Category: Philosophy

Amusement at Incompetence and Confusion

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It’s been a rough week in the news. And it’s been a rough week in comment sections … and Facebook posts … and Twitter.

If you, like us, could use a bit of Internet delight right now, consider this:

Politeness memes are silly. At best they add unnecessary delay to stating an idea. (I wonder how many days over the course of a lifetime are spent on politeness BS.)

At worst, if you don’t get them correct, people can actually get upset and refuse to interact with you over them. Which is maybe why Nan is careful to even put them in her google searches JUST IN CASE. sad story 🙁

Also they are forced on children without explanation.

That’s a tweet by 25-year-old Ben Eckersley, who lives near Manchester, England. He was visiting his grandmother’s place to do laundry — he and his boyfriend don’t have a dryer, he told the BBC.

Then he happened to notice this eminently charming search, and decided to share it with the world.

“I asked my nan why she used ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ and it seemed she thinks that there is someone — a physical person — at Google’s headquarters who looks after the searches,” he told the BBC.

“She thought that by being polite and using her manners, the search would be quicker.”

Now this explanation is deficient for several reasons.

But first, I could see this sort of thing making sense to say a very young child who doesn’t know much about the world.

But how do you get to old age and have this kinda stuff make sense?

Also, Nan apparently knows enough to USE GOOGLE, albeit not super effectively. But still, that beats not being able to use google at all by quite a lot.

So she could try and refute this theory of hers, if she cared to. She could find out, for instance, that 


1) approximately 40,000 searches per second occur on google.
2) google has only 57,100 full time employees

These numbers don’t bode well for what we might call the “telephone switchboard operator theory of Google searches.”

Also does she think the searches are CONSTRUCTED in real time by a person? Or that there’s some huge archive of every possible search that individual humans somehow access and provide?

Doesn’t she notice how fast Google is already? How much does she think politeness helps?

Has she tried comparing the speediness of polite and non-polite searches?

If Google worked at all like she imagined, wouldn’t you expect Google to have very fast, standard response times required of its Google operators?

I worked in a McDonald’s for a while and we had to hit certain minimum speeds for making burgers etc. They tracked the speed. I would imagine Google would do the same if it worked at all like how Nan thought it did
so there wouldn’t be much room for the Google operators to treat stuff preferentially based on stuff like liking politeness.

It might not have helped speed up the servers, but it certainly warmed many an Internet-hardened heart.

The grandma in question — May Ashworth, who was born in 1930 — spoke to the CBCafter her grandson’s tweet went viral.

She said she’s not very computer-savvy; she uses Google only a few times a week.

“I thought, well somebody’s put it in, so you’re thanking them,” she told the radio network.

Very vague what “somebody’s put it in” means…

“I don’t know how it works to be honest. It’s all a mystery to me.”

No surprise here.

Google UK and the main Google account have both responded on Twitter — politely, of course.

Gross pandering.

Meanwhile, how did Ben and his grandmother celebrate her new Internet celebrity?

“We’ve gone really British and she just made me a cup of tea,” Eckersley told the CBC.

People’s amusement at incompetence and confusion seems disgusting to me. What do people like about it?