'Conservatives' want to see those viewpoints. They are a minority.
There's a minority, being less than 50%, and there's a minority, being less than 1%. Conservatives are the first kind; Holocaust deniers the second, outside of countries such as Saudi Arabia and Iran, which I have no qualms about saying Google should ignore.
Again, what is your problem here, exactly? You are OK with banning things you don't like.
Google is not banning Holocaust denial. Not showing it unless people ask for it isn't banning.
The extent of the worldview is 'my reasons are good, other peoples reasons are bad'.
What's the alternative to using reasons, even if you think your own are good and someone else's are bad--just don't use reasons?
Jiro
1yr ago
The algorithm was fine. You saying it's 'unintentional' is just you saying it because you don't feel good about it.
I'm saying it's unintentional because it's unintentional.
Same is true for 'conservatives'? What is your problem here with anything exactly?
"Not shown to people who want something else" doesn't apply. Many people do want conservative viewpoints.
There are more people who don't believe in the holocaust than there are American 'conservatives'.
Google is not aimed at Saudi Arabia or Iran.
Jiro
1yr ago
Those kinds of changes are truly worth fighting over, not cosmetic changes to Harley's butt so it's less jiggly.
If there are fifty changes all of which makes the game worse to varying degrees, there may be only a few of them which are blatantly, inarguably, provably bad, but a whole lot of them which make the game a little worse but where a crafty debater can say "are you sure? You just aren't looking at it from the right angle." But the game becomes worse anyway, because all of these little changes with plausible deniability add up..
and from the outside for women, it's a tedious trope.
Don't women usually pick attractive characters in games? I believe there was a reference to that in one of the earlier discussions.
Jiro
1yr ago
Whether it genuinely is a high value product, I have no idea. But I believe that he genuinely believes in it, and wouldn't offer it if he didn't believe it was valuable,
People have a way of convincing themselves of things that are convenient for themselves. Which means that a standard of "if they themselves believe it, it doesn't count as a scam" is unworkable. If they don't have some well-founded reason to believe it, they're indistinguishable from scammers even if on some level they've convinced themselves that their scam is really a good deal. You can't read their mind, after all.
And why was it on top of Google?
As the unintentional effect of stupid algorithms. Again, by your reasoning since a lot of people click on spam, they want to read spam.
You keep oscillating between 'true/false' and 'minority'
It's both.
What I am suggesting is that you can't even have a discussion on whether or not something is true or not if you ban it.
It's not banned. It's just not shown to people who want something else. People who actually want will still get it if they search for it. You're acting as if Google won't return Holocaust denial no matter what you do. They're not doing that. They're not even making it difficult to find.
Besides, there is no "discussion" except among a tiny minority.
Jiro
1yr ago
The people looking up the holocaust and related stuff obviously clicked on it.
Because it was on top of Google. You are trying to justify putting it on top of Google by saying that people clicked on it, but people only clicked on it because it was on top of Google. That's circular reasoning.
It's not false. It's true.
Oh come on now. Holocaust deniers really are a tiny, tiny, minority. Conservatives aren't.
You decide truth for the holocaust and ban it.
No, the world does. Holocaust deniers are a tiny minority, and they state false things.
Progressives decide truth for 'conservatives' and ban it.
Are you seriously suggesting that we should pay no attention to truth because someone might think false things are true?
Holocaust denial got the most clicks. But centrists don't like that so they want it banned. So screw any principle or fairness, I should just have my way because 'reasons'.
Right now Google is infested by SEO spam and SEO spam, of course, gets the most clicks. By your reasoning, Google should be sending people to the SEO spam and should not try to get rid of it in search results. It "gets the most clicks" because Google promotes it, you cannot use the clicks as a reason to say why Google should promote it--that's circular reasoning.
Holocaust denial is neither something that many people want (since they want truthful things and it's false) nor something that many people produce (since it comes from an extreme minority). So Google should in fact be not showing it prominently in search results that don't specifically ask for it.
Funnily enough, that's how the people banning 'conservative' stuff think. They see a tiny portion of the population.
"It's a tiny percentage" is false for conservatives and true for Holocaust deniers. That's a big difference; being true or false actually matters.
I'd expect the typical reasoning of 'Only do it to the smallest of outgroups', but given how demonstrable it is now that such reasoning does not hold when we are trying to uphold broad principles for big populations...
I'm surprised that you think "only do it to the smallest of outgroups" would be a useful description even when that's sort of what Google did.
Search is at least partly supposed to be a popularity contest. If the group that says something is small, what they say should be underemphasized. If the group that thinks it's true is small, that's another reason to underemphasize it because if there's 99% agreement that it isn't true, Google should be treating it as false and people don't want to search and find false information.
There are plenty of conservatives out there, and the truth of conservative beliefs is an active dispute, not something 99% of people take the same side on. But Holocaust denial? There are few Holocaust deniers, and no truth to Holocaust denial. Not returning results because Holocaust deniers are the "smallest of outgroups" is the proper thing to do here.
Jiro
1yr ago
A "decent number of people" out of the size of the Internet is a tiny number of people.
