The Search Engine As An Impediment To Online Research

I had the time last night to research, online, the question as to whether or not someone has noted what Galileo had to say about Giordano Bruno, his cosmology, his religious ideas and his execution only to find out that Google was little help in doing that.  It returned results that mostly had to do with the most vulgar level of popular myth surrounding both names.  I say "both names" instead of "people" because what I have found from reputable historical sources leads ever more away from what people believe they know about those guys which is almost uniformly wrong.   It would seem that the topics have been Google-bombed either through intention by ideological partisans or, more likley, through the lazy repetition of the common received myths as seen on TV, first, but, and probably less influentially, the historical fiction in blurbs found in high school science textbooks.

Research continues and, though I am hampered by reading Italian very poorly and very, very slowly, and the fact that the search engine of the Italian site that has his opera omnia online, frankly, stinks, I'm hoping I might find it. Though it would be faster if I had easy access to a university library with, you know, dead trees in it.

The extent to which the algorithms of search engines based on numbers of hits will distort and aid the falsification of commonly accepted "knowledge" is probably a lot more of a serious problem than people would like to acknowledge.  The ease with which you can do an online search leads to ever lazier habits and an ever more lazy acceptance of crappy sources, or at least those of known unreliability.  And the ability of a group to produce that result through "Google-bombing" has been well known for more than a decade.  It was about twelve-years ago when the puerile Dan Savage turned that on the anti-gay bigot and liar Rick Santorum to turn his name into a dirty joke.   And what Dan Savage did, others have done, some of them on the political right.   Not that this practical demonstration to the level of absolute proof has done anything to lead to someone seriously addressing the problem that using Google as a means of ideological distortion of the collective culture given a large enough and motivated enough group effort.    While that was possible in paper-based culture - consider the success in making the story of Galileo into a common received myth that way - its effects in online media, generally accessed through automatic, electronic ranking of searches,  has the potential to be much worse. That fact probably ensures that what was touted as an opening up of knowledge, on its most commonly used level will be more like the obvious and concerted effort to bend American electronic media to the liking of the corporate oligarchs, who certainly have noticed the opportunity to use the algorithms of Google and other practices of online media.

Wikipedia is, of course, the prime example of online media prone to that kind of manipulation, an "encyclopedia"  which is better as an experiment in how when no one takes real responsibility for the honesty and accuracy of something, when that is left to a form of faux peer review, it will be totally unreliable on any topic in which there is an active peer group with an ideological or even financial ax to grind.  I mentioned the blatant and public organizing to produce bias in Wikipedia by the pseudo-skeptics such as Susan Gerbic, but what David Auerbach says in  this article in Slate gives a more general picture of the automatic bias produced by peer pressure, the formation of in-groups and all of the other guarantees of bias that come with unmoderated, online communities that just-grow.  I like the honest description of what Wikipedia is in this paragraph.

“The encyclopedia that anyone can edit” is at risk of becoming, in computer scientist Aaron Halfaker’s words, “the encyclopedia that anyone who understands the norms, socializes him or herself, dodges the impersonal wall of semiautomated rejection and still wants to voluntarily contribute his or her time and energy can edit.” An entrenched, stubborn elite of old-timers, a high bar to entry, and a persistent 90/10 gender gap among editors all point to the possibility that Wikipedia is going adrift. Because Wikipedia is so unprecedented, I cut it a lot of slack, but precisely for that reason, it faces unanticipated dangers and no easy solution.

Well, I don't think Wikipeda should be cut any slack, none at all,  because, unless you have set a blocker to block it from your search engine, as I have, the top listing in almost any web search will almost always be a Wikipedia article.   On any topic of controversy there is a good chance that the article will be biased, at best, seriously misleading if not dangerously false if the topic is of some real importance in the world.   The least that an "encyclopedia" should be demanded to be is not hazardous to your life and not mislead you about important topics/ And there is nothing, nothing whatsoever in either Wikipedia's real life existence or Google's hit-based ranking of results that isn't just about guaranteed to lead you to misleading information, first.

