Alex Ko's Public Library

25 Nov 09

lots of choice makes people less likely to choose anything, and less happy when they do choose
The bigger display attracted more customers but very few of them actually bought jam. The display that offered less choice made many more sales – in fact, only 3 per cent of jam tasters at the 24-flavour stand used their discount voucher, versus 30 per cent at the six-flavour stand. This is an astonishingly strong effect – and utterly counter to mainstream economic theory.
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- We are often offered an apparently pointless choice between two equally good products, not appreciating that they are only good because we have been offered the choice.
- Zero choice is the fastest route to low quality.
- “choice demotivates” is not a universal human truth

24 Nov 09

A Speculative Post on the Idea of Algorithmic Authority « Clay Shirky

www.shirky.com/...-idea-of-algorithmic-authority - Preview

human-evaluation human-based-computation collective-intelligence authority

people trust new classes of aggregators and filters, whether Google or Twitter or Wikipedia
The social characteristic of deciding who to trust is a key feature of authority
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- because some other group has vouched, formally or informally, for my trustworthiness
- Why would you feel less silly getting the same wrong information from Britannica than from me? Because Britannica is an authoritative source.
- Authority thus performs a dual function; looking to authorities is a way of increasing the likelihood of being right, and of reducing the penalty for being wrong.
  - I think looking to authorities is a way of avoiding spending time to verify the information yourself, assuming that others have already verified it and did all the necessary fact checking. But if they don't, this reliance on authority creates information cascades and spreads false information. - on 2009-11-24
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- f you’re wrong on good authority, it’s not your fault.
  - IMHO, this belief leads to uncritical acceptance of information from authorities. It propagates myths that are false. I think it is still your fault if you're wrong on good authority. - on 2009-11-24
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- T
  hose investors accepted the judgement of the ratings agencies because everyone else was too.
  - A classic example of an information cascade - on 2009-11-24
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- Algorithmic authority is the decision to regard as authoritative an unmanaged process of extracting value from diverse, untrustworthy sources, without any human standing beside the result saying “Trust this because you trust me.” This model of authority differs from personal or institutional authority, and has, I think, three critical characteristics.
- First, it takes in material from multiple sources, which sources themselves are not universally vetted for their trustworthiness, and it combines those sources in a way that doesn’t rely on any human manager to sign off on the results before they are published.
- Second, it produces good results, and as a consequence people come to trust it. At this point, it’s become a valuable information tool, but not yet anything more.
- The third characteristic is when people become aware not just of their own trust but of the trust of others: “I use Wikipedia all the time, and other members of my group do as well.” Once everyone in the group has this realization, checking Wikipedia is tantamount to answering the kinds of questions Wikipedia purports to answer, for that group. This is the transition to algorithmic authority.
- an increasing number and variety of groups that regard these kinds of sources as authoritative
- authority is a social agreement
- As more people come to realize that not only do they look to unsupervised processes for answers to certain questions, but that their friends do as well, those groups will come to treat those resources as authoritative. Which means that, for those groups, they will be authoritative, since there’s no root authority to construct from.
- Now there are boundary problems with this definition, of course; we trust spreadsheet tools to handle large data sets we can’t inspect by eye, and we trust scientific results in part because of the scientific method. Also, although Wikipedia doesn’t ask you to trust particular contributors, it is not algorithmic in the same way PageRank is. As a result, the name may be better replaced by something else.

23 Nov 09

Want to Remember Everything You'll Ever Learn? Surrender to This Algorithm

Your chance of recalling a given word when you need it declines over time according to a predictable pattern. SuperMemo tracks this so-called forgetting curve and reminds you to rehearse your knowledge when your chance of recalling it has dropped to, say, 90 percent.

www.wired.com/...ff_wozniak - Preview

psychology learning

Fortunately, human forgetting follows a pattern. We forget exponentially. A graph of our likelihood of getting the correct answer on a quiz sweeps quickly downward over time and then levels off. This pattern has long been known to cognitive psychology, but it has been difficult to put to practical use. It's too complex for us to employ with our naked brains.
they will cue us to remember what we've read, help us track whom we've met, and remind us of our goals
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- Wozniak is a kind of algorithmic man.
- Ebbinghaus showed that it's possible to dramatically improve learning by correctly spacing practice sessions. On one level, this finding is trivial; all students have been warned not to cram. But the efficiencies created by precise spacing are so large, and the improvement in performance so predictable, that from nearly the moment Ebbinghaus described the spacing effect, psychologists have been urging educators to use it to accelerate human progress. After all, there is a tremendous amount of material we might want to know. Time is short.
- If students nonetheless manage to become expert in a few of the things they study,
  
