What Google Thinks People Think About Philosophers
Enter a word or two into Google and its guesses about what you’re looking for, based on what most other people have looked for using similar words, will appear.
So what do people think of philosophers? Hmmm….
How does Google autocomplete other philosophy-related searches? If you find one worth sharing, take a screenshot, send it to [email protected], and I’ll post it here.
from Craig Bacon:
from Tomas Bogardus:
from HK Anderson, who notices that Google’s answers depend on how you ask:
Jeff Sebo and Danielle Wenner both sent in versions of this:
from Jeff Heikkinen, who notes how the results change with the addition of a single letter:
from Chris Hinchcliffe:
It seems that there is a significant linguistic variation. Try typing in ‘la philosophie’. I got this:
la liberte philosophie
la definition de la philosophie
la verite philosophie
la raison philosophie
Of course, if I typed things in a bit differently, I also got la philosophie de la boudoir.
Depending on how you ask, philosophers may be wise depressed mortal mathematicians, or perhaps smart happy intelligent atheist introverts.
For comparison, I tried inputting various other academic sorts into the “___ are…” Google function. Here is what the digital zeitgeist thinks of our colleagues:
Mathematicians are lazy
Sociologists are the worst bullies
Chemists are gangsters
Geologists are the kardashians of science
Philosophy is…
dead
pointless
bullshit
and, last but not least
a walk on a slippery rock (an Edie Brickell song from 1988)
What would constitute animal testing of philosophy products? Discussing a paper with your cat?
There’s a cosmetic line called “philosophy.”
In undergrad, one of my professors learned about this company during a discussion about Kant; he was so appalled/bemused/horrified we spent the rest of the class time listening to him ranting as he attempted to understand why that would make sense and later, attempting to come up with mock-names for products. It was a fun break.