Life is disinformation as well as information and what we need is the real raw data and education to tell them apart. Critical thinking, asking who benefits? what is your record? and who are you funded by? etc are important things to know in whether you trust a source or not.
Of course its not that simple and people get things wrong all the time but I think certainly teaching real critical thinking (as opposed to contrived nonsense like critical theory) can help improve the chances of telling fact from fiction.
What an evolution that would bring if critical thinking was taught in schools. It should be a basic, like reading and writing, for without evaluation of the data, it is worthless.
The last thing the elite/establishment want is people who think critically.
A Spetzari
3 years ago
Credit to Douglas Murray for this – we have algorithms built into google that deliberately skew towards a political slant.
If you search google images for “european art” – you get a host of European paintings with explicit bias towards people of colour, despite the vast catalogue of European art being nothing of the sort. A strange similar thing occurs if you type “straight couple”; you get a mix of images containing large numbers of gay couples. For “gay couple” you get what you expect, images of gay couples. I would urge anyone to take 5 minutes and test this themselves if they are in any doubt.
Intrinsically and personally i couldn’t care less – these are not things I can imagine searching for ever under normal circumstances and at a very high level see little harm in greater cross-representation of minorities in general.
What does bother me though is that a decision has been made to implement political bias into something that should be as straightforward as a search engine. It’s dangerous when superficially innocuous companies are doing this surreptitiously.
What else is manipulated and how much? We talk of Russian and Chinese influence in software but we’re doing it to ourselves.
“we have algorithms built into google that deliberately skew towards a political slant” Not necessarily. The search is based on keywords. If you look for “European art” the top results will not be the most popular examples of European art because the words “European art” are rarely used explicitly in describing individual paintings. They are described by their artist, style or content.
The examples where you find the most use of “European art” are going to be from webpages discussing a particular theme in the history of European art in general – and they’ll be ranked by how many people link to that page (and to some extent by your own previous searches). So the top results are either surprising examples – like people of colour – or they are linked to current hot topics (especially if you are interested in politics and often search on topics related to this) – like race – but it’s not necessarily due to deliberate political bias one way or the other. It’s also been shown that Google algorithms suggest racist or antisemitic questions when you start typing. The actual problem is in taking Google rankings too seriously – it’s a flawed system technically.
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean- neither more nor less.” “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master-that’s all.”
I’ve just searched on Google Images for gay couples and got gay couples. I then replaced the word gay with straight and got …. more gay couples. So it is true. In fact it was worse than that because a good proportion were entitled “gay couples are happier than straight couples” etc. This is almost certainly bias, but the bias might also be affected by the fact that people writing about gay / straight couples are from gay friendly websites / news outlets etc. Church groups or conservative outlets are not writing articles on the subject so much and are not going to get the hits to propel them up the search list.
That is a very good point and provides some comfort that it’s not hard coded.
That said doesn’t really explain the European art one or that if you search by any specific “race”+couple you get a similar effect (also from D. Murray). I tried to come up with a more simple rationale for it – notwithstanding that I have a decent technological understanding of the software behind it. But couldn’t explain it.
I guess “straight couple” is not a typical thing to write or say unless in the context of also talking about gay couples so it makes sense.
The European art one could conceivably be explained by the fact that people have recently been debating whether our art tradition is exclusionary; it wouldn’t surprise me if, as a result, a lot of people have been Googling “people of colour in European art” (whether to support or to refute the ideological claim). The algorithm then associates “European art” with the more extensive search term, and throws up painting of people of colour when you search for just those two words.
That was my first thought as well – but Mr Murray wrote in 2018 and the search brings up near identical images as described. If anything i was surprised it hadn’t changed more as the search tendencies and website content shifts.
But actually on the main point – Geoff Cox has pointed out this actually makes sense and is a non issue thankfully.
