Eugoogleogy

Copyright Urban Mole 2016

Trust is a mountaineer’s rope made from the laces of dead climbers’ shoes. It is predicated on truth values but incorporates fallibility because often the thing you trust, or the class of thing you trust, has been known to fail. Scientists sometimes lie, air planes occasionally fall from the sky. Trust becomes a matter of probability, if you’re so inclined to calculate it. If not, let someone calculate it for you and trust their results.

Children are not good at statistics. They chose the let someone else route, and the person they chose is often one who has informed them well in the past. It’s also likely (perhaps in a tie break of competent adults) to be a person who’s part of the in crowd, one who shares the norms of their group — a normal. The questionable standing of cultural outliers becomes an issue later in life; for children, “s/he plays in my team” seems sufficient. See here and here for the science.

The silence of the calculation machine is the golden unfolding of youth. Trust, for an adult, is more complicated. It’s when you look at climbing shoes in earnest. Questions don’t have clear answers, nor answers clear questions. “Immigrants are bad for the economy” begs for someone to ask “Am I richer for this influx of ideas?” Deafened ears, because the question’s been asked and answered behind academic pay walls, and you can’t google it.

You can google it, traipsing round the pay wall, or use any other search engine you like to get at the information you need, but do you like? Children have a lot of growing up to do, and if Mum says water’s H20, they’ll trust her that glucose is C6H12O6. Adults, too, are sometimes busy. Staring at a pint of amber goodness, you might think what magic is in this? You could google it and read the top hit, which has been preloaded with the leading paragraph for you (a “featured snippet”): barley, water, hops and yeast. You could click through to the any of the pages indexed here, but you don’t need to: you already have the answer. This is search-engine-as-encyclopaedia, and therein lies a problem.

The child’s proclivity to trust an adult ripens into an adult’s proclivity to trust an algorithm. Algorithms are written by people, those people work for companies, so, by extension, adults trust companies. These companies tick the old informant’s boxes: they seem to tell the truth, and they seem to be part of your group. But they’re not informants, they’re indexers. They are supposed to lead you to something which, in possession of the amazing powers of scepticism, criticism, and reasoning you never had as a child, you can evaluate for yourself. Just how many laces *does* it take to make a rope?

A recent Guardian article highlights the warping of truth ongoing behind the scenes of your favourite oracle, and that’s another, bigger, issue. But it does highlight a common vulnerability: credulity. Curiosity is human, and questioning things is essential: little progress will be made if you fail to evaluate what you see.