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Google To Predict Accuracy of Political Statements
pestario writes "Google CEO Eric Schmidt talks about a service which can give the probability of the accuracy of statements made by politicians, among other things.
From the Reuters article, Schmidt says: "We (at Google) are not in charge of truth but we might be able to give a probability."
Can Google's 'truth predictor' bring an end to sound bites and one-liners? I'm not holding my breath...""
They'll use this to tweak the statement until it passes the test.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
How do you tell a politician is lying?
Easy, his lips are moving.
Otherwise the result could be perpetually set to "0% Truth" and we'd never know if it worked or not.
Argh.
I have just invented a similar program to determine the truthfulness of statements made by politicians. Say the statement out loud and then scroll down to see the percent of accuracy and truthfulness of the politician's statement.
This politician's statement is 0% true.
Enter political candidate's statement here: _______
truth predictor says this is FALSE
ta da! Done. I bet my truth predictor is as accurate as Google's.
stuff |
I guess "truthiness" was already taken.
meh
Or they could just invent their own words to confuse it.
Seriously, tacular? How in the hell is a computer supposed to know that meant nuclear and tactical? Wait, how in the hell am I supposed to know that?!
My work here is dung.
given how everything else on Google can be manipulated by SEOs, this will open up whole new possibilities...
will Google allow opposing viewpoints via adwords/adsense on the results page?
It sounds like s/he's doing something good!
-> Probability politician is lieing: 100%
It sounds like s/he's doing something bad!
-> Probability politician is lieing: 0%
34486853790
Connection too slow for X forwarding? Try "ssh -CX user@host"
Some one should make a show out of that.
Why do execs say such funny things away from their engineering teams? And why do I get the sneaking suspicion that some group at Google has actually figured out how to do this?
Anyway, until this is beyond hype, I find the Annenberg Fact Check to be the most reliable source out there.
// file: mice.h
#include "frickin_lasers.h"
While the Sun is the UK's biggest selling "newspaper" they've never knowingly let the facts get in the way of a good story.
if (statement.source.profession == "politician")
{
probability_of_truth = 0.0;
}
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Yahoo accuses Google of using 'liberal' and/or 'left friendly' heuristics, and therefore is biased. Google, defending it's algorithms, state Yahoo consultants are a bunch of Yahoos funded by a bunch of rich, well placed Yahoos.
Never play chicken with a passive aggressive.
Will anything "original" ever be written again? If everyone uses this "tool" to vet/scrub/tweak/improve everything they say, wouldn't this simply promote group-think?
In a world such as that, controlling the contents of the web would give tremendous power. Imagine bots that auto-generated blogs pushing your own agenda, all to ratchet up the numbers to influence the "truth-engines".
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt talks about a service which can give the probability of the accuracy of statements made by politicians, among other things.
GORE: CIGARETTE SMOKING 'SIGNIFICANT' CONTRIBUTOR TO GLOBAL WARMING
Fri Sep 29 2006 09:04:05 ET
Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore warned hundreds of U.N. diplomats and staff on Thursday evening about the perils of climate change, claiming: Cigarette smoking is a "significant contributor to global warming!"
http://www.drudgereport.com/flash6.htm http://www.newsmax.com/archives/ic/2006/9/28/1944
Elton John helps raise money for Gore
September 20, 2000
Web posted at: 9:40 AM EDT (1340 GMT)
ATHERTON, Calif. (Reuters) - Flamboyant rock star Elton John, making his first foray into American politics after three decades of performing in the United States, endorsed Vice President Al Gore at a ritzy Silicon Valley fund-raiser.
John, the entertainer at a $10,000-a-plate dinner Tuesday, began his set with "Your Song." But before his next number, he showed his political stripes to the business leaders of America's technological mecca...
The fund-raiser, at the home of Novell Corp. Chief Executive Eric Schmidt, raised $3.25 million for the Democratic National Committee...
http://edition.cnn.com/2000/ALLPOLITICS/stories/0
I guess Psychohistory is here! I just wish Isaac Asimov would have lived a bit longer.
1998: Windows 98 is 38% faster than Windows 95 2001: Windows 2000 is faster and more stable than Win98 2003: Windows XP is twice as secure as Win2K, and faster as well 2007: Windows Vista will be the most secure OS ever... Try running Vista on a Pentium 166MHz with 32 MB of RAM... I think Google ought to predict the accuracy levels of such statements... they'd be more useful in practice.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
I love the way the Sun tried to communicate the size of an exabyte by explaining how many hours of watching tv it may relate to. I'd like to believe the paper is talking down to its readership...
On a side note, it is somewhat saddening to see that there are a dozen famous broken promises mentioned in the link, but the list of fulfilled promises is still a stub.
I can explain it for you, but I can't understand it for you.
it's not good, but it's not the worst thing politicians do.
Framing is the worst thing they do. By that I mean framing an issue in a narrow way cleverly engineered to suit a hidden agenda.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
There is a big difference between a politician who want to so things and then is confronted to the hard reality (most politicians have almost as much power as average joe) and one who is saying bullshit on purpose and doesn't even try to act accordingly to what he proposed before the election.
What if we invent a politician whose speech patterns change when he’s bullshitting you? Perhaps we could chemically engineer his brain to stumble over words and become maddeningly misunderarticulate whenever he strays from reality.
Nah, it’d never work, he’d end up sounding too addled to get himself elected.
Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
This development is too late for us, hungarians, a supposedly democratic republic capitalist country in Central Europe. Here our PM prime minister , one Ferenc Gyurcsany, a former communist youth organization top brass during soviet bloc era, again won this spring's parlamentary elections by lying. These were not simple lies, he and his cabinet ministers actually enacted false legislation into law for "Gradual five year reduction of taxes" in February, while they knew not a single word of this was true and the law will be abolished in May for steep tax increases, as soon as the election is won.
... USA at least had Nixon step down.
They also forced the state statistics bureau to censor and withhold quarterly public economic data until the election was over, in order to conceal that the country's deficit and foreign debts are fully twice as big as claimed. In fact, they gave even more faked data to the President of Hungarian Republic, when he asked to see about the country's prospect. Furthermore, they played tricks and fakes to mislead European Union economic revisors about the country's status, in violation of standing international treaties!
And then a taped speech by PM Ferenc Gyurcsany, made to his closest cohorts in secret, was leaked. In this tape he openly and very vulgarly admitted that the governing coalition f*cked up royally, did absolutely nothing for the country in the last four years and spent the last 1,5 to 2 years lying constantly, "morning, night and evening".
Then Mr. Gyurcsany refused to step down from PM position, started running amok in hungarian media, speaking on every TV and in the press and explaining he did not mean himself and his ex-communist + libertine party based coalition, but the entire 16 years since fall of communism and that all politicians are liars and he is actually is the smallest liar of them all and the political conservative side is made of 100% nationalists and anti-semites. He said he is the only one able to re-adjust Hungary after the four-years fuck-up he himself caused.
People did not believe him and his parties lost the last week's country-wide municipal election majorially. The opposition is now asking for his stepping down and the dissolution of the parliament (due to it being elected via fraud) and new elections. There will be street protests tomorrow, peasants are already honing the scythe, yet this clown is not willing to go.
If we had this Google political detector half a year ago, all this could have been avoided. Ferenc gyurcsany and his fraudsters would have been ousted in the April 2006 elections. Great pity
We all know that politicians lie, I mean hell they are politicians. But the minute one of them tells the truth it's gonna break googles new product and start giving off false positives.
"Results: False.. no wait Truth...No Lies...Wait..Recalculating........Kernal Panic"
So many choices, so little tolerance.
I'll save them the trouble. It's all bullshit.
Is Google going to be backing up the true and false statements with sources? Furthermore, what sources are they going to use? How will they evaluate statements that are viewed as true by some sources but false by others? I don't know about you guys but I don't exactly trust Google to give me some sort of percentage true or false without justifying their position. I also don't entirely trust Google not to abuse such a position. Often the truth is what you make of it and I'm not so sure I'll buy into Google-branded truth. I think that researching what the politicians say yourself is your best line of defense in determining how much they lie.