Messrs Spetzari and Cox, the observations you make are truly fascinating, but I’d hesitate to be certain that the example of gay versus straight couples is evidence of bias in the search engine. It could just be evidence that straight couples tend not to be particularly conscious that they fit into a specific category, so that the only time you are likely to read about “straight couples” is in juxtaposition with comments on “gay couples”. I remember years ago the film critic and scholar Richard Dyer mentioning that his students told him they knew that he was gay because he used the word “heterosexual” so often. (A comparable phenomenon can be noticed with other minorities; for comparison’s sake, try searching for “white men” and see how many black faces pop up!).
Andrew Baldwin
3 years ago
The tenor of this piece is disturbing. Its background assumption is that the officials in democratic governments are disinterested parties who are seekers of truth, which is naïve in the extreme. Pomerantsev notes that in the UK Magnitsky Act sanctions have been sanctions have been imposed against individuals in Saudi Arabia, Russia, Myanmar and North Korea. The absence of the People’s Republic of China from this list is glaring. It confirms the fears that the various Magnitsky acts instituted in NATO countries, with the NATO leader the United States taking the lead, have basically been cudgels for NATO warhawks to use to attack the Russian Federation, rather than the neutral tool to punish bad actors that they are supposed to be. Sovereign states have always had the right to deny foreigners entry to their country at will, and these could be used to deny entry to people suspected responsible for the death of Sergei Magnitsky or any other crime. To go beyond that and try to impose financial sanctions on foreigners without any formal judicial process is highly questionable, especially when applying it to Russian officials but not Communist Chinese officials turns the whole thing into a bad joke. Canada’s Magnitsky Act was the work of Chrystia Freeland, now our deputy prime minister. When journos asked her about completely factual reports coming from Russian sources that her maternal grandfather, was a Nazi collaborator, editing a pro-Hitler Ukrainian-language newspaper first from Cracow and later from Vienna, she refused to admit the truth of the claims. Instead she disgracefully squawked about Russian disinformation and the Canadian Minister of Public Safety, Ralph Goodale, echoed her claims. In the future perhaps such embarrassing revelations about our political leaders can be nipped in the bud by our so-called democratic leaders as malicious disinformation from hostile powers. Who will protect us from those protecting us against disinformation? It’s not a rhetorical question. I really wonder what Pomerantsev thinks about it, if he has ever given it a moment’s thought.
Derek M
3 years ago
In the late 90s and early 00s Labour had an ‘ethical’ foreign policy and the Neocons were ascendant in the US believing they could spread democracy around the world. That didn’t end well. Freedom in other countries whilst desirable is not something that it’s our job to impose (haven’t the lessons of the ‘Arab Spring’ and associated interventions between learned?), it’s up to the people in those countries to make their own way. The aim of our foreign policy is to further our interests, whatever celebrity ‘human rights’ lawyers say. Meanwhile a Marxist revolution is occurring in our country (and the US) where our history and culture is being trashed with the acquiescence and even support of the ruling class. Let’s sort that out first.
“The aim of our foreign policy is to further our interests” – it’s unclear what long-term aspect of our interests is served by inviting investment from tyrants and oligarchs. Clearly, it makes us more vulnerable for such people to have a financial stake in and corresponding influence on our society.
It’s true that efforts to impose or even promote freedom abroad usually end badly, but if our interests in part involve preserving freedom and democracy here at home, it’s clearly undesirable in principle to have successful examples of nations in the world that don’t embrace these values. People gravitate toward successful models, and the cause of freedom and democracy has been drastically undermined in the last quarter century by the fact that tyrannies and autocracies have become steadily richer. Our interests are not independent of what happens elsewhere in the world.
Dennis Boylon
3 years ago
Magnitsky was a corrupt parasite who got just what he deserved. Russia did the world a favor. It is just a shame Browder and Jamison Firestone didn’t suffer the same fate. Why the hell would anybody claiming to care about justice back these vampires trying to suck the blood out of the ruins of the USSR and the suffering Russian people? Our oligarchs didn’t get their way in Russia and got kicked out once the Russian people realized what the game was… Oh boo hoo. Give me a break.
David Jones
3 years ago
“We have already committed to making media freedom one of the aims of our foreign policy”
So has the EU. So what are we doing to cooperate on this and make the most of our influence?
