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Do you think Google's attempts at ideological sculpting are effective, neutral, or counter-productive? Why are they doing this?
Search for any social topic or event that a conservative cares about, and Google will list progressive news sources and fact checkers denying its validity or, if this is impossible, condemning political weaponization of the facts. Google's information sculpting seemed to reached its apex mid-2022, when PM of Hungary Viktor Orban made a speech with inflammatory takes on European history and EU policy, and Google would not give a link to the speech. Trying all sorts of keywords, one could find page after page of thinkpieces with two-word scare quotes about what a horrible Nazi speech Orban had made, but it was impossible to read what he actually said. (Yandex gave an English transcript as the second result.)
Putting aside the morality or fairness of this: Do you think Google's efforts prevent people from being radicalized? Do they increase political capital for the establishment left? The recent Gemini AI debacle shows a hilarious tin ear for the company; no one could fail to see the tight ideological corset around the image generation squeezing the AI's intestines out its throat. And personally — though I am not normal — the information sculpting I get from search results doesn't make me accept the sources as presented; it just makes me angry.
The three broad explanations I see for Google's approach are:
Is there a way to tell which of these is true?
If we look at the very public firing of Damore when writing an internal memo of gender differences. More specifically the public firing of Timnit Gebru might have spread that same culture of fear in the AI team. Being uncomfortable by having diverse thought and getting publicly ousted because of them would spread a culture of fear! So I would bet on 2 on being the truth.
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I don't think it's a culture of fear so much as a culture of adults doing their jobs so as to earn money. The vast majority of people are doing technical (or legal, or design) work that is politically neutral. A tiny sliver are doing whatever intentional political tuning goes on. Even on the political tuning teams, I suspect the attitude is much less "I hate these politics, but I'm afraid if I speak out I will get fired" than "These politics are not important to me but I sure know what to say to get promoted."
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Like with most things of this nature, most of the politically centric who would lament this development would otherwise celebrate its birth. I.e. The end of holocaust denial being the top result relating to the holocaust.
There was a big media storm surrounding the topic in 2016. I'm pretty sure Google had already been working on something before this. (Though that might have just been a concentrated effort of extremist jews trying to skew the results through very radical 'manual click farms', wish I could find those forum posts again.) As this matter had the added controversy of the site in question being Stormfront, a well known media boogey monster. The matter was closed in the same year as Google expunged holocaust skepticism from its top results.
It's hard to say what exactly a gray/centrist would change about the past to make the present a better place. I'm sure most of them on this website are far outside the norm when it comes to tolerating 'unsanctioned' holocaust revision and would just not press the censorship button. Or at least that's what they would say when faced with a hypothetical. However, when they actually have the button... well, then things can get messy.
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... Where to? Can we at least stop using that argument?
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.
Yes, that's the centrist position. What I don't understand is how you can stand by it whilst refuting it in your own post.
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'.
Funnily enough, that's how the people banning 'conservative' stuff think. They see a tiny portion of the population. A minority in their own communities and a minority globally. They see these 'people' denying obvious truths about global warming, racism, transphobia, the J6 insurrection, Trump the racist fascist, the truth of the election result, trans children and hormones, Immigration... I mean, have these 'conservatives' just considered not being factually wrong on everything? 99% of people don't agree with them. No one wants to go on google and be bombarded with false information. There are few conservatives, and no truth in conservatism.
No really, it's so easy to justify against the outgroup, as you artfully show. How can't centrists figure out that other people can do that as well?
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.
"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.
Are you playing antagonistic defense for some particular reason?
This is what you said. How is Stormfront comparable to SEO spam? Yes, I think Google should remove predatory sites that, for instance, try to put malware on your system. Everyone does. That's kind of obvious, no?
It won out the algorithm. The people looking up the holocaust and related stuff obviously clicked on it. You saying that people don't want that kind of stuff is just you saying it. Actual reality is different. Wanting to play veto by your feelings is not a good or fair. Don't think so? Don't lament progressives banning your 'conservative' conspiracy theory hogwash. They're just playing by your rules.
It's not false. It's true. That's the difference you need to understand. You might think you can prove it but you wont receive the platform or information to do so. Those are the rules you follow when dealing with the holocaust and they are the exact same for wingnut nonsense. How can you complain? The situation could not be any more symmetrical. You decide truth for the holocaust and ban it. Progressives decide truth for 'conservatives' and ban 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.
Oh come on now. Holocaust deniers really are a tiny, tiny, minority. Conservatives aren't.
No, the world does. Holocaust deniers are a tiny minority, and they state false things.
