Alan Stainer

Tech head through and through.

The funniest true story of the day?

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The funniest true story of the day?

I am waiting for an explosion from other news outlets, like the Daily Mail.

h/t Eli Fennell 

Originally shared by Gideon Rosenblatt

Knowledge-Based Trust vs. Truthiness

“That’s really scary to think about on this weekend.”

Was this Fox News reporter talking about her concerns around climate change? Nope, she’s worrying about how Google’s latest Knowledge-Based Trust research will affect the battle between facts and truthiness. 

What’s interesting is that when you read the actual research paper (http://goo.gl/13krAS), one of the examples that the Google researchers use is actually the birthplace of President Obama, using it to show “Kenya” as an incorrect answer, while “U.S.” is correct. Yep. Not truthiness, but truth. 

Might we be headed to a very different version of the web, where it’s no longer “Let the public decide what’s the truth” and we start building in better accountability structures for facts and truth? I hope so. 

Yes, Peter Parker’s uncle Ben got it right when he noted that “with great power comes great responsibility.” And that will be very much true when (not if) Google rolls out these new capabilities in Search, but personally, I’m quite excited at the prospect and the destabilization of truthiness that we’ve learned to accept as modern reality. 

Thanks to Karen Peck and Robert T. Best for catching this one. 

Some background on the Knowledge Graph and Knowledge Vault and Google’s efforts to automate the extraction of knowledge: 

http://www.the-vital-edge.com/knowledge-and-artificial-intelligence/

http://www.addictinginfo.org/2015/03/07/fox-news-officially-freaking-out-about-googles-plan-to-rank-sites-by-accuracy-video/

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Comments

  1. Art Hutchins says

    “They say you’re entitled to your own opinion, but you are not entitled to your own facts. It’s a concept not everyone is comfortable with.” – #DouglasKennedyFox News

    Erm…. well yes you are entitled to your own opinions, everyone has their own viewpoint, if they are capable of having a viewpoint, if not, they borrow one from somewhere else, and thats OK, as long as they acknowledge that they borrowed it and don’t claim authorship. However…. there is no such thing as “your’e own facts” those are just opinions, and can not be called facts because that is not what a fact is.

    For instance, it is my opinion that Fox News is solely and exclusively for the purpose of delivering Tea Party propaganda, a bastion of racism and bigotry, and an organ of misinformation and fear mongering nastiness. That is my opinion based upon what I have seen of the show.

    Fact is, when checking the statements presented as fact made on Fox News, we find that they are either a partial fact used to mislead people to believe something which is untrue, and completely opposite to the whole fact, or has no basis in, semblance to, or has no evidential foundation to support it as a fact, which makes it a fabrication, a deceit, a lie.

    #FoxNews #FauxNews #FakeNews