[extropy-chat] Google Sets

Mike Lorrey mlorrey at yahoo.com
Thu Jul 8 21:11:02 UTC 2004


--- Brent Neal <brentn at freeshell.org> wrote:
>  (7/8/04 11:28) Mike Lorrey <mlorrey at yahoo.com> wrote:
>  
> 1) 7 times an infinitesimally small number is still infinitesimally
> small number.

half a million hits a month is not an infinitesimally small number

> 2) Traffic is not what Google cares about. If you get 100k hits a
> month from people involved with your organization, then you are still
> a null value to Google's PageRank algorithm. 

How would they know who is and is not a member?

> 3) Considering that Google Sets is beta (hence the "labs.google.com"
> address),  it is not unreasonable to assume that the algorithm they
> use to find co-occurences in their database is somewhat primitive and
> perhaps subtly broken. Occam's Razor suggests that this is a more
> reasonable explanation that a conspiracy.

incompetence before conspiracy? I'm willing to buy such a claim for a
few months. Then I'll fall back on the rule of "twice is happenstance,
three times is coincidence, four times is enemy action."

I've been getting a LOT of enemy action around here lately...

> While it certainly would be flattering for the FSP if there were a
> conspiracy, I would seriously doubt that the California Democrats
> care.  Just as an academic exercise, after your last response to my
> email, I asked a highly biased and unscientific sample of NC
> "Progressive" Democrats if they knew what the Free State Project was.
>  Thus far, zero out of roughly 25 people have responded in the
> affirmative. Certainly, the NC Democratic party couldn't care less
> what has gotten your Democratic regional vice-chair's panties in a
> twist. (They're much more concerned about the fact that the
> Kucinich/Dean folks are hell-bent and determined to "reshape" the NC
> party.)

You are assuming that google editors would not be NH resident
Democrats. One assumption too many.

> 
> I assume you have been involved with the Libertarian party, which
> tends to have fairly good cooperation between the state
> organizations. I can assure you that the Democratic party has very
> little of that in general. Your NH Democratic vice-chair may know a
> few equivalently-levelled folks in nearby states, but to assume that
> he or she can call out a national jihad, bringing shadowy and murky
> forces to bear on your organization is, frankly, just a little silly.

Actually, I only became an LPNH member last year. Up to then, I
considered party membership a characteristic of ineffectual big
"L"-ness. LPNH actually doesn't cooperate very well with National, and
doesn't share funds at all. However, I have noticed that political
people cooperate nationwide outside of party organization. Most
Libertarian activism happens in spite of the national party, primarily.
Similarly, the US 'liberal' movement displays a similar degree of
decentralized distributed networking in its activism.

For instance, the fellow who created the 'save grafton' website is a
DNC party operative who moved to grafton two months ago to coordinate
the attack on the Free Town movement as a 'local'.

The real target of the attack on us is Governor Benson (R) who endorsed
the FSP last year, and who the Dems are unable to mount a credible
opponent against in this years race. They may not care about us. They
do care immensely about who sits in the governors office in NH, since
the state has so much influence on Presidential politics. Smear us, and
by association, they smear him.

> 
> Finally, though Google plays its cards fairly close to the chest in
> this regard, I'm pretty confident that a "Google editor" is a
> non-existent thing. 

Really? Then why do they have links for people to sign up to be google
editors?

The DNC has a distinct history of editing history to help achieve their
goals, for example, the editing of US history to eliminate any mention
that the original 13th amendment was properly ratified (this dealt with
stripping citizenship from those who accept titles, pay, or other
emoluments from foreign governments or sovereigns, specifically those
who claim the title "esquire" due to membership in any Bar Association
that is a franchise of the International Bar Association, which was
chartered by the king of England.) They have also edited history in
editing legal dictionaries to redefine words of prime importance in our
laws and our constitution, as I've discussed previously in essays
published elsewhere. They also perfected the art of fictitious voting
with dead people and other non-qualified voters.

If the internet is to be the archive of first resort for most people,
their perception of reality will be shaped by what information search
engines present to them. If such engine content can be shaped by
volunteer editors, as google allows, any political movement with a long
range plan (and prior experience in doing so in other media) can easily
edit history and reality that people perceive to fit a political
agenda.

> Google's whole raison d'etre was to find
> algorithmic ways to classify relevance. Hiring folks to edit the
> algorithm's results would not be congruent with what we've seen of
> Google's strategy. They are more likely to hire people to tweak the
> algorithms or to develop new ones, as has been amply demonstrated by
> their past responses to perceived or real deficiencies in PageRank.
> Further, I can't see any smart businessman devoting that kind of
> manpower to what is at this point a skunkworks project.

You are assuming they are paying for that manpower. One assumption too
many. Nor would political agendas be new in such dot coms. The founder
of Monster.com has invested heavily in the anti-gun movement and the
policies of the company reflect his political agenda.

=====
Mike Lorrey
Chairman, Free Town Land Development
"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom.
It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves."
                                         -William Pitt (1759-1806) 
Blog: http://www.xanga.com/home.aspx?user=Sadomikeyism


		
__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail - 50x more storage than other providers!
http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail



More information about the extropy-chat mailing list