Education and Bias - the Pichai Testimony
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, was asked by Rep. King of Iowa to provide the names of the 1000 employees who work on the search engine algorithm so they could be evaluated for political bias. There is no need because the answer is clear: yes, there is bias. Thousands of pages of research have been done on this issue. The more educated you are the more likely you are to identify yourself as Democrat or to feel aligned with the principles of the Democratic party. This is not because colleges indoctrinate students as part of vast conspiracy, it is because educated people understand that the world works better when both physics and tolerance are understood and used to make the world work better.
There is an argument for not educating people. There is an argument that technology has harmed us all by allowing the human population to increase and by creating machines of war and industry that kill, pollute, and confuse. Since the industrial revolution began skeptics have wondered if technology was a good idea. Perhaps we should all just live lives off the grid of technology; die young, not communicate or travel beyond the block on which we live, hunt and gather for food and clothing, all the things that have become so easy with electricity and rational thought.
But we do educate our children. We send them to high school and college. As they learn about the world, they learn that we need to work together to survive. And we need to use facts, not mythology, to inform our decisions. The bible does not contain instructions for building a cell phone.
So Representative King is correct. There is political bias at Google. Its employees are educated. They cannot do their jobs by referencing scripture, they reference math and statistics text books. In 2018 the Pew Research Center published this graph of the percent of voters who are Democrats or lean Democratic:
The demographic swing is not the result of a conspiracy. It is the result of learning more about how our world works. Once you are exposed to the history, literature, science, psychology, economics, and all the fields of study that a college offers, the receivers of this information choose to be more tolerant of their fellow human beings, to believe that working together in the form a government offers benefits of scale, and that there is more to life than money.
Why isn't the difference more, is the question. Probably because the belief in a god is so strong in many people. Education has some success in pushing aside the belief in god. The less educated you are the more you believe in God. And for these folks religion opinions often outweigh opinions based on facts.
Many folks just don't want to give up believing in whatever deity they have believe in. Faith is not rational. It is probably emotional. One can't be easily reasoned out of an emotional belief. In a previous essay I gave a short opinion on why this belief in god is so strong. Briefly (and this is a weakly supported opinion) many people believe in an invisible, all powerful entity, because their first memories, before language and before any other visual experience, is the face of their mother and father holding them. Out of the blackness of the womb, into the light, and the first thing they see is a face looking right at them. This face feeds them, keeps them warm, clean and dry, and protects them. They have no name for it, no experience of anything like it before, and it gets embedded into their psyche. Read my essay about God sometime for more support for this opinion but it is powerful and many folks can't give it up, so education will never be a 100% successful in converting believers into non-believers.
So, yes, bias exists in all places where educated people are required to do their work. The more education the more likely you are to understand that we all need to work together through a democratic, law based, government in order to continue to live the unbelievably wonderful life that many of us have. For years, I wondered why those people who considered themselves to be Christians should be so against supporting the poor and incapable segment of our society, so intolerant of other religions, of immigrants, and align themselves with racists and fascist elements. The answer is easy; religion is no substitute for a good education.
There is an argument for not educating people. There is an argument that technology has harmed us all by allowing the human population to increase and by creating machines of war and industry that kill, pollute, and confuse. Since the industrial revolution began skeptics have wondered if technology was a good idea. Perhaps we should all just live lives off the grid of technology; die young, not communicate or travel beyond the block on which we live, hunt and gather for food and clothing, all the things that have become so easy with electricity and rational thought.
But we do educate our children. We send them to high school and college. As they learn about the world, they learn that we need to work together to survive. And we need to use facts, not mythology, to inform our decisions. The bible does not contain instructions for building a cell phone.
So Representative King is correct. There is political bias at Google. Its employees are educated. They cannot do their jobs by referencing scripture, they reference math and statistics text books. In 2018 the Pew Research Center published this graph of the percent of voters who are Democrats or lean Democratic:
Why isn't the difference more, is the question. Probably because the belief in a god is so strong in many people. Education has some success in pushing aside the belief in god. The less educated you are the more you believe in God. And for these folks religion opinions often outweigh opinions based on facts.
Many folks just don't want to give up believing in whatever deity they have believe in. Faith is not rational. It is probably emotional. One can't be easily reasoned out of an emotional belief. In a previous essay I gave a short opinion on why this belief in god is so strong. Briefly (and this is a weakly supported opinion) many people believe in an invisible, all powerful entity, because their first memories, before language and before any other visual experience, is the face of their mother and father holding them. Out of the blackness of the womb, into the light, and the first thing they see is a face looking right at them. This face feeds them, keeps them warm, clean and dry, and protects them. They have no name for it, no experience of anything like it before, and it gets embedded into their psyche. Read my essay about God sometime for more support for this opinion but it is powerful and many folks can't give it up, so education will never be a 100% successful in converting believers into non-believers.
So, yes, bias exists in all places where educated people are required to do their work. The more education the more likely you are to understand that we all need to work together through a democratic, law based, government in order to continue to live the unbelievably wonderful life that many of us have. For years, I wondered why those people who considered themselves to be Christians should be so against supporting the poor and incapable segment of our society, so intolerant of other religions, of immigrants, and align themselves with racists and fascist elements. The answer is easy; religion is no substitute for a good education.
Comments
Post a Comment