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Google's Featured Snippets Are Worse Than Fake News (theoutline.com)
Adrianne Jeffries, reporting for The Outline: Peter Shulman, an associate history professor at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio, was lecturing on the reemergence of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s when a student asked an odd question: Was President Warren Harding a member of the KKK? Shulman was taken aback. He confessed that he was not aware of that allegation, but that Harding had been in favor of anti-lynching legislation, so it seemed unlikely. But then a second student pulled out his phone and announced that yes, Harding had been a Klan member, and so had four other presidents. It was right there on Google, clearly emphasized inside a box at the top of the page. "I understand what Google is trying to do, and it's work that perhaps requires algorithmic aid," Shulman said in an email. "But in this instance, the question its algorithm scoured the internet to answer is simply a poorly conceived one. There have been no presidents in the Klan." Google needs to invest in human experts who can judge what type of queries should produce a direct answer like this, Shulman said. "Or, at least in this case, not send an algorithm in search of an answer that isn't simply 'There is no evidence any American president has been a member of the Klan.' It'd be great if instead of highlighting a bogus answer, it provided links to accessible, peer-reviewed scholarship."
If sites like Google and Facebook want to let algorithms decide which information to highlight, they will need to spend more time doing human assisted ranking of various information sources. Crowd sourcing will be very helpful here, but you will still need some human moderators who can perform real research to help determine which information has credibility. I know too many otherwise intelligent people who are becoming so disenfranchised they just don't believe anything they read anymore, which is the ultimate goal of these misinformation campaigns.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
I wonder if Prof took the time to review with the students the difference between a search result and a fact.
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When I read these stories, I find myself wondering if I am the only one aware that humans write algorithms.
I once took an excursion to Reddit, and later HN. Unlimited up/down voting sucks when dealing with a hive-mind.
It'd be great if instead of highlighting a bogus answer, it provided links to accessible, peer-reviewed scholarship."
That scholarship is behind a paywall.
I forget, are we calling out Woodrow Wilson for his racist "Birth of a Nation" behavior, Klan sympathies, and "Northern Aggression" political responses, or are we still rewarding his legacy because of his liberal socialist policies that started the modern era of the all-encompassing federal government?
Looking at the sources for most of the links it's just that there's a shitload of bogus crap on the internet. Good example of false authority though
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
Well duh, Google was the source and Google's motto is Do No Evil. Ergo ipso facto summa Sauron, four Presidents were high-ranking official Klan members.
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
But the snippet problem can easily be resolved. Worse than fake news, not really. Fake news will be around and tossed around almost as a weapon, cf., this thread.
Typing the same search "presidents in the klan" into DDG also puts the same fake news result at the top (at least it's at the top if I set my location to UK. If I set it to worldwide it comes in second). Bing also puts the same story at the top. So this is not just Google's problem. It's a problem that all search vendors need to tackle collectively.
Tabloid trash used to be contained within that special group of "news" providers, and quarantined near grocery store cash registers.
Unfortunately, the quest to extract revenue derived from clicks has pushed damn near everyone to publish and aggregate a similar flavor of clickbait bullshit.
Hey Capitalism, stop rewarding Bullshit. Otherwise, You Reap what You Sow.
Maybe the problem is that the incorrect information is free and the peer-reviewed article costs $30 to read.
What? Our first black president was also a member of the Klan?
STOP THE PRESSES!!
#DeleteChrome
How about he fails the student since the kid obviously doesn't know how to research and cite sources? This is something said student should have learned prior to attending a university.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
Wikipedia!
Warren Harding was also alleged to be black,
That was made up by his political rivals to discredit him during an era when to have "black blood" would be scandalous.
DNA tests done show that Harding did not have any detectible black ancestors. Also, Obama is only half black. Genetically he's more "white" than "black" (men get slightly more DNA from their mothers than their fathers, plus all their mitochondrial DNA).
Not that that really means anything. Race has always been more cultural than genetic though, and having any noticably darker skin makes society push you towards the "black" culture. From a genetic perspective, we still haven't had our first "mostly black" President. Given the current political climate, I suspect we may have to wait a few decades for that.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Given the current political climate, I suspect we may have to wait a few decades for that.
Given the current political climate, I suspect there may not be a POTUS a few decades from now.
That is all.
