In the email this morning, I see Quora has ideas about what I might want to read. You can enlarge these 2 images by clicking on them:



If I didn't know this was selected for me and you showed me those selections and asked me what sort of person do you think this list was made for, I'd say a white supremacist!

This is obviously based Google searches I've done in the process of writing this blog. Here's the March 6th post musing about the mysteries of IQ, notably the IQ of Jesus. And I brought up Hitler yesterday to say: "If those who think Trump is dangerously destructive are really right and they spend their time consuming Trump-mocking entertainment, they're more like the audience in 'Caberet,' making light of the rise of Hitler."

That is, the wrongness of Quora's picture of me is obvious. But it's not as though Quora is defaming me. It's just computeristically processing data that I created. This is just one glimpse into what computers are "learning" about me, based on my input, the context of which they cannot understand.

What method does Quora use? Wikipedia says: "Quora requires users to register with their real names rather than an Internet pseudonym (screen name)...." So I must have registered at some point because I wanted to ask or answer a question and it didn't seem like such a big deal. And: "Users may also log in with their Google or Facebook accounts by using the OpenID protocol..." I don't know if I logged in with Facebook, and I didn't think Facebook leaked data when you used it to log in at other places, but I can tell by Quora's suggestions that it is getting its data from Google.

I don't know if I care that this data flows around and companies attempt to use it with sophisticated analysis that I can't see and couldn't understand anyway (not without my mental e-bike). But I am a little afraid that the internet is forming significant important political ideas about us, and that this could be used in some terrible way. But in this case the idea is obviously wrong.

Obvious to me. Maybe not to you. Maybe you think I'm a white supremacist. And it's at this point that I worry that what people are doing all the time is more harmful and unfair than what these computers seem to be doing. People take minimal data, out of context, and think all sorts of things about you and carry those thoughts forward, spreading them among other people, beyond your view — distorted, emotional, self-serving.