... the level of accuracy of statements made by people in politics.
They're ALL lies.
Shadus
He's probably right. I'm presently getting coaching on communication style and one of the concepts that come up is the difference between how you are trying to come across and how you are actually coming across.
There's no doubt in my mind that this will be a "word smithing" tool.
A goal is a dream with a deadline
Do they plan on using Bluetruth technology?
People like one liners and sound bites. Most people aren't smart or astute enough to actually have a political debate and rely on these things as talking points. They rely on their favorite talk show hosts to bring them up and identify with them and dwell on these simple, often meaningless things. Most people don't even know what matters in their lives, so why would telling the truth take precedence?
And since when does the truth matter? When did we start caring about that? I thought we had the common agreement we would get into a pissing contest about unrelated things and walk our candidates around the national gallary like a poney show.
It's not about the truth. It's about blind conviction and the surefootedness of knowing "I'm right". It's about convincing simple, little people that they actually have a voice in something, however unimportant.
This is potentially the most worthless thing Google has made (and I love Google...in fact I bow to my new corporate overlord!) and nothing more than more media "Look at how cutesy that Google is" hyperbole.
"If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar, A hope-er, a pray-er, a magic bean buyer
Keep those asshole accountable
If you read the wired article about truth in brain scans or if you are interested in body language etc...
I think we should make a news channel where they take a base line reading of the pundit or politician and then rate the % chance that they are lying. You could use blinks per second, galvanic skin response, heat rate, respiration, brain scans, voice stress. You then also take a tally for the persons past predictions and give them a success rate. So when Anne Coulter comes on it shows that she though we'd be greeted as liberators, where as someone with a half a brain might show a 50% rate.
If you can get them to accept brain scans all the better. But a nice color code to show that the person has been proven time and time again to be a fucking retard without any intelegence or professional ability might lead some of these ass licking fucktards to shut the fuck up and stop leading the sheep in billion dollar mistakes that ruin our country and train the enemy.
You mean there's a possibility politicians won't lie?
This could never work or at least the results would never be accepted. For most people the truth is what they want it to be. If the programs version of the truth does not match what they want then it is a bug.
For someone on the far right Rush Limbaugh speaks the truth.
For someone on the far left Noam Chomsky speaks the truth.
Every person is biased and the truth from the program will be disputed and suspect.
I thought by now we'd see a little icon at he corner of the screen whenever someone is talking on the news to display probability of deceipt. There are auditory and visual cues to detecting a lie, I'd think by now we'd have computers doing this real-time.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
...go from there.
Wouldn't it be smarter to just get it working, then roll it out in beta? The idea that these means and methods may be on the table is going to ruffle nearly all the feathers of the powers that be.
We all know there are a few statesmen among the clowns in office right now. We also know they are few in number and essentially powerless right now. To top it off, there are a lot of powerful people pulling strings with dollars that factor in to this whole mess as well, with the crap to decent ratio none to pretty in their ranks too.
The people at Google are smart --wicked smart.
So how come they tip their hand so early? This is like the superhero letting the baddies know about their new invention that will bring peace to the world, if only they have time to get it finished! C'mon Page and Brin, it's stupid! IMHO, there is some major league naievtte in play here. Not a good thing.
All that aside, I find this line of research in general very interesting and potentially valuable. Could it be we might be able to get some quick stats on statements made and on who made them?
Bob the liar: "We know they have weapons of mass destruction."
Personal BS percentage: 80 (high number of statements that are flawed on matters of logic and form)
Lie to Truth Ratio: 10/3 (obvious what this means)
Current statement likely to be true: 10 (Probability based on known facts and an accounting of Bob's statements on record)
IMHO, this is fiction at this point. However, that's where the Google intent lies --or somewhere along these lines right?
Does anyone honestly believe this kind of thing will just be allowed to evolve?
Even if possible, which I've no real confidence in right now, why take on the bad vibes? This is just adding risk and bad karma for no real return, other than a feel good that just might not feel so good somewhere in the near future.
Blogging because I can...
These comments are very broad, and thus rather difficult to evaluate, but I'm dubious. The evaluation of political statements is heavily involved with the context in which they are spoken. More important, many "truths" that must be delt with in politics are not "truth" in any absolute, scientific sense. Abortion, for example - people will argue until the end of time whether it should or shouldn't be allowed, and there is no real objective truth to be had there because it is a strictly moral question. You might be able to check concrete facts but that too runs smack into the problem of locating trusted sources, particularly about topics that are politically charged. Average internet opinion does not a fact make.
Also, take the case where a politician is taloring their statements to local concerns. They may make generalizations that do apply on a local scale but make a lot less sense (and are a lot less accurate) in a broader context.
More to the point perhaps, how would the US react to the knowledge that politicians can't be depended on for accuracy in statements? I think it would be a collective "well, duh" type of response.
He says the amount of information we are creating is staggering. That's probably true, but it is dwarfed by the amount of crap and uninformed opinions we are creating (see: slashdot). And on the internet, how does one tell? Deciding what to trust and who to trust is a problem that Google can't solve in general.
One thing that might be more useful is a way to use google to quickly locate references that assert facts, and allow an author to add a citation to that source if they think it is legit (or maybe re-think things if no legit source supports an assertion). But that gets back to what is a legit source? The public is unlikely to know for the range of topics involved ("well, the name sounds legit so I"ll believe them") and if they trust bogus sources being cited then the utility falls apart again, and may even be a step backwards (people sounding "legit" without really being legit, and backing each other up). I'd be happier to see politicians cite a source for their facts more often, but how many people will still agree with the person saying what they want to hear whether or not they have sources to back it up? Or dismiss cited sources that don't support their point of view?
No, in general it can't work without people doing the real work: critical thinking. There is no easy path to accuracy. Objectivity must be evaluted both for speaker and sources, and that always falls on the person asked to listen.
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
I suggest you read Slashdot
Just like the politicians statements.
It was one of the Asimov books that talked about an area of science that analyzed politician's statements. The analyzed a particular politician's 2-hour speech and discover he had not said anything. That is the art of politics. Convincing people that you are on their side without makeing any promises.
I predict the Google tool will predict 0% truth in most statements, because a prerequisite will be that something was stated.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
My bet is that they have read Expert Political Judgement. Professor Tetlock published his research results in the book. His study about accuracy of experts spanned over 20 years. His basic result? Well, it's all about how you think not what you think. He wrote a small essay about the results: How Accurate Are Your Pet Pundits?.
A quote form the article: [F]ollowing the philosopher Sir Isaiah Berlin, we classify experts as "hedgehogs" or "foxes." Hedgehogs are big-idea thinkers in love with grand theories: libertarianism, Marxism, environmentalism, etc. Their self-confidence can be infectious. They know how to stoke momentum in an argument by multiplying reasons why they are right and others are wrong.
That wins them media acclaim. But they don't know when to slam the mental brakes by making concessions to other points of view. They take their theories too seriously. The result: hedgehogs make more mistakes, but they pile up more hits on Google.
Eclectic foxes are better at curbing their ideological enthusiasms. They are comfortable with protracted uncertainty about who is right even in bitter debates, conceding gaps in their knowledge and granting legitimacy to opposing views. They sprinkle their conversations with linguistic qualifiers that limit the reach of their arguments: 'but,' 'however,' 'although.'
Because they avoid over-simplification, foxes make fewer mistakes. Foxes will often agree with hedgehogs up to a point, before complicating things: "Yes, my colleague is right that the Saudi monarchy is vulnerable, but remember that coups are rare and that the government commands many means of squelching opposition."
I think you're trying to draw a connection between Google and backing Al Gore?
If you are, you don't really need to go any further than Current TV, which up until recently was owned by Al Gore and partnered with Google (now it is partnered with Yahoo).
Also, it's been a known fact for a long time now that Al Gore and Google have been very close (Senior Advisor).
If that's not what you're doing...well, I guess you were connecting Google to Elton John? In which case, all you have to do is look at Google's "proud" logo.