The reputability of something that declares itself a reference work, an "encyclopedia" when its refusal to demand named people take ultimate responsibility for everything in it is made possible from the much higher standards we got used to from the old system in which those were produced by professionals, editors, publishers, scholars, etc. who put their reputation on the line by what they put their name to.  It was moderated by the reputation it built up for quality through the production of its content and the maintenance of its standards.  That's out the window, in practice, though the habits of relying on something as proven to be misleading as the robotic search of Google and the comment thread level of control built into Wikipedia's method of generating itself.

That it isn't liberals, and such "leftists" who claim to be all about facts and evidence and the such, aren't moved by this is troubling.  They, mostly, take this junking of the collective culture by this crap with remarkable disinterest.  The extent to which they've been lulled by that old, somewhat misleading and inevitably misrepresented article in Nature magazine, [Nature has the article behind a pay wall, which isn't my fault] comparing Wikipedia to The Encyclopedia Britannica, is, itself, an exercise in lazy and misplaced confidence based on repute instead of even reading the article to see what it really said.   Here is a fascinating retort to it produced by Britannica, with a really interesting look into the objections of Natures reviewers and the revealing responses of Britannica, pointing out that Nature's study used shoddy and even misleading methods of selecting what it submitted for review and the arguably arbitrary identifications of lapses by the reviewers.  I will point out that in my Google search most of the first pages of returns carried articles and posts uncritically accepting Nature's original assertions about its own study without much of any of the critique of it showing up on those pages, what most searchers would stop at.

Wikipedia operates like the worlds biggest and most bully controlled unmorderated blog comment thread. I wasn't aware of the class of "editors" who were called "The Unblockables" until I read that Slate article.

A controversial edit of a page attributed views to me I would never hold, and when I tried to correct the misinformation, several recalcitrant editors attacked me until Wales himself stepped in and saner editors prevailed and fixed the error. (To them, I am grateful.) As it turned out, I’d run into a couple of what one Wikipedia administrator terms “The Unblockables,” a class of abrasive editors who can get away with murder because they have enough of a fan club within Wikipedia, so any complaint made against them would be met with hostility and opprobrium.

The existence of "Unblockables" whose power is granted by a fan following of "editors" shows that there isn't even any internal evidence that Wikipedia's founding definition has any credibility, it certainly is of known unreliability.  And that isn't any surprise since those who could have pulled the plug on any of it built it on their refusal to take any responsibility for what resulted.  About the only comfort that real liberals can take from this is that it is a practical demonstration of the folly of libertarianism which, like anarchism, will always devolve into a system where the biggest bully with the fewest morals will win. We might have been glad when Dan Savage managed to turn the name "Santorum" into a dirty word because Rick Santorum was such a vile bigot, but maybe we should have been a bit more careful as to what we wished for because there is no one to keep the corporate oligachs from using the same tools to control information.  But the tendency in online culture would seem to encourage the kind of thinking that is done in the early months of puberty.

Update:  The extent to which the acceptance of that Wikipedia vs. Britannica study was sold merely on the name "Nature" is worth thinking about.  A brand name is as thoughtlessly bought in even the higher reaches of intellectual culture based on past reliability made possible only through peoples' names and reputations being on the line.  And once a brand name reaches the gold or platinum of the most known science magazines, even crap can be sold through it, even stuff that is generally considered an outrage against open inquiry and freedom of thought.  John Maddox, the former editor of Nature called out a fatwa against Rupert Sheldrake, advocating the suppression of one of his books and, also, wrote a diatribe against The Big Bang theory based on ideological objections - he thought its implications would lead people to religion.  That Nature's reputation shouldn't be taken as nearly the guarantee of quality that it is universally required to be believed is proved by its own history of retractions and an outrageous denial of its own responsibility for what it submits to review and publishes with a guarantee of that level of reliability.

 From that 2010 editorial, Nature argued four years back that scientists are primarily hurt by retractions and so perhaps should be primarily responsible for detecting misconduct that might lead to retractions:

“Ultimately, it comes down to the researchers — those most affected by the acts — to remain observant and diligent in pursuing their concerns wherever they lead, and where necessary, to correct the literature promptly. Too often, such conscientious behaviour is not rewarded as it should be.”

Frankly, these words ring somewhat hollow today, particularly now after the STAP paper debacle. In March Nature rejected a paper from Dr. Ken Lee reporting that the STAP method failed and there was no apparent logical reason given for the rejection. Ken has been the most conscientious of all researchers trying to determine experimentally what the real deal was with STAP.