Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Google’s efforts to filter out positions which they think are fake news, like climate skeptic posts, have hit an unexpected snag: Google have just noticed large groups of people across the world hold views which differ from the views championed by the Silicon Valley monoculture.
Alphabet’s Eric Schmidt: It can be ‘very difficult’ for Google’s search algorithm to understand truth
Catherine Clifford
2:38 PM ET Tue, 21 Nov 2017
In the United States’ current polarized political environment, the constant publishing of articles with vehemently opposing arguments has made it almost impossible for Google to rank information properly.
So says billionaire Eric Schmidt, Chairman of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, speaking at the Halifax International Security Forum on Saturday.
“Let’s say that this group believes Fact A and this group believes Fact B and you passionately disagree with each other and you are all publishing and writing about it and so forth and so on. It is very difficult for us to understand truth,” says Schmidt, referring to the search engine’s algorithmic capabilities.
“So when it gets to a contest of Group A versus Group B — you can imagine what I am talking about — it is difficult for us to sort out which rank, A or B, is higher,” Schmidt says.
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In cases of greater consensus, when the search turns up a piece of incorrect or unreliable information, it is a problem that Google should be able to address by tweaking the algorithm, he says.
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The problem comes when diametrically opposed viewpoints abound — the Google algorithm can not identify which is misinformation and which is truth.
That’s the rub for the tech giant. “Now, there is a line we can’t really get across,” says Schmidt.
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However, platforms like Facebook and Twitter have a different issue, sometimes referred to as the “Facebook bubble” or as an echo chamber. Because those companies’ algorithms rely, at least in part, on things like “friends” and followers to determine what’s displayed in their news feeds, the users are part of the problem.
“That is a core problem of humans that they tend to learn from each other and their friends are like them. And so until we decide collectively that occasionally somebody not like you should be inserted into your database, which is sort of a social values thing, I think we are going to have this problem,” the Alphabet boss says.
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As a climate skeptic and IT expert I’m finding this Google difficulty highly entertaining.
What people like Google’s Schmidt desperately want to discover is a generalised way of detecting fake news. They believe in their hearts that climate skepticism for example is as nutty as thinking the moon landings were faked, but they have so far failed to find a common marker which allows their personal prejudices to be confirmed as objective reality.
Google could and likely does simply impose their prejudices, explicitly demoting climate skeptic articles and specific websites to the bottom of their list – but they feel guilty about doing this, because they know imposing their personal views on the search algorithm is cheating. Explicitly imposing personal prejudices on their search ranking algorithm forces Google to admit to themselves that those views are prejudices. It bothers them that they have not yet discovered a way to objectively justify those prejudices by applying a generalised filter to their underlying data.
To put it another way, in the case of climate skepticism I suspect Google’s problem is they have discovered there are lots of published mainstream peer reviewed papers which support climate skeptic positions. This is likely messing up their efforts to classify climate skepticism as not being part of mainstream science.
The mounting evidence US tech giants are refusing to accept is that their Silicon Valley monoculture might be wrong about a few issues. They will likely continue to burn millions of dollars worth of software developer time chasing unicorns, because as long as they can convince themselves they are working on a solution, they don’t have to admit to themselves that they might have made a mistake.
It is not google,s job to pick truth.
It’s job is to gather information related to the search requested.
It is the requesters right to determine what is the truth.
Anything else is sociatle manipulation.
I speculate that if government decreed that search engine algorithms intended to filter fake news/truth from lies were user selectable with an ON/OFF button on the front page it might help. Each Google user could turn OFF the Google algorithms and see the raw search. This would make certain things very transparent and thus in itself would moderate the evil as well as shine a light on it.
For things like FB, MSN, etc you could similarly have a number of algorithm driven features under user control.By toggling the buttons users would be able to see the effect. The transparency would probably create a market for sites with “NO ALGOS” as a USP.
The demographic would split into users who are happy to accept the algos the companies choose and those who prefer the more open “no algo” stuff. Arguments about censorship and manipulation are assisted when you advise people, “OK, now try turning it OFF and see the difference..” .
Ah…the continual search for that elusive objective reality, which everyone agree exists, and yet which no one has conclusively found a way to get close to.
What is Truth. Even Pontius Pilate allegedly wrestled with that one!
It’s worse than that. They seem to think they can write a general algorithm for finding “truth”, that AI can match the hype that has been attached to it since the advent of electronic computers. It is as if centuries, nay, millennia, of human intellectual effort and development can quickly be described and improved upon with a few lines of code written by a bunch of programmers with a bit of ‘attitude’. The apparent naïveté of Google executives really ought to worry their stockholders.
What Eric Schmidt needs is for a senior engineer not afraid to give him a birds-and-the-bees talk about the truth of where AI is at. Unfortunately, since the firing of engineer James Damore for telling the truth, Schmidt will find such people very thin on the ground at Google.
I’d like to ‘tweak’ Eric’s ‘algorithm’.
So “they” pretend that Truth is a matter of False/Not False and a combination of AND, OR and XOR logical operations?
Google, like the vast majority of progressives/leftists, never engage in conversation with conservatives. They surround themselves in life with others just like them, so they believe their views are held by the majority of people. It comes as a complete shock to them when they are confronted with the fact that their views are in the minority.
Their main problem is that they are trying to treat opinion and bias as provable or falsifiable facts (or falsehoods). Bias and opinion are virtually by definition neither provable nor falsifiable.