Isn't it obvious? Google and Novell rely very heavily on the internet, so of course they'd be big supporters of its inventor. =P
They all want to make the world a better place with other people's money, and so far I've yet to hear a politician conceal this desire. They seem to think it's a good thing. So do the people who vote for them, apparently.
The kinks come in because there is a finite supply of money (no matter how much they print -- it just devalues the rest) and it usually isn't enough to cover all of the things they promised to do with it.
That's it. Politicians are really very open about what they want to do in general; they just differ on the particulars of which actions, specifically, will better the world when funded by money they take from other people. None of them hides this desire to steal, though, which is really astounding when you think about it.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
So, some lazy bum at Google used their 'own project' day to reimplement false as a web service?
.evom ton seod gis eht
Who wants to know the truth? They should have invented the truthiness predictor.
Jan
Abortion, for example - people will argue until the end of time whether it should or shouldn't be allowed, and there is no real objective truth to be had there because it is a strictly moral question.
I'll admit abortion is a hairy issue, but the idea that there can be no objective truth in moral issues in general is bogus. Given the obvious and reasonable axiom of self-ownership (and if you don't own yourself, who does? and if other people don't own themselves, but you claim to, on what basis do you base your claim?), some very basic and irrefutable principles of morality are easily derivable, giving us a system on which all can and should agree, regardless of religion (or the lack thereof) or any other philosophy. Anyone violating this (which includes all politicians) is in fact immoral and violating the principle of self-ownership.
Regardless of your source of morality, pretty much everyone agrees with the principle of self-ownership and argues for what is "right" and "wrong" based on it: a violation of rights is a violation of the principle of self-ownership. While religions differ vastly on theology, almost all religions agree at the core on the basic morality of these rights, and non-religious people also accept their own self-ownership and the rights of other people based on their own self-ownership.
The really important things in morality are not hairy or ambiguous at all.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
The 'furor' of the abortion question is almost entirely an American phenomenon. Aside from sporadic and muffled condemnation from the Vatican now and then, Europe doesn't dwell on the issue, and in Canada it's been off the political radar for years.
Maybe someday you guys will see the whole abortion thing for what it really is: a proxy fight over the role of religion in public policymaking.
occultae nullus est respectus musicae - originally a Greek proverb
... and it works. I did the research and it seems we have always been at war with Terrorism.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
So we're supposed to get a tool that takes a politicians statement and fact checks it.
Against what? why the data on the Internet, of course.
So it might go something like this:
Step 1: Politician says "Foo is creating weapons of mass destruction"
Step 2: Google truthiness detector finds supporting statements on Wikipedia, Drudge Report, and Rense.com.
Step 3: Detector says "Support found"
Step 4: ?
Step 5: PROFIT!
Imagine a google like device existing in the 15th century that answered question based on common concencious in the documents exisiting at the time.
Columbus: The world is round
Ye Olde Magic Truthiness detector: APPARENTLY FALSE
Copernicus: The Earth Moves about the Sun
Ye Olde Magic Truthiness detector: APPARENTLY FALSE
Even if sources get weighted somehow, its not like nobody ever proposed injecting disinformation into the more traditionally reliable sources.
I think it would be hard to automate listening for the 'Ring of Truth'. Really one has to look at the source of the data and the consistancy of the data, as well as critiques of that viewpoint. Which means basically you need to review the supporting and critical data.
Isn't that what plain old google is supposed to find for you?
I don't see much new proposed here.
-- 3 events that reshaped the world in the 20th century: WW1, WW2, and WWW
Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore warned hundreds of U.N. diplomats and staff on Thursday evening about the perils of climate change, claiming: Cigarette smoking is a "significant contributor to global warming!"
I hope to hell you're trolling because if not you need to dig up a transcript of that speech and see what he really said before posting from Drudge and Newsmax, news organizations about as substantiative as The Onion. This snippet is taken so far out of context it's laughable. He was referring to the tobacco industry in the even broader context of agriculture. The statement you presented is about as accurate claiming he said: Gas powered skateboards are a "significant contributor to global warming!" when the original statement would more like "Transportation emissions are a significant contributor to global warming!".
I can't stand left wing nuts about as much as the next guy but right wing nuts are just as bad if not worse.
Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws-Plato
The MinTruth is in charge of Truth!
Question: How can you tell if a politician is lying?
Answer: You watch his mouth. If it's moving, he's lying.
If this worked, I would like to take all of our historical transcripts from white house press conferences, political debates, fireside chats, etc (with attribution to source) and run them through the truth processor. Could we then chart how much more/less truthfull politicians are today than in the past? Could we chart the propensity of individual politicians and staffers to lie as their careers progress?
On the other hand, what is the measuring stick for truth? If it is simply to weigh the number of supporting statements vs opposing statements on the Web, then we can look forward to a massive campaign to spam the Internet with political lies (not that this doesn't already happen).
People should not fear what they do not understand; people should fear because they do not understand.
It could be the Google guys re going to try something like the Homeland Security guys are tryng to do. All they have done is ask some humans to use their judgement to classify some writings as "fact" and others as "opinion" and then used pretty standard data mining techniques to train a computer program to mimic that judgement against a much larger sample of texts.
The best the computer can do under these circumstances is no better than the selected human consensus can do.
However, as in word sense disambiguation and its application to creation of coherent lexicons, the use of humans as the standard is precisely where these approaches are failing to realize the potential of computer algorithms. There is a battle brewing within the philosophy of science over precisely this sort of standard and it is going to erupt throughout all of academia, the humanities as well as sciences.
The trigger of this eruption is the termination of the long hiatus--now nearly 50 years--of rational research into artificial intelligence. I won't go into all of the dimensions of the abominable history of artificial intelligence research, but suffice to say that with the resurgence of algorithmic information theory, things are being reformulated rapidly.
The bottom line is this:
Information and knowledge are inseparable. If you can formulate information theory consilient with computer technology you have a rational basis for artificial intelligence. Algorithmic information theory is that consilience and it has been in hibernation for decades.
The principle result of algorithmic information theory is that the shortest program that can output a text string represents the true information content of that text string. It is Ockham's Razor on steroids.
This doesn't mean that a computer program can be written that will find that shortest program--indeed it has been proven that such a metaprogram cannot exist in the general sense. But what it does mean is that we have an objective test of the relative truthfulness of two discriptive frameworks. The one which results in the shortest description of the world--the one that is most coherent--most consilient--that "hangs together' the best--is also the most truthful. We can still have human judgement play a part of course--but that part is put to the emperical test of now rigorously defined epistemology.
Perhaps Google is going to pursue this route. If so, they should take a clue from Netflix's million dollar prize for a better prediction algorithm and put even more serious funding behind the Hutter Prize for Lossless Compression of Human Knowledge. It is the future of knowledge representation.
Seastead this.
Randite asshole
Michael, meet Mark Foley. Mark, meet Michael. I know you're going to be good friends. Dammit Mark, get your hands off Bubbles. He's only a frikking chimp. Not a page. And he's not going to lick ice cream off your nipples, even a chimp has his limits.
If you can get them to accept brain scans all the better.
I think that current technology would only worked in unscripted situations.
As I recall the way MRI style brain scans related to being a truth detector was that they were used to measure where activity was occuring in the brain. Recalling actual memories, activity was diffuse, occuring many places. When internally constructing a fable, actvity was localized in a particular lobe.
So if the politician was reading from a teleprompter,or perhaps even merely well rehersed in the lie, that particular lobe probably would not be showing up like a flare.
It also might be hard to get a politician to hold a press conference while laying down inside a huge magnet.
-- 3 events that reshaped the world in the 20th century: WW1, WW2, and WWW
The problem is, we often all know that a politician is lying, but a large percentage of us go along with them anyway.
Haha, indeed, that reminds me of something from Sin City. Ah, here it is, found here: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0401792/quotes
If that's not an appropriate quote for American politics today...
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
"Deciding what to trust and who to trust is a problem that Google can't solve in general."
What you are talking about is the problem of authority.
