Google Maps won’t correct the hours on my local Safeway supermarket which have been wrong for years. Asking Google Search (which is even more automated and relies less on manual user input compared to Google Maps) would probably do nothing. In the rare chance it does accomplish something, that “something” would probably be to just trigger the Streisand effect.
Shouting “how dare you call us a cult” makes you look like a cult. The correct response is to laugh it off.
I agree that getting into public debates about LessWrong’s cult-status would be a bad idea and likely trigger the Streisand effect.
But reporting an automated search prediction doesn’t seem like the sort of thing to start an argument, and it isn’t publicly visible anyway (to my knowledge).
While the impact of an effort to remove the prediction is likely very small or nonexistent, the effort involved also seems low, and the impact is plausibly non-zero on the margin. While priming hasn’t really replicated, the association (between LessWrong and cult) being one of the first things visible to anyone searching for the forum doesn’t strike me as a good look.
Google Maps won’t correct the hours on my local Safeway supermarket which have been wrong for years. Asking Google Search (which is even more automated and relies less on manual user input compared to Google Maps) would probably do nothing. In the rare chance it does accomplish something, that “something” would probably be to just trigger the Streisand effect.
Shouting “how dare you call us a cult” makes you look like a cult. The correct response is to laugh it off.
I agree that getting into public debates about LessWrong’s cult-status would be a bad idea and likely trigger the Streisand effect.
But reporting an automated search prediction doesn’t seem like the sort of thing to start an argument, and it isn’t publicly visible anyway (to my knowledge).
While the impact of an effort to remove the prediction is likely very small or nonexistent, the effort involved also seems low, and the impact is plausibly non-zero on the margin. While priming hasn’t really replicated, the association (between LessWrong and cult) being one of the first things visible to anyone searching for the forum doesn’t strike me as a good look.