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The New Mind Control – The internet has spawned subtle forms of influence

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Re: The New Mind Control – The internet has spawned subtle forms of influence

#191

Post by ArkyBeagle »

dilemma wrote: post #72
md224 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm just saying I wish we could have only organic results. Why should people with more money have more of a presence online? Money shouldn't be able to buy speech. The Internet should not be a place where those with more money get to cut the line in front of those with less. Let PageRank sort it out. Also, what's this about my example not holding weight because "information purity" doesn't exist? It's not about the i…

PageRank isn't transparent and objective, it is opaque and arbitrary.

PageRank is of ... anthropically/existentially significant importance to the continuation of Google as a going concern.

You can't trust people to be transparent about things that are anthropically significant and that they realize are anthropically significant. Now throw in that it's legally protected as proprietary...

It's just one of those things...

The fact that Stallman cannot or will not accept this troubles me. I view this as a mechanism for choosing continued disappointment on his part. But it does serve as part of a dialogue.

Re: The New Mind Control – The internet has spawned subtle forms of influence

#192

Post by ArkyBeagle »

coldtea wrote: post #175
pcmaffey wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The library is a catalog of books produced by publishers for the sake of making money. Your example doesn't hold weight, as there is no "purity of information". Even your own insights are filtered through the perspective of your personal influence, your wants, your desires, your history, etc. Google is no different. The organic search results are largely from commercial, or at a minimum, self-interested sources. That…

> The library is a catalog of books produced by publishers for the sake of making money. That's not what he asked though. Generally libraries don't have special "sponsored" books, and don't control and push certain books to people more than others. Those libraries that do, fall into 2 categories: 1) Promoting widely recognized cultural works (e.g. with events like "Mark Twain Year", etc). 2) Promoting some ideologica…

"Wrong" is at best ordinal. Not absolute. We make up our own lines we won't cross and then complain because others disagree.

Re: The New Mind Control – The internet has spawned subtle forms of influence

#193

Post by ArkyBeagle »

alanwatts wrote: post #162
nickff wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Money always buys speech; whether it is by allowing a columnist to write full time, affording the puchase of a computer to post on the internet, or giving someone the ability to travel to a public square. Using money to purchase a magazine, newspaper, television, radio, or online advertisement is just another way that money helps people express their views. In any case, I wouldn't be too worried about money changing…

"We just had a misunderstanding, I thought I lived in the U.S.A, the United States of America, and actually we live in the U.S.A, The United States of Advertising -- freedom of speech is guaranteed, if you've got the money!" -Bill Hicks on being censored by CBS

Bill Hicks was both wonderful and a very talented troll.

Re: The New Mind Control – The internet has spawned subtle forms of influence

#194

Post by ArkyBeagle »

abandonliberty wrote: post #137
md224 wrote: post #9

I have made this case before, but I will make it again. The Internet is the largest information system in the world, and Google is the primary portal into that information system. Google's "organic" results are accompanied by AdWords results, which are based on a mixture of bid price and relevance. These ads are marked with a small "Ad" label that many people miss, and even those who know they're ads can't really "un…

Money buys speech. I also used to fantasize about the democratization of speech via the internet. No longer would money determine what information reached you. Adwords is no less ethical than search rankings, newspapers, TV, radio, literature, bus stops, music - reality, ultimately. Reality is for sale. Good news: I agree that this is a problem. Bad news: It's incredibly more prevalent than you realize. If communicat…

We want speech to be pure and abstract. So this relegates money to our expression of the venal.

Then we find this, and wonder why it bothers us.

You are ultimately responsible for your own perceptions.

Re: The New Mind Control – The internet has spawned subtle forms of influence

#195

Post by Karunamon »

tunap wrote: post #184
Karunamon wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the risk of sounding flip: Install adblock. If this "purity" is really that important to you, you're about 3 clicks away from banishing the paid advertising and only having organic results show.

