jsburbidge: (Sky)
jsburbidge ([personal profile] jsburbidge) wrote2020-09-07 01:46 pm
Entry tags:

One of Life's Minor Irritations

The Android ecosystem by default comes with Google-driven alerts for news and blog-type posts.

One thing they may not have thought of is the effect of some of these pushed posts on people who actually know something about the topic.

I was just pointed to a post on "the best French authors". It is (naturally) not entirely wrong: it has Balzac, Voltaire, Camus, Baudelaire, Flaubert, Rimbaud, Victor Hugo ("hélas"), de Beauvoir, and Dumas.

It does not have the following, all of whom I would certainly place above Dumas: Villon, Rabelais, Ronsard, du Bellay, Diderot, La Bruyère, Bossuet, Lamartine, Zola, Verlaine, Mallarmé, Proust, Céline, Aragon, Apollinaire, and Perse.

It's a bit like writing a list of the best English authors and omitting Swift, Sidney, and Sterne while including Conan Doyle.

It's a reminder that posts which look informed, and probably intend to be informed rather than misleading, are not to be relied on.


Post a comment in response:

This account has disabled anonymous posting.
(will be screened if not validated)
If you don't have an account you can create one now.
HTML doesn't work in the subject.
More info about formatting