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Google’s first all-hands after 2016 election [video]

breitbart.com

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Re: Google’s first all-hands after 2016 election [video]

#211

Post by azinman2 »

rdtsc wrote: post #192
ChuckMcM wrote: post #161

Wow, they are still using Dory. That is the question collecting software that Taliver Heath wrote. It was a pretty brilliant idea, people submit questions and other people vote the questions up (or down) and top ranked questions get selected automatically. Its interesting to think about Brietbart putting this out there as some 'evil' thing, given what their all hands meeting would have looked like if the election had…

> Its interesting to think about Brietbart putting this out there as some 'evil' thing, Never worked at Google, but as they say it went about as I would have expected based on my outside perspective. Or at least I wasn't stunned by anything in particular... Overall I think what people dislike is the disconnect between the PR message of "all opinions are welcome / we are open / neutral" vs the reality of them being fa…

Just because there’s a semi-uniform political bend doesn’t mean they’re biased in product. The ACLU backed the KKK’s right to March, but clearly doesn’t stand with the KKK’s values.

That’s something the Breitbart audience can’t wrap their mind around, as they’d never do the same.

Re: Google’s first all-hands after 2016 election [video]

#212

Post by jacquesm »

comesee wrote: post #204
jacquesm wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They need to figure out some way of monetizing those comments. The people funding those sites are cleaning up with the votes they've bought in this way. The comments are the monetization.

Breitbart is hardly unique in being accused of being a tool for manipulating voters for the business-owning elite. In any case, it's just a conspiracy theory. You have no reason to believe the people at Breitbart don't sincerely believe in the issues they report on.

> You have no reason to believe the people at Breitbart don't sincerely believe in the issues they report on.

I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt by staking the claim that they are doing this because they are a bunch of cynical bastards. You are making things worse for them by claiming they really are that stupid, and while I can't rule it out 100% it borders on the unbelievable.

But if you want to go down that route, be my guest, I do believe Robert Mercer knows what he is doing (just like Rupert Murdoch) and that the damage they are doing is intentional. It's pretty easy to mess with people's heads and there is an awful lot of that going on, if the visitors of those sites sincerely believe in the various levels of BS that are being peddled then some sort of shared blame would be appropriate.

I have similar feelings towards religious people and the perpetrators of religion: a failure of critical thinking skills leading to significant damage to the world, with a larger portion of the blame apportioned to the guys in charge (why is it always guys?).

Re: Google’s first all-hands after 2016 election [video]

#213

Post by ryanobjc »

gizmo686 wrote: post #48
roenxi wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I value political neutrality in the workplace, so I have a lot of in-principle issues with what is being shown here right from the get-go. I didn't wind the video back to find the exact quote, but we now have publicised evidence of senior leadership at Google who stood up and said 'obviously our values are not the same as a big chunk of Americans'. Clearly a lot of them are specific Hillary supporters, a candidate so…

As I mentioned elsewhere in this thread, I think search should be regulated, and part of that regulation should be some standard for political neutrality [0]. However, there is no neutral algorithm to this problem. Any algorithm favors certain sites over others. There is almost definitely going to be some correlation between the sites that are favored and the content of those sites, political or otherwise. There is s…

Why should search be regulated?

And I assume ALL search engines should be equally regulated.

Also, you better be pretty specific about what politically neutral really means.

For example, I just started a political party devoted to spreading obvious lies. Political neutrality means I should have top billing, right? Above the fold? Even though no one needs or wants what I’m selling?

Re: Google’s first all-hands after 2016 election [video]

#214

Post by ryanobjc »

pen2l wrote: post #194
aikinai wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems everyone's down-voting you, but considering the huge number of immigrants and international employees at Google, it'd be crazy to expect a Trump win to be treated neutrally when the foundation of his platform was antagonism of immigrants and other countries. And it wasn't completely overblown, there were many Googlers trapped inside or outside the US immediately after Trump took power; one, for example, had no…

I work in a research hospital, I went through a lot of similar meetings, and a lot of emails talking about where to get help if you're feeling down. I remember thinking hey this is a bit over-blown... but then I talked to this Iranian guy on my floor: he was extremely shocked and depressed. He had a situation on his hands -- he wanted his wife to come to America, but was afraid that wouldn't be possible and he was en…

Also, many people think that openly accepting immigrants is what makes both google and America great. It was pretty clear that trump was very anti immigrant. And that’s a direct attack on the success of google.

And the first thing he did policy wise literally confirmed everyone’s worst fears.

Re: Google’s first all-hands after 2016 election [video]

#215

Post by [deleted] »

mc32 wrote: post #196
geofft wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But from a tech perspective its always destabilizing to endorse a political ideology just like it is destabilizing to endorse a religious ideology in what is a collective for economic output. Is it destabilizing at all? The British Empire, one of the world's most economically successful projects, had its own religious ideology. The US has a "Protestant work ethic." When have we historically seen the adoption of rel…

Didn't catholics in britain have a hard time og it for some period? Didn't that contribute to internal instability? Or am i misrecalling history lessons?