Are you seriously suggesting that we should pay no attention to truth because someone might think false things are true?
And why was it on top of Google? Do the people clicking the link need your protection? They can't read something on their own? Why not? What might happen? They might believe something you don't personally approve of?
I am not saying that anyone should put it on top of Google. I am saying it should not have been removed if we are trying to uphold any sort of liberal/centrist fairness across the board. It was a website doing exactly as advertised. 'Top 10 Reasons Why the Holocaust Didn't Happen'. That was the link, that was what people clicked. It wasn't predatory, it didn't have malware. It did exactly as advertised. It was only removed because a certain minority of people didn't like it there. There was no mass movement, no popular sentiment. Just a few journalists and philosemites leveraging power.
You keep oscillating between 'true/false' and 'minority', it's annoying but still besides the point. It doesn't matter how many programmers use C++ vs C#, you can't ban one from the results because you feel like most people, in your particular context, which you arbitrarily decide to favor your argument, don't use one or the other. The people using Google click those links. They get bumped to the top. As soon as you have an arbiter above that process that can decide what is and isn't true you are bound by their will. That's the precedent you set. Stop complaining about it. The fact you surround yourself with the opinion of a bunch of idiots from the US doesn't change what's actually true for the global majority.
No, I'm seriously suggesting you start reading what I write instead of cutting it into bites you can twist out of context and lie about. 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. If you do that you've already decided what is true and what is false. Not just for you but for everyone else who is deprived of information they might otherwise have used to find out. Case in point being Dachau.
Why does every folly of censorship have to be trotted out to people like you? You want to ban your outgroup. So do progressives. You don't have an argument. You're just mad your false beliefs get banned. Want to prove they're true? Try Google. Oh wait...
As the unintentional effect of stupid algorithms. Again, by your reasoning since a lot of people click on spam, they want to read spam.
It's both.
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.
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I remember controversy and hilarity about Google's search predictions (not the results, the predictions when you typed in the search bar) from some years before 2016 (e.g. if you started typing "why are Asians..."). I feel like the Grey Tribe response to this problem should have been to just patch the specific issue instead of reengineering the search upstream as an overcorrection.
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One of the things that I find interesting about Google is that when they were making (and now they are making) a ton of money, they didn't split the profits between investors (either via buybacks or dividends) and staff, they just hired orders of magnitude more people.
In finance, things are very different. If the bank is making a lot more money, as much money as possible gets used to pay everyone (those at the top much more than those below, of course) a lot more. As Warren Buffett famously noted, banks are run as much for employees as for shareholders, and indeed more for the former. Investment banking teams hire, for the most part, the minimum possible number of people they can get away with without making shorter decks/worse pitches than the next bank. That's one of several reasons behind the 100 hour week. Everyone is mostly happy with this, nobody wants to halve their bonus so they can work a few fewer hours.
Google is also famously a company that many have declared is run more in the interests of its employees (engineers described as coasting, practically retired, etc) than its shareholders, and the only two of the latter who matter are off in Hawaii on the beach anyway.
But at Google, they've spent 15 years printing money, and instead of just paying all the engineers $5m a year each, they decided to hire 25,000 more engineers to make failed products. It seems like such a weird failure of incentives. Were the early employees just so rich from their equity stakes that they didn't care about money anymore? Why did they agree to hire so many more people instead of just paying themselves from the unbelievable rents they extracted from the rest of the economy? Did Sergey and Larry really want that many more people on payroll?
It's finance that's weird here. The finance people are in it for the money as an end in itself. Most management types are in it largely for power, and that means more people under them. They certainly don't want to pay individual contributors more; there's no upside, and the ICs (who also aren't finance people in it for money as an end in itself) might take the money and retire early leaving them scrambling for more workers.
Managers that want to deal with less bullshit from low quality employees would like to pay as much as possible to attract top talent. Since it’s not their money, they don’t really care that they might be able to get away with lower tiers of talent.
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Would save them the trouble of doing layoffs after the irrationally exuberant hiring.
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Yeah, it's extremely weird that Google et. al. went on hiring sprees when they could have just given their employees next level money. All those weird side projects that haemorraged money led to lower return on capital employed, which pisses off investors (even more than not giving them fat dividends does) and also pisses off your employes compared to the counterfactual where they would get millions a year.
Funnily enough I was recently talking to a (leftier than me) friend of mine who didn't know that all the big famous investment banks were public companies and that anyone could buy their shares.
After I told him he was extremely surprised by this fact and opined that they must be an excellent way to make money only to be brought down back to earth after I told him that in reality they were really shitty investments because all that money they made went to their employees as salaries and bonuses, leaving their public investors with mediocre returns.
