And what about Google...?

As an un-looked for sequel to the previous post, "What if I don't want Facebook to decide what I see & which friends I hear from?," this past weekend I came across "You Still Need Your Brain," a piece by Daniel T. Willingham that questions over-reliance on Google, especially in the learning process (New York Time SundayReview, 5/20/2017).

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In my post about Facebook, I shared Farhad Manjoo's "Social Insecurity: Can Facebook Fix Its Own Worst Bug?" (New York Times Magazine, 4/30/17). The kicker for that post read:

Facebook's News Feed uses algorithms to choose which stories we see and in what order, based on who posted them, who among our "friends" reacted to them, and how much they mesh with the "preferences" we signal by our own clicks. Is this what we want?

In "You Still Need Your Brain," Willingham cites Jonathan Rochelle, the director of Google’s education apps group, who

said last year at an industry conference that he “cannot answer” why his children should learn the quadratic equation. He wonders why they cannot “ask Google.” If Mr. Rochelle cannot answer his children, I can.

Willingham writes that "Google is good at finding information, but the brain beats it in two essential ways."

Context

Champions of Google underestimate how much the meaning of words and sentences changes with context....

With the right knowledge in memory, your brain deftly puts words in context. Consider “Trisha spilled her coffee.” When followed by the sentence “Dan jumped up to get a rag,” the brain instantly highlights one aspect of the meaning of “spill” — spills make a mess.

Had the second sentence been “Dan jumped up to get her more,” you would have thought instead of the fact that “spill” means Trisha had less of something. Still another aspect of meaning would come to mind had you read, “Dan jumped up, howling in pain.”

The meaning of “spill” depends on context, but dictionaries, including internet dictionaries, necessarily offer context-free meanings.

Speed

Students have always been able to look up the quadratic equation rather than memorize it, but opening a new browser tab takes moments.... Yet “moments” is still much slower than the brain operates.

Speed matters when the quadratic equation is part of a larger problem. Imagine solving 397,394 x 9 if you hadn’t memorized the multiplication table.... That’s why the National Mathematics Advisory Panel listed “quick and effortless recall of facts” as one essential of math education.

Speed matters for reading, too. Researchers report that readers need to know at least 95 percent of the words in a text for comfortable absorption. Pausing to find a word definition is disruptive.... 

Deeper knowledge of words also helps. Your knowledge of what a word means, how it’s spelled and how it sounds are actually separate in the brain.... Good readers have reliable, speedy connections among the brain representations of spelling, sound and meaning. Speed matters because it allows other important work — for example, puzzling out the meaning of phrases — to proceed.

So what do I use Google for?

Williamson does value Google as a search tool, yet he advocates properly selective use rather than use as a substitute for memory.

The brain beats the internet when it comes to context and speed, but the internet clobbers the brain when it comes to volume. You can find any fact on the internet, even alternative ones. Your brain, in contrast, is limited, so how should we choose what to learn?

Students should learn the information for which the internet is a poor substitute. Getting information from the internet takes time, so they should memorize facts that are needed fast and frequently. Elementary math facts and the sounds of letters are obvious choices, but any information that is needed with high frequency is a candidate — in algebra, that’s the quadratic equation.

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Image Source & Notes

Image: "Your Brain on Google," from "Smarter than you think: How technology is changing our minds for the better," on the blog Chris Dorman, life as a techno-geek (9/10/2015).

See also "Your Brain On Google," by Chandler, on the blog The Curved Road: My Reality Check Has Bounced (7/15/2011).

Image: "The Quadratic Formula...," from Mrs. Smith's Webpage: Algebra I (4/17/2015).

Daniel T. Willingham is a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia and the author, most recently, of The Reading Mind: A Cognitive Approach to Understanding How the Mind Reads.

Cataloging & search algorithms:the Amazon "scandal"

In Sunday's New York Times, Motoko Rich has an Ideas & Trends article entitled "Crowd Forms Against an Algorithm."

Rich's starting point is last week's sudden online controversy over a major "cataloging error" by Amazon.com, one which "caused thousands of books—a large proportion of them gay and lesbian themed—to lose their sales ranking, making them difficult to find in basic searches."

In fact, "more than 57,000 titles were affected, including [top-selling classics like] E.M. Forster's Maurice, the children's book Heather Has Two Mommies and False Colors, a gay historical romance by Alex Beecroft."

One focus of Rich's article is the massive, almost instantaneous reaction of Amazon's online critics, which ranged from accusations of deliberate, homophobic censorship to arguments that, "while Amazon's intentions may not have been overtly prejudiced, the assumptions underpinning the retailer's categorization of books were still suspect."

What most caught my attention, though, was Rich's additional focus on the fact that the traditional ethical challenges of cataloging are being compounded by today's complex algorithms for categorizing digital content.

"It wasn't the first time," Rich writes, "that a technological failure or an addled algorithm has spurred accusations of political or social bias. Nor is it likely to be the last. Cataloging by its very nature is an act involving human judgment, and as such has been a source of controversy at least since the Dewey Decimal System of the19th century" [emphasis added].

Some folks this past week tried to exonerate Amazon of any intentional discrimination, acknowledging, as did Ed Lasazska of the University of Washington, that there can be all sorts of "unintended consequences of either computer algorithms or human behavior."

As Rich explains, though, others, including some who would not accuse Amazon of outright bigotry, still hold Amazon accountable. Mary Hodder wrote in a post on TechCrunch.com:

The ethical issue with algorithms and information systems generally is that they make choices about what information to use, or display or hide, and this makes them very powerful.... These choices are never made in a vacuum and reflect both the conscious and subconscious assumptions and ideas of their creators.

Dewey is a case in point, says Rich. The DDS is heavily biased toward the dominant white, European-American, Christian culture in which it was birthed. "More than half of the 10 subcategories devoted to religion, for example, catalog Christian subjects."

Most of us 'Net-age library professionals have little direct input into the processes of subject classification and cataloging—either in the library world proper or in the commercially driven world of online search algorithms.

Nonetheless, this one brief article has reminded me that we at least have an ethical responsibility as professionals to be watchful for and, if necessary, to counterbalance both the intentional and the accidental biases of the cataloging and searching tools which we and our customers use.

This includes, by the way, being scrupulously watchful for our personal biases in listening to our customers requests and doing the reference interview. I don't mean just the obvious biases having to do with class, culture, race, religion, etc. I also mean those subconscious biases which can arise out of disinterest in, discomfort with or outright distaste for certain subject areas which customers wish to explore.

For example, I've never had any interest in business. In fact, I grew up with a 1960s liberal kid's cynicism toward what I supposed were the motives of business people. That disinterest in and latent resentment toward the business world means not only that I have remained ignorant of the needs of customers with business questions, but also that I have avoided learning what resources would serve them.

Not very professional on my part. Certainly not good service to my customers.

Rich's article is worth reading in its entirety, and the issue of bias in categorizing and cataloging is an important one for library professionals to keep in plain sight.

One more demonstration that the mandate of the library is to protect everyone's access to all information.

Thanks,
Mike