licentious radio

Thursday, March 21, 2002
[3:40:57 PM]

Does Google have a responsibility to index Scientology sites?

What is the relative harm of de-listing uncooperative organizations, versus allowing corrupt, unaccountable bureaucracies to use lawyer-terrorism to cover-up their outrageous practices?

This gets down to elementary game theory: if there's no cost to back-stabbing over time, back-stabbing is a winning proposition. (Look at Trent Lott.) Tit-for-tat with a bias towards cooperation wins over time because misbehaving sociopathic louts get no cooperation, and therefore have incentive to behave.

The problem with tit-for-tat in this case is that we are all worse off if Google stops indexing Scientology. Of course Scientology loses more....

Of course we all know Scientology has a huge Google-baiting operation: hundreds of sites linking to each other in order to appear high in Google's search results. Google wouldn't have to de-list Scientology. Google could just adjust its weighting of Scientology sites. That would be entirely appropriate -- one organization pointing to itself doesn't meet Google's criteria. It would also be a service to the community.