Re: Solomon''s curse and search Bias - a possible solution

Hi Paola:

I am pretty sure that Search, as a technology, can ever be free of bias. 
Your suggestion that schema.org (or some other such system) might be a 
solution will not work.

The issue is that any schema, framework, taxonomy, ontology, etc. is 
already biased. Bias is a nice word for prejudice. The very essence of 
any such top down filtering system is prejudice.

Someone has already made a decision as to what is important and what can 
be ignored. The practical result for you is that any elements already 
deemed unimportant are instantly invisible to you, with no way of 
bringing them to the surface.

You used Google. Now, of course, Google can never be accused of 
filtering any results to their own benefit. That would be unthinkable. 
Usurping results for some self serving economic or political gain is 
dastardly and I am sure they would never do it.

What is required is a complete shift from Search (index and heuristics) 
as a means of addressing information.

The first requirement is a system that can assemble a complete set of 
possibilities in response to any query, simple or complex.

The second requirement is that the user can select from a list 
(hopefully a very long list) of filtering tools to derive truth from 
connections/possibilities.

He or she might wish to see the query results from a variety of 
viewpoints to gain perspective.

Let me give an example to illustrate:

Two facts are in evidence ...

The Alpha Motor Car Company made 100 million in profit last year .... 
and ...

they fired 5,000 workers.

Now comes the viewpoints to interpret the two fact.

 From the worker's union point of view (schema) ... those bastards, they 
made a hundred million and they fired 5,000 of the guys that made that 
profit possible for them.

 From the shareholder's  point of view (schema) ... we only made 100 
million on all that investment, .. fire 5,000 more workers.

 From management's point of view (schema) ... Well, how we managed to 
make any cars at all at the outrageous wages demanded by the union is a 
miracle. The only reason we were able to sell any of those cars was 
because we surrendered to the low offers made by the customers, 
squeezing us from the top. We managed to get some designs for products 
for next year and we ground out 100 million in profit.

Not as good as Toyota down the street but better than GM up the block. 
All in all, not a bad year.

Now you see the framework for the solution to your problem. The schemas 
are not used to derive the possibilities (that has to be done by a new 
system of addressing information) but they are used to sort and qualify 
the results from as many different points of view as possible to gain 
real perspective.

Good question





On 3/2/2019 9:07 PM, Paola Di Maio wrote:
>
> I wanted to share a concern, as I know posts gets read and issued 
> picked up and addressed in time
>
> I searched Google today for Solomon Curse, trying to find some 
> references to some historical cause and conditions in the first house 
> of David - not in relation to a specific race, but more in relation to 
> the history of the modern world
> to see if anyone is following up the courses and recourses of history
> https://www.iep.utm.edu/vico/
>
>
> Well, I was shocked to see that the first page of results were all 
> about a book and its author, and nothing
> about history came up at all.  I had to add additional words to create 
> some context to dig up some
> historical references.
>
> Just wanted to point out that I am very concerned about future 
> generations receiving a distorted
> version of history by heavily commercially biased search results when 
> typing some search terms and
> getting only/mostly the results from one entity, rather than a 
> representation of the plurality of meanings and contexts
>
> Bias is a known problem in searches, however I was hoping that by now 
> we would have
> some mechanisms to reduce this bias? Doesn't look like it.
>
> I hope that schema.org <http://schema.org> could help that by creating 
> metaschemas for disambiguation
> or other mechanism, such a representation of context which should 
> include at least
> two perspectives: the domain a search term is present, and the 
> time/chronology (to show which came first)
>
>  Just a sunday morning note before digging in more confusing knowledge 
> from search results
>
> PDM
>
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