By the Blog Author
There’s an alarming tendency by search engines such as Google to take you on a train ride to hell (formally, philosophically, through the fallacious philosophical preferences of deconstructionism.)
What Google, for example, does is guess your preferences and attitudes, then filters your search to suck up to you and give you back clickable selections that you will find to be groovy and which appeal to your mindset.
That’s cheating. That’s irrational. It’s also a lousy way to do research. What you want, instead, in accordance with good debating technique, good argumentation and good science, is an authoritative, unbiased, disinterested search engine that gives you the best matching and most relevant responses.
Google flunks these criteria of fair-mindedness. So do most other search engines. And they are not telling you that they are filtering their findings to flatter you.
Odd things fall out of this. You might get a "C" instead of an "A" on your next research paper, because you were directed to a goofball cult instead of a scientific laboratory. You might think you don’t have to bother to save an article or website, because you can always search for it later and find it. But over a year, your searches skew differently, such that when you finally go back to find that website, you’re identical search doesn’t work! You have to flail around trying to remember snappy key words that will somehow bring it back up (this has happened to me fairly often).
Here’s a website that explains this manipulation, with examples, and then offers a link to its own favoritism-free search engine:
http://dontbubble.us/There’s an alarming tendency by search engines such as Google to take you on a train ride to hell (formally, philosophically, through the fallacious philosophical preferences of deconstructionism.)
What Google, for example, does is guess your preferences and attitudes, then filters your search to suck up to you and give you back clickable selections that you will find to be groovy and which appeal to your mindset.
That’s cheating. That’s irrational. It’s also a lousy way to do research. What you want, instead, in accordance with good debating technique, good argumentation and good science, is an authoritative, unbiased, disinterested search engine that gives you the best matching and most relevant responses.
Google flunks these criteria of fair-mindedness. So do most other search engines. And they are not telling you that they are filtering their findings to flatter you.
Odd things fall out of this. You might get a "C" instead of an "A" on your next research paper, because you were directed to a goofball cult instead of a scientific laboratory. You might think you don’t have to bother to save an article or website, because you can always search for it later and find it. But over a year, your searches skew differently, such that when you finally go back to find that website, you’re identical search doesn’t work! You have to flail around trying to remember snappy key words that will somehow bring it back up (this has happened to me fairly often).
Here’s a website that explains this manipulation, with examples, and then offers a link to its own favoritism-free search engine:
= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =
There is a current events topic that is tangential to this. Out there in Intellectual Village, there is a legally fallacious argument behind the fog machine that says that the NSC hasn’t broken any constitutional requirements, because it is obtaining telephone numbers and visited websites rather than listening to telephone calls or reading your entire emails (scanning them for key concepts and words used by terrorists is supposedly not the same as a search or seizure.)
But the power of modern computing and the mathematical power of association elevate data minting to a search and a seizure. So NSC is, with certainty, conducting a searches without warrant and lacking probable cause. Be careful.
No comments:
Post a Comment