He said something along the lines of "Of course this happens, typical greedy banker behaviour". Because I value this friendship I wisely left it at that and changed the subject, but deep down a part of me wanted to quip "Firstly you complain about big companies putting investors ahead of their employees and how this makes them capital-B Bad/greedy, and now here you have an example of a class of companies which do the opposite and put their employees ahead of their investors and now you are calling them capital-B Bad and greedy for this behaviour? Make up your mind man!"
Why aren't there more often shareholder revolts against the banks then?
A few reasons. Banks do actually generate very healthy returns for investors in good times, and most large investment banks are integrated parts of ‘universal’ banks like Bank of America and Citigroup that have large retail banking operations that print money when rates are reasonable and the economy is fine. So often, while an economy is overheating and investment banking deal fees skyrocket, retail banking profits shoot up too, which means as a whole investors have little to complain about. The margin on M&A (especially in the US where deal fees are very high) is also so high that there’s enough for everyone to come away happy.
The second reason is that bank stocks are like all equities largely owned by institutional investors, many led by portfolio managers / executives who themselves started their career on the sell side (in investment banking). They have an understanding that a handful of the best and most well-liked dealmakers and traders (and their ancillary junior staff) can represent hundreds of millions or billions of dollars of income for the bank, and are themselves paid extremely well anyway, so they’re reticent to complain about banker pay (ie. “If you think banks pay too much, wait until you see hedge funds/pension funds/etc”).
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I agree, in many ways finance is one of the most worker-friendly industries there is. Things like MDs who have a few too many bad years and get forced out being given (almost military style) promotions to some made up title and a couple million for a year or two while they look for a new job, long sabbaticals available to most longstanding employees, a real air of camaraderie. We had senior leaders take huge real pay cuts despite some of their individual sector teams doing well to limit layoffs early last year.
I have a friend on the business side of engineering who said that he almost got fired when he was late to a whole-team meeting with the CSO/global head of sales because they’d been drinking the previous night and he’d overslept, he’d been thrown under the bus. In finance that’s a rite of passage! I’ve seen a VP miss a critical pitch because they went too hard the previous night and everyone (including the MDs and relevant Vice-Chairman) covered for them, not to do so would have been dishonorable. I’ve seen guys give each other the shirt off their backs (literally!) if someone’s going out for a client meeting and they notice a stain and don’t have time to buy a replacement.
Seems sad that other industries lack that. There’s backstabbing in banking, but it’s pretty rare because it’s a small world and nobody wants to hire assholes after 2008, the money usually doesn’t justify it and clients rarely like them anyway.
Yes to all of this.
The dirty secret in banking is that it is a fantastically boring job with close to zero intellectual stimulation. It's a sales gig that also makes you work 60+ hours a week on busy work. The military analogies and military-like culture makes sense - the guys (and gals) who make it are 10-20% above average sales people and 80-90% "I can take relentless shit for years on end" tough.
The best hustle in the finance world is high-net worth / ultra-high net worth individual wealth management. If ever there was a job that was literally "I get paid to golf and go to cocktail parties" this is it. The hours are sane to luxurious (anywhere from 20 - 40 a week). The money can be seven figures easily. The rub - your first five years are often poverty wages, it is 110% networking (meaning that if your network is bad at networking, you pay the price), and everyone has their "lucky break" story. No one makes it through grinding alone.
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It all comes down to Sergey and Larry, IMO. They wanted to try lots of off the wall things with their newfound power and wealth without being subject to market discipline, which isn't necessarily a bad thing (except to investors). One option would be to just start new companies, but that's a bit more complicated than just starting random projects within your existing company. So people were hired to enable those things, and the ads revenue not only continued but increased exponentially, so hiring continued.
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I describe the possible motivations behind this "condemning the opinion without describing it" approach in this post and earlier this one.
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Google doesn't exist.
It's just a bunch of people, sending messages to other people, with its components arranged in a particular way that has created self-sustaining income streams (largely based upon luck and having stumbled on ads and executing on them effectively before anyone else). Even if Google did have some deep ideological principles, it would be unable to translate them into some kind of transformative cultural force.
From that, principal agent problems dominate. There's no way for individuals' actions to cohere enough for any collective Google agent to arise. Google doesn't want a woke fascist state, or to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful, or even to make a profit. It's just a bunch of bureaucratic fiefdoms posturing to other fiefdoms to get a bigger cut of ad revenue. So an individual can get an edge in getting a bigger cut of ads revenue by leveraging woke arguments: who's going to say "well, it's stupid to ban Gemini from generating white people"? Because it certainly won't actually help them in getting their own bigger cut.