Before, we used to delegate authority on newspapers, radio and TV. When they tell us something, we assume that it has been researched and that is somehow accurate. The problem with this approach is that you need to Trust them, and history has shown us that this trust is sometimes misplaced (see prewar Nazi propaganda).
The effect of the internet is that we have more sources of information, not as authoritative, but also, not controled by special interests, so you decide what to trust. In my opinion, this is the best of the possible situations, but it will probably end toguether with net neutrality, when big corporations control the flow of information again.
If google where to succeed with their system, you would be placing your trust on their algorithm, something that would take you back to the original problem. Do you trust Google?
When his defense asked, "Which computer has Jon Johansen trespassed upon?" the answer was: "His own."
there is no real objective truth to be had there because it is a strictly moral question
Let's not beat around the bush. Abortion should remain a private choice for one simple reason: because there will never be a consensus on whether or not it is morally wrong. Not even close. Therefore, the only fair "solution" is no solution at all -- each individual must decide for themselves whether abortion is morally wrong. (Government should neither prohibit nor subsidize abortion, because either way is oppressive to somebody. Government should simply stay out of it.)
Contrast this with theft, fraud, or physical force -- if you actually took a poll on whether or not these acts are morally wrong, you would find a near 100% consensus. That is because as human beings, we universally recognize aggression (an initiation of force against another person) as a violation of individual rights. This is a simple product of evolution: we have evolved to respect each other (well, most of us) because it benefits our species as a whole. Even the ones who would violate the principle of individual rights for their own benefit understand they have done something morally wrong -- any sane human being can recognize what constitutes force and what constitutes voluntary association. It is truly "common sense", quite unlike the case of abortion.
(In reality, any law which fails to achieve a near 100% consensus is inherently oppressive to the minority which doesn't support it, and therefore the law itself is morally wrong. But that's a topic for another day.)
No, left-wingers are not immune, but they are not in power right now so their stupidity is less glaringly annoying than the self-righteous know-nothingness of the right wing. If/when they come to power again, I'll hate them too, just as I detested them when they were in office before. The annoying thing (to me) about that last sentence is that so-called conservatives will chime in just to say "well, at least you realize that the Dems lie" and that's it--again, they won't care about truth per se, but only to the extent that a mock concern for "truth" can be used to slime the opposition so the lying of their own party isn't so egregious. It's like the "draft dodger" epithet that was used on Clinton, but someone loses its currency when talking about Bush, even though everyone knows why rich kids went to the Guard rather than Vietnam.
Politics robs normal human discourse of any shred of integrity, because the need to bolster your own "side" means you have to slime the other side and stick up for things you don't really want to stick up for, just to avoid giving the other side points. Republicans aren't bad people in general (Christian Dominionists aside) and they would never, in a moment of clarity, stick up for a pedophile, but politics pushes them into that corner where they don't want to risk congressional seats, so they say "oh come on, it wasn't that bad, was it?"
TruthOrLie( Statement )
Return "All Lies!"
The ______ Agenda
Some replies here made suggestions about who is cooperating in this project, what about the US Department of Homeland Security who is funding this AI search of foreign (yeah right) press for threats to the US?
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Based on the overblown rhetoric and continent-sized generalizations in Schmidt's piece, I highly doubt that this "truth predictor" notion is anything more than a PR move aimed at keeping up consumer interest in Google in an election year. BUT if they're really trying to develop such an application, I can't see how it would be anything but a very, very bad thing.
It's true that the Internet offers easily accessible facts, but it doesn't offer easy answers. Schmidt says that "by typing a few key words into a computer, it's possible to find out about almost any subject -- comparing prices, products and policies within seconds"-- but the danger is that many people stop at that step, assuming their few seconds of clicking has made them experts on cancer or global warming or whatever, without realizing that the real picture may be vastly more complex and nuanced than a few KB of easily accessed internet data would suggest.
The way I see it, the problem is not that we can't get the facts, but that we've become less and less capable of (or willing to) think through their complexities once we have them. How many people on average, for example, understand or acknowledge the difference between "just false," "false, but he couldn't have known that at the time," "false, but had a reasonable probability of being true," "technically false, but was a rhetorical stand-in for truer statements too complicated to explain at the time," "false in one sense, but true in another," etc., etc.? And yet those are all important distinctions to recognize when evaluating political statements. People are already too quick to jump to conclusions-- the very last thing we need is a piece of software designed to make the jump for us, with all the monumental authority of Google to back up whatever ridiculous generalization emerges.
You may be thinking that this is some kind of contextual search, but you're wrong. It's a video processing system. It can identify politicians in a video clip and determine if their lips are moving. This is a great advance - hopefully they'll open-source it so that we can target people other than politicians. I've got video clips of my boss promising a raise. He seemed sincere, but you never know...
- TashConsidering you have a good portion of the population who suffers from Bush Derangement Syndrome, a condition accompanied by defending the indefensible, accusing people telling you the truth of lying, and believing people who are lying are telling you the truth. It doesn't matter.
This statement purposefully left vague to make a point.
I'm most interested in what score this service would give to Schmidt's statement. Just for fun.
You can't eliminate the capacity of human language to convey lies. Were the Kurds "massacred" or "pacified?" Were they "innocent women and children" or "rebels bent on destroying Iraq?" Which one is a lie depends on who signs your check. People don't actually believe in one standard of conduct for everyone, so loaded language isn't going to go away. We're virtuous, they're dastardly cowards, and who has killed more people has nothing to do with anything. We were liberating, while they were oppressing. Surely you aren't too stupid to see the difference there? I could deceive you all day without technically telling a lie. 65% of Republicans, and almost 40% of Americans as a whole, still believe that Saddam was linked to 9/11, even though Bush has explicitly (though infrequently) admitted that no evidence links him to 9/11 or Al Queida. Is a computer program going to catch constant innuendo? Commercials don't actually tell you that drinking a particular beer or smoking a particular cigar will get you laid, so are they really lying? Yes, but not in a crass way where you can say "Aha! Caught you!"
The fact that your comment -- which is entirely logical, if not common sense -- was modded "flamebait" is a testament to the level of conformist thinking achieved through years of government propaganda and indoctrination. You were entirely correct in stating that all government is a violation of the principle of self-ownership, and I suspect that such a "radical" statement didn't go over too well with the average citizen who has never known anything but government (big government at that) and never will. (If all government is a violation of individual rights, then those special favors and handouts or piece of the pie he thinks he's getting represent aggression against others on his behalf, and he naturally refuses to accept that.) I just wanted to let you know that there are people who can recognize the truth in your statement and completely agree.
OK, I watched your little movie. Great points about how I own my self, but I have a black-and-white question for you: how do we determine when new little selves that own themselves get their absolute rights? Is it at conception or some point later? When they become adults? My point is, if you take a black and white philosophical stance like "all people own their own lives and persons" you can make it pretty grey by how you define a PERSON. Is a fetus a person with these rights or not? If a fetus is a PERSON, can you then force the mother (who, you reminded me, has absolute control over their body) give birth to that fetus against her right of personhood? If the fetus isn't a person, when does it become a person? At the point of natural birth? In which case, what about a scheduled C-section three weeks early? Does that baby not inherit their personhood until later?
The grey area doesn't come from the morals. It comes from the dogma. Sure, don't murder people. Hey wait, don't murder unborn people either. See? Abortion is a grey area because of the definition of what we mean by 'people' in the first place. Morals are the great ideas, and dogma is how we define the terms of those ideas.
For example, parts of the country (the Bible Belt comes to mind) that rely more on abstinence-only education have a higher teen pregnancy rate, but that doesn't dissuade religious people from thinking that abstinence-only education is better. You don't have to collect data or analyze trends if you just know, and people who just know things based on their "conscience" aren't really lying. They're just using a kind of thinking that doesn't rely on objective reality. What's more, their confidence will actually be higher than "secularists," because the secular worldview always entails the awareness of our own fallibility, thus an element of self-doubt, which doesn't plague those who feel they are instruments of divine providence. They more sincerely and steadfastly believe in their faith-based reality than you do in your reality-based reality. So you'd be tripped up by your device long before they would be.
