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Google featured snippets are worse than fake news

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Re: Google featured snippets are worse than fake news

#171

Post by segmondy »

ronack wrote: post #120

I've also wondered why Google isn't held responsible for publishing libelous claims and hoaxes as facts. Examples: Is Hillary Clinton a pedophile? https://www.google.com/search?q=is+hillary+clinton+a+pedophi... Is John Travolta gay? https://www.google.com/search?q=is+john+travolta+gay Does Lil Wayne have HIV? https://www.google.com/search?q=does+lil+wayne+have+hiv Perhaps worse, this is what drives Google Home's ques…

Did Google publish that? It didn't, it "answered with what it found" You asked Google, and it replied with data. There was no person at Google who decide that any of the following is true and hit a publish button.

For Google to be held liable, Google must know what is true and false for all it's knowledge base.

Re: Google featured snippets are worse than fake news

#172

Post by thwarted »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #124
deong wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's true, but I don't think it's a problem. That's a question that just has two separate intentions, and even the world's foremost expert on Easter could give you the wrong one. If Google were as good as the best human experts at answering any question, then I think we'd have to declare victory and live with the occasional miscommunication, just as we do today.

I think the crux of the issue is that real experts in any area, when presented with a question in their field, will answer "That depends" and then engage you in a conversation that ends with you being more knowledgeable about the specific question you should have asked, and why. This is because most areas of human endeavor aren't solid sciences like physics, although for most day-to-day activity we treat them as if t…

I think the crux of the issue is that real experts in any area, when presented with a question in their field, will answer "That depends" and then engage you in a conversation that ends with you being more knowledgeable about the specific question you should have asked, and why.

While I actively encourage this method of inquiry and information acquisition, I've found that people often don't care to know why their question isn't even wrong, and challenging it leads to a defensive posture. This conversation is only keeping them from getting an answer and the expert risks being labeled as "uncooperative" because they refuse to provide an answer. This is a social problem, and it won't have a technical solution.

Re: Google featured snippets are worse than fake news

#173

Post by benmcnelly »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #169
benmcnelly wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are right, and I was agreeing with it. One downside to being sarcastic on a comment thread to make a point is I can't tell if people are down-voting me because they clicked the link, or because they didn't.

Another downside is that it doesn't add much to the discussion.

Sure it does, one of the most effective forms of provoking thought is satire.

People just don't like it when you don't think the way everyone else is thinking.

Re: Google featured snippets are worse than fake news

#174

Post by ronack »

segmondy wrote: post #171
ronack wrote: post #120

I've also wondered why Google isn't held responsible for publishing libelous claims and hoaxes as facts. Examples: Is Hillary Clinton a pedophile? https://www.google.com/search?q=is+hillary+clinton+a+pedophi... Is John Travolta gay? https://www.google.com/search?q=is+john+travolta+gay Does Lil Wayne have HIV? https://www.google.com/search?q=does+lil+wayne+have+hiv Perhaps worse, this is what drives Google Home's ques…

Did Google publish that? It didn't, it "answered with what it found" You asked Google, and it replied with data. There was no person at Google who decide that any of the following is true and hit a publish button. For Google to be held liable, Google must know what is true and false for all it's knowledge base.

It is being represented as the answer to my question - visually on google.com and explicitly from Google Home. This is different than a forum, Reddit, etc. hosting a variety of content for which it is not responsible. Google is effectively endorsing a specific piece of content in response to my question. This will either need to be refined or I suspect it will be challenged in court eventually.

Re: Google featured snippets are worse than fake news

#175

Post by forgottenpass »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #76

Yikes. More of this "People only want to be told what to do" stuff. I can easily think of a dozen political questions for which no simple answer would be correct -- the language is simply too fuzzy. For many, many things, this is a good idea. The date of Easter is the date of Easter. But the glaring danger here is that for many things this is a freaking evil dystopian nightmare. Why? Because Google will keep tweaking…

Epistemology, Google. There are things you can know and things you cannot. Please do not treat them all the same.

There does not exist a category of things the google can know when a question with semantic meaning is answered by trawling the web and looking for statically connections to the words and phrases in the question.

I don't even think we have to take a peek into philosophy of what "knowledge" is to categorically deny that any output of that process could ever be called knowledge.