Ranking is everything in the Google world. Results on page one of a search are those articles that have more people referencing them than those on page 12. This is the Google algorithm. Fake news or crappy news has always been a problem. It is possible there is an algorithmic solution. To do this however, requires a return to Aristotle — premises leading to a conclusion. Popularity, as such, of a proposition is by definition a fallacy. The more people that link, like or retweet something has no weight on truthfulness. Democracy is decent for, say, the selection of a delimited administrator for a specific period of time but rubbish epistemologically.
The problem with social media is that it is social. There is no barrier to entry. However, nonsense has always been with us, it is just easier to spread it today. Hopefully, the next “Google killer” will be able to detect how well some argument is supported. It could be AI or something else.
Helicobacter pylorii
‘They believe in their hearts that climate skepticism for example is as nutty as thinking the moon landings were faked, ‘oddly in Lew papers research what was found is that AGW proponents were very keen on the whole ‘fake moon landing ‘ idea more so than AGW sceptics. Which comes as little surprise when you consider how keen they are to see ‘fossil fuel funded ‘ conspiracies behind every-door , and how some of them clearly gone through considerable supplies of tin-foil to keep ‘the man ‘ out of their minds .
Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube all have the same problem. You wouldn’t believe what’s happening – no, that’s not right – there are those of us that have wrongly had accounts taken down. (I forgot to mention Flickr, which also has a problem.)
There is a way to “fix” this: restore freedom of speech. Truth has a way of winning.
Primarily so much social media mistakes popularity for truth — just because something is widely believed does not make it correct.
Social media too often undermines the feelings of worth of the undecided, and elevates feelings of worth of the opinionated, and the socially manipulative types.
Social media too often reduces highly complex issues to little more than simplistic diatribes of judging outcomes as a binary ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ result.
Social media too often pushes the idea of being ‘on the winning side’ as a primary virtue (either implicitly or explicitly). This often leads to a form of suppression of minority, and often unconventional, views by the willfulness of the semi-tutored but often ignorant majority.
These sentiments will never ‘go viral’.
Eric Schmidt must be a bloody idiot.
A always comes before B.
The answer is 42 of course.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/yes-the-answer-to-the-universe-really-is-42-1351201.html
We would not tolerate a phone company deciding about content on the phone network. We would not tolerate a a highway system thst used political tests to determine who gets on the highway.
There is no reason to tolerste a search engine company deciding what we search for based on their politics.
Google is a highway of information.
They create basically zero content.
End the google/fb/etc. censorship and exploitation of our lives.
Is my prima facie conclusion wrong that the majority (all?) of the peer reviewed papers that contradict AGW are authored by non-climate scientists who are simply doing science related to their field (e.g., geology) , and therefore not beholden to AGW funding?
The “internet”, or rather the “WWW”, became all about “linking” “stuff” as Tim Berners-Lee “posited” in the 1990’s. The rest is history.
So, when I researched a subject in the 1970’s, I had to go to a well stocked library. Common back then. Today? Google is your “friend” and libraries are being depleted.
In my research, I find the more interesting papers or anecdotes are way down the numbered pages, so that is where I start and then go backwards. Or I use Duck Duck Go, which doesn’t seem biased.
Google’s mistake is trying to regulate content.
But I have an algorithm for them to detect fake news. If the principles have a (D) by their name, it’s fake.
Your last paragraph in the article is a very good definition of “corporate culture”. As long as the party line can be supported – or not proven wrong – all those people who follow it will willfully look the other way at anything that would endanger their position – both on the issue and their position in the corporate culture that it depends on.
Are we maybe talking about (yet) another ‘Magical Thought Bubble’
—–these folks have thought so long and so hard about something/anything that they become quite blinkered/blind to any other possibility.
– and maybe as we know from personal experience, a messenger bringing an opposing view is summarily shot.
Just this week, I went on (and promptly left) an online course on Food, Nutrition & Well-being – from Uni of Aberdeen.
I dared suggest that people with a BMI of 26, 27 or 28 have been found (by counting actual corpses) to live longer than most everyone else. i.e that advice from the WHO was flat out wrong.
Also that ultra low sodium guidelines were dangerous (from the getting cramps) for folks on existing hypertension medication and generally folks working in high temp/humidity environments.
I was summarily deleted with not a word of explanation.
An appeal to the WORLD authority?????
This is the chemical brain depressant at work (sugar and grog) , especially awful coming from Uni of Aberdeen which actually started the course by suggesting there are 4 food groups – fat, carbs, protein and ALCOHOL
The Drug is doing the talking.
And what *exactly* are these people spending my tax ££££ on – what *does* go on in these ivory towers?
That’s what happens when you are taught (or you teach) that there is no truth with a capital T.
It’s all subjective to your point of view.
Google just learned that there are a lot of people in the world that don’t share their points of view.
It was not clear to me as to which was the greater problem.
1. People disagree with them.
2. How to teach the computer these other viewpoints were incorrect while still allowing the program
to learn on its own.
Is this the reason the nation was shocked when Donald Trump was elected president of the United States? Their own biased fooled them all into thinking this election was in the bag. It has happened here, too! In fact, the gatekeepers believe their own words.
“Thinking themselves to be wise, they became fools”.
Happy Thanksgiving, A.W. and to all.