3 ms·

It’s certainly interesting that in sciences like history, determinism is only plausible when you know very little. The more you know the harder it becomes to fi

It’s certainly interesting that in sciences like history, determinism is only plausible when you know very little. The more you know the harder it becomes to figure out why something happened. News feed prediction behaves the opposite of this. It tries to predict your intent based on past behavior, but that is, as you say, not possible, and could likely be why the news feed is dying.

fallous 9y ago
Behold the wisdom of the disclaimer "past performance is no guarantee of future results."
- chiefalchemist 9y ago
  At the tree level, yes. At the forest level most people are predictable, often to a fault.
  - fallous 9y ago
    Of course, and yet there is a reason that demographics is useful only when dealing with aggregates... it tells you nothing about a specific individual. Trying to use inferred data from the behaviors of millions of people is quite useful in discovering certain aggregate info, but using it in place of a specific individual's chosen intent is an excellent way to lose a user.
padobson 9y ago
I wonder if another dimension is useful. YouTube's UI prominently features search. So if my interests change and I search for something I've never been interested before, YouTube can show me a pretty good selection of videos and tune its recommendations for future viewing. I will say, though, that all social networks seem to fail at weighting past behavior too strongly. Whenever I start a new account on a social network, I find it's recommendations are much more tuned to my interests, and those recommendations become less relevant overtime. Biologically, I'm a new person every seven years. As a collection of varied interests, it seems like I turnover much more often than that - and I suspect the rate of turnover is different for everyone.
- chiefalchemist 9y ago
  Why not just give me more control? Why can't I say (soon literally) "Dear Zuck - show me news" or "Dear Zuck - show me cat photos"? For me, FB is far too controlling. So much so that I have 10 groups that I've started to "organize" my friends and in a way build my own feed. It helps. But it still not what I want, mainly because a lot of people are not group share minded. I don't understand why FB is spending soooo much time and effort trying to guess what I want when all it has to do is...wait for it...ask.
  - madhadron 9y ago
    > Why not just give me more control? Why can't I say (soon literally) "Dear Zuck - show me news" or "Dear Zuck - show me cat photos"? That's Google.
  - fallous 9y ago
    I suspect, but certainly can't prove, that there are two things going on... first that in order to get reasonably true answers to questions you have to provide a fair in-kind trade with the user. If you want their home location you could ask for it, in which case a lot of people will seem to come from zipcode 12345, or you can offer a solution to a problem (or preferably a set of problems) they may have that is easily solved with their correct zipcode such as "lists of X within a mile of your house." That's a bit harder to pull off when it's something like "what political party are you?" for anyone who isn't rabidly political. The second suspicion that I have is that this is a result of a larger conceit of the tech industry that they are an enlightened minority who either know or can know better than the masses (tech isn't unique in this conceit, alas).
- fallous 9y ago
  You're conflating a recommendation/suggestion system, which uses data from an inference engine, with systems that replace explicit user intent with the results of an inference engine. A recommendation/suggestion system should offer its opinions and the user is free to follow them or not. Replacing explicit user intent with inferred intent is over-ruling the user, saying that the system's decision-making is more important than the user's.

fallous 9y ago

Behold the wisdom of the disclaimer "past performance is no guarantee of future results."

chiefalchemist 9y ago
At the tree level, yes. At the forest level most people are predictable, often to a fault.
- fallous 9y ago
  Of course, and yet there is a reason that demographics is useful only when dealing with aggregates... it tells you nothing about a specific individual. Trying to use inferred data from the behaviors of millions of people is quite useful in discovering certain aggregate info, but using it in place of a specific individual's chosen intent is an excellent way to lose a user.

padobson 9y ago

I wonder if another dimension is useful. YouTube's UI prominently features search. So if my interests change and I search for something I've never been interested before, YouTube can show me a pretty good selection of videos and tune its recommendations for future viewing. I will say, though, that all social networks seem to fail at weighting past behavior too strongly. Whenever I start a new account on a social network, I find it's recommendations are much more tuned to my interests, and those recommendations become less relevant overtime. Biologically, I'm a new person every seven years. As a collection of varied interests, it seems like I turnover much more often than that - and I suspect the rate of turnover is different for everyone.

chiefalchemist 9y ago
Why not just give me more control? Why can't I say (soon literally) "Dear Zuck - show me news" or "Dear Zuck - show me cat photos"? For me, FB is far too controlling. So much so that I have 10 groups that I've started to "organize" my friends and in a way build my own feed. It helps. But it still not what I want, mainly because a lot of people are not group share minded. I don't understand why FB is spending soooo much time and effort trying to guess what I want when all it has to do is...wait for it...ask.
- madhadron 9y ago
  > Why not just give me more control? Why can't I say (soon literally) "Dear Zuck - show me news" or "Dear Zuck - show me cat photos"? That's Google.
- fallous 9y ago
  I suspect, but certainly can't prove, that there are two things going on... first that in order to get reasonably true answers to questions you have to provide a fair in-kind trade with the user. If you want their home location you could ask for it, in which case a lot of people will seem to come from zipcode 12345, or you can offer a solution to a problem (or preferably a set of problems) they may have that is easily solved with their correct zipcode such as "lists of X within a mile of your house." That's a bit harder to pull off when it's something like "what political party are you?" for anyone who isn't rabidly political. The second suspicion that I have is that this is a result of a larger conceit of the tech industry that they are an enlightened minority who either know or can know better than the masses (tech isn't unique in this conceit, alas).
fallous 9y ago
You're conflating a recommendation/suggestion system, which uses data from an inference engine, with systems that replace explicit user intent with the results of an inference engine. A recommendation/suggestion system should offer its opinions and the user is free to follow them or not. Replacing explicit user intent with inferred intent is over-ruling the user, saying that the system's decision-making is more important than the user's.