My words fail me, the best explanation I've seen on machine learning 'facts' is: "The output of the algorithm is not a human-understandable fact. It is the result of complicated and unintuitive statistical properties of the input material. However, that data looks like facts we can easily understand" [0]

"Don't be evil"? Cleaning up the result of such an algorithm so that it looks like a fact to a layperson is in a very real sense evil.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/5tovk1/on_the_...

Re: Google featured snippets are worse than fake news

#176

Post by Karunamon »

TuringTest wrote: post #162
Karunamon wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem there is that, at the end of the day, it's a fallible human putting stuff in the "bullshit blacklist". It also means that you're evaluating a statement based on its source rather than its merits, which is.. bad. When you're the #1 source of information on stuff in the world, that's an awful lot of power that can be trivially abused (e.g. "let's just blacklist unfavorable coverage of this lawsuit against u…

> you're evaluating a statement based on its source rather than its merits, which is.. bad. If you don't know the source, you have no way of knowing its merits, as you won't be aware of how the people came up with that knowledge.

By all means, show the source - just don't blacklist things based on the source. Truth is truth regardless of who speaks it.

Re: Google featured snippets are worse than fake news

#177

Post by forgottenpass »

theseatoms wrote: post #110
DanielBMarkham wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a great point. It shows how easy it is for somebody to think wow, that question obviously has a clear answer when the opposite is true. Take the lead example: Was President Warren Harding a member of the KKK? We know the KKK said he was. We know he vigorously denied it. We know that biographers of him and experts in his history do not think he was. But how could you ever prove that somebody was not the member of…

Google should report a probability distribution for each truth claim.

But google isn't even making a truth claim. Google fundamentally doesn't understand the claim, or how to grade it. All the google engine knows is the statistical properties of words and phrases involved and associated with the claim.

Re: Google featured snippets are worse than fake news

#178

Post by varjag »

benmcnelly wrote: post #164
varjag wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure what to make of your comment. It it some new clothes of middle ground fallacy? Should I give equal consideration to every opinion, no matter how outlandish? Do I have to read from Moon hoax people just because I watched a SpaceX launch or flatearthers since I clicked on NatGeo piece last week?

Oh look another "the moon landing was real" guy. ^ See what I did there? I made a comment on the Internet, and called into question the legitimacy of your comments. Anyone can do it! So what we really need is HN to moderate our comments to filter out comments like yours so that we can just read the truth without having to filter out the garbage. I don't want to hear about how you think the the earth is round just bec…

Edgy a.f., but what any of that wonderful rant has to do with my original point?

Re: Google featured snippets are worse than fake news

#179

Post by tyingq »

segmondy wrote: post #171
ronack wrote: post #120

I've also wondered why Google isn't held responsible for publishing libelous claims and hoaxes as facts. Examples: Is Hillary Clinton a pedophile? https://www.google.com/search?q=is+hillary+clinton+a+pedophi... Is John Travolta gay? https://www.google.com/search?q=is+john+travolta+gay Does Lil Wayne have HIV? https://www.google.com/search?q=does+lil+wayne+have+hiv Perhaps worse, this is what drives Google Home's ques…

Did Google publish that? It didn't, it "answered with what it found" You asked Google, and it replied with data. There was no person at Google who decide that any of the following is true and hit a publish button. For Google to be held liable, Google must know what is true and false for all it's knowledge base.

Try searching: Which presidents are rapists?

On mobile at least, it really does look like Google is presenting a fact: http://imgur.com/a/DZP1H

Attribution at the top, and maybe more context would help.

Note that the article Google scraped this from is NOT calling those presidents rapists. It mentions one of them was accused, but not prosecuted.

Re: Google featured snippets are worse than fake news

#180

Post by tomjen3 »

DaUR wrote: post #83
tomjen3 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That wouldn't work when somebody leaks something that is true but the cia denies (as an example).

There's a difference between "government sources" for hard facts (CDC), facts about the world (e.g. DoJ travel warnings, CIA factbook, DoE energy savings tips), for facts about the government (e.g. for Trump's EO, the suggested snippet would be to the text of the EO), and claims from the government. These are easily distinguished.

Most, if not all of those, are payed for by lobbyists.
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