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Who'll be the next president – Google Search
- AJAr 11y agoAre there other known instances of this bug? Funny, but could be pretty impactful with the audience being the whole general public.
- domas 11y agoThere was an instance where Google gave creationist's answer about what happened to dinosaurs[0]. [0] http://thenextweb.com/insider/2015/05/26/why-is-google-giving-a-creationist-answer-to-a-question-about-dinosaurs/ http://thenextweb.com/insider/2015/05/26/why-is-google-givin...
- joelrunyon 11y agoAnother unintended consequence of Google doing the things that Google recommends you don't do (in this case, scraping sites). Can we talk about how terrible a piece of pro-hillary propaganda that was? Namely this: > America is ready for the leadership of a Hillary Clinton. A new history will be made when she becomes the leader of the free world. The world of women everywhere will change Sure, this sounds very reminiscent of 8 years ago, but what's even scarier is the opening paragraph: > She has paid her dues as a political candidate Do people really think like this? All you have to do is "pay your dues" and you "deserve" it instead of voting on issues, track record & potential to make real change? This is why we can't have nice things.
- visakanv 11y ago> Do people really think like this? All you have to do is "pay your dues" and you "deserve" it instead of voting on issues, track record & potential to make real change? Yes. Source: Click around the Facebook comments of any substantially large digital publication. Tonnes of people don't even vote. Of those that do, most vote for the parties they're already loyal to. Of the few that are in the middle, most decide according to whatever is fashionable. It's a vanishingly small few that bother to evaluate issues, track records, etc.
- joelrunyon 11y agoI get voting on party - what scares me is voting on someone because they "paid their dues" - which is especially mind boggling when you look at people's approval ratings of those same candidates in their previous jobs (typically congress - which is hanging out at around 16%).
- k-mcgrady 11y agoVoting on party scares me - especially in a system where there are only two.
- joelrunyon 11y agoSorry - that also scares me. What is even worse (in my opinion) is people voting on candidates based on last names (which seems to be the trend lately) - especially when that's seen or used as a positive aspect.
- briandear 11y agoOr voting against candidates based on their last names. Let's be intellectually consistent here..
- joelrunyon 11y agoYou can be consistently against dynastic tendencies of an institution.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- rsynnott 11y agoI think the "paid their dues" thing is meant to be necessary but not sufficient. That is, a lot of people would be cautious of voting for someone who had no significant political experience.
- gjm11 11y agoI think "She has paid her dues" is meant to be justifying the claim that she's fit to be a candidate, not that she should win. Last time around there were suggestions that Clinton didn't have the political experience necessary to make a good president, and that's a harder argument to make now. (I do think it's a pretty fatuous article, not that that's a huge surprise from the Huffington Post. But it's probably not far off the mark -- the factors it lists really are likely to make as much difference to whether anyone votes for Clinton as any details of her policies or past achievements.)
- fixxer 11y agoAs opposed to Obama, who had absolutely zero track record?
- veidr 11y agoNo, as opposed to most political candidates who have historically been taken seriously as candidates for the presidency. Obama was (and is) an outlier.
- kevin_thibedeau 11y agoIt's worth noting that Obama himself was not originally planning to run in 2008 due to lack of experience in public office. Tom Daschle is responsible for pushing him to run precisely because he had no track record on hot topic issues that weakened the competition.
- veidr 11y agoYeah, I totally agree that is worth noting -- I think until Obama beat Clinton in some of the early contests, the conventional wisdom from virtually everybody (who follows politics) was that it was just too early for him to go for the big prize. But I am curious whether that will hold -- whether candidates like Obama will remain outliers -- or whether that kind of thing will become the new normal. Our political system is somewhat sick; having any record is a political liability. That is why our politicians almost all speak in tongues incomprehensible to any normal human being. But the people favoring the established/experienced candidates are mainly the ones engaged and participating in the system which (perhaps insanely) doesn't include 98% of voters. So I wouldn't be that surprised if candidates with very limited experience in government become more common.
- gerty 11y agoIt does read like an ode before a coronation. Though a poorly written one. Anything but Clinton/Bush. Sanders perhaps.