I suspect a few people might be self-aware and cynical enough to do this on purpose, but given how such a defense is only good for the ego and not for profit,
Such a defense is good for media publicity. Media publicity can't make a bad work into a hit, but it can certainly increase the profit by some amount since it takes longer for people to figure out how bad it is.
Most people don't read classical literature (including nonfiction) except for a specific reason, usually school. The size of the population, let alone the size of the young male population, who'd 1) consider reading such things to not be boring drudgework and 2) actually get anything out of them is tiny. Reading such things is no longer considered high status in our society anyway. It doesn't matter whether you personally read them as a boy and found them useful; typical-minding is a thing.
What they should read, or watch, is a variety of things that they mostly read or watch for other reasons, but which have the occasional bit about using power properly because the idea is in the zeitgeist so writers naturally put it in their works every so often. And the only way you're going to get that to happen is to restructure society first. (Although there's an interesting conversation in Fate/Zero.)
Your list is useless unless a boy actually comes up to you and says "I'd like to read some classical literature about exercising power, what do you recommend?" In which case, recommend away, but that won't happen much. It's the political science equivalent of "how do I get my child interested in programming computers?" To which the answer is "You don't, most people are not interested in that."
If the problem is data collection, them change the rules on data collection.
You're not going to be able to walk into a company office in China and look at the private books of Tiktok to confirm exactly how much data collection they're doing. Changing the rules for data collection and confirming obedience is impossible.
Jiro
1yr ago
"Applying the same law to the politician that he supports" is vague.
First of all, what's the same law? Suppose the politican says that software pirates under age 30 get the death penalty, and the politician happens to be over age 30. The politician would then say "sure, apply the same law to me" and never be affected. You could object that "... under 30" is a self-serving distinction, but it's actually very hard to pin down what counts as a self-serving distinction; if the politician doesn't rob banks, you would think it's okay for him to create a law that only applies to people who rob banks. Or if he lives in a house, he should be able to make a law that applies to people who live in apartments. What if the politician creates a law which says that in order to vote, you have to gather some documents, but 5% of people, not including the politician, would have trouble getting documents that fast--do you have to deny the politician the vote?
Second, laws can have an infinite number of side effects. What if the politician makes a law raising taxes on yachts, and this law hurts the economy by 5%, and in a worse economy, it takes an average of 1 extra week for a poor person to get a doctor's appointment. Are you supposed to trace the line of causality and compute the delay accurately enough that you can delay the politician's own doctor's appointment by an equal amount?
[2.] “Condition X is fake; those who claim to have it are perfectly fine” versus “Condition X is fake; those who claim to have it actually suffer from Condition Y”:
In context, people talking about conditions being real are talking about them actually being physical conditions. Delusions aren't "real" in this sense. It's true that you can claim "it really is a delusion" or "delusions are real things, see, we can describe what a delusion is" but that's not what "real" normally means and claiming that the condition is still "real" because it's a real delusion is sophistry.
Jiro
1yr ago
The reason the public is in favor of the death penalty 50 years after it's ended is that the public is in favor of the death penalty but anti-death-penalty laws are pushed through by activists that don't represent the public.
Jiro
1yr ago
If you think being a mod for a place where charged political discussions happen is a power trip, you are so far off base that you aren't even in the stadium. I've modded a forum like that before, and let me tell you: it fucking sucks.
I think you're typical-minding. There are people for whom it is a power trip.
Jiro
1yr ago
There's a thread (not on SV) devoted to questionable invocations of that rule on SV.
Jiro
1yr ago
allow me to suggest that none of the WWI vets who happened to get control of the government afterward were 'unhinged gangsters'
I'd suggest that at least one was.
Jiro
1yr ago
They all get God's grace, and in fact everyone does.
There are a whole bunch of Christians who disagree with you on this. Some have even posted here.
Jiro
1yr ago
those types know full well that the medical system will respond with transition, everyone knows that.
No they don't. They may think "well, I don't know if trans is correct for my kid, I'm sure the doctor can figure it out". They'll assume that the doctor would act like a professional and diagnose based on objective standards that might say yes, but might say no.
Jiro
1yr ago
We use H1Bs because of a diversity fetish
No we don't. Indians and Chinese are not central beneficiaries of diversity and are often thrown under the bus by diversity advocates.
Jiro
1yr ago
However, if predictions matter more than words, then where words don't actually confuse people (as I believe they do not in this case) there can hardly be an objection to using a particular word for something.
It may be that you are not confused, but the people who use the words are still trying to sow confusion. "Trans women are women" is used to demand that trans women be treated like women. Nobody demands that toy elephants be treated as elephants.
Jiro
1yr ago
If you squint hard enough, isn't any political movement that has not already won "trying to advance the cause of oppressed groups"?
True, but it seems to be the same sort of oppressed groups as before. They didn't shift from blacks to Star Trek fans or anything like that and while you could argue they shifted from gays to trans people, the gays and trans people are part of the same coalition.
I would agree that opposing banks or military is deemphasized nowadays and I don't know how different it was in Germany.
Because Google is there to provide what people search for, and people aren't searching for false results.
Because a substantial number of people want to find the things said by their outgroup, but no substantial number of people wants to find Holocaust denial (outside Iran, Saudi Arabia, etc.)
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