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someone explain this to me a little better. Is this a web-app for people to pose questions because they're too wishy-washy to weigh their options themselves?

• ShabbyDoo 18y ago
  I'd understand your sentiment if people sought advice on whether or not they should break up with their significant others. However, there are tons of complicated questions in life where others' experiences are worth a lot. Epinions is quite popular, but it makes no attempt to structure or codify advice on a particular product or need. Which smartphone is best for you?
• GHFigs 18y ago
  Is this a web-app for people to pose questions because they're too wishy-washy to weigh their options themselves? Everyone has trouble making decisions sometimes--it's human nature on contact with a world more complex than the one we evolved in, not a character flaw. I don't just mean major decisions either--sometimes the hardest ones to make are things like where to have dinner or what movie to rent or what color shirt to wear. People are constantly encountering situations in which the cost of making an optimal choice exceeds the consequences of making a sub-optimal choice. More generally, this is the problem of bounded rationality. If you can't make perfectly rational decisions, you have to find efficient heuristics to approximate those decisions by reducing the amount if information that has to be collected and considered. We've reduced the cost of information gathering to nearly zero, but that only exacerbates the problem of processing it into something useful for making decisions. Most attempts to mitigate this aim to rank, rate, and prioritize, in order to narrow the firehose and give you only the relevant information. This is great if you know what information you need to make the decision and how you weight various aspects of that information. It's useless when you don't know how to decide: what information to consider and how to rank it. It's like having a research assistant when you want an expert. So what is useful in that situation? It turns out we already have technology for that: expert systems. They're good for reasoning through a problem because they actively ask for information as it becomes relevant rather than requring the user to know beforehand what is relevant. They're great for situations involving uncertainty because they don't require answers to every question in order to provide potentially useful results. Where expert systems fail it is because they lack common sense, breadth of knowledge, and the ability to adapt and expand themselves. These are all things which the collective intellegence of networked humans have demonstrated great aptitude at. Driving the former with the latter seems likely to produce interesting results, even if Hunch itself fails. I have no idea if Hunch will be "huge" or hugely mediocre -- that is heavily dependent on the yet-unseen functioning of the site itself and users that contribute to it (the who, the why, and the how), but I at least find the approach novel and interesting, which is more than can be said for many startups. Must be nice to have a huge name to tag onto some silly idea that'll make insane money no matter what. Not as nice as it is to take shots at people for being successful, right?