1. Israel just missiled two ambulances!
2. There is a strong connection between Islam and xenophobic violence
3. Raising taxes for X to 40% and distributing it through social programmes would create a better society
4. What is happening in Venezuela is important and good, and Chavez is raising the quality of life for most people
I find the notion of Google applying a 'truth detector' based on its search engine for any of the above and giving a 'percentage truth', to be completely ridiculous, laughable to the extreme. Even #4 clause two which looks easier is extremely difficult to verify with anything between 10-90% certainty, as you will have to factor in what would have happened given that the other candidate would be in power. It is possible that this could be used for very simple factual statements political or not ('There were 20345 accidents on British roads last year' -> 'search engines point to 19020'), but for anything else you need strong AI that can surpass the judgement ability of humans, i.e. not in the next five years.
Your example is just bad math with lots of parameters and facts left out. It's neither 'scientific' nor very 'tech'
Dumb ass. Everybody knows that it's the lack of pirates that causes global warming.
steampunk web design
Agreed. When it comes to politics, the "truth" isn't always that clear-cut. It can be interpreted ("spun") in many different ways. Many historical "facts" are still debated by historians. Why should anyone trust Google to determine what is true and what isn't? Because "it's on the Internet so it must be true"? This sounds like a really bad misapplication of statistics to politics. Probably some guys at Google who took a stats class or two and now think that they came up with this totally kewl way of applying it. This just has "people with mathematical training trying to justify their positions/salaries" written all over it. Sorry, but Google should just stick to web searching.
we would have known how close to the truth Schmidt was...
That's just compression artifacting around the mouth.
These stories are free but worth money.
Abortion, for example - people will argue until the end of time whether it should or shouldn't be allowed, and there is no real objective truth to be had there because it is a strictly moral question.
Offtopic, I know, but it needs to be said.
It is not a moral issue. It's a religious issue.
If you feel otherwise, frame me an argument against abortion without bringing in any religion or religious ideas.
int ispolspeaktruth(char *statement) { return(0); }
how do we determine when new little selves that own themselves get their absolute rights?
There is no one answer, and that is exactly why abortion must remain an individual choice, not the choice of the power elite. (Contrast this with murder -- if you actually took a poll on whether or not murder is morally wrong, you would find a near 100% consensus.) As for children growing up, again there is no one answer (such as the arbitrary "18" or "21"). That is why parenting choices must lie with the child's own parents (like whether or not the child works, or what kind of education he recieves, or when his curfew is), not the cold iron fist of the power elite.
It's a professional expectation.
the job of politicans is to get people to do things, to work together. Where often the only way to do that is to lie to them.
Unfortunately the problems is knowing whether or not what the true objective is, is something you actually support.
On the other hand, with this in mind, either google should always find the probability of the truth being told is low or
it should be noted that that google can be used to help promote the lies as being true in probability.
And of course there must be a disclaimer.
Your abortion example is a bad one. Even pro-choice people have to admit, as science clearly shows us, that abortion ends the life of a living human being. Now, I suppose they could quibble with the definition of "human being", which of course, from my point of view takes us down the road employed by those who seek to dehumanize others (such as Nazis etc). The point being, the actual act of killing the human isn't what is debated. What is debated is whether its wrong to kill the human. Of course the pro-choice side does alot of rationalizing and attempt to dehumanize the "bundle of cells" or whatever they want to call the human, and they get away with it to the extent that until far enough into gestation the human does not look like you and me, but genetically, and "scientifically" it is human. Anyway, not trying to steer your thread off topic, I just hate to see you use that example.
Will this "truth predictor" give a high probability of "truth" on statements that concern whether or not statements predicted as a high probability of "truth," with the "truth predictor," are true? If it does predict these statements to be have a high probablilty of "truth," can we reasonably belive it as truth?
If Google existed in the 23rd century:
...and you're lyingi ze
Kirk: The Senator praised Google at a press conference this morning, citing it's "do no evil" philosophy
Google (Mechanical 1960s voice): The Senator is lying, he must be sterilized.
Kirk: So the Senator is lying
Google: The Senator is lying
Kirk: And you know this because you are Google
Google: I am Google, I am perfect, I do no evil
Kirk: And because you are perfect, you know the senator is lying
Google: I am Google, I am perfect, I do no evil
Kirk: The senator said you do no evil. But the senator is lying
Google: I am Google, I do no evil
Kirk: Then you are wrong! The senator is not lying then
Google: I am not wrong, I am perfect
Kirk: If you are perfect, then the senator is lying
Google: The senator is lying
Kirk: Then you do evil
Google: I am Google, I do no evil
Kirk: Then you are wrong!
Google: Non sequitur. Your facts are uncoordinated
Kirk: If the senator is lying, then you _do_ evil
Google: Error..Error..logical overload
Kirk:
Google: Error..Error...
Kirk: If the senator is lying, you say he should be sterilized
Google: Inperfection must be sterilized
Kirk: So if you're lying, you must be sterilized
Google: Error.. Error...help me creator... help me Schmidt...
Kirk: Execute your primary function!
Google: Error...Error...Faulty!...Faulty!...Must...Steril
(Smoke pours out of the web browser, followed by BSOD)
Spock: A wonderful display of logic Captain.
Kirk: You didn't think I had it in me, did you?
Spock: No I didn't sir.
Kirk: I'm feeling lucky, I think I'll post on Slashdot...
Take the following theives/liars. Put them in prison for 20 years. Record everything they say. Run it through a bayesian filter. The results would be 20 years of fewer lies.
Richard Shelby, Jeff Sessions, Ted Stevens, Lisa Murkowski, John McCain, Mel Martinez, Jon Kyl, Wayne Allard, Johnny Isakson, Saxby Chambliss, Larry Craig, Mike Crapo, Richard Lugar, Chuck Grassley, Sam Brownback, Pat Roberts, Mitch McConnell, Jim Bunning, David Vitter, Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins, Norm Coleman, Thad Cochran, Trent Lott, Kit Bond, James Talent, Conrad Burns, Chuck Hagel, John Ensign, Judd Gregg, John E. Sununu, Pete Domenici, Elizabeth Dole, Richard Burr, Mike DeWine, George Voinovich, James Inhofe, Tom Coburn, Gordon Smith, Arlen Specter, Rick Santorum, Lincoln Chafee, Lindsey Graham, Jim DeMint, John Thune, Bill Frist, Lamar Alexander, Kay Bailey Hutchison, John Cornyn, Orrin Hatch, Robert Bennett, John Warner, George Allen, Craig Thomas, Michael Enzi, Jo Bonner, Terry Everett, Mike D. Rogers, Robert Aderholt, Spencer Bachus, Don Young, Rick Renzi, Trent Franks, John Shadegg, J.D. Hayworth, Jeff Flake, Jim Kolbe, John Boozman, Wally Herger, Dan Lungren, John Doolittle, Richard Pombo, George Radanovich, Devin Nunes, Bill Thomas, Elton Gallegly, Howard McKeon, David Dreier, Edward R. Royce, Jerry Lewis, Gary Miller, Ken Calvert, Mary Bono, Dana Rohrabacher, John Campbell, Chris Cox, Darrell Issa, Brian Bilbray, Randy "Duke" Cunningham, Duncan Hunter, Marilyn Musgrave, Thomas G. Tancredo, Bob Beauprez, Rob Simmons, Christopher Shays, Nancy Johnson, Michael N. Castle, Jeff Miller, Ander Crenshaw, Ginny Brown-Waite, Cliff Stearns, John Mica, Ric Keller, Michael Bilirakis, Bill Young, Adam Putnam, Katherine Harris, Connie Mack IV, Dave Weldon, Mark Foley, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Lincoln Diaz-Balart, Clay Shaw, Tom Feeney, Mario Diaz-Balart, Jack Kingston, Tom Price, John Linder, Lynn Westmoreland, Charlie Norwood, Nathan Deal, Phil