
When Good Intentions Backfire - kawera
https://points.datasociety.net/when-good-intentions-backfire-786fb0dead03#.c9xmyludh
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kyleschiller

      There’s a reason that no one can tell you exactly how Google’s search engine or Facebook’s news feed works. Sure, the PR folks will tell you that it’s proprietary code. But the ugly truth is that the code has been patched to smithereens to address countless types of manipulation and gamification 
    

I'm pretty sure the real reason no one can tell you how search works is
because doing so would make it much much easier to game the system and do
exactly what this author seems worried about.

Oh right, and also because it's worth billions.

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chipperyman573
It's probably a combination of the two. It would take tens of hundreds of man-
hours to write a meaningful explanation of exactly how search acts, and doing
so would provide no use to Google.

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smallnamespace
> no use to Google

And little use to anyone except consultancies that will charge someone through
the nose to help game the system.

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Animats
That reads like the introduction to something that could be good. But the meat
isn't there yet. Maybe he needs to write a book.

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tom_pulo
*she

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sampl
and it looks like she's already written a few :)

[http://www.danah.org/](http://www.danah.org/)

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jwatte
"Objectivity" doesn't mean that all statements should go unchallenged in
media, nor that all sides of an argument should get equal time or treatment.
There exists such a thing as objective, empirically verifiable truth, and
media owes its audience doing so.

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gydfi
True, but on the other hand people seem to believe their own opinions are
"objective truth" more often than is justified.

This being the case, perhaps it's a nice idea to err on the other side for a
change.

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WalterBright
An awful lot of evil is done by people with the best of intentions. For
example, Lenin said: "In order to make an omelet, you have to break a few
eggs" to justify mass murder.

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RangerScience
Best short discussion I've seen on "ends justify the means":
[https://strongfemaleprotagonist.com/issue-6/page-112-2/](https://strongfemaleprotagonist.com/issue-6/page-112-2/)

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esteves_
Lesson of the day: stop being good.

