From Eric Worrall at Watts Up With That?:
Google’s efforts to filter out positions which they think are fake news, like climate skeptic posts, have hit an unexpected snag: Google have just noticed large groups of people across the world hold views which differ from the views championed by the Silicon Valley monoculture.
Like we said, the snag is people.
As a climate skeptic and IT expert I’m finding this Google difficulty highly entertaining.
What people like Google’s Schmidt desperately want to discover is a generalised way of detecting fake news. They believe in their hearts that climate skepticism for example is as nutty as thinking the moon landings were faked, but they have so far failed to find a common marker which allows their personal prejudices to be confirmed as objective reality.
Darwin’s faithful do much the same in science education. No matter what is happening in evolution studies, Darwin is always right.
To put it another way, in the case of climate skepticism I suspect Google’s problem is they have discovered there are lots of published mainstream peer reviewed papers which support climate skeptic positions. This is likely messing up their efforts to classify climate skepticism as not being part of mainstream science. More.
If there were not at least some such papers, we should suspect political manipulation. For example, only in totalitarian regimes, does the party’s candidate get 100% of the vote.
But basically: Humans vs. bots? Humans won because bots don’t believe anything and we are not yet forced to believe the bots.
See also: A note on that fired Google engineer (who got his start in biology). You’d think he’d have known from Biology Today 101 by then: It’s all about feelings, not about facts.
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New Mexico: Science standards changes draw protest
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What can we do about fake news that would not diminish real news? Critics of ‘fake news’ should go to China — only the government has the right to post fake news.