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Google and Facebook Have Failed Us

theatlantic.com

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Re: Google and Facebook Have Failed Us

#181

Post by intopieces »

nilved wrote: post #74
intopieces wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that they are incapable of exercising judgement. It's that when they do exercise judgement, it is consistently towards bad content. False content.

This problem needs to be fixed with education. The article demonstrates an extremely profound misunderstanding of technology.

What kind of education do you propose? Who would it target? How much would it cost? Who would be responsible for implementing it? Who would pay for it? Who would be responsible for overseeing their implementation? By what metric would we determine success or failure? Over what time scale do you propose the education to last?

This is a problem now. Your solution has too many associated questions to be implemented immediately. Without the answers to at least some of the questions I posed, I cannot agree that your proposal is the remedy.

Re: Google and Facebook Have Failed Us

#182

Post by int_19h »

solidsnack9000 wrote: post #68
int_19h wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The ideas of freedom of information, of freedom of expression are repugnant to the aristocrat (who always consider they know best), but these are founding principals of so far the most innovative and productive societies history has known. I'm not entirely sure this is true. Before Internet, what we had was mostly freedom of the press - which is to say, the freedom to spread information (or disinformation) by those…

So much information in the times before freedom of the press was spread without the press at all. The press made not only communication but also censorship feasible on an unprecedented scale.

It certainly was - but it was also spread much, much slower, and filtered (by those passing it along) on every step of that way.

Re: Google and Facebook Have Failed Us

#183

Post by abrahamepton »

amcca029 wrote: post #168
abrahamepton wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked at Google News for 5 years, and completely agree w/Alexis. Google promoted 4Chan as a top result for people who wanted to know about Las Vegas; that's a fail, period. It is a fail. It should not have happened; it should not happen again; it should never happen. Great, maybe you personally weren't fooled. That's entirely and totally irrelevant since there are 7 billion people on the planet and Google (and FB…

> Google promoted 4Chan as a top result for people who wanted to know about Las Vegas Great Job! But in all seriousness 4chan and other sites tend to react very fast, was there any manipulation going on or was it just that they where getting picked up due to high initial activity?

I'm sure there's a lot of truth in the given explanation: the terms that were returning this 4Chan result had basically no search history beforehand, and all of a sudden this post was probably getting a lot of links, traffic, whatever. That's not exculpatory in the least, but it does make sense to me.

Re: Google and Facebook Have Failed Us

#184

Post by acdha »

OCASM wrote: post #169
acdha wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That argument still requires evidence that those personality differences exist, aren’t learned (other primates have learned behavior, too – see e.g. http://www.radiolab.org/story/91694-new-baboon/ ), and are significant to the very complex behaviors under discussion. The other area it ignores is the degree to which humanity’s distinctive advantage is plasticity. We can learn to do things like be comfortable in an enc…

There are also experiments (Simon Baron-Cohen) with infants at one day of age showing the differences in interests (human faces vs things). In that vein we can also include personality changes displayed by transgender people who undergo hormone replacement therapy. Also studies on the personalities of separated twins. Everything points to a mix of biology and socialization. The idea of parity in division of labor as…

Simon Baron-Cohen has been pushing that idea for a long time but while they’ve gotten a lot of attention for his career, his conclusions are far from definitive. There are various papers contesting his conclusions and review articles have failed to support the bold claims – e.g. https://software.rc.fas.harvard.edu/lds/wp-content/uploads/2...

That doesn’t mean that there’s nothing here but I find it telling that the neuroscientists I used to support were far more skeptical than, say, the Damore fans here. This topic came up a bit and there was a strong consensus that the science was still too early to say anything — there are low level biological differences (e.g. percentages of white matter) but that hadn’t been linked to high-level skills, and the few low-level differences were still being studied to identify the cause. This is all complicated by the plasticity of the brain based on usage so answering even simple-sounding questions is usually a significant percentage of multiple people’s research careers.

Re: Google and Facebook Have Failed Us

#185

Post by throw2016 »

Since Google and co were never given the responsibility of telling anyone the truth this seems to be another naked powergrab to spread FUD and scare stories so someone can have a 'monopoly on truth'.

Diversity of opinion and widespread rumour mongering is a natural state of affairs in human society. Those who are unsettled by this and seek some sort of uniformity and control betray a troubling megalomania. Elevating yourself over others to decide somehow only 'you' are able to discern the facts confirms it.

That leads to not to Google or Facebook curating news but 'one source of truth' controlled by the government and authoritarian entities, using the exact same logic. Some people may be experts at C and Go but betray an astonishing illiteracy when it comes to history, freedom and evolution of human society.

Notions of truth have been debated for eons so there is already a large body of knowledge. You need an educated literate population and accept people will have wildly differing views and trying to protect the 'ignorant' not only turns your society into a tightly controlled cage but reflects a streak of authoritarianism and megalomania in the 'protectors,' now prevalent among many technical folks.