Life is disinformation as well as information and what we need is the real raw data and education to tell them apart. Critical thinking, asking who benefits? what is your record? and who are you funded by? etc are important things to know in whether you trust a source or not.
Of course its not that simple and people get things wrong all the time but I think certainly teaching real critical thinking (as opposed to contrived nonsense like critical theory) can help improve the chances of telling fact from fiction.
What an evolution that would bring if critical thinking was taught in schools. It should be a basic, like reading and writing, for without evaluation of the data, it is worthless.
The last thing the elite/establishment want is people who think critically.
Credit to Douglas Murray for this – we have algorithms built into google that deliberately skew towards a political slant.
If you search google images for “european art” – you get a host of European paintings with explicit bias towards people of colour, despite the vast catalogue of European art being nothing of the sort. A strange similar thing occurs if you type “straight couple”; you get a mix of images containing large numbers of gay couples. For “gay couple” you get what you expect, images of gay couples. I would urge anyone to take 5 minutes and test this themselves if they are in any doubt.
Intrinsically and personally i couldn’t care less – these are not things I can imagine searching for ever under normal circumstances and at a very high level see little harm in greater cross-representation of minorities in general.
What does bother me though is that a decision has been made to implement political bias into something that should be as straightforward as a search engine. It’s dangerous when superficially innocuous companies are doing this surreptitiously.
What else is manipulated and how much? We talk of Russian and Chinese influence in software but we’re doing it to ourselves.
“we have algorithms built into google that deliberately skew towards a political slant”
Not necessarily. The search is based on keywords. If you look for “European art” the top results will not be the most popular examples of European art because the words “European art” are rarely used explicitly in describing individual paintings. They are described by their artist, style or content.
The examples where you find the most use of “European art” are going to be from webpages discussing a particular theme in the history of European art in general – and they’ll be ranked by how many people link to that page (and to some extent by your own previous searches). So the top results are either surprising examples – like people of colour – or they are linked to current hot topics (especially if you are interested in politics and often search on topics related to this) – like race – but it’s not necessarily due to deliberate political bias one way or the other. It’s also been shown that Google algorithms suggest racist or antisemitic questions when you start typing.
The actual problem is in taking Google rankings too seriously – it’s a flawed system technically.
Are “we”?
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean- neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master-that’s all.”
I’ve just searched on Google Images for gay couples and got gay couples. I then replaced the word gay with straight and got …. more gay couples. So it is true. In fact it was worse than that because a good proportion were entitled “gay couples are happier than straight couples” etc. This is almost certainly bias, but the bias might also be affected by the fact that people writing about gay / straight couples are from gay friendly websites / news outlets etc. Church groups or conservative outlets are not writing articles on the subject so much and are not going to get the hits to propel them up the search list.
That is a very good point and provides some comfort that it’s not hard coded.
That said doesn’t really explain the European art one or that if you search by any specific “race”+couple you get a similar effect (also from D. Murray). I tried to come up with a more simple rationale for it – notwithstanding that I have a decent technological understanding of the software behind it. But couldn’t explain it.
I guess “straight couple” is not a typical thing to write or say unless in the context of also talking about gay couples so it makes sense.
The European art one could conceivably be explained by the fact that people have recently been debating whether our art tradition is exclusionary; it wouldn’t surprise me if, as a result, a lot of people have been Googling “people of colour in European art” (whether to support or to refute the ideological claim). The algorithm then associates “European art” with the more extensive search term, and throws up painting of people of colour when you search for just those two words.
That was my first thought as well – but Mr Murray wrote in 2018 and the search brings up near identical images as described. If anything i was surprised it hadn’t changed more as the search tendencies and website content shifts.
But actually on the main point – Geoff Cox has pointed out this actually makes sense and is a non issue thankfully.
