When Truth Survives Free Speech • Hacker News Board

Re: When Truth Survives Free Speech

#51

Post by chc » Tue, Dec 13, 2011, 4:50 AM UTC

zem wrote: post #24

drinkzima wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google doesn't editorialize. What do you mean allowed?

it's not a questionn of editorialisation; it's whether one person using bad-faith seo tactics can manipulate front-page results like cox did.

It's not entirely clear to me that what she was doing was SEO. I mean, if repetition and overuse of style tags is all that's necessary to be accused of keyword stuffing, we'd have to acknowledge the Time Cube guy as the father of modern SEO.

And anyway, it doesn't require a lot of Google love to rank for the query "Kevin Padrick of Obsidian Finance Group." That's about as long-tail as it gets.

Re: When Truth Survives Free Speech

#52

Post by neilk » Tue, Dec 13, 2011, 4:56 AM UTC

byrneseyeview wrote: post #29

danso wrote: post #6

Carr ends with: >> Then again, I’ve got some institutional muscle when it comes to how I’m perceived on the Web. All Mr. Padrick had was his good reputation. Too bad there’s no algorithm to measure truth. I know he's a writer and needs to end with a real zinger, but it's a cheap shot against algorithms and their role in helping us make correct assessments. 1. There are algorithms which can gauge truth and accuracy. T…

Are there really algorithms for judging the truth? I think the closest we can get is heuristics for identifying whether or not something is being actively deceptive, but it's a big epistemological leap to say that we can definitely determine truth in an algorithmic way. Google is very good in these situations, but Google has a hard time differentiating between a popular movement and a single determined astroturfer. I…

I've been thinking a lot about this problem lately.

Perhaps in the era of the web, the right answer is to have a kind of error range for sourcing.

If you see the same fact quoted in three places on the web, you track that there are three instances, and the number of independent sources is anywhere from 1-3.

On the web, reshares and linkings far outnumber independent synoptic views of the same data. So in a way it's more accurate to take the opposite approach, assuming it's a single source.

You start upping the number of independent sources when you can prove it. Like, there are multiple camera views. Or, you somehow verify that the independent observers are real people, and you make some best guess about whether their accounts are independent (that's trickier though).

Re: When Truth Survives Free Speech

#53

Post by byrneseyeview » Wed, Dec 14, 2011, 2:49 AM UTC

ramidarigaz wrote: post #44

acomar wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, that's just not true. A heuristic is a procedure that gives no guarantee of a correct answer. An algorithm is a deterministic procedure that does guarantee a correct answer. Heuristics are very useful in making difficult decisions that don't have definite answers, but they are not algorithms.

Erm. Algorithms aren't necessarily deterministic. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nondeterministic_algorithm Primality testing is a very good example of a useful algorithm that gives an answer that is probably correct.

Thank you for the correction. I'd been using terminology ineffectively. The way I was taught it was:

- An algorithm is a step-by-step process for transforming any valid input into a specific valid output. - A heuristic is a process that brings you closer to something that looks like an answer, but does not necessarily find the best possible answer.