[deleted]

Re: Google’s first all-hands after 2016 election [video]

#216

Post by axlprose »

beachy wrote: post #145
gizmo686 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they are being genuine when they say their plan is to combat fake news with AI; their business is built around AI. It is one of their core competencies. I think they are going to fail, and quietly increase the human involvement once they realize that their AI isn't good enough. Then they will slowly scale back the humans as their AI improves, until the next controversy when they realize that they still need h…

That's a tragic view. How did we get to the state where the "truth" is such an elusive concept? Is it so hard to determine whether basic statements are true or false? And to build larger, higher constructs out of those building blocks? That's basically what science has been and is. It seems comically easy to identify fake news in most cases. Was this inauguration crowd larger than that one? That's a simple question t…

> How did we get to the state where the "truth" is such an elusive concept?

Look into the fields of epistemology and the philosophy of science, in particular the works of Karl Popper such as The Logic of Scientific Discovery. The "truth" has always been an elusive concept. Outside the realm of mathematics, it's rather difficult to objectively prove most things "true".

Re: Google’s first all-hands after 2016 election [video]

#217

Post by dragonwriter »

Digory wrote: post #138
dragonwriter wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's only disturbing if you reject the premise of the question in advance—that the concern is addressing inaccurate factual information. Connecting users with good information is literally the function on which Google wad founded, and applying AI to that mission has been a Google vision from very early on. It would be weird and worrying if Google selectively choose not to do that with information that might have poli…

Right, but google’s premise is/was that it is feeding you the unfiltered view of the crowd. If not the world, at least of American computer users. That’s some signal about invariably qualitative judgments on facts. “Hillary Emails” should give you results based on global pagerank, whether or not you agree with the subjective assessments about the importance of Hillary’s emails. Silently substituting the pagerank of N…

> Right, but google’s premise is/was that it is feeding you the unfiltered view of the crowd

No, it's never been that; it's always been that it's algorithmically selected to promote the best information, whether the best answer to your question or, more recently through some of their mechanism, the information most likely to be useful in the absence of a specific request, considering a wide variety of general, (and, for very many years, location-based, and personalized) indicators of quality and likely utility. “Unfiltered” is exactly the opposite of what has always been Google's value proposition.

> “Hillary Emails” should give you results based on global pagerank

PageRank is the oldest and most primitive of the algorithms used in Google's rankings.

> Silently substituting the pagerank of New York or the subjective judgment of a room of Googlers undercuts the signal.

Neither of those things is suggested in the response given to the question.

> But there should always be some free, unfiltered pagerank available.

Are you seriously suggesting that Google is obligated to offer a version of its search engine using only its 1998 link ranking algorithm with none of the additional filtering and ordering criteria that have been developed I the last 20 years?

Re: Google’s first all-hands after 2016 election [video]

#219

Post by dragonwriter »

axlprose wrote: post #172
ehsankia wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, anyone who finds this offensive is implicitly agreeing that removing unfactual results would skew the results to be politically biased.

So it's wrong to be offended at the possibility of mass-scale censorship just as a matter of principle? Search results are always going to be biased the same way that any media is always going to be biased. Have the regimes of the 20th century not taught us that it's naive to think we can objectively correct for that without opening the possibility for significantly worse repercussions?

> So it's wrong to be offended at the possibility of mass-scale censorship just as a matter of principle?

Mass-scale censorship other than that already implicit in algorithmic link ranking wasn't suggested, improving the quality of the algorithms already in use and intended to provide he best information (which false propaganda is emphatically not) was suggested.

Re: Google’s first all-hands after 2016 election [video]

#220

Post by allthenews »

throwaway_trust wrote: post #61
gizmo686 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they are being genuine when they say their plan is to combat fake news with AI; their business is built around AI. It is one of their core competencies. I think they are going to fail, and quietly increase the human involvement once they realize that their AI isn't good enough. Then they will slowly scale back the humans as their AI improves, until the next controversy when they realize that they still need h…

> I think they are going to fail, and quietly increase the human involvement once they realize that their AI isn't good enough. Then they will slowly scale back the humans as their AI improves, until the next controversy when they realize that they still need humans. Exactly. AI is not good at subjective decisions of qualitative data. For example, nobody knows any political candidate's net worth apart from IRS, until…

>AI is not good at subjective decisions of qualitative data

That's exactly the core strength of AI. It is what differentiates AI from hard coded solutions. Estimations(subjective decisions) based on correlations in fuzzy (qualitative) data.

In your example, you could take a set of data containing the net worths and other characteristics, e.g. birth zip code, spending habits, affiliations, and if there are any trends related to net worth, a properly architected neural network trained on the appropriate data could easily estimate subjectively on what amounts to qualitative data.

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