- briandear 11y agoSanders? An admitted Socialist? How about Rand Paul? Someone that has actually fought on the right side of issues important to the HN community. Sanders actually supports an 80% tax rate. If you want an economy that resembles Romania in the 1980s, vote for Sanders. If you want freedom, vote Rand Paul. Democrat values are inconsistent with entrepreneurial. They want to disincentivize success with higher taxes and they want to subsidize failure through increased government handouts. If you want less of something tax it. If you want more of something, subsidize it. under Obama, food stamps have quadrupled. Black unemployment is higher than it was under Bush and wage growth is non existent. Look at economic charts from 2002-2014 make note of what party was in control of Congress and thus the budget. Look at Clinton's economic performance during the 1990; correlate that to the party controlling Congress. It's fascinating. Research Cheis Dodd's role in Congredd during 2006-2008. See what Bush was warning about in terms of the housing market and what the Democrat response was when Bush warned about Fannie/Freddie instability. He was essentially laughed at by Chris Dodd and friends. This instinctive anti-Reublicann sentiment is depressing because it seems like the Democrat marketing machine has done a good job obfuscating the issues. Whenever someone gets close to real scrutiny of the issues, they conveniently pull 'racism' or 'war on women' out of a hat. Meanwhile, I bet a majority of Americans can tell you the name of the Charleston shooter but have no idea what percentage they paid in Federal income tax or payroll taxes last year. Rand Paul released his tax proposal and more people seem to be concerned about a stupid flag. These supposedly 'big' news stories aren't that important. They're distractions. Who gives a flying -- what race that white NAACP lady was? Who cares what comic book the Charleston shooter read when he was 15? Distractions. Give them bread and circuses..
- zxcvcxz 11y ago>This instinctive anti-Reublicann sentiment is depressing Most people on HN are probably too young to remember a republican president before GW Bush.
- Shivetya 11y agoWhy not just flag the submission? Just like the hit piece we had last week on Rubio under the guise of prison reform. Look, we likely will have to filter any story where a candidate is mentioned because its been obvious for far too long that their supporters who are in the press will slip in favorable or unfavorable stories as they are instructed to do so all under the guise of hard journalism. Best yet there are entire groups devoted to landing such stories onto as many sites as possible. We have two years of war on women, etc, crap coming, because we live in an age where politics of identity are more important that what you stand for and when what you stand for isn't popular to throw out the race/sex/etc card.
- 4ad 11y agoWhy flag the submission? The submission illustrates a real problem (maybe?) and people have a (potentially interesting) discussion about it. I don't see any reason to flag it.
- ck2 11y agoHillary will be president for one reason. Do you really want a third Bush in the White House for a third Iraq war? Alternatively, do you really want a Bush picking the next two or three Supreme Court judges? It would set back the country into the 1960s. Voting rights, equality, access to abortion. All rolled back to 1960s with an imbalance of power in the supreme court.
- briandear 11y agoReally? Set the country back to the 1960s? You also actually think Bush is going to be the nominee? You don't seem to know much about Republicans if you think that. As far as the 1960s goes, the economic picture was much better then than it has been over the past 8 years. The JFK tax cuts caused a decade of prosperity; the middle class was much stronger, wage growth was steady. What we have now is a generalized malaise. If you're suggesting some kind of war on women malarcky, ask yourself why in Hilary's State Department and in Obama's White House do women still make 70% of what men make? These anti-republican memes are getting a bit stupid. Remember Hilary supported the Iraq War, the Libyan War (which did not even get Congressional approval as was required under the War Powers Act.) Hilary also strongly supports and supported the Patriot Act and warrantless NSA surveillance of Americans. Her only accomplishments as Secretary of State were aggrevation of Russian relations, the loss of American allies Libya and Egypt to Muslim extremists, more nonsense in Syria as well as facilitating the failure of Iran's Green Revoluion. She and Obama also a let the Pakistani doctor who provided the Bin Laden tip to be captured, imprissoned and tortured by the Pakistanis as a reward for his helping the U.S. She also racked up a lot of frequent flyer miles. The woman has zero accomplishments, either for woman or anyone else. She has never worked as a chief executive of anything, she has barely ever had a real job; she's a lifetime political hack and the U.S. is worse for having her in the national dialog. Remember it was Rand Paul that fought the NSA and Rand Paul that has promoted the end of civil asset forfeiture and he has also called for the ending of racist sentencing guidelines as wel as decriminalization of drugs. Hilary represents a totalitarian Democrat plantation owner. She's a horrible choice for the school board, let alone President of the United States. She's an evil snake and anyone who supports her is either mentally ill or profoundly ignorant or just brainwashed. If she cared about women she wouldn't have defended a child rapist. She also wouldn't have defended Bill Clinton amongst multiple credible allegations of rape, harassment and other misconduct. She also would have declared Boko Haram a terror group when she had the chance. I could go on for days; the point is that Hilary Clinton deserves to be in jail or scrubbing toilets in Siberia. I didn't even touch upon the Clinton Foundation "donations" from foreign governments while she was Secratary of State. Or the email servers. Or the utter lack of transparency she has demonstrated over her long illustrious career as a leech suckling upon the blood of the American people. I'd vote for Sheila Jackson Lee or even Michael Jackson before I'd vote for Hilary.
