[curtisblaine]

Devil's advocate was a way for the Catholic Church to argue against the canonization of a saint by providing a contrarian point of view about his life (everybody possibly loved the guy who was about to be canonized, after all he was a saint-to-be, but it was the Church's responsibility to provide an objective judgement on him).

Today it's synonym with providing an explanation of the facts which goes against public sentiment, for sake of completeness.

In this case, it means "I don't know what is the truth, but Google's angle, which wasn't reported before, is this: ...", which seems a perfectly reasonable and informative comment to me.

[lapcat]

> for sake of completeness

Who cares about the "completeness" of all possible, hypothetical beliefs?

> Google's angle, which wasn't reported before, is this

That's actually a claim, which is disputable. Unless it's simply reporting what Google has said publicly, which as I noted in another comment would be much better phrased as "Google said X" rather than "Devil's advocate: X".

As you noted, the Catholic Church origin of the phrase carries the implication of insincerity behind it, which is one reason I find the use of the phrase in other contexts to be objectionable.

[curtisblaine]

Why insincerity? Doing the devil's advocate is all about painful sincerity: we'd all love to proclaim a new saint but we have to nitpick his life adversarially first, to be really sure. In this case, we all love to say "Google bad", but there's an alternative explanation to explore first.

[lapcat]

> we all love to say "Google bad"

No, we don't love to say it for no reason. Google has demonstrated repeatedly over the years that they are in fact bad and have made a mockery of their previous motto "Don't be evil".

[curtisblaine]

> No, we don't love to say it for no reason.

That is besides the point. I also believe that Google has been acting badly for years. Even more so it's intellectually honest to do the devil's advocate and examine their motivations.

[lapcat]

> to do the devil's advocate and examine their motivations

These are two different things.

Examining their possible motivations is fine. Consider them, weigh them, criticize them.

But that's not what a so-called "Devil's advocate" does. The Devil's advocate takes just one side, one possible motivation, and argues for that, come what may, possibly insincerely. The Devil's advocate is dogmatic, single-minded, intransigent. When does the Devil's advocate ever admit that they're wrong?

Go back and look at how definitively the Devil's advocacy was made. There's not even a whiff of doubt or questioning. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42974179

[curtisblaine]

> The Devil's advocate takes just one side

He has to, because no one is willing to take that side.

> The Devil's advocate is dogmatic, single-minded, intransigent. When does the Devil's advocate ever admit that they're wrong?

He doesn't need to, because he announces he's the devil's advocate in the first place. Everyone knows that he's taking a contrarian, artificial (and much less popular) position that no one else wants to take.