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Exactly. It's possibly a bit disturbing that on hacker news, this thread consists of three people all complaining that, effectively, 'This bayesian filter does

by SEMW 13y ago

Exactly. It's possibly a bit disturbing that on hacker news, this thread consists of three people all complaining that, effectively, 'This bayesian filter doesn't quite do exactly what I want out of the box, so it's clearly broken and/or I'm not the target audience for it', instead of acknowledging that bayesian filters aren't psychic, and considering putting in the few seconds per email it takes to train them when they make a mistake.

badman_ting 13y ago
Who knows how it works? How am I supposed to know it's Bayesian? If G's magic works for people then great, but I just want to check my email without going into multiple little hidey-holes. If you're not the sort of person who gets tons of email, the value prop for stuff like this goes way down.
- SEMW 13y ago
  > How are you supposed to know that? I could be misremembering, but IIRC when the new inbox first appeared it featured a popover over my inbox explaining how to drag and drop a miscategorized email into a different tab to train it.
- anu_gupta 13y ago
  Then don't activate the feature.
dhugiaskmak 13y ago
This isn't Jimmy Growthtard's useless MVP. It's not a stretch to think that Google and their massive, massive, massive set of training data (i.e. everyone's e-mail) should be able to do better out of the box. Not being able to tell the difference between promotions and bank statements or travel bookings is a pretty huge failure to me.
- IanCal 13y ago
  What training data? They've got unlabelled data, not labelled data. Also, all they could provide is really a one-size-fits-all solution, after that it can train to your own needs.
- SEMW 13y ago
  The problem being there's no universal definition of "better". My guess is it's not a matter of "not being able to tell the difference" - it's putting bank statements in 'promotions' because people have been putting their bank statements there. People who want to receive them for their records, but not have them 'in their face' in their primary inbox. (Should those people have put dragged them to another tab - maybe 'Updates' rather than 'Promotions'? Possibly. If you think so, drag them to there instead. That'll change it for you, and presumably, if enough people do that it'll eventually change the categorisation for everyone who hasn't changed it themselves).
- soperj 13y ago
  Hold up, you get bank statements by email? Which bank to you use so that I can avoid them completely.

by SEMW 13y ago

badman_ting 13y ago

Who knows how it works? How am I supposed to know it's Bayesian? If G's magic works for people then great, but I just want to check my email without going into multiple little hidey-holes. If you're not the sort of person who gets tons of email, the value prop for stuff like this goes way down.

SEMW 13y ago
> How are you supposed to know that? I could be misremembering, but IIRC when the new inbox first appeared it featured a popover over my inbox explaining how to drag and drop a miscategorized email into a different tab to train it.
anu_gupta 13y ago
Then don't activate the feature.

dhugiaskmak 13y ago

This isn't Jimmy Growthtard's useless MVP. It's not a stretch to think that Google and their massive, massive, massive set of training data (i.e. everyone's e-mail) should be able to do better out of the box. Not being able to tell the difference between promotions and bank statements or travel bookings is a pretty huge failure to me.

IanCal 13y ago
What training data? They've got unlabelled data, not labelled data. Also, all they could provide is really a one-size-fits-all solution, after that it can train to your own needs.
SEMW 13y ago
The problem being there's no universal definition of "better". My guess is it's not a matter of "not being able to tell the difference" - it's putting bank statements in 'promotions' because people have been putting their bank statements there. People who want to receive them for their records, but not have them 'in their face' in their primary inbox. (Should those people have put dragged them to another tab - maybe 'Updates' rather than 'Promotions'? Possibly. If you think so, drag them to there instead. That'll change it for you, and presumably, if enough people do that it'll eventually change the categorisation for everyone who hasn't changed it themselves).
soperj 13y ago
Hold up, you get bank statements by email? Which bank to you use so that I can avoid them completely.