I hate it when people call being wrong "lying."
This is a semantic argument. He was born there so it could be argued that Israeli is technically accurate. I hate it when people call being wrong "lying."
As noted in the article, it could be also be argued that Ted Cruz is a well-known Canadian politician, but at some point you move from "technically right" to just "wrong", and I think that easily passes it. Ted Cruz is not a Canadian politician, and it's not even technically accurate to say he is.
(The distinction between being "wrong" and "lying" I'll grant you, but I suspect the author is a bit peeved, and should be excused for using hyperbolic language when being ignored by Google's famously amazing customer service.)
So what is the distinction anyway between lying and being wrong?
Is the dividing line between wrong and "plain lying" whether someone has cold customer service? Is that why my buggy programs are just wrong, whereas Google is engaged in dishonesty? Or is hyperbole just dishonesty here.
It's not lying. Maybe it's being wrong, maybe it's negligence, but it's not lying. It's not like they're trying to display the wrong information. The algorithm isn't a person. It's not as simple as saying "oh, our algorithm messed up, we'll kindly tell it to say that you live over there from now on".
I wouldn't call it lying, I'd call it a sub-optimal algorithm design.
Generally, the person or group of people behind an algorithm needs to be fully accountable and responsible for the algorithm they use to interact with the world.
If saying: "it's not me, it's the algorithm" gets you out of the responsibility you can do all kinds of morally questionable things.
To me, it's about intent. If they are unknowingly wrong, they aren't lying. As soon as somebody informs them of the error, if they continue to report falsehoods, they are lying (and have now become fake news). It doesn't matter if the falsehood is generated by an algorithm or a person, or if the falsehood is malicious or not - as soon as they know they are wrong, they should take action to correct whatever has been published.
That's not the definition of lying. Lying is about intent. If you keep using that word wrong, you'll end up saying something that isn't true. Are you lying?
Being wrong is not the same thing as lying, or else everything wrong becomes lying and the word "lying" loses its meaning. No one wants to be wrong. That is where intent comes into play.
I was actually interested in at what point this should be considered intentional. At what point should Google be obligated to hide this (mis)information, or show some disclaimer? After one "feedback"? After 10? After this blogpost? After a newspaper article?
If continuing to spread the falsehood after multiple corrections doesn't attach intent, what could Google possibly do for you to think they were lying in a search result?
Google isn't a single person saying sentences who can immediately change what he says in his next sentence. Changing Google results is not trivial, the search engine has lots of quirks and is a complex code. If you ask Google to change something, you need to submit a ticket, which is in line with thousands of other tickets. That ticket needs to get evaluated by a customer support team, which sends it to another team, which sends it to another team. Google is a gargantuan entity and things take time. It is very easy to see how this lack of change can arise from something other than malicious intent. I highly doubt Google is intentionally trying to taint this one man's reputation.
TLDR: Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by stupidity.
Any possible situation? Of course there is. This one? Highly unlikely. There's no way Google cares enough about this guy to lie about him. Apparently, they don't even care enough about him to fix the error in their search result. Poor guy, he's in the "famous but not famous enough" valley.
I do not understand why you hate this. Making a false statement is lying, at least in my playbook.
That the argument is semantic is irrelevant. It may be the case that Google is only wrong because of a technicality, but they are wrong nevertheless. (Unless you believe that Google is right and the author is actually Israeli, but that is a different discussion.)
In vernacular usage, the act of lying requires intent. Is it perhaps possible that Parent is trying to communicate a difference between intentional false statements, commonly called lies, and unintentional false statements, commonly called being wrong?
If someone is incorrect about the time when you ask, it's possible they are deliberately misleading you. It's also possible they are not, and their clock is also incorrect. Would you consider both cases to be lying?
What's the difference between lying vs being wrong when your platform generated over $100 billion in savings but you refuse to pay for the same kind of routine customer support that allows many other companies to fix mistakes for their customers?
(The distinction between being "wrong" and "lying" I'll grant you, but I suspect the author is a bit peeved, and should be excused for using hyperbolic language when being ignored by Google's famously amazing customer service.)