This kind of falls under your 2), though calling it stupid assumes a bit too much an entity that uses its agency in an obviously counterproductive way. How to distinguish each possibility? In isolation, the Gemini debacle doesn't give too much evidence (although it weakly indicates against 3; if demoralization was the goal, Google wouldn't have walked back the image generation). But if you place it in the broader constellation of issues that plague Google, 2 is the simplest and most consistent explanation.
Is this to imply that the corporation is effectively headless, unable to focus on anything as the left hand is unaware of what the right hand does?
While I don't know that much about how Google works on the inside (that is, that I haven't learned from here and the broader ratsphere, plus from YouTube drama), if it is the case that the corporation's divisions are locked in competition with each other, then you may want to amend your first statement to "Google probably won't exist in the future." To my mind, such an operation will either have to succumb to one set of execs unifying the corporation around one mission and focus, regardless of the pain that causes, or Google will just simply go the way of RCA.
Yep. Sundar's leadership right now is saying AI as many times as he can per minute, and this is the best he's ever done.
Google will exist in some form a decade from now, but, yeah, it will fail. The issue isn't lack of talent, money, or market position: Gemini is a solid response to ChatGPT, and Google should be able to leverage its existing weight to win. It won't be able to, because of institutional dysfunction.
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I don't think so, but let's dive into each one.
It's true that most users probably don't notice the sculpting, but then again, they do notice that for some reason, somehow, Google has gotten worse. I don't know if the sculpting is the issue with search, I don't think anyone outside Google (and maybe inside Google too) knows the exact reason why Google Search sucks now, but since for Gemini's image generation it seems exceedingly likely sculpting was the reason for images not matching the expectations of the prompter, then I think we should assign a fairly high probability to it being at least part of the cause for the degradation of service for search too. And as dominant as Google is now, changing search engines is very easy, low friction, so once a competitor gets enough traction it might turn out to have been very counterproductive.
I think people at the very top could dial back if they wanted to, as long as it's not framed to be dialing back on the commitment to ideology, but as a technical matter; they don't have to give any rationale except degradation of the service. Companies have been laying off DEI employees/departments with little pushback, because companies still officially run on the rules that put finances above ideology (for now). As long as it's because the company needs to trim some of the less "core" employees, and not framed as "our customers and employees hate everything the DEI department has been doing". So while businesses are not allowed to explicitely retreat from the ideological battleground, they still have the latitude to excuse themselves for technical reasons.
This one seems pretty unfalsifiable and conspiracy minded. I don't think most people outside of extremist political operatives think along those terms. And demoralization is easily countered by reminding oneself that if it was truly hopeless, they wouldn't need the propaganda, whether it's opinion shaping or demoralizing.
Would Theodore Dalrymple count as an extremist political operative? Or am I misreading you?
Ah, you are misreading me, it's not Theodore Dalrymple who's the extremist political operative, it's the communist commisars who deployed propaganda knowing full well that its purpose was to humiliate.
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Mostly this. It's the same schtick the MSM were doing all the way up to the invention of the Internet. Can't get angry about what you don't know. The annoying thing about it is that for a brief moment the Internet showed us what a truly free media landscape could look like, but this is why they had to clamp down.
I sometimes compare all this to some anecdote, quote, and perhaps even a completely made up story that never happened, where some bloke back in the day said that with the invention of the airplane all wars will end, because who will be able to stop people from travelling around the world, and realizing that humanity is one big happy family with no reason to fight each other outside of elite interests. I'd like to take that poor naive fool into the future and show him that not only is air travel possibly the worst option if you want to go somewhere without being harassed by authorities, but also what wonderful weapons of war do airplanes make! Then I wonder if every single media innovation didn't unfold this way. Cable? Plain old TV? Radio? Freakin' newspapers? Did they all go through the cycle of "woo! look at new thing! look at all the freedom" -> "tubes for pure unadulterated regime propaganda"? If so I only wish for AI optimists to stop and take a note.
Re: your second paragraph:
From the philosophical perspective, technology simply enhances humanity's capabilities, it's still up to us to actively choose to embrace liberty, honest communication, the pursuit of wisdom, and brotherhood among all men. I, for one, will not yet forsake that dream.
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Am I typical minding when I say that even without the way airplanes developed you mention, the effect should be precisely the opposite? I was all for liberalism and tolerance before the internet showed me female and black inner worlds, now I'm fully on board of the repeal the 13th and the 19th train.
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