101–110 of 295 posts
Artificial Intelligence has become an alias for "shit I have no knowledge of but would like to pretend to have expertise on that is, at least tangentially, related to a computer"
Google search results reflect what's in use on the web via PageRank and modern PageRank-like approximations. Google and its human staff does not apply human intellect to the problem of sorting, picking, and ranking each search result. Moreover, Google has included "Safe Search" features for several years that would remove these types of results from search. Before we condemn Google for the collective actions of the b…
I think thats basically what Facebook is at the moment, a filter/curation bubble - only jacked up to 1000. What would be IMO useful and more powerful is being able to switch bubbles. Google at the moment has a "no personalization", which is better than only being allowed to access your perspective bubble, but you probably only click on your bubble. The point should be to slowly break down the bubbles, make them less…
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> Google search results reflect what's in use on the web via PageRank and modern PageRank-like approximations. PageRank is only a fraction of the total inputs to Google search. Once PageRank was described it was subject to being gamed at such a scale that it essentially destroyed the web, ironically making Google that much more a necessity. > Google and its human staff does not apply human intellect to the problem of…
> That a query for an innocent term... I take strong issue with the "obvious" conclusion that Google knows which terms are innocent. Disclaimer: In this specific case, I agree with you that "black girls" has an innocent connotation and am not suggesting otherwise. Please do not misinterpret my thoughts below. Shall we require Google to be ever vigilant about the meaning of words in use at various times by the various…
Is it your argument that they should be prevented from doing this because highly personalized, low quality results might instead be the result of their efforts?
A Google search for "American inventors": https://i.imgur.com/qw5kfQp.png A Google search for "American women scientists": https://i.imgur.com/o6mxG56.png Can the media stop doing this thing where they p-hack reality for proof of racist/sexist conspiracies?
These days we have systems that is not as smart as us trying to figure us out, with predictable results. Tricks and quirks are ever shifting. A query that used to produce the results yesterday might not function the same two weeks from now. Any skill gained in navigating the system needs to be constantly trained and updated.
I believe something similar happened to Hawking, where he had a keyboard that was not smart, but was predictable so that he was the one learning to use the system. He disliked a new version of the software that would not behave in a predictable way because it 'learned'. I can't find the link anymore sadly.
Do we know if Google or tech in general hires black women less than proportional to the US population?
The real question is whether or not they hire proportional to the number of black women that are looking for work in a specific role.
But that's not what this is really about, it's about racial justice. It's about redistributing wealth and power from whites to everyone else in an attempt to create more equality across the board, not about "fair" hiring practices.
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>I think Google is responsible in 2018, now that they offer extremely tailored results. Duckduckgo, maybe not. But if Google is going to say "we're going to show you listings for restaurants in SF in your simple 'restaurants' search because we know you live in SF," I think they should also say "we're going to show you results for LGBT resources when you search for 'gay men' because nothing about your query indicates…
> This seems like a bad idea to me, especially in the context of a discussion about how to reduce the political/social influence of Google. It seems to me that there's an enormous contingent of people who wants to yell about the influence of Google and Facebook and then yell even louder about how they're not actively intervening to skew content towards their political preferences (ie increase their influence massivel…
I'm getting a sense of that from your post.
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I think it's possible we're actually in violent agreement due, in part, to our different result set from Google. Even "incognito mode" doesn't return for me the set of salacious results reported by the author.
She clearly states this is what happened in 2009.
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Also, how hard is it really to get a sense for the quality of a search and the irrelevance of its results for the vast majority of people? Given how much demographic data Google pulls in from your history, it seems to be not super hard to notice that actual black girls are repulsed by what was shown to them. It also seems easy to post a notice saying: "Hey, searchers like you have found this query to contain many irr…
Taking it a step further, Google could apply this rule: if users really wanted to see (e.g.) porn, then adding that word to the query would show it; so let's keep the results safe by default.
This isnt that different from search engines for specialized databases. I used to use meta-search engines that woukd have checkboxes or selection menus to focus search on specific topics or collections. It was very useful. I still do it for technical papers using the "site:" operator to limit search to known-good sites for them.
This is a much harder problem that it looks to a casual observer. Just imagine what kind of people would type "black girls" to Google search. Not "black girls outfit", not "black girls social bias", just "black girls". I'll bet at least 50% of the searchers are looking for porn. So even if Google had infinite resources, its choices are: (1) act as a moral authority and deny pornographic contents to those who are look…
Isn‘t this precisely why safe search was invented? I find the „unprofessional hairstyle“ example much harder - you‘d have to first classify all pictures according to minority groups, determine the mix of minority group mix located in the search locale of the user, decide whether the mix should be local, regional, national or international in this case, and then correct the bias in the results accordingly. Seems quite…