74 Replies to “This Is My Brother Mohammed, And This Is My Other Brother Mohammed”

  2. Walter:
    What am I supposed to be looking for, exactly? I’ve got them open right now, but nothing is jumping out.
    AFAIK, google doesn’t filter search results based on political bias, with the exception of searches done within China. They were opposed to doing it there, also, but either had to comply with the “request” of the Chinese government or be excluded from operating in China. The google ranking system is still “secret” but it generally relies on the popularity of given sites (ie. how often they’re linked / mentioned on other sites). The basic idea is just crowd-sourcing. If you’ve got any evidence to the contrary, I’d love to see it.

  3. Alex, there’s nothing jumping out, but there is nothing negative about Obama, but about half the entries are mocking/negative of George Bush. Perhaps more than half if you don’t include the obligatory Wikipedia type references.
    If Bush’s bloopers are so notable, wouldn’t Obama’s 57 states and 20 century constitution be at least as important? Instead of Krauthammer’s essay supporting Bush’s record in the ME, there is a takedown of it instead. etc.
    Or is this just a feature of Al Gore’s internet?

  4. Walter: that’s the effect of media bias and the general social atmosphere rather than filtering on the part of google. Bush-bashing was practically an Olympic sport for the latter part of his presidency, and that trend continues today (although it’s declined slightly). You don’t see the same kind of criticism of Obama, and you DEFINITELY don’t see it on the same scale.
    Not saying I agree with it – I rather liked Bush – just pointing out that it doesn’t take any “filtering” on the part of google to create that kind of slant.
    FYI, the info is available – searching for “bushism” and “obamaism” both return about 90,000 hits. And searching for “Barack Obama crticism” actually returns 27 million hits, vs only 19 million for “George Bush criticism”. Try doing variations on searches and see what you get.

  5. It’s quite clear that fundamentalist islam hasn’t evolved at all so it’s not surprising that they’re against the theory of evolution. I’d like a reference to the statement that some of the more imbecilic imans is Saudi Arabia believe that the sun revolves around the earth. If this is the case, then it seems we’re doing Galileo vs the church, round #2.
    When it comes to defending science against religious ignorance I’ll take the side of science each time regardless of the religion. I should note that I consider “environmentalism” a particularly repulsive religion that tries to pass itself off as scientific.
    Christianity has evolved in that major religious orders no longer kill people for their beliefs. That stopped around the time of Galileo. There are nutcases that go out and shoot doctors who perform abortions, but these are isolated incidents condemned by the religious order they belong to. The difference between Christianity and islam is that in islam the incidence of insanity rises the higher one gets in the religious hierarchy. The writings of the immans I’ve read differ little from the rants I get from my paranoid schizophrenic patients.
    If psychiatrists had any balls, (I can dream can’t I) they would include islam in the DSMV as a particularly dangerous mental disorder. I presume it can be treated with antipsychotic drugs but often high-velocity lead therapy is needed to treat the more recalcitrant cases.

  7. “If this is the case, then it seems we’re doing Galileo vs the church, round #2.”
    Not quite Alex. Galileo’s conflict was with his own generation of ‘scientists’. The Church was trying to act a arbiter. Imagine if you will the Church trying to arbitrate the dispute between the pro and anti AGW ‘scientists’. A few years ago the Pro AGW ‘scientists’ were in a dominant position and the Church would likely have opted to accept the AGW hypothesis. In a few years the Anti AGW crowd now is in the ascendancy so the Church would have to reverse its ruling. The Church in Galileo’s time suffered from severe hubris in thinking it was an arbiter in this matter but the debate itself was almost entirely within the ‘scientific’ community.

  8. Alex, if Google isn’t filtering, then Bing and Yahoo must be. There is not near the level of mocking/negatives on their first page of “George Bush” search results.
    Google’s motto is a very Christian “Do no evil.” And you know how well anyone does at that. (BTW It’s ok to be critical of Christians, it’s an incentive to do better and hopefully nourishes a bit of humility.)

  9. Yeah, not on the first page; in Bing all the same mocking appears on the SECOND page.
    So … you can assume that google intentionally promoted all of those links and moved them up slightly in the page ranking … or you can assume that it’s just the natural result of the difference between the Microsoft and Google ranking algorithms. Do you REALLY think it’s the former?
    It would be foolish of me to try and claim 100% certainty on the issue, but clearly the latter is by far the more plausible explanation. There are many problems with jumping to the “OMG FILTERING!” conclusion, but, to name a few:
    1. Correlation is not causation.
    2. The cost/benefit trade-off simply isn’t there.
    3. Pulling off such a feat without any of your employees going public with it would be difficult as hell, if not impossible.
    4. Assuming deliberate deception based on such poor data is the hallmark of conspiracy theorists. In any serious discussion, the standard of evidence is far higher.
    In other words, while it’s certainly possible that google is intentionally screwing with the results in order to push a political agenda, it’s highly implausible, and the evidence you’ve presented is nowhere near enough to justify the presumption of guilt.

  10. Alex, your arguments are valid for discussion. I suspect your knowledge on any of these is no deeper than my own.
    I’m maintaining that search engine results are not unbiased, as sorting/organizing/differentiating is the core function of a search engine.

  11. Of course they’re biased. Saying that search engines are biased is about as useful as saying that natural selection is biased; it’s obvious to anyone who understands what’s being discussed. It’s also irrelevant unless you understand where the bias lies, what causes it, and how it functions. There are people/companies who make a living exploiting the bias in the ranking algorithms, so the biases are fairly well understood, yet nobody has seriously proposed that there may be a political bias, intentional or otherwise.
    Here’s one statistical study comparing the difference between Bing and Google results:
    http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-vs-bing-correlation-analysis-of-ranking-elements
    That should give you some idea of how these things are tested. Using similar methodology, you could design an experiment to check for political bias (although it would obviously be a bit more complicated). There are other similar studies available online – if you’re honestly interested in ranking algorithms, you might want to read through a few of them.

