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The point of any system should never be to choose for a person, but rather, to improve the quality of available choices.

• davisclark 11y ago
  In that case, aren't you, in effect, choosing for me the set of choices available to me for selection, based upon a preconceived notion of "quality"? The Underground Man goes on to say, “I agree that two times two makes four is an excellent thing; but if we are dispensing praise, then two times two makes five is sometimes a most charming little thing as well.” Would two times two makes five be included in a set of high-quality choices?
  • saalweachter 11y ago
    And Rush said, "If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.". There is no alternative to curation. If you display all the possible options, there is still the order -- humans, being humans, will not thoroughly read and equally consider even a list of a thousand options, so the order will affect their choice. Choosing to display the results in random order, or in alphabetical order, or in chronological order, is still a decision which affects the choice of the user. Curation cannot be avoided, as long as we are men. I am reminded of Stanislaw Lem's Demon of the Second Kind.
  • pcmaffey 11y ago
    Such curation does not exclude alternative choices. The mind works by narrowing the field of possibilities down to a manageable bandwith. We make tools to help us do this. But the choice is always still our own. And we can choose anything we can imagine.