I use AB+ AND NoScript(Google-free whitelist) and my results aren't even organic-ish. I searched for cabling a few weeks back & monoprice.com's first result was on page 12. First 3 or 4 pages were almost exclusively amazon & ebay. That's google's algo, sans adsense.

And those are organic results, not paid ones. The algo has learned that when people search for a product, having results from the most common places up front is more relevant.

Monoprice's google juice just isn't as good.

Re: The New Mind Control – The internet has spawned subtle forms of influence

#196

Post by nickff »

alanwatts wrote: post #163
nickff wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree with you on every point here. McDonalds provides a consistent array of food and beverages across many countries, and many people (especially children) enjoy the experience in their restaurant. Comcast is often the only provider of Internet services, and in other instances provides faster or cheaper service than their competitors. Fox News is like every other news channel, in that it informs their viewers w…

What does make a product bad then?

My definition of a bad product would simply one where the purchaser would not have bought it given the information they learned after acquiring it. A simple way to measure how good a product is would be to see whether the product is recommended by the purchaser, or whether they buy similar products from the same brand/source again.

Re: The New Mind Control – The internet has spawned subtle forms of influence

#197

Post by Lawtonfogle »

md224 wrote: post #9

I have made this case before, but I will make it again. The Internet is the largest information system in the world, and Google is the primary portal into that information system. Google's "organic" results are accompanied by AdWords results, which are based on a mixture of bid price and relevance. These ads are marked with a small "Ad" label that many people miss, and even those who know they're ads can't really "un…

Information produced costs money. Groups that do not have equal funding can have far less information produced about them. This becomes a significant issue in social science where only certain questions get funding and related but opposite questions do not, resulting in a one sided view of information (especially since many people think that absence of evidence is evidence of absence).

Re: The New Mind Control – The internet has spawned subtle forms of influence

#198

Post by treebeard901 »

ArkyBeagle wrote: post #190
treebeard901 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You raise an interesting point. Do people consume things they know are bad because they want to or because they are manipulated to?

And here's Stimpy with the red shiny history eraser button...

I am ashamed that I had to look up this reference.

Re: The New Mind Control – The internet has spawned subtle forms of influence

#199

Post by smitherfield »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #129
smitherfield wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Disclaimer: I voted for Bernie Sanders in the Massachusetts primary). I agree; the Hillary portion of it seemed like a bit of a silly conspiracy theory to me. They'd still need to provide evidence rather than innuendo, but it'd be more believable (albeit attract fewer HN upvotes) if the article had claimed Google has a pro-Bernie bias, since he's the candidate who likely has the most support amongst Google employees…

It's worth pointing out that the positions of a company's executives and financial staff aren't necessarily the position of a company's line employees or engineers. Sanders is much less supportive of big business in government. And Google has put a LOT of money into government.

I think if Google execs had been directing Google engineers to make search results less favorable to Bernie and/or more favorable to Hillary, we would have heard about it.

The relevant engineers themselves would have more opportunity to change the search algorithm without generating public complaints from their coworkers. I really doubt they would, though, so conspiracy theorizing about it is still silly.

Like I said, I think the potential for political bias doesn't come from Google executive conspiracies or Google engineer conspiracies to alter the search algorithm, but rather from how the execs and/or engineers might react differently to outside demands that they change the algorithm, depending on the degree to which they sympathize with the source of the demands.

Re: The New Mind Control – The internet has spawned subtle forms of influence

#200

Post by WalterGR »

mgraczyk wrote: post #166
WalterGR wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For example, a search engine could add a small factor to search results from "friendly" companies, and subtract a factor from results from competitors. Google absolutely does this - for example, to a site that I own. So it's not just theory: Google has put it into practice.

Unless you're talking about AdWords, it is not possible to pay Google in any way to improve the ranking of your site.

In this case, my site is subject to the "subtract a factor from results from competitors", but that's equivalent to Google's preferred site buying rank.

Unless you're talking about AdWords, it is not possible to pay Google in any way to improve the ranking of your site.

Only officially.

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