Oddbean new post about login | logout I also suspect, based on precisely zero actual data, that: — Older people are susceptible to this, because their mental model for search engines are phone books — Younger people are susceptible to this because they’ve grown up in a world where everyone relies on Google for answers. Getting people to revise their mental models of How the World Works™ is challenging, to say the least.
@3409b63c https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/09637214221121570 is an interesting study on how to encourage people to develop strategies that enable them to fight exactly that kind of SEO attention-grabbing.
I also this that these conceptual models are probably the biggest reason AI/LLMs/ML will be a big problem. People aren’t wired to defend against these tools.
Maybe having heard and read — at an impressionable age — Douglas Adams’ seminal The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, in which the answer to the objectively unanswerable question as to the meaning “of life, the universe, and everything?” is presented as the highly computer-centric “42” inoculated me to all this somehow at some level. Or maybe it’s that I’ve been building websites since before Google existed, so I’ve been watching the sausage-making too long to fall for it.
@3409b63c Older people remember Alta Vista, Northern Lights, Yahoo.... So we're used to total bullshit coming up. Usually it was porn - search query "wood pulp production per year globally" Top result - "HOTTEST BARELY LEGAL XXX TEEN PORN TONS OF HOT XXX ACTION"
@e3c3962f hotbot, lycos, ask jeeves, metacrawler, oh yeah.