  12. Alex: “There are people/companies who make a living exploiting the bias in the ranking algorithms, so the biases are fairly well understood, yet nobody has seriously proposed that there may be a political bias, intentional or otherwise.”
    Are you saying content farms would not be operated for intentional political bias?

  13. Honestly? There’s very little difference between a middle eastern Christian and a middle eastern muslim. The common factor in all these links is crazy, bearded, black-eyed lunatics. The main difference is, the Christians aren’t under orders to murder innocents, whereas the muslims have an obligation to do so.

  14. coach, there’s even less difference between driving on the left side of the road or on the right.

  15. OK Alex, so there are still people that believe in geocentrism. Yes, if one assumes that the earth is motionless then the rest of the universe will rotate around the earth. This results in all sorts of bizarre corrections of the motions of other planets and it is far more parsimonious to assume that the earth rotates around the sun. It’s been too long a day at the hospital for me to look into the physics of how one can easily disprove geocentrism but I suspect that looking at doppler shifts of light from the sun at various places in the earth-universe system would quickly disprove the stationarity of the earth. Geocentrism was probably not an application of relativity theory that Einstein had imagined.
    If one happens to believe that a creator put the earth in the center of the universe and set into motion all of the matter of the universe into complex epicycles around the earth then geocentrism is plausible. If one believes that the earth is just an unremarkable chunk of dirt in orbit around one of the billions of stars in the galaxy, then geocentrism is lunacy. I’m agnostic and it may be that we’re all elements in a universe simulation on a massive supercomputer created by G_d2.0 3 hours ago and all of our memories are artificial and the simulation ends in a couple of weeks. Can’t be disproven but Occam’s razor comes in very handy at times like this.
    The people who created the galileowaswrong website are just as nuts as the Saudi clerics who preach the same idiocy. The only difference is that I haven’t seen any Christian geocentrists blow themselves up in large crowds of people.

  16. I don’t believe in Evolution either. That does not mean I have to hate or kill evolutionists. They do that themselves every two weeks with a new Ape they find. That turns out not to be human, just another monkey. Than ignore real human skulls at the same depth as deposited by a river .
    Anyway to me evolutionists have just boughten into the latest World Mythology. If you think its not, just check what was believed at the start of the 19th through 21 century theoretical “science”?
    Most evolutionists are even good real scientists. Frankly to me it doesn’t make a whiff of difference religious wise. First cause & all.
    What this does show is the typical arrogant Islamist tendency to think they run the World. With the only solution they know. Death & more death to the alters of their bloody god of hate.
    JMO

  17. Walter:
    “Are you saying content farms would not be operated for intentional political bias?”
    I’m saying it’s possible, but that it’s unlikely, and that I’ve seen no evidence of it. Just like most conspiracy theories – possible, but unlikely and unsupported.
    loki:
    “OK Alex, so there are still people that believe in geocentrism”
    According to various surveys, around 20% of Americans and Brits (and more than 30% of Russians) believe in geocentricism. That’s more than “a few”.
    Now, personally, I’m fairly sure that this is mostly a failure of the educational system rather than religious indoctrination – most of those people are simply scientifically illiterate and/or ignorant of anything that doesn’t directly impact their lives. However, there is certainly a percentage within their number who believe in it solely due to religious indoctrination. In that respect, they’re no different than the evolution-deniers – depending on how you define it, only between 13% and 40% of Americans believe in evolution. A large percentage of them are simply ignorant – this becomes obvious when you hear arguments like “I didn’t come from no monkey!” – but much of that ignorance could have been cured if it wasn’t for the literalistic interpretation of scripture by fundamentalists. THAT is the real harm caused by religion – it normalizes and even encourages not just ignorance, but pride in that ignorance.
    “The only difference is that I haven’t seen any Christian geocentrists blow themselves up in large crowds of people.”
    I haven’t seen any Sex In The City fans blow themselves up in large crowds of people, either, but I think they’re a bunch of ignorant twits, too. If the best you can say about christianity is “they don’t blow themselves up in large crowds” … well, you’re damning them with faint praise.

  18. 1) Alex, is your lack of knowledge of politically biased content farms a failure of your education or a result of your religious indoctrination?
    2) You believe that the 9-11 hijackers weren’t Sex in the City fans?

  19. 1) Walter, have you stopped beating your wife yet, or do you still do it on a nightly basis?
    2) You believe that the LRA aren’t Sex in the City fans?

  20. Alex, 1) Your ignorance on this prevents any possibility of discussion.
    2)I believe the LRA are not followers of God. But, in view of our discussion, it would discredit your hypothesis regarding Sex in the City fans.
    Meanwhile, you avoided answering my questions.

  21. Walter, 1) That’s why I asked whether you had stopped beating her; obviously we can’t have a discussion unless I have all the facts.
    2) I believe you believe all sorts of silly stuff, but I don’t believe you have any sort of divine authority to dictate who is and isn’t a “follower of god”.
    I didn’t avoid answering any questions – I gave them the full response which they deserved. If you expect a serious response, ask serious questions.

  22. Alex, 1) Ok, you can have a time-out while you get the facts relevant to the discussion.
    2) Who is the one believing the silly stuff? 😉
    Sorry about the lack of serious questions; I was myself to material from your comments. Guess that answers “2)”.

  23. “Sorry about the lack of serious questions”
    Apology accepted.
    “I was myself to material from your comments”
    I don’t think that was English.

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