I completely agree, but the problem is that we only have ourselves to blame. The only "newspapers" making money are the tabloids. Same with online clicks and views, it's the trash people click on. If the majority of people wanted long-form impartial investigative journalism, that is what we'd end up with next to breath-mints at the checkout line.
Collectively, we, are getting exactly what we deserve and want. Does capitalism as an entity want us to consume immaterial garbage, you bet it does, but again, at the end of the day we are collectively bending over and asking for more.
Truth cannot be determined by consensus, of course. However, you can get close (high probability of truth), and the interesting thing is, it's basically just another application of the PageRank algorithm which made Google.
Suppose I showed you sources written by two people who won Nobel prizes in chemistry both saying the same about some chemistry fact, and a Google search revealed no similarly credible sources who disagree. We'd say the laurettes are very likely telling us the truth.
If you look at all of the sources cited in Encyclopedia Britannica, that'll give you a list of pretty credible sources; not perfect but pretty good. The second-order list of sources which are in turn referenced by two or more of the Britannica sources is a much larger list of pretty credible sources. If two or three or four of these sources agree on some statement, AND none disagree, the statement is very likely true.
Fake news and spam, and chain emails, and all that junk has been around nearly as long as the operating Internet (oops, small 'i' now ...internet). The thing that is crap is that real news outlets, those with a recognized brand ala CNN, MSNBC, FoxNews, etc pick up on this stuff and slap it on their web feeds w/out actually checking. Its the race to be first, or at least not left behind. Wish they would just wait 4 hours...I mean outside of a "N Korea nuclear missle enroute to US soil" nothing needs to be that instantaneous.
And for goodness sakes, stop letting Trump troll you (media). Stop reposting his tweets. We all know its hard to do...super hard, but the only way of defeating a troll is to ignore them. The best, cleverest, well-written rebuttal is still food for a troll. Ignoring them is the only way they go away,
I don't like the guy, didn't vote for him, but he is the president, and despite many fantasies about a an impeachment and whatnot, he has a full Republican congress. Dems' should be smarter, eat humble pie on their election losses and know that this guy, however detestable, in many ways is malleable, especially if you stroke his ego. Dems won't get a lot out of him, shouldn't expect a liberal prez (you lost the elections dumbasses, not just the presidential one...all of them!), won't be happy with mot of his choices, but they can get some things they like from this guy.
In theory we should be able to get ourselves out of war(s), should be able to reform taxes for individuals and corps, should get some infrastructure...maybe even some lower govt spending, though his defense dept nonsense seems to blow that out of the water. But just try...think of him as you new brother-in-law, the one you can't believe your sister married, but she did, so make the best of it.
FYI Linus Pauling, laureate in physics and chemistry, spent the last 20 years of his life proselytizing that vitamin C was a cure for what ailed you. He was convinced he'd get a 3rd Nobel in medicine when he was finally proven correct.
Even brilliant scientists sometimes go off half cocked in their later years. When somebody's mind had a fine edge, but it's been lost, they rarely notice and just keep talking.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Not you when you have crap logic like:
"wikipedia can be edited, but on other hand, any source that claims Truman had nothing to do with KKK could also be inaccurate, intentionally or otherwise. "
Like the water well that was poisoned but later cleaned up. Problem is nobody trusts the well anymore, and this is what happened to news media.
mfwright@batnet.com
Suppose I showed you sources written by two people who won Nobel prizes in chemistry both saying the same about some chemistry fact, and a Google search revealed no similarly credible sources who disagree. We'd say the laurettes are very likely telling us the truth.
FYI Linus Pauling, laureate in physics and chemistry, spent the last 20 years of his life proselytizing that vitamin C was a cure for what ailed you. He was convinced he'd get a 3rd Nobel in medicine when he was finally proven correct.
I was under the impression there were many similarly credible sources who disagreed with Linus Pauling, so I'm not sure how this example refutes the GP's point,
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
All you need is two, you could find a second for just about any position. Especially around vitamin C in the 1980s. It was like anti-vax for a minute or ten. Real science was drowned out on public media like google search. You'd have to get to page 2 before getting to credible information. Happens today.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
The problem here is not Google snippets, the problem is ignorant/dumb students with poor truth filters. You need to start out with a basic knowledge of history. You used to be able to get this knowledge from your history books in junior high and high school (I am assuming that you still can if you want to). Then you find news outlets who do a good job of being right and reporting the story accurately and in it's entirety instead of grinding a bias into every sentence. When you are browsing the internet, again, you have to evaluate first the source. Wikipedia, for all it's flaws, is usually pretty accurate about non-controversial historical events. If the topic is a historical event and it is locked from editing, it is probably pretty accurate as well. Current political stuff on Wikipedia is pretty useless. Browsing some random website not affiliated with a well established foundation or news outlet for historical facts is just dumb.
