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There is an interesting idea growing bigger and bigger in recent months. Some say that proliferation of feedback-based recommendation engines and machine learn
by tx 19y ago
There is an interesting idea growing bigger and bigger in recent months.
Some say that proliferation of feedback-based recommendation engines and machine learning algorithms for predicting "what I may like to read next" is bad for our society, because eventually people will be revolving in their own little narrow worlds of interests, reading/watching/listening same stuff without exposure to anything new, disruptive and mind-stimulating.
Many Americans are already largely ignorant of what's going on in the world partly due to CNN+friends that have been doing somewhat similar "content suggestion" for years and now the matter will get only worse. People are being enabled to build these "walls of ignorance" around themselves.
From personal experience, it is especially noticeable with music: if it wasn't for my friends who introduce me to their music, I'd still be listening to the same old stuff (or similar, coming from suggestions on sites like Pandora)
- gaika 19y agoAgree, this is why I do not use pandora or findory. If you teach jaanix that you like new and mind-stimulating things, it will find things that are new to you. It even lets you stretch the limits of your comfort zone with sliders.
- cstejerean 19y agoThis is only true if the recommendation engine is primitive. There must be a relationship between the stuff you currently like and subset of "new" stuff that you like because it's disruptive and mind-stimulating. But I don't want a news site to figure out what articles I will like. I just need it to filter out the stuff it knows I definitely dislike so I have less crap to filter through.
- yters 19y agoThe learning algorithm could find others that have similar tasts and use their recommendations too, though maybe this just pushes the problem up a level.
- h34t 19y agoI fail to see how systems that I use precisely because they are stimulating and curiosity-satisfying are going to dull my mind.