- netcan 11y agoPolitics is full of "this is why we can't have nice things." :) Anyway, I don't think anyone really thinks like this, or at least a lot fewer than the people who talk like this. This is the kind of stuff that people come up with when they are already convinced and trying to make their case and not how they become convinced. There is a common fallacy (or cognitive bias, I'm not sure what to call it) that affects almost everything we think but seems particularly pervasive in politics. We use far more rational arguments to justify or argue for our positions and opinions than we do when adopting them. Adopting opinions is emotional (a bundle in itself), associative. Rational thought plays a part, but it's much smaller than we like to admit. We also see the logic in arguments with the logical conclusions we have already reached far more readily than the other way around. "she has paid her dues" and "the world of women everywhere will change" seems convincing to someone who is already convinced. I doubt it convinces anyone (or many, anyway). In this case, it's almost testable. There are people on the other side of politics who are woman and have paid (or will have paid) their dues. If Hillary loses and one of them runs next time, do you think she'll switch?
- JustSomeNobody 11y agoYes, of course people believe this sort of thing. And yes, this is indeed why we cannot have nice things. Before you down vote because you think I'm anti-H.C., I'm not. Nor am I pro-H.C. I've not made up my mind yet.
- hsshah 11y agoNice example of how much ground "AI" has to cover before it can be considered "intelligent". OTOH, lot of humans struggle with differentiating facts from opinions, so can't be too hard on these systems.
- AJAr 11y agoI don't think this has ever been presented as the cutting edge of AI.
- glogla 11y agoGiven that google shows different people different results for the same query, to tell people what they want to hear, I wonder if others see the same result I do.
- kattuviriyan 11y agoSome will need a screenshot of the query at some point: http://i.imgur.com/SEq4GW9.png http://i.imgur.com/SEq4GW9.png
- draugadrotten 11y agoMy search result is quite different. http://i.imgur.com/uDN14bw.png http://i.imgur.com/uDN14bw.png
- lucb1e 11y agoI think that is why kattuviriyan added the screenshot: I get the same as you, it's probably a country-based feature (or what DuckDuckGo calls bubbling).
- laumars 11y agoI get the Hillary "answer" and I'm not US based. Interestingly, this HN thread is already the top search result, despite this thread only being an hour old.
- 001sky 11y agonow its... Who will be the next president? Google says Hillary Clinton The Next Web - 34 mins ago We've seen oddly partisan answers on Google before (remember its answer to “What killed ...
- GFischer 11y agoI get "Diego Maradona" as the 2nd result (the HN thread is the 1st one :) . I'm in Uruguay (South America) where the FIFA news are huge, and logged into my Google account, so that must be it. Interesting to see the "bubble effect". I opened on an incognito window and it gives me answers similar to the ones posted above. Edit2: for the curious, the link it gives me is "Diego Maradona would like to be the next president of FIFA" http://ftw.usatoday.com/2015/06/diego-maradona-would-like-to-be-the-next-president-of-fifa http://ftw.usatoday.com/2015/06/diego-maradona-would-like-to...