  it's not because they retain the material from their lessons but because they specialize in a relatively narrow subfield where intense practice keeps their memory fresh.
- The memory appears to be gone because you can't recall it, but we can prove that it's still there. For instance, you can still recognize a 'forgotten' item in a group. Yes, without continued use, things become inaccessible. But they are not gone.
- Long-term memory, the Bjorks said, can be characterized by two components, which they named retrieval strength and storage strength. Retrieval strength measures how likely you are to recall something right now, how close it is to the surface of your mind. Storage strength measures how deeply the memory is rooted.
- One of the problems is that the amount of storage strength you gain from practice is inversely correlated with the current retrieval strength. In other words, the harder you have to work to get the right answer, the more the answer is sealed in memory.
- What was needed was not an academic psychologist but a tinkerer, somebody with a lot of time on his hands, a talent for mathematics, and a strangely literal temperament that made him think he should actually recall the things he learned.
- The problem wasn't shyness but the same intolerance for inefficient expenditure of mental resources that led to the invention of SuperMemo in the first place.
- winnowing written material down to the type of discrete chunks that can be memorized, and then scheduling them for efficient learning.
- once it's loaded into the system, he trusts his algorithm to apportion it to his consciousness at the appropriate time.
- Having turned over his mental life to a computerized system, he refuses to be pushed around by random inputs and requests.
- unprecedented power to remember
- If excitement over his research leads him to work into the night, he simply shifts to sleeping in the day.
- When he encounters a passage that he thinks he'll need to remember, he marks it; then it goes into a pattern of spaced repetition, and the information it contains will stay in his brain indefinitely.
- When he entrusts his mental life to a machine, it is not to throw off the burden of thought but to make his mind more swift. Extreme knowledge is not something for which he programs a computer but for which his computer is programming him.
  - This sounds like a peculiar kind of human-based computation where computer manages/coaches a human for some purpose - on 2009-11-23
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- You must clarify your goals, gain knowledge through spaced repetition, preserve health, work steadily, minimize stress, refuse interruption, and never resist sleep when tired. This should lead to radically improved intelligence and creativity. The only cost: turning your back on every convention of social life.

22 Nov 09

Lots of Animals Learn, but Smarter Isn’t Better - New York Times

www.nytimes.com/...06dumb.html - Preview

intelligence evolution

being smart can be bad for an animal’s health.

BEHAVIOR OF YOUNG CHILDREN UNDER CONDITIONS SIMULATING ENTRAPMENT IN REFRIGERATORS -- Bain et al. 22 (4): 628 -- Pediatrics

pediatrics.aappublications.org/...628 - Preview

psychology

a higher rate of success being associatedwith fewer years of education attained by mother and fathercombined

Wikiversity:What shall we do with Wikipedia? - Wikiversity

en.wikiversity.org/..._shall_we_do_with_Wikipedia%3F - Preview

wikipedia human-based-computation research creativity policy

Wikipedia is a goldmine of original research. People publish original research on Wikipedia all the time. More original research (by far) is published on Wikipedia than on Wikiversity. Where does it all go? Well, it gets deleted fast, because of the no original research policy, which is a loss to humanity. But so much original research is published on Wikipedia that there is a backlog.

Google Insights for Search - Web Search Interest: mittens - United States, 2004 - present

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google search internet tools

Hair Raiser § SEEDMAGAZINE.COM

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science journalism

All this does is show that, where statistical rigor is actually applied, it takes the discussion to a level of abstraction that is not useful to the average reader
we’d all be happier if he would just admit that
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- - I read a lot of popular science books when I was a kid. Those books lacked scientific rigor, but they led me to more rigorous books and then to becoming a computer scientist. Explaining complex subject in simple terms and motivating a reader to explore it in dept is very useful and requires a lot of ability. Admitting that some subject is beyond understanding of most people doesn't require any ability and is not useful. - on 2009-11-22
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Someone ignorant but smart will come along and reinvent everything,
and in the process simply fail to reproduce certain existing ideas.

SSRN-The Empty Idea of Authority by Laurence Claus

This article presents an evolutionary account of law and government. The law of a human community is a self-generating, self-recognizing system of human communications that signals likely action within that community. Law is a signaling system that uniquely serves and symbiotically defines a human community. Autopoiesis, not authority, is the phenomenon that authentically animates law and government.

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law evolutionary-computation

Your Race Affects Whether People Write You Back « OkTrends

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social-networks dating research

it was immediately obvious that the sender’s race was a huge factor.
- It is not obvious from this table if the differences are significant. It would be nice to see p-values along with averages. Also it is not clear where is the data for other combinations, it is unlikely that white males only send msg to white females - on 2009-11-22
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Networks of this sort are self-organizing and democratic but without any collective interaction.
as we are awakening to the power of this interaction on the web, the most progressive companies and individuals are the ones actively creating new business models around this information, hybrids that combine existing frameworks with new social models
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- From a social viewpoint, the architecture of business seems all wrong
- to constrict a person’s capabilities into rigid, set roles that limit creativity and innovation just doesn’t make sense. Diving talent into silos is an outdated paradigm. Rather, we should be encouraging the facilitation of diverse groups of people working together on common problems.

Alex Ko's Public Library

FT.com / Weekend columnists / Tim Harford - Given the choice, how much choice would you like?

A Speculative Post on the Idea of Algorithmic Authority « Clay Shirky

Want to Remember Everything You'll Ever Learn? Surrender to This Algorithm

Lots of Animals Learn, but Smarter Isn’t Better - New York Times

BEHAVIOR OF YOUNG CHILDREN UNDER CONDITIONS SIMULATING ENTRAPMENT IN REFRIGERATORS -- Bain et al. 22 (4): 628 -- Pediatrics

Wikiversity:What shall we do with Wikipedia? - Wikiversity

Google Insights for Search - Web Search Interest: mittens - United States, 2004 - present

Hair Raiser § SEEDMAGAZINE.COM

Carsonified » Top 10 UX Myths

DailyPerfect, predictively personalized news, behavioral targeting technology

the ragbag - arial & helvetica on friday, i hosted a screening...

Fresh vs. Familiar: How Aggressively to Redesign (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox)

Random Observations: Why I left math

Introduction to Blind Source Separation

A Student's Guide to Startups

SSRN-The Empty Idea of Authority by Laurence Claus

Your Race Affects Whether People Write You Back « OkTrends

What I’m reading: Viral Loop by Adam Penenberg | Andrew Chen (@andrew_chen)

RockYou! Snap Summit 3-25-08

Is Twitter a Complex Adaptive System? « emergent by design

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