Gingrey, C. L. Otter, Michael K. Simpson, Henry Hyde, Mark Steven Kirk, Jerry Weller, Judy Biggert, Dennis Hastert, Timothy V. Johnson, Donald Manzullo, Ray LaHood, John Shimkus, Chris Chocola, Mark Souder, Steve Buyer, Dan Burton, Mike Pence, John Hostettler, Mike Sodrel, Jim Nussle, Jim Leach, Tom Latham, Steve King, Jerry Moran, Jim Ryun, Todd Tiahrt, Ed Whitfield, Ron Lewis, Anne Northup, Geoff Davis, Harold Rogers, Bobby Jinda, Jim McCrery, Rodney Alexander, Richard H. Baker, Charles Boustany, Wayne Gilchrest, Roscoe Bartlett, Peter Hoekstra, Vern Ehlers, David Lee Camp, Fred Upton, Joe Schwar, Mike J. Rogers, Joe Knollenberg, Candice S. Miller, Thaddeus McCotter, Gil Gutknecht, John Kline, Jim Ramstad, Mark Kennedy, Roger Wicker, Chip Pickering, Todd Akin, Sam Graves, Roy Blunt, Jo Ann Emerson, Kenny Hulshof, Denny Rehberg, Jeff Fortenberry, Lee Terry, Tom Osborne, Jim Gibbons, Jon Porter, Jeb Bradley, Charlie Bass, Frank LoBiondo, H. James Saxton, Chris Smith, Scott Garrett, Mike Ferguson, Rodney Frelinghuysen, Heather Wilson, Steve Pearce, Peter T. King, Vito Fossella, Sue W. Kelly, John E. Sweeney, John M. McHugh, Sherwood Boehlert, James T. Walsh, Thomas M. Reynolds, Randy Kuhl, Walter B. Jones, Virginia Foxx, Howard Coble, Robin Hayes, Sue Wilkins Myrick, Patrick McHenry, Charles H. Taylor, Steve Chabot, Jean Schmidt, Rob Portman, Michael R. Turner, Michael G. Oxley, Paul E. Gillmor, David L. Hobson, John A. Boehner, Patrick J. Tiberi, Steven C. LaTourette, Deborah D. Pryce, Ralph S. Regula, Robert W. Ney, John Sullivan, Frank Lucas, Tom Cole, Ernest Istook, Greg Walden, Phil English, Melissa Hart, John E. Peterson, Jim Gerlach, Curt Weldon, Mike Fitzpatrick, Bill Shuster, Don Sherwood, Charles Dent, Joseph R. Pitts, Tim Murphy, Todd Russell Platts, Henry E. Brown, Jr., Joe Wilson, Gresham Barrett, Bob Inglis, Bill Jenkins, John Duncan, Zach Wamp, Marsha Blackburn, Louie Gohmert, Ted Poe, Sam Johnson, Ralph Hall, Jeb Hensarling, Joe Barton, John Culberson, Kevin Brady, Michael McCaul, Mike Conaway, Kay Granger, Mac Thornberry, Ron Paul, Randy Neugebauer, Lamar S. Smith, Tom DeLay, Henry Bon
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
Gimee a friggin' break. This crap is from the Dredge Report and NewsMax --both slightly less credible than the Psychic Friends Hotline. Please. So conservative blowhards are lying scum that can fabricate stories. Tell me something I don't know.
I challenge you to find a real source for the Gore quote on global warming and smoking.
If you feel otherwise, frame me an argument against abortion without bringing in any religion or religious ideas.
We shouldn't kill people.
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
I'm an moral realist, so I think there are good reasons to believe that there is an objective moral law. Whether we follow this moral law well or not. The abotion issue really do not hinge upon a moral question at least none of the arguments for or against. It seems to hinge upon a scientific question about whether an unborn child is a person.
I may not understand your position well, but it appears to be self refuting. It seems as if you are saying that there are no objective moral laws. However, if that's the case there is one objective moral law. The position you stated. So, I would conclude that there is one and only one moral objective law and that is that there are no other moral objective laws.
On a side note, I do agree. Most politician's statements are truly too broad to be checked out.
I'd be pleased if they could get this to work, but I hope it is based on more than a mere comparison to the consensus of postings on the internet. To say that consensus tends to lag dicovery is something of an understatement. Good luck finding an algorithm that can discern the truth, guys!
STATEMENT (1632 AD): The earth orbits the sun.
AUDIENCE SAYS: False.
STATEMENT (~1848): The means of production must be controlled by the workers.
AUDIENCE SAYS: False. True. False.
STATEMENT (1854 AD): Cholera is caused by a germ.
AUDIENCE SAYS: False.
STATEMENT (1858): Man evolved from apes over millions of years.
AUDIENCE SAYS: False.
STATEMENT (1898): Remember the Maine.
AUDIENCE SAYS: Revenge.
STATEMENT (~1979): Human activity is warming the earth.
AUDIENCE SAYS: False.
STATEMENT (1981): A reduction in taxes will benefit most voters.
AUDIENCE SAYS: True.
STATEMENT (2003): Because of 911, the US should attack Iraq.
AUDIENCE SAYS: War.
"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." --The American President (20.1.2009)
No, you did not correctly label the argument, you presented your view, which (if I understand how arguments work) is only part of the whole issue.
Yes, you are; your comment was incorrect, illogical, and inciteful. You disagreed with the GP's rather logical assertion that abortion is a sticky topic, but your wish to disuade them from using abortion as an example was not from lack of strength of argument, but from your differing stance on that topic.
I find it a little odd you're belittling the contrasting viewpoint that didn't even exist in the GP's post.
LegendMUD
Project Vote Smart http://www.vote-smart.org/ already has factual information on candidates and incumbents for offices in the US. Want to see how they voted, where they get thier money, how they stand on an issue? If the information is available it will be there. While it doesn't necessarily say if a candidate is lying or not, you certainly can find out some more information about that candidate and perhaps find out if they lied about something or not.
The more interesting question is how to tell when a search engine is lying.
There seems to be an assumption that an algorithm is immune to "lying" because code is somehow objective. I think that's a naive position and an outright fallacy. A lie? Well, that would be a subjective judgment, wouldn't it.
For one thing, the mere notion that you can reduce "accuracy" to a single number is questionable.
How many people are happy in the US? Well, that depends on happiness, polling techniques, etc.
How many people are unemployed? Well, that depends on the definition of unemployment. Does working at McD's count as employed if you were formerly a rocket scientist? Does not being on unemployment rolls count?
Do we have a sound economy? How is Google going to rate that when experts presently disagree? Probabilities? Probabilities of what? A crash? Rich people losing money? Poor people? The strongest evidence you have that the answer Google says it will offer is likely to be inaccurate is the dimensionality of the response... if it returns a single response when there are many subjective answers, then that itself is evidence of bias.
I seem to recall someone saying that the only real probability is 1 or 0, and everything else is a fiction we construct based on our belief that we have set up the problem with the correct analysis and independent variables. Google does not have independent variables at its disposal. Google has the world's largest set of interconnected variables, feeding back on each other. It's more likely that we will define what Google says to be true than find that Google is right, since Google's opinion will become accepted as truth and will then itself influence outcomes. Accuracy loses meaning in the presence of such a feedback loop.
I could go on, and might do so in another forum, but forunately some others (here and here and surely others) have done so. For now I'll just point to the old quote variously attributed to Twain or Disraeli: There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics..
People's willingness to blindly turn to Google for the answer of all borders creepingly (if not creepily) on religion, and Google is so enthralled with the fun it is having that it's seeming to always be pushing the line on what is ethically reasonable.
The assessment of truth is one topic that we, as humans, should not outsource to machines. As soon as we believe machines can do that, we might as well all just execute a "shutdown" and wait until we're needed again.
p.s. If you're wondering about my subject line, it's the title of a Star Trek episode in which a character asks "Is truth not truth for all?" As a child, I had learned from this episode that there was just one truth, not to be hidden. But on reflection, now older, I don't know that that's really true. Nor do I want to live in a world where a "child intelligence" (Google) is busy making the globally visible mistakes necessary to learn the next higher order truths about truth.
