true, then a team built on this core principal should clearly be better than one built without it. If you see a fallacy in the last sentence of my first post, please explain it to me. Calling something a fallacy is your thesis. Now it is your job to prove it. Irony, indeed.
- Iftheshoefits 12y ago
  Nowhere does Raffa claim that a team built entirely of English majors would be better than one built of any other constituency. That's a strawman you erected. QED.
  - VikingCoder 12y ago
    Raffa says, "they [topflight English majors] are what he is looking for." Topflight English majors are the constituency Raffa says Bock should hire. You have to purposefully misread what Raffa has written, in order to see it any other way.