- higherpurpose 11y agoThe dangers of having a machine give you the "right answer". This isn't that different from that other "right answer" in Google about dinosaurs: http://thenextweb.com/insider/2015/05/26/why-is-google-giving-a-creationist-answer-to-a-question-about-dinosaurs/ http://thenextweb.com/insider/2015/05/26/why-is-google-givin... All this teaches us is to take Google's first answer with a huge grain of salt, if not almost immediately discard it in favor of further research, even when there's a "simple" question like "how tall is something" (remember Google got Stephen Colbert's height wrong as well: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/21/google-stephen-colbert-height-search-results_n_6022386.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/21/google-stephen-colb...).
- popeshoe 11y agoWhile it's kinda funny, I think it's made pretty clear that text is a summary generated from the first search result that is clearly linked below, only a moron would consider this an endorsement of Hillary by Google.
- kriro 11y agoI love that this thread is #1 and "Who will replace Sepp Blatter" is #7 at the time of this post :D
- MrDosu 11y ago"Because the other side doesn't have a viable candidate" Glorious two party system, how is that even remotely called democracy by anyone?
- adventured 11y agoThere's no correlation between having a lot of parties and a sound, well functioning political system. See: Italy, and a dozen other examples from Europe over the last 70 years If your culture is rotten, your politics will be rotten, regardless of whether you have 2, 5, 27 parties.
- mcv 11y agoA multi-party system does not guarantee that there will be no political problems (particularly not if it polarizes into what's effectively a two-party system), but a two-party system is practically guaranteed to not represent minority opinions, and very likely to degenerate into a "vote for the lesser evil".
- soylentcola 11y agoNot to mention the issues of access you run into when money and influence are able to build up behind one or two campaigns. Two insanely massive parties are basically like competition between two massive marketing budgets. Trying to compete against the Republican or Democratic parties is like trying to start a new cellular carrier from scratch to compete with Verizon and AT&T. Sure, if you managed to get enough "viral" support and maybe some wealthy investor you could mount a campaign big enough to get into a debate but the frameworks that have grown around the two-party system make it very difficult to take advantage of any popularity boost. Trying to compete with the two established parties in a "winner takes all" system would require working against the entire political system which is overwhelmingly made up of people in those two parties.
- paulhauggis 11y ago"but a two-party system is practically guaranteed to not represent minority opinions," It's designed this way. Many minority opinions are minority because they are bad and should never be implemented.
- exo762 11y agoI would prefer seeing answer to this question from prediction markets, not analysis of websites aka "experts opinions". It's much easier to understand mechanism that generated such prediction and you know that those people actually bet their own money on result.
- rajathkm 11y agoI think it can confuse a lot of people at first glance because Google generally displays the best answer to the query in that space. Funny to see it in this context.
- ExpiredLink 11y agoAs always, the candidate with the higher advertising budget wins.
- HarrietJones 11y agoTwo Points. Google answers questions, it sometimes gets those questions wrong, but it's getting better. I'm not that worried about the odd wrong answer because that's a consequence of fledgling deep learning software. Things will get better. Of course, some idiot's going to listen to Google one time, and do something disastrous with the "advice" and then they might have to tone it down a bit, but I for one welcome our question answering overlords. Of more concern is the possibility that Google is increasingly correct, and the algorithms and heuristics it uses know us better than we know ourself. Nothing's going to fuck with democracy more than the knowledge that free will is a myth and the outcomes for Very Important Things are already decided. Media in the UK are stopped from reporting on Exit Polls before elections and there's a move to ban all polling because knowing how people will vote is enough to adversely affect elections. I can see this being applied to issues like this, but even that's problematic. I don't know if a machine accurately telling everybody who will win is better or worse than a machine only telling Important People who will win.
- laumars 11y agoI'd rather see the media banned from telling people who to vote for than see a ban on all polling. But something like that would be impossible to enforce given all publications / news networks have a political bias.
- vixen99 11y ago300 million people and (as is all too possible) another Clinton, another Bush? Someone should do justice to the sickness this demonstrates. Good example for Kim in N. Korea.