Messrs Spetzari and Cox, the observations you make are truly fascinating, but I’d hesitate to be certain that the example of gay versus straight couples is evidence of bias in the search engine. It could just be evidence that straight couples tend not to be particularly conscious that they fit into a specific category, so that the only time you are likely to read about “straight couples” is in juxtaposition with comments on “gay couples”. I remember years ago the film critic and scholar Richard Dyer mentioning that his students told him they knew that he was gay because he used the word “heterosexual” so often. (A comparable phenomenon can be noticed with other minorities; for comparison’s sake, try searching for “white men” and see how many black faces pop up!).
The tenor of this piece is disturbing. Its background assumption is that the officials in democratic governments are disinterested parties who are seekers of truth, which is naïve in the extreme. Pomerantsev notes that in the UK Magnitsky Act sanctions have been sanctions have been imposed against individuals in Saudi Arabia, Russia, Myanmar and North Korea. The absence of the People’s Republic of China from this list is glaring. It confirms the fears that the various Magnitsky acts instituted in NATO countries, with the NATO leader the United States taking the lead, have basically been cudgels for NATO warhawks to use to attack the Russian Federation, rather than the neutral tool to punish bad actors that they are supposed to be. Sovereign states have always had the right to deny foreigners entry to their country at will, and these could be used to deny entry to people suspected responsible for the death of Sergei Magnitsky or any other crime. To go beyond that and try to impose financial sanctions on foreigners without any formal judicial process is highly questionable, especially when applying it to Russian officials but not Communist Chinese officials turns the whole thing into a bad joke. Canada’s Magnitsky Act was the work of Chrystia Freeland, now our deputy prime minister. When journos asked her about completely factual reports coming from Russian sources that her maternal grandfather, was a Nazi collaborator, editing a pro-Hitler Ukrainian-language newspaper first from Cracow and later from Vienna, she refused to admit the truth of the claims. Instead she disgracefully squawked about Russian disinformation and the Canadian Minister of Public Safety, Ralph Goodale, echoed her claims. In the future perhaps such embarrassing revelations about our political leaders can be nipped in the bud by our so-called democratic leaders as malicious disinformation from hostile powers. Who will protect us from those protecting us against disinformation? It’s not a rhetorical question. I really wonder what Pomerantsev thinks about it, if he has ever given it a moment’s thought.
In the late 90s and early 00s Labour had an ‘ethical’ foreign policy and the Neocons were ascendant in the US believing they could spread democracy around the world. That didn’t end well. Freedom in other countries whilst desirable is not something that it’s our job to impose (haven’t the lessons of the ‘Arab Spring’ and associated interventions between learned?), it’s up to the people in those countries to make their own way. The aim of our foreign policy is to further our interests, whatever celebrity ‘human rights’ lawyers say. Meanwhile a Marxist revolution is occurring in our country (and the US) where our history and culture is being trashed with the acquiescence and even support of the ruling class. Let’s sort that out first.
“The aim of our foreign policy is to further our interests” – it’s unclear what long-term aspect of our interests is served by inviting investment from tyrants and oligarchs. Clearly, it makes us more vulnerable for such people to have a financial stake in and corresponding influence on our society.
It’s true that efforts to impose or even promote freedom abroad usually end badly, but if our interests in part involve preserving freedom and democracy here at home, it’s clearly undesirable in principle to have successful examples of nations in the world that don’t embrace these values. People gravitate toward successful models, and the cause of freedom and democracy has been drastically undermined in the last quarter century by the fact that tyrannies and autocracies have become steadily richer. Our interests are not independent of what happens elsewhere in the world.
Magnitsky was a corrupt parasite who got just what he deserved. Russia did the world a favor. It is just a shame Browder and Jamison Firestone didn’t suffer the same fate. Why the hell would anybody claiming to care about justice back these vampires trying to suck the blood out of the ruins of the USSR and the suffering Russian people? Our oligarchs didn’t get their way in Russia and got kicked out once the Russian people realized what the game was… Oh boo hoo. Give me a break.
“We have already committed to making media freedom one of the aims of our foreign policy”
So has the EU. So what are we doing to cooperate on this and make the most of our influence?
https://www.youtube.com/wat…
Not so widely publicised details of Bill Browder’s narrative.