Comments on: Mechanical Turks and Mirror Stages https://blogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/blog/2011/12/14/mechanical-turks-and-mirror-stages/ Culture, Politics, Academia and Other Shiny Objects Mon, 09 Jan 2012 21:33:48 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.4.15 By: lemmy caution https://blogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/blog/2011/12/14/mechanical-turks-and-mirror-stages/comment-page-1/#comment-8536 Mon, 09 Jan 2012 21:33:48 +0000 https://blogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/?p=1829#comment-8536 Wikipedia is a top page hit for many searches. This weakens my fears of a “filter bubble” with respect to search.

This is the top hit for “bank teller feminist”:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conjunction_fallacy

Not only do you see the study you were looking for, you get a good discussion of an alternate view on the study.

Easy access to alternate views through wikipedia is pretty common. It is hard to stay in a bubble when wikipedia is a top hit.

]]> By: Jay Scott https://blogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/blog/2011/12/14/mechanical-turks-and-mirror-stages/comment-page-1/#comment-8456 Thu, 15 Dec 2011 20:56:48 +0000 https://blogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/?p=1829#comment-8456 I find the mechanical Turk analogy confusing for two reasons. First, it understates the importance of technological limitations. Google built a very complicated engine and they have a lot of control over it, and it’s important to know that they use that control for their own business goals rather than our goals as users, but in the end it’s an engine that has to answer each of vast numbers of queries about terabytes of information in a fraction of a second. The human chess player inside the Turk is on equal terms with the human opponent outside, but the search engine is not on equal terms with its user.

And second, it causes a collision in my head because there’s a service run by Amazon called Mechanical Turk, in which humans do small tasks for money: http://aws.amazon.com/mturk/

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