- happyscrappy 11y agoIt is kind of humorous how people can't see past their hate of America. Meanwhile weed is being legalized here, is it legal where you are?
- ionised 11y agoWhile I am pro-legalisation, it's not among the most important issues.
- happyscrappy 11y agoThe point is the people get their way, albeit slowly. It is popular to believe the US is a fascist country, mainly because it is very powerful regardless of objective reality.
- GFischer 11y agoIronically, it is. (I live in Uruguay). So is gay marriage, etc.
- Ciantic 11y agoInteresting, I find answers from DuckDuckGo more relevant: http://i.imgur.com/Dg96e42.png http://i.imgur.com/Dg96e42.png all hits are on the title. I didn't get the one intended by parent from Google though.
- KhalilK 11y agoI like how the second search result points to this thread. We've gone meta HN!
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- EU_hacker_nrd 11y ago..err..so you guys get identical search results? Are you all on Tails over Tor with en_US? I get: "Who will replace Sepp Blatter? - ESPN FC", "Who will be Zambia's next president? | - sardc" etc. Is this an American problem?
- SomeoneWeird 11y agoNope, I'm in aus and I see it.
- bsbechtel 11y agoTo me this is a great example of how far we have yet to go in machine learning and AI.
- DanielBMarkham 11y agoOkay, this is weird. I'm almost certain that within the last year or two one of the main Googlers said something like "People just want to be told what to do" It was quite a controversy at the time, and people argued that he was just being flip. I thought it would make a nice addition to this story, juxtaposing people's desire for easy answers with an example of the type of easy answers Google provides folks. It could have kicked off a discussion about the very, very fine line between "helping people" and "telling them what to do" Only now I can't find that quote anywhere on the internet. Huh?
- paulhauggis 11y agoI think they realized that they can easily influence our political landscape by pushing desired candidates and ideas to the top of the search engine results. But what he said does have truth to it. Most people are employees (they need to be told what do do). It's just an easier way to live. *Edit: I forgot. So many people on HN work for Google and I can't criticize the king.
- decafbad 11y agoWhich country?
- raus22 11y agoThey have not nailed the "Knowledge-Based Trust: Estimating the Trustworthiness of Web Sources" yet paper here(paper by google): http://arxiv.org/pdf/1502.03519v1.pdf http://arxiv.org/pdf/1502.03519v1.pdf
- richmt 11y agoInterestingly enough, the top link for me just below the "in the news" headline is this comment thread.
- sjbase 11y agoIt's reflexive SEO :)
- hudell 11y agoIt's funny that the first result is now a link to this post on Hacker News.
- IanDrake 11y agoThe thing that scares me is that Google is probably right (my political leanings aside). It's scary because the political machine (the "news" and media) probably gives off a signal that a deep neural network has learned. It might be that simple. Our entire democracy could be exposed for the sham that it is. It doesn't matter what a candidate has done or says they're going to do, it only matters what media keeps saying about it 24/7. I've seen this over and over. I'd tell someone about a particular congressmen's voting record and bills he's sponsored and they'll say "wow, that guy sounds too good to be true, I'd vote for him", then tell them it's Ron Paul's voting record and they'd say "That guys is crazy" and then repeat everything they've ever "heard" about him. That's just one example, but voters only know candidates by the media's labels, not by their actions or platform.
- paulhauggis 11y agoIt's even worse on the Internet with younger voters. If you look at /politics on Reddit, it's all propaganda that bashes the opposition. Link titles are changed to invoke anger. I hate to see when this generation grows up and Twitter and Reddit are the sole sources of political information. The "hands up don't shoot" is a good example. Forensic evidence came out and it was proven that this never happened, yet it didn't fit the political narrative. CNN and most of the mainstream news continued to push it as if it was fact.
- mladenkovacevic 11y agoIn a couple of years we'll be hearing from digital marketers who worked on Hilary's campaign about how they "hacked Google results" that one time. That's only if she wins, though. If she doesn't we'll never speak of this again.
- adibchoudhury 11y agoLooks like Google took it down? I'm not seeing Hillary when I search this.
- lern_too_spel 11y agoIs it wrong? Google's answer is the most likely next president, no matter my politics or whom I would like to win instead.