If you disagree, please post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like
On the other hand, google already managed something similar in the past :
its page rank system.
Back when Google was simply a keyword search engine,
it didn't simply return *all* webpages (that it knows off) where the query keywords appears.
it did return *the top* webpages, using a whole ranking system to assess the quality of the page.
Whereas other more primitive search engines could be easily fooled by a link farming (e.g: forum and wiki spamming),
it did require quite some art to manage a google bomb successfully, with the developers at google constantly refining their algorithm
(pages with the same keywords showing up won't be given the same importance depending on their rank and/or the rank of pages leading to them and/or quality of the links).
The same here : instead of feeding the "featured snippets" AI with whatever the google crawler find, the snippets AI will eventually need to have the concept of "confidence level" associated with the information.
Being able to react differently when the AI parses information from a reputable source (a peer-reviewed scientific article) (and/or even being able to autonomously process retraction of such source) and when the AI parse information on some "dubious" site (some extremist's site with an agenda).
That won't save google from a well though-out and coordinated google-bomb (snippet-bomb ?), but will at least avoid the AI blindly believing every bullshit it reads on-line.
(On the other hand, given the gullibility of the average people, the current snippet AI isn't reacting much differently that this weird uncle that is always blabering about some conspiracy theory he read on-line somewhere. Successfully "passing turing test through stupidity" ?)
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Part of the reason for the 1st amendment to the U.S. Constitution was the presumption that good information would conquer bad in the 'marketplace of ideas'. Do you believe that the Earth is round? Or that the Earth orbits the sun? With freedom of speech, you could advocate those ideas and, it was hoped, overcome the flat-earth and geocentric hypotheses.
Then we had superstition, urban myths, and fake news.
Perhaps the truth-will-prevail folks failed to account for some important factors:
1) While people might have limited time to spread falsehoods, computers have overcome that.
2) Controversy sells, particularly in the age of click-advertising.
3) While charlatans used to be identified and shunned, internet anonymity lets them persist and reincarnate themselves.
4) No idea, no matter how bad, ever seems to go away entirely; convincing 'most people' is the best you can do.
5) Many people prefer a falsehood that seems to make them happy to an unpleasant truth.
Is free speech a failed experiment in the service of truth?
"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." --The American President (20.1.2009)
Google search is not a magic tool to learn the truth. If you feed some nonsense in the algorithm, you should not be to surprise of getting some nonsense back. The Google's Snippets feature says nothing about accuracy of the presented information. So you should not be surprise of getting some nonsense if you search for it. To be able to use Google correctly means being able to validate different online source, and not to rely on what came up in Google search first. What is really surprising is how many university students are incapable to work with online sources and blindly believe in whatever Google says. IMHO, that is a much bigger problem than any imperfection of Google's algorithms.
That's exactly the same (partial) counter-example I thought of when I wrote the post you replied to. I suspect we both thought of that exact same thing, rather than some other statement, precisely because it's so unusual. However, before, during, and after Pauling's vitamin C fetish, other reputable sources showed that Pauling was mistaken (many times). Therefore the algorithm as I described it would not be fooled.
Every day you people run anti-Republican, anti-Donald Trump news.
these days that's just called "news"
Pauling won the Nobel prizes for Chemistry and Peace (not Physics.)
Pauling was not the first great scientist to go wacky in his later years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
> How would your algorithm handle a eminent scientist making a claim so controversial
If it's controversial, that's the answer Google should give (with the list of links as usual). Where credible sources disagree, there's your quick-answer search result: credible sources disagree.
... the Universe and Everything. So who cares about the rest (like the preferred size for DCP subtitles, which is apparently the same anyway)?
Here's Google Home's answer
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
Seriously. I think if they assign negative truth value to anything appearing in a story on a web page which has an ad for "male enhancement products" that features someone holding a geoduck clam in a disturbingly suggestive manner... that would improve the accuracy by an order of magnitude.
Of course there will be a POTUS... ... he may not be democratically elected though.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch