Can you handle the truth?
Imagine being able to check instantly whether or not statements made by politicians were correct. That is the sort of service Google Inc. boss Eric Schmidt believes the Internet will offer within five years.
Politicians have yet to appreciate the impact of the online world, which will also affect the outcome of elections, Schmidt said in an interview with the Financial Times published on Wednesday.
He predicted that “truth predictor” software would, within five years, “hold politicians to account.” People would be able to use programs to check seemingly factual statements against historical data to see to see if they were correct.
“One of my messages to them (politicians) is to think about having every one of your voters online all the time, then inputting ‘is this true or false.’ We (at Google) are not in charge of truth but we might be able to give a probability,” he told the newspaper.
The advent of television taught political leaders the art of the sound bite. The Internet will also force them to adapt.
“The Internet has largely filled a role of funding for politicians … but it has not yet affected elections. It clearly will,” Schmidt said.
“It has broken down the barriers that exist between people and information, effectively democratizing access to human knowledge,” Schmidt wrote. “This has made us much more powerful as individuals.”
I sort of envision this like having Mr. Spock in a box. Ask if a specific statement on Middle Eastern politics from the President is true or false — and receive a measured Vulcan answer like, “Likelihood of truth = 6%; likelihood of false = 94%.”
As much I would like to see this, I can’t see it how it could ever work. Who decides what is true? Is it determined by how many results claim its true, or by how many experts it can find that support it. In which case how does it determine who/what is an expert?
This would probably work great if the politician quotes a study, it could determine if they quoted the study correctly, but what about WMDs? No one will ever come to agreement on that.
I suggest readiing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Light_of_Other_Days
for an idea on how this could play out.
In addition to being a decent book, it deals with exactly what we’re talking about here…. *instant* accessibility to the actual occurences of the past. If you think someone is lying, you can “travel” back in time to see what actually occurred.
Of course, this particular “solution” had other implications beyond verificaiton of fact.
Pick it up if you’re not busy.
Ryan
And how can we know the info on the internet is the truth? How can we know it’s not been manipulated? I think we should stick with the good old common sense + knowing that all politicians lie.
My earliest memories are from the 1970s in NYC. I remember a city that was polluted, crime-ridden and fear was rampant. Killings were a common occurence. I had to walk around drug addicts sprawled inside my building’s stairways. I was caught in street shoot outs where I had to run for cover because shots were being sprayed in the streets. Gunshots could be heard everynight while police sirens echoed everywhere. I don’t know how I survived living in and making it out of that cesspool. I think it had to do with Liberals giving power to criminals because everyone’s voice and freedom of expression was protected under the constitution. Where am I going with this? Well, this is what I remember. BUT, my dad remembers the 50’s and 60’s. He was a shop owner. He told me how everyone in the neighborhood was friendly. He didn’t have to pull down iron gates at his shop when leaving for the day. A simple lock on the front door was enough. The next, the pane window was still there– not broken, not vandalized. The streets were clean. People were courteous. There was little crime. Our building was nice– a classic six as realtors call it in pre-war building. I’ve walked into 5th Avenue homes and Park Avenue ones where the rich and famous live, and our apartment was not much different. What happened in the ’70s. I think it was the FALL OF TRUTH. It was the Vietnam War, Nixon’s lies. The fall of Truth seems to come with it a decline in civilization. The ’90s, however, saw a rebirth. NYC became brilliant, cleaner. My folks who still live in the same building have seen their building go from a rat’s hole to a luxurious, doorman building with totally renovated apartments going for $2,000++/month rents (though they still pay $400 under rent control). Again, tragically, Truth has once again fallen with Bush. Another Vietnam and another president who lies. I think another destruction of civilization is coming unless there is an immediate correction. Frank Rich has a great book that recently came out that tells it like it is. The front cover says it all:
The Greatest Story Ever SOLD: The Decline and Fall of TRUTH, From 9/11 to Katrina (Mission Accomplished. Heckuva Job, Brownie. Shock and Awe. Slam Dunk. Dead or Alive. Bring ’em On! Last Throes. The Smoking Gun is a Mushroom Cloud. Uranium from Africa. As the Iraqis Stand Up, We’ll Stand Down…)
[edited: pls use tinyurl for long links]
The Bush administration is DESTROYING America. The way to Truth is NOT BY LIES. The only way to Truth is by BEING TRUTHFUL. The Truth brings with it revival, rebirth and a future for our children. Lies brings with it destruction, death and a debt to our children.
“It has broken down the barriers that exist between people and information, effectively democratizing access to human knowledge,”
But it is also “Balkanizing” people – in that we all seem to be self-selecting our information providers, and forming online echo-chambers…
i.e.
How many “Liberals” get their news from News Corp websites?
How many “Conservatives” regularly visit NYTimes.com?
Why bother? Just assume they’re lying all the time, which they are…
Oops. “Exactly” was a strong word. It deals with a similar idea.
Ryan
How do you know when a politician is lying? Their lips move. *rimshot*
Vis-a-vis worldwide acceptance of an “it’s not my job!” planning strategy, there is a likelihood that most of the electronic based dialogue on every subject, which probably contains significantly important information (and sure tons of worthless crap, like my posts) will be lost because of the relatively short shelf-life and fragility of electronic media and the absence of any unified archive methodology. It matters very little if information is on the Internet or from a book, newspaper or broadcast, only if it survives and is available in full and not selectively archived, according to financial or political motives, will it even be around to be evaluated by historians. It’s great to be able to be able to read a transcript from a speech two weeks or years ago, but who makes the call on what survives over the decades? This really goes way beyond just political filtration and Google’s short term role. We have reached a point already where hundreds of companies have gone by the wayside and their content discarded along with their office furniture. Ten years into “Digital Web World” we only have a tiny fraction of the contents of libraries, historical collections of books, newspapers, photographs and other artifacts worth saving, having been made available on digital media or online. We aren’t getting ahead here we are falling behind at an exponentially increasing rate. Cave painting is an advanced technology compared to what we are doing today to insure the survivability of the record of our existence. Hell, we couldn’t even find John’s Singer PC 15 years after the fact.
lol – and in 5 yrs society will be so much more connected too… watch out govt ppls – too bad we dont have it now (running on a sidebar onscreen during the “state of the union adress”, fox style)
Liars love the internet. Even snopes.com, the urban legend people, floated some intentional urban legends (e.g., Mr. Ed was really a zebra) just to illustrate what they called the False Authority Syndrome. Now Google is to become the authority? Hmm.
But Schmidt is right about one thing – lying is easy whether one is doing it on the internet or on the Rush (“it’s just entertainment’) Limbaugh show. An efficient search-engine-based fact checker could at least make it a bit harder for pols to twist history to fit their agendas.
The truth only counts if people want to hear it. When Bush and cronies were telling America that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, the head of the CIA at the time said that there was no evidence of that. They even released a report to that effect. No one listened.
If Google want to help Joe Blow to decide which candidate to choose, then make a tool that makes it easy to see how truthful the politician has been in the past, and what his opinions are on different issues.
Sign me up to be one of the first users!
#1 – You are correct though. Who determines what are lies? So many studies are biased. So many times people can not agree to baselines and definitions to measure success and failure. The formulas the OMB uses to gauge national debt, efficiency, etc. are under constant debate and still influenced by who has the power.
This will not prevent spinning or destortion of facts.
Marnie,
It’s important to note that the Nature article you cite isn’t a peer reviewed scientific study, it’s a casual review at best, and one which suffered from a number of methodological errors. For instance, Nature sent one reviewer a 300 word introduction to a 6500 word EB article, who cited the Britannica article for omitting key information (that was covered in the 6200 words the reviewer didn’t see).
And of course, not all errors are created equal. For instance, a Nature reviewer prefers the spelling “Crotona” to Britannica’s “Crotone”. The proper English spelling of the name of this Italian town might be a bit hard to pin down, but the U.S. Board on Geographic Names and other sources agree with Britannica on this. Nature reviewers cited some Wikipedia articles as “highly misleading” or “absoultely wrong”. Are these problems really comparable? Nature reported them as if they were.
Although several errors within Britannica were identified by the Nature review (and corrected as fast if not faster than the errors in Wikipedia), Britannica wrote a detailed response to the study, citing profound errors in the study’s premise and methodology. See http://corporate.britannica.com/britannica_nature_response.pdf for more.
-eb gal
Thanks for the link, eb, I actually had read Britannica’s response already, as I usually try to read various sides of a story, including, in this instance, the viewpoint of Britannica, one of the parties under scrutiny in the study.
Just for balance this is a link to Wikipedia’s viewpoint, the other party under scrutiny. In a typical wikipedia fashion, you’ll find there is an attempt there at covering both sides of the stories (including Britannica’s response), and some…
Also, for the record, for its study, Nature chose articles from both sites in a wide range of topics and sent them to what it called “relevant” field experts for peer review. The experts then compared the competing articles–one from each site on a given topic–side by side, but were not told which article came from which site.
But this is probably not the place to begin a thread about wikipedia. The point is that the fact that people are even having a debate about which of Britannica or Wikipedia is the most accurate of the two takes us, I think, a long way already from the predictions of the nay-sayers who predicted the worse about Wikipedia and said it would be chaos and couldn’t work.
I believe the nay-sayers will be proven wrong about the “truth-predictor” or about the internet in general, for exactly the same reasons they were wrong about wikipedia: diversity and pluralism can be a workable synergistic instrument of truth.
Politicians know that one can say things that cannot be done. And most of them will do so, if they can get away with it and it works in their favor, or appears to be the populist thing to do (Tell people what they want to hear. Or scare or delude people into accepting as a necessity policies they would normally oppose.) They’ll do it because investigative reporting is not what it used to be and reporters will let them get away with it. The trick is to keep the focus on what is being said and not on what can be done. Here is hoping that the Internet will be an instrument that helps bring the focus back on a meaningful debate about what can be done or things of interest that could be done in this country or in the world regardless of whether politicians are talking about them or not.
My prediction is that soon is is not the Internet that will be looking at what politicians are doing but the politicians who will be looking at the Internet looking for what the current trends are, what the people’s dreams, hope and expectations are…the dreams, hopes and expectations of the people they represent. And shouldn’t that be the way it is!