Re:Google is not just a platform – It frames, shapes and dis...
by wutbrodo on Sunday December 11, 2016 @06:21PM
(#13154101)
This is the direction Google has been moving in for uncontroversial facts for years: the barriers to them doing this completely are mostly technical, not product-based.
For questions where there's any sort of controversy, this broad a solution is by definition unsolvable. It requires taking an explicit side on _literally every controversial issue the human race is talking about_, which means they'd spend roughly 100% of their time fending off mobs demanding to know why they said X.
Since we're on the topic, let's use history as an example. There are TONS of things in history that "everyone knew" where the "cranks" turned out to be right and overturned our entire understanding of a given time and part of the world. The scientific and academic methods are messy and iterative and (for the soft sciences) often subjective, attempting to provide a "best guess" for what the human race knows. To ask one entity to explicitly answer questions, stamp out unsupported theories but somehow magically spare contrarian theories that ultimately end up being correct is simply insane.
For questions where there's any sort of controversy, this broad a solution is by definition unsolvable. It requires taking an explicit side on _literally every controversial issue the human race is talking about_, which means they'd spend roughly 100% of their time fending off mobs demanding to know why they said X.
Since we're on the topic, let's use history as an example. There are TONS of things in history that "everyone knew" where the "cranks" turned out to be right and overturned our entire understanding of a given time and part of the world. The scientific and academic methods are messy and iterative and (for the soft sciences) often subjective, attempting to provide a "best guess" for what the human race knows. To ask one entity to explicitly answer questions, stamp out unsupported theories but somehow magically spare contrarian theories that ultimately end up being correct is simply insane.