Why is it hard to believe that an engineer would engineer something that agrees with their own beliefs?

It’s because of the way the conjecture is structured. It proposes that we believe a multi billion dollar corporation would risk their profit margins on the tastes of one engineer in the shadows.

Occam's razor would say that such a large corporation does not have the direct controls to monitor every single actor. Is it so hard to find actors acting against the interest of their employer? I've even personally experience cases where the actors are rewarded for such actions due to flaws in the incentive structure.

Saying AI does funky things from time-to-time is hardly an extraordinary claim.

Meanwhile, an individual injecting bias without the hack's true purpose being obvious to co-workers would be difficult. The more subtle and circumstantial the hack, the more likely it will be broken/ignored by someone else's changes.

A hack is still possible, but I'd want evidence of intentional bias before entertaining the claim.

Algorithmic bias does not have to be an intentional "hack" to have drastic effects.

Because most people don't work in silos that allow them to operate with impunity. I'd assume at a company the size of google any feature is going to have minimum of 3-4 different sets of eyes on it between Engineering, QA, UX, and Product.

Have you never heard of algorithmic bias?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithmic_bias

It's quite real, and it is not illegal (in the US), so asserting this is a "conspiracy theory" is silly.

Software engineers are human beings, so of course they have inherent bias.

The very term "conspiracy theory" is frustratingly flawed in the first case, in practice being nothing more than a perjorative for anything that runs contrary to the official narrative, where 'official' is highly context sensitive.

In practice it means 'a theory about a conspiracy' with the implication that conspiracies aren't real and therefore the a theory involving a conspiracy is wacky bunk. But sometimes the official narrative is that there was in fact a conspiracy, and in those cases the term 'conspiracy theory' is not typically used. A prime example is the 9/11 Commission Report which describes in great detail a conspiracy to commit mass murder. When it comes to 9/11, everybody agrees there was a conspiracy. I've yet to even hear rumor of anybody who believes that day was a series of unlikely coincidences. Whether you think it was bin Laden or Dick Cheney, it's obvious somebody was doing some conspiring.

I think the difference between the logical and practical meanings of the term is rooted in a specific case in which popular theories were theories about conspiracies, but for which the official narrative is that the guilty party didn't conspire with anybody. Obviously I'm talking about the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

It's no conspiracy, we all encode our beliefs into what we do. I don't think the poster is suggesting it's on purpose. Occam's Razor would suggest it's more work to take bias out, I would think.

“You know, you can remove men like Alan and me from the system, but we helped create it. And our spirit remains in every program we designed for this computer.”

— Dr. Walter Gibbs, Tron, 1982

> That's a popular conspiracy theory, but it doesn't hold up to Occam's Razor.

Occam's Razor isn't some sort of physical law that governs human behavior.

https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor

> Occam's razor (or Ockham's razor) is a principle from philosophy. Suppose there exist two explanations for an occurrence. In this case the one that requires the least speculation is usually correct. Another way of saying it is that the more assumptions you have to make, the more unlikely an explanation. Occam's razor applies especially in the philosophy of science, but also more generally.

That doesn't refute my point. A razor is a tool for working with limited evidence, which is exactly what I'm doing.

Statement #1:

> That's a popular conspiracy theory, but it doesn't hold up to Occam's Razor.

This comment is open to interpretation. A reasonable interpretation is that something must hold up to Occam's Razor, or else it is not true, especially with the inclusion of "That's a popular conspiracy theory".

In fact, the "conspiracy theory" charge is also flawed. The speculative claim "The algorithms are a proxy for some youtube engineers' tastes" may actually be true. We do not know.

Statement #2:

> The simpler explanation is that content from all sides gets buried to some extent, but it appears biased to people because they only notice when their own content is buried.

This persuades the reader, perhaps based on a presumed knowledge of the phenomenon of confirmation bias, that any such beliefs are likely an example of such confirmation bias. Again, the truth is not known.

If you don't like your comments being interpreted, you could tighten them up to minimize the need or possibility for interpretation.

I think he's saying that positing Occam's Razor isn't proof of anything. If he's not, then I'm saying it, and that it gets over applied to the extreme.

Sure it does. I'm hypothetically designing a filter that checks for objectionable content on my site. You find any use of skeletons objectionable. I don't, if they're cartoon skeletons. My filter will not prevent cartoon skeletons from being posted, but will post real skeletons.

Bias has been introduced.

The fact that "both sides" are affected doesn't mean there's no bias, it means there's > no bias. It's literally impossible to censor something without SOME bias, because somewhere, someone doesn't find the thing you censor objectionable.

My right wing friend argues that Google straight up manipulated search results to harm Trump and I don't have any evidence to argue against him.

https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Epstein%20Tes...

I wouldn't be surprised if there's an anti-alt right bias (which frankly I don't feel so bad about because many of those folks are toxic).

Also, to be pedantic that's a misapplication of Occam's razor. The simplest explanation to explain nature is likely true. Nature likes simple laws. People and organizations, however, can be endlessly complex.

Although bear in mind here that Epstein has a long-standing beef with Google that may be introducing a bias here.

> In 2012, Epstein publicly disputed with Google Search over a security warning placed on links to his website. [...] Several weeks later, Epstein admitted his website had been hacked, but criticized Google for tarnishing his name and not helping him find the infection.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Epstein

Here is a thought experiment: there are two political parties vying for control over the government of a country. Ahead of an election, leaked documents are published on the internet describing a plan by one of these parties to tear down the institutions of democracy in that country and install themselves permanently as a dictatorial elite. This party's political enemies will be rounded up and killed on an ongoing basis by a militarized police force, women will be stripped of their rights and property and reduced to chattel, possession of subversive materials will be punishable by torture and death, and so on. This is all outlined in the document, which was written and reviewed by the leaders of that party. They've been caught red-handed!

The other party has its skeletons-in-closets, but no analog to the above-described document exists. So, people using popular search engines to research their options ahead of election day find this horrifying information about party A and nothing comparable for party B, and they end up voting for party B mostly on this basis.

So, those search engines, despite providing results that faithfully reflect reality without a priori bias toward either party, will (hopefully) greatly influence the outcome of the election. Is that bad? Should they have censored this document in results so that nobody comes away from a web search with different opinions than they had going in? Is finding the truth an unacceptable thing for "big tech" to facilitate?

It's like when politicians like Steve King complain that search results for their names make them look bad. To me, if you conduct yourself as a racist, bigoted lunatic on the public political stage, that's what a web search result about you should say. I recognize that statements like "racism is bad" are subjective value judgments, but that's rolled up in all of this too: if as a society we don't think racism and other bigotries are bad, then this sort of search result won't be seen as negative. So there's some admission here that Steve King and his ilk know their words and actions are viewed negatively by a large segment of the population and so they would like them to be suppressed. By not suppressing them, are major search engines exhibiting a bias?

No, not really. I don't think so.

P.S. The burden of proof falls on the purveyors of conspiracy theories, not the other way round.

That's funny, because the only political video recommendations I get are right wing videos, despite actively avoiding them for years.

I guess when it comes to politics the Youtube algorithm just shows whatever the user doesn't want to see.

Youtubes PS4 UI "breaking news" section is exclusively videos about brexit/boris johnson (this was even before he became PM) for me despite me not living in the UK and having zero interest in the topic. It's weird.