Comments on: Lies, Damned Lies, And Facebook (Part 2 of ∞) http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/04/lies-damned-lies-and-facebook-part-2-of-%e2%88%9e/ In a mad world, all blogging is psychiatry blogging Fri, 24 Jul 2015 10:12:43 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=4.2.3 By: Avery http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/04/lies-damned-lies-and-facebook-part-2-of-%e2%88%9e/#comment-90066 Thu, 29 May 2014 06:05:34 +0000 http://slatestarcodex.com/?p=351#comment-90066 Thank you, good sir, for inspiring the best laugh I’ve had in a good long while. I just about lost it at “Dead people should stay dead,” interfering greatly with my attempt to read the whole thing aloud to my husband.

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]]> By: honnibal http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/04/lies-damned-lies-and-facebook-part-2-of-%e2%88%9e/#comment-20914 Sun, 17 Nov 2013 03:54:23 +0000 http://slatestarcodex.com/?p=351#comment-20914 I doubt anybody will be able to comment publicly on exactly how Google’s search completion works. But, here’s a plausible scenario.

Check out the results here: https://encrypted.google.com/#q=french+people+should+die

See how the second link is “Judge Agrees Marine Should Die For Murdering French Valley Couple”? It’s a useful reminder that Google will be chopping up the input query and searching for its component words and phrases individually, as well as the whole thing.

A natural way to model the probability of the next word after “French people should…” is to make a maximum likelihood estimate: given some example data, count the probability of each continuation, and normalise by the probability of the original.

But language is pretty sparse, so no sample is ever big enough, once you’re asked to model continuations from more than a few words. So you get better results by asking questions about the distribution of words immediately following “should”, searching for “french people”, etc.

So you’ll see similar results for “Republicans should…” and “Democrats should…”, because both results are strongly influenced by the query “should…”.

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]]> By: DSimon http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/04/lies-damned-lies-and-facebook-part-2-of-%e2%88%9e/#comment-17614 Thu, 17 Oct 2013 16:29:45 +0000 http://slatestarcodex.com/?p=351#comment-17614 You may also need to delete all your Google cookies.

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]]> By: Anonymous http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/04/lies-damned-lies-and-facebook-part-2-of-%e2%88%9e/#comment-15963 Sat, 17 Aug 2013 21:26:30 +0000 http://slatestarcodex.com/?p=351#comment-15963 *applauds*

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]]> By: Oligopsony http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/04/lies-damned-lies-and-facebook-part-2-of-%e2%88%9e/#comment-2435 Fri, 05 Apr 2013 23:42:36 +0000 http://slatestarcodex.com/?p=351#comment-2435 whatdoestheinternetthink.net may serve as a control for Google (unless based on it in some way; I don’t know.)

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]]> By: Mary http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/04/lies-damned-lies-and-facebook-part-2-of-%e2%88%9e/#comment-2407 Fri, 05 Apr 2013 19:19:32 +0000 http://slatestarcodex.com/?p=351#comment-2407 Probably revolving about the whole Indo-European stuff.

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]]> By: Avantika http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/04/lies-damned-lies-and-facebook-part-2-of-%e2%88%9e/#comment-2361 Fri, 05 Apr 2013 08:07:32 +0000 http://slatestarcodex.com/?p=351#comment-2361 I’m getting ‘Indians are caucasians’ which seems utterly bizarre.

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]]> By: Brian Delwiche http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/04/lies-damned-lies-and-facebook-part-2-of-%e2%88%9e/#comment-2359 Fri, 05 Apr 2013 07:36:12 +0000 http://slatestarcodex.com/?p=351#comment-2359 I’m getting “Sauron shoulda put a ring on it”, which I think I like better.

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]]> By: Julia http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/04/lies-damned-lies-and-facebook-part-2-of-%e2%88%9e/#comment-2354 Fri, 05 Apr 2013 01:41:57 +0000 http://slatestarcodex.com/?p=351#comment-2354 Jeff did an elaborate test of variations on “Why are [nationality] so ….”, which comes up with uniformly negative questions. First hit for Americans is “Why are Americans so stupid?” followed by “so cocky,” “so lazy,” and “so rude.”

Canadians seem to have the best Google reputation, as people want to know why they are “so polite” and “so friendly”.
http://www.jefftk.com/news/2012-08-17

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]]> By: BeoShaffer http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/04/lies-damned-lies-and-facebook-part-2-of-%e2%88%9e/#comment-2351 Thu, 04 Apr 2013 22:46:26 +0000 http://slatestarcodex.com/?p=351#comment-2351 I get “rationalists should win”.

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