Re: Google and Facebook Have Failed Us

#186

Post by abrahamepton »

eighthnate wrote: post #172
abrahamepton wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked at Google News for 5 years, and completely agree w/Alexis. Google promoted 4Chan as a top result for people who wanted to know about Las Vegas; that's a fail, period. It is a fail. It should not have happened; it should not happen again; it should never happen. Great, maybe you personally weren't fooled. That's entirely and totally irrelevant since there are 7 billion people on the planet and Google (and FB…

> that's a fail, period. I disagree. If that's what people are viewing and if that's where the discussion of the news was happening then google should reflect that. If 4chan was the only source google was pushing then fine. But as long as google is posting a wide variety of "news", then anything, including 4chan should be allowed. Edit: People forget that the TMZ and even the inquirer used to be attacked also but the…

> If that's what people are viewing and if that's where the discussion of the news was happening then google should reflect that.

Nope. Nooooope. Nuh uh. Not at all. Could not disagree more profoundly.

Google has a responsibility to its users. Surfacing a 4Chan result in a top-results box is a fail for those users who see it. The Google search results in that case are worse than returning nothing at all.

Let me put it differently. There are some sites that should never be treated as authoritative on any subject under any circumstances. 4Chan is one of those sites. It's one thing for a user to be looking for something _on 4Chan_ but for anyone else, 4Chan results are garbage and an algorithm fail 100% of the time (at least, that's what I would argue; obviously I do not work at Google and cannot speak for them).

Re: Google and Facebook Have Failed Us

#187

Post by nitwit005 »

indubitable wrote: post #55
jordigh wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The reason why those of us on this forum can tell the difference between good and bad information is because we received a good education and learned critical analysis skills. We really need to stop congratulating ourselves on how smart we are and we would never fall for such blatant lies, because we are such highly-educated critical thinkers. There are a bunch of silly beliefs that we witness even amongst us like…

Do you believe Steve Jobs could not have told you the statistics on treatment for the normal treatment for the cancer he had? Or that he was not aware that most reputable literature on homeopathics is less than encouraging? Turning the stables do you feel you have access to all the information necessary on his situation and logic to be able to accurately judge his actions? Society as a whole is becoming increasingly…

You're imagining Steve Jobs made some sort of rational choice. It sounds like he pretty much ignored the facts, as well as the advice of family and friends. Here's his biographer's quote to CBS:

"I think that he kind of felt that if you ignore something, if you don't want something to exist, you can have magical thinking. It'd worked for him in the past. He regretted it."

Re: Google and Facebook Have Failed Us

#188

Post by SolaceQuantum »

davidjsevans wrote: post #66
Spivak wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would like to see that evidence, thanks. You won't find it. This is the problem in the soft sciences. There are certain hypotheses that you just can't test and this is one of them. Choosing to believe that unbalanced gender representations in certain fields is unnatural is just as unfounded as the parent's opposite view. The best we can do is make conjectures based on the results of things we can test but it's in…

The OP said: "There are a bunch of silly beliefs that we witness even amongst us ... that having no gender parity in tech is both good and natural." I didn't make any statement on "good" because it was poorly defined. It could be defined as anything from the individual's opinion to measurable outcomes (society's productivity or reported happiness). I think "natural" in this debate tends to mean "biological factors" a…

1) I asked for traits correlated with gender, 2) I asked for Traits correlated with career prospects.

1 merely correlates gender with career prospects and assumes traits exist biologically that performs the causative effect.

2 merely correlates behavior traits and assumes that there is a causative effect to career prospects 10, 20, 30 years down the line.

I do not want assumptions since they make a donkey out of you and me.

Re: Google and Facebook Have Failed Us

#189

Post by UnpossibleJim »

acdha wrote: post #145
UnpossibleJim wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem comes in our choice of who should be the "gatekeepers of information"? Certainly not The Altlantic, The New Yorker (as seen sited in this discussion) or any other traditional news outlet. They have shown time and time again that the peiple running these outlets, not only, have very biased stations when presenting the news (i.e. from MSNBC to Fox News and the rainbow of bias between), they have shown, for…

> They have shown time and time again that the peiple running these outlets, not only, have very biased stations when presenting the news That’s a really sweeping equivalence claim to make without any proof, much less a way to account for the mountain of evidence contradicting your assertion. Dismissing real organizations with editors, fact checkers, a range of viewpoints, etc. because they aren’t fun by dispassionat…

I don't know if what I've read is actual proof and a lot of this seems to point to "opinion" pieces on news networks, I guess. I have not done the legwork, but here are some articles I've found going towards what I stated:

http://www.npr.org/2016/12/14/505547295/fake-news-expert-on-...

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/09/business/media/what-weve-...

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2011/jun/...

https://www.alternet.org/story/154875/the_science_of_fox_new...

In retrospect, though, I probably think it's more prevalent than it is in actuality. To be completely honest, the sensationalism by media outlets exposing misinformation by media outlets "on the other side" of the news gets to me, sometimes. As for corrections, though, mea culpa's seem to be a mid page item, at best =/

Re: Google and Facebook Have Failed Us

#190

Post by solidsnack9000 »

int_19h wrote: post #182
solidsnack9000 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So much information in the times before freedom of the press was spread without the press at all. The press made not only communication but also censorship feasible on an unprecedented scale.

It certainly was - but it was also spread much, much slower, and filtered (by those passing it along) on every step of that way.

It was filtered by individuals but coordinated filtering was much more difficult -- a crucial distinction.
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