Flame — HabitableZone

Flame » in reply to re: The Oracle at Google

negative affirmations
Robert — (archived)

I think that's correct. The questions must be phrased carefully when playing "The Oracle at Google". The technique I favor is to pose two questions, both phrased affirmatively (the "do not" seems semantically insignificant to Google), but expressing opposite or at least distinctly different thoughts.

For example, I just tried two questions phrased to try and see which destination people favor for space flight. I got 6,210,000 for "spaceflight mars", and 1,350,000 for "spaceflight venus". Five times as much interest in Mars, and that tracks what we know from everyday experience about what the public is interested in. Mars is more popular than Venus by a factor of three when the question is "colonization [planet]".

It would be easy to spin this game by phrasing questions with an inherent bias. The most objective technique, I think, is to keep most of the phrase the same but change just one term. That's the techique I used in the questions "democratic shitheads" and "Republican shitheads", and I think the results are pretty objective.

Log in or register to post.

The whole thread (37 posts)