[extropy-chat] Humor: Gmail [was: Agency as Prime Determinant of Personal Identity]

[Robert Bradbury]

On 11/4/06, Lee Corbin <lcorbin at rawbw.com> wrote:
>
> Jef  writes to provide the best description I've ever seen
> of the danger to one's personal identity posed by simply
> becoming different over time.
> ...
> > Alice at the age of six loved playing with dolls but boys
> > were icky.


[assorted snips]

I've noticed from time to time that the ads/links gmail provides can range
from simply interesting to extremely humorous.  But the email above
generating a link to "Peter Potty" -- "The only flushable toddler urinal.
Easiest way to train boys!" had me ROTFL.  Immediately after that was
"Personalized Potty Song" -- "Encourage toddlers to use the potty Put some
fun into potty training!"

This got connected in my mind to recent episodes from "Boston Legal" where
the aggressive lawyer rakes a flagrant (gay?) "pervert"  over the coals in
court.  The pervert subsequently labels the lawyer as a "potty mouth" and
sues him for defamation.

So my mind was connecting Google's link selection with Lee (or Jef) being
"potty mouths" [1].

I'm assuming the potty links are being generated by the discussion of "Alice
at the age of six", but one would presume that at six one is beyond potty
training.  So is Google's "best match" poor in this instance?  The humor
goes further when you consider that the lead in link which appears above the
message is to "The McKnight Endowment Fund for Neuroscience" so Jef & Lee
are "brainy potty mouths".

Related to this might the question of what kind of "intelligence" Google is
using to select links?  One would presume with billions of dollars at stake
that this is a very non-trivial question.  I don't think I've ever seen any
academic or public discussion of this but perhaps I've simply not been
paying attention.

People might want to follow up with their favorite Gmail "things that make
you go hmmmm..." or perhaps "Intelligent advertising" (though that might
want to be a different thread).  And a third thread might be whether we can
expect such corporate efforts to generate "intelligence" [2].  I do know
that without gmail having been created and my choosing to use it I would not
have these interesting views of reality from a different perspective.

Robert

P.S. I've still got a lot of gmail invites if anyone needs one.

1. No reason this association would have occured had Google not selected
*those* links and the Boston Legal writers not come up with *that*
particular phrase.  Serendipity at work.
2. Perhaps this has been discussed at length on other lists and I'm just
unaware of those discussions.
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