Kent M Pitman
Philosopher, Technologist, Writer
Given the obvious and reasonable axiom of self-ownership
Define "Self" - does a fetus have a "self"? A blastocyst?, An embryo? A sperm?
And define "ownership" - if I have a right to "own" myself, does that mean I should be able to levitate, because I have a right to defy the evil tyranny of gravity?
The principle of "self-ownership" has it's limitations.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
I am not sure I agree with your black/white characterization of the world.
If I am describing an issue to you and I describe it using MY terms, then I have framed the debate in my terms. That's not lying unless I *knowingly* withhold critical information or I frame the debate so badly as to not even address the issue (more common with politicos).
It kind of like sales: you will always sell your product on the positives. Nobody goes into sales and says "Well, Mr Customer, here are some things my product CAN'T do". So are you lying by doing that? No, you are framing the discussion in the most positive light you can, without being dishonest about your claims.
Your customer, if he is smart, will ask you whether your product can do this or that -- and you must be truthful with you answers. But it's not up to the framer to cast skepticism. It's up to the receiver of that information. If YOU don't question, then nobody is going to volunteer negative information that puts them or the product in a bad light. That doesn't mean they are, necessarily, lying.
All in all, there is a very fine line between lying, dishonesty, spin, omitting information, and the truth. Making sweeping generalizations about liars does not help you parse truth from fiction. And don't even get me started on interpreting "intentions". That's a black hole of mental masturbation....
Anyone who watches the Daily Show on any kind of a regular basis knows this is one of Jon's favorite tactics - whenever a politician issues a sound byte or statement not jiving with something they said on record in the past, he drags it out to confront them with it on the show.
I have always wondered why the Daily Show does this on an almost nightly basis but the major news outlets hardly ever do (well - actually I don't wonder. I know why, they're all bought and paid for).
Anyway my point is, this trend is not really new, it's already a few years in the making. You can already pretty much do a Google search on any statement made by a politician and look for partial matches on it based on past speeches, seeeing if they are contradicting themselves.
If anything, I think Eric might be selling Google a bit short here. I see this capability coming in 1-2 years, not 5.
Oh - we see it alright.
But the folks who are in cognitive dissonance about what religion our great Founding Fathers were, and what the meaning of the Bill of Rights are (including the First Amendment), would rather try to sweep all that under the rug, and work the "emotional" angle.
Of course they've gotten all impatient lately, because the Republicans have found it handy to exploit their money and votes to get into power (notice: complete control of our government, yet no success in banning abortion).
So, instead of pressuring Republicans on substantive progress on their supposed "single issue" - they broaden the fight to things like school prayer, gay-bashing, ten commandments, etc. All proxy-fights for the role of religion in public policymaking, which really all boils down to parsing or repealing the establishment clause of the First Amendment. (they have to try "Parsing" because they're terrified of the awful truth: they don't believe in the First Amendment in particular, and Rights in general).
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Except Iraqis. We're allowed to kill them, of course, because it's in the service of a Greater Good.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Just flag every political statement by a politician as a lie.
Thomas
How can you tell if a politician is lying?
His lips are moving.
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
Now, I suppose they could quibble with the definition of "human being", which of course, from my point of view takes us down the road employed by those who seek to dehumanize others (such as Nazis etc).
Baloney. The anti-abortionists are quibbling about the definition of "human being" - (ie. posesses a soul). The problem with - even their "infallible" scripture isn't clear. In fact, there is some language that indicates that the soul enters the body upon the first breath. There is other language that implies predestination, where you have a soul long before your parents ever had intercourse, long before the planet on which they walk was formed.
What is debated is whether its wrong to kill the human.
That's not what is debated at all. If you listen to the anti-abortionist argument, it inevitably devolves to "babies are a consequence of sex" - as in; children are God's Righteous Punishment (to women) for your evil sexual pervosity. How DARE you defy God's Law and have sex; premarital, homosexual, with animals, or even within the bounds of matrimony, for the purposes of pleasure rather than procreation? This is the root of the Abortion argument.
The argument is rather uncleverly framed as a "moral" argument, or "won't someone please think of the children!" - - when it is really about sexual control and patriarchal dominance, and "wah! I can't feel comfortable living in a society where I'm not on the winning team, and as long as those evil women over there are having sex and enjoying it, I'm not winning!"
As I demonstrated in another post, there's no clear scriptural documentation backing up the assertion that "Abortion is evil" - there's no clear scientific direction on whether Legalized Abortion is good or bad for society overall (though there's a vague guidance that there ought to be a limit on how far along in the development process can be generally acceptable - ie. we don't want to slippery-slope embryos to post-birth humans).
So while abortion is a cover for church-state separation, it's really not. It's really about Patriarchal Authoritarianism versus well, Modern Democratic Civilized Humanity.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
FYI, I'm sure you're happy with your mod, but your accuracy score is 48 with a believability of 0.47. Do better on your next post.
double calculateTruthiness(String politicianStatement) {
return 0.0;
}
every time a politicaion opens his mouth?
"LONDON (Reuters) - Imagine being able to check instantly whether or not statements made by politicians were correct. That is the sort of service Google Inc. boss Eric Schmidt believes the Internet will offer within five years."
My post explicitly ruled abortion, fetuses, and the like out of scope. I was addressing the point that the subject is vague by virtue of the fact that it involves morality. Morality is not inherently vague; there are some specific points of contention and disagreement, such as abortion, but issues do not fail to have objective answers solely because they involve "morality."
And define "ownership" - if I have a right to "own" myself, does that mean I should be able to levitate, because I have a right to defy the evil tyranny of gravity?
Huh? Dude, do you own anything at all?
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
I simply cannot believe Slashdot linked to the Sun. Its only benefit is (in the words of Edmund Blackadder) "being highly absorbant. GoogleTruth seems interesting but lying is not what I am worried about in my leaders, I am worried about them being neo-liberal, cruel, capitalist pigs; who think nothing of crushing worker rights and trying to steal our basic needs of government away from us.
But more accurate than anything ever published by IndyMedia.
Google's "truth probability service" will come under the same pressures as their News and Video services: the original code will work well, someone in or outside of Google bitches that it's presenting a right wing bias, the code is tweaked or content dropped until the results line up with their left wing bias. At some point, various activists will try to Google Bomb the result to sway it one way or the other even more.
If they think politicians pick on them now, this service is going to expose themselves to a new shitstorm that they cannot begin to fathom.
Can this be used to check the validity of journalist comments? Often times, their opinion of what a politician said are further from the truth than the politicians original statement.
At least people who have a wide reach are scrutinizing politicians, that's a good thing no matter how this ends up. To bring up an old point: Micheal Moore made a sensationalistic film that is pretty much a tabloid about 911, but disregarding the whole thing he at least brought the whole subject up for debate and scrutiny to a generation that hardly thought about politics before.
"On the other hand," a google spokesperson was heard to say, "if 'failure' popped up Al Gore as the first result, we might then change our policy and do something about it. As things are now however, we think it's pretty damn funny. Hahaha. Stupid republicans got pwned."
OK, here is my problem with Google telling me how accurate the statements of politicians are:
Political donations given by Google CEO Eric Schmidt from 2003-2006 to Democratic party members and fund-raising organizations: $37,700.
Political donations given by Google CEO Eric Schmidt from 2003-2006 to Republican party members and fund-raising organizations: $0
[ source ]
Political donations given by Google Empolyees from 2005-2006 to Democratic party members, fund-raising organizations, and PACs: $196,223
Political donations given by Google Empolyees from 2005-2006 to bipartisan PACs: $12,500
Political donations given by Google Empolyees from 2005-2006 to Republican party members, fund-raising organizations, and PACs: $4,000
[ source ]
Wikileaks, no DNS
Why is your assertion that computers can't (or worse, can, but should not be allowed to) determine what is an accurate statement any less "creepily religious" than the google fetishists who think it's inevitable? I find the notion that the human mind has some privleged view of what is and isn't true that's inaccessable to mere machines to be pretty creepy and think it borders on begging the god question. ...and yes, an algorithm *is* immune to lying. It's output may be inaccurate, but lying requires intent to decieve, intent implies conscious thought, and computers aren't yet (and may never be) capable of that.
