Tom Scocca has made it his personal mission to bring truth to the internet when it comes to caramelizing onions. Frustrated by recipes grossly understating the amount of time necessary for onions to turn brown and soft in a pan, he wrote a blog post for Slate in 2012 to correct the record. But recent developments prompted him to revisit the issue in a piece for Gizmodo headlined “Google's algorithm is lying to you about onions and blaming me for it.” He talked with Marketplace host Kai Ryssdal about what happened. Below is an edited transcript of their conversation.
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So, I read these articles that were coming out in the last week or two about how Google has this new feature that's supposed to give you the one true answer to a question you type in. Instead of just feeding you a list of things, it pops out in a big box and tells you what the one true answer is. And the problem is that people discovered that if you ask it if Barack Obama is planning a coup d'etat against the U.S. government, it says “Yes, he is.” If you ask it, “Is MSG poisonous,” it says, “It certainly is.”
Because bad information that people passionately believe has a way of rising to the top. So, when I saw this, I thought about the onions again, and I thought about how this was a false thing that there was a lot of information about. So, I typed in “How long does it take to caramelize onions?” and I was shocked by what I got. Not only did it have the wrong information, but it had the wrong information because it was citing my piece.
http://www.marketplace.org/2017/03/14/tech/internet-falsehoods-are-hiding-truth-about-onions
