Sunday, March 15, 2015

Can Google decide Truth?

Google is making a lot of people nervous by studying possible ways of ranking links by the truthfulness of the sites linked to.

It's just a study, and would be too wildly controversial to be likely to be implemented. But it makes me think:

Who would decide what is true?
Who and how would they decide if it's true that there is a god? Or isn't one? Or is many?

Even more earthly facts may change radically. Just consider this: if this was done, and if it also was done a hundred years ago, how different wouldn't the results be!
There are innumerable things which then were believed broadly to be Facts, which turned out not to be, or which we simply decided we no longer believed was so. Even the most learned scientists disagree wildly about the most basic things. And since it continually has been so in history, it surely is still so, we have not suddenly become omniscient that I have noticed.
And if a superpower like Google back then had put its might behind all those things believed to be facts, how many of them would we have been able to revise?

4 comments:

Tommy said...

"Even the most learned scientists disagree wildly about the most basic things."

But isn't all this chaos and confusion, the mother on invention the therefore the truth?

"Who and how would they decide if it's true that there is a god?"

Of course, only God knows if he/she exists. But, that kind of makes a circular statement doesn't it? Yikes another bottoless pit!

emptyspaces said...

I'd like to see Google work on the world's most indisputable lie detector instead.

Bru said...

I would rather see a bottom up approach to truth rather than top down. I'd like to see Google put some courses on youtube that teach how to tell the truth from the lie: basic logic, basic statistics, things like that.

Anonymous said...

Scientists are pretty good at testing and determining "truth" or "Fiction" eventually. For some topics it take a lot of testing and time.