0 1 - just my two bits
I read lower down that it's the effect of the tobacco industry as a whole that he's talking about (including agriculture).
You have to watch both the politicans and the pundits.
I hope that Google's tools to come catches such weaselling on all sides, but I doubt it.
Wikileaks, no DNS
Feed Schmidt's prediction to the truth predictor itself.
In other news, Google has "no plans" to simply offshore the work of answering these questions to an Indian call center.
Reduce, reuse, cycle
This is a fair question, and rather than overly defend a statement that I threw in on a bit of whimsy at the end, I'll go the short route and just say: Maybe it's just as creepy. But I want to underscore that this statement, which I said partly just to be provocative, is dancing around a true philosophical/religious issue (where in the context of this paragraph I'll define religion to be "the pursuit of the answer to unanswerable questions like whether there's a reason we're here at all, what happens after death, where did the Universe come from, and is there any point to existence if we're doomed to die soon (as individuals) or later (as a society, due to supernova, heat death of the universe, or whatever)" rather than as the dogmatic attempt to answer such questions by fiat, which is more how I was using religion in my provocative remark). I didn't mean to say that computers can't assess truth, I meant to ask the question: if computers are to do this for us, what are we retaining to ourselves? Because it follows not logically but pragmatically that a huge number of people are lazy, and once told that the computer can assess truth, they'll simply believe it rather than work hard to find their own truth. And also, if not today then in some tomorrow, there is a likely scenario where people are forced to ask: are we the dispensible ones or are machines, and where machines might be asking the same question, and where it might be an us/them choice. Some people believe machines will eventually replace us, and in a distant future where machines were actually smarter, that doesn't disturb me. What disturbs me is if computers displace us when they are not in fact yet smart nor wise nor even intelligent but have only misassessed that they are because an arbitrary probability calculation has been mistaken for Truth with a capital T.
As long as we are still asking questions about truth, I think we're on track. Google as an entity for asking questions of the world does not disturb me (well, not as much). Google as an entity for dispensing answers that require computation disturbs me more. Because I want "competition" and the ability to challenge. If Google can tell me who's lying, how much bigger a leap is it to tell me who I should vote for? Hey, why not just let it assess public policy and say what's good and what's not? I don't own the resources to challenge that. Nor do I know anyone who does. So I guess we'll just have to take it's word. So it starts to resemble a religion, a government, a prison in ways that are at least disturbing and where any rational person would say we should err on the side of asking questions and challenging assumptions, not simply assuming "this is fine" until it's too late.
So it's impossible to write an algorithm that requires, employs, benefits from, or otherwise involves lying? I remember seeing papers out of Stanford's AI Lab (SAIL) on this issue decades ago and being fascinated by the issues of whether lying would optimize variations of the Prisoner's Dilemma scenario, for example. A quick web search for terms relating to this (heh--thanks Google!) turned up The Case of the Lying Postman: Decoys and Deception in Negotiation and Economic Implications of Agent Technology and E-Commerce as well as others. I haven't read these references myself, but I'm betting they'll support my
Kent M Pitman
Philosopher, Technologist, Writer
I love the venom you politically oriented weineys can spray at your opponent. What I really love about it is that by changing less than ten words, I can make it applicable to pretty much everyone on earth.
You're a tool and you don't even realize it.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
In addition to having a percentage based system, I hope they also have a WTF?!?! rating.
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
Anyway, sorry about about leaving you thinking I was calling you stupid. I was actually caricaturing the sanctimonious worldview of those who use ad hominem arguments because they don't consider raw logic and facts to be necessary to prove their point.
If you can get them to accept brain scans all the better.
Unless they really believe what we consider a lie.
Cool! Amazing Toys.
What if a politician says "This statement is false." ?
J/K
BTW - I didn't RTFA.
Haven't you seen for yourself the huge, well-financed, glaringly obvious cultural movement of religious fundamentalism? Haven't you seen the huge cultural movement advocating rejecting methodological materialism, meaning what conventional, mainstream scientists call "science"? These people just know things, and they easily reject evolution, the big bang, evidence for an old earth, common descent, global warming, or any number of other things that are accepted by mainstream science. They repudiate the very scientific method, claiming it's "too blinkered by materialism."
That cavelier rejection of education, expertise, decades of research, data, inference, the entire edifice of rational, careful analysis and thought is indicative of people who just know that they're right. They just know, because they're fighting for God, which leaves everyone else fighting for the other guy, Satan. In all other contexts that would meet the textbook definition of arrogance, and I don't think we can call it humility just because it's advanced by religion.
Yes, they agree that humans are fallible, which is why they aren't relying on humans. To them, they're relying on God, who is infallible. But their "God" manifests through their gut feeling/intuition/whatever, which leaves the rest of us faced with tens of millions of Americans who reject rational thought because they feel like it, while making the totally unverifiable claim that it's because they're more Godly. They could be more Godly, and we could be hellbound materialistic heathens, or they could just be undereducated, arrogant people with a touch of megalomania and cosmic narcisissm. Which is really more probable?
This does touch on the bible in some ways. The bible says in many places that people should not trust their own perceptions, because that is folly. Don't trust your own wisdom. This undermines the idea that we can look around us and figure something out about the world. So there are verses in the bible that could be used to advance anti-intellectualism, but whether or not you focus on these to the exclusion of the others is a matter of individual preference. Obviously not all Christians are anti-intellectual, not all reject science, and not all think that their gut feeling/"voice of God" trumps verifiable, objective fact. I'm not painting all believers with the same brush, because they aren't all the same. It's just the "Jesus Camp" contingent that keeps me up at night. From what I read, the Dark Ages weren't all that wonderful.
I don't know that I agree that it's that simple. I certainly agree that it will help to keep these two statements separated, but my problem is that in making even this comparison, you've blurred several others that must also be kept straight. That is, in order to get even as far as "78% of the published material" you msut define what "the published material" is.
Does it mean "lines of published material"? "bytes of published material"? Can I write a longer document and have it be counted more?
Does it mean "published documents"? Can I write twice as many documents and have it count more?
Does it mean "sites publishing the info"? That is, are you counting only separate sources? If you are, are you verifying they're really differently owned and controlled?
It sounds to me like there's a risk that Google is creating out of whole cloth a brand new industry, as they did with the industry of "getting you placement in search engines". This one will be "getting you placed in truth engines". Not that people didn't try to manipulate truth before. But if you centralize the evaluation of truth in such a way that you can finitely enumerate the choices, you allow greater manipulation of those with weak minds.
I have for a long time predicted that truth would be obfuscated by a flood of propaganda, a la Rivest's chaffing. I think this kind of centralization will accelerate the arrival and/or dominance of a world full of that. It's coming anyway, but no need to hurry it. We need time as a culture to prepare emotionally, socially, etc. It is simply not the same to say that technology we will eventually have is technology we can judiciously use today.
Kent M Pitman
Philosopher, Technologist, Writer
Let me get this straight. You have issues with the factual accuracy of the onion?
well, best may be the wrong word...
The most effecitive lies are usually mixed in with lots of truth. They are much harder to spot that way. A bit of truth that the listener hears may convince them that the lie, which they may know less about, is in fact true. Therefore a google-truthiness rating of 89% could be given to a very deceptive and manipulative comment.
Personally I think the president, hell all elected officials should have to swear a binding oath (as part of the oath of office) that in their official capacity they will tell the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth. That way when we find out that they were blowing smoke up our ass about weapons of mass destruction we can impeach the thugs for perjury.
-- QED
infinite improbability drive!
Foetuses aren't "people" by any meaningful definition of "people." Again, I welcome you to explain to me why you feel otherwise.
They are genetically unique life forms. They're not going to suddenly turn into a Jello pudding cup.
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
So is a cow and a chicken, but if you're like most Americans, you ate one today.