Attention is scarce and so called information is being thrown at us at exponentially growing speed. So I guess it is fair to assume we'd rather not pay attention to made up stuff, only discovering later that it is all bullshit (or low quality entertainment ;) ).
Todays tools for filtering are mostly using quantitative methods to help you find the right stuff, not really smart and effectively using ad populum reasoning for deciding about what is right - which is a fallacy.
Singularity, the moment when computers outsmart humans, could be really good for us. Singularity is not, or should not be, about machine vs. man, but about how the machine can extend man (in certain tasks) with its ever expanding resources. Allowing us to focus on what is really important (or enjoyable).
If we can only trust the machine. Or the driver of that machine (paraphrasing [Douglas R…
Increasing the haystack
Facebook is doing another tweak on the timeline algorithm because they want "to show people the most interesting stories at the top of their feed". Ok, sounds fair.
But then their announcement says: "Through testing, we have found that when people see more text status updates on Facebook they write more status updates themselves."
In other words: updates invite updates. It doesn't work for pages, though, as they "noticed that this effect wasn't true for text status updates from Pages." Guess people want to be as noisy as their friends. We're social animals. But pages are not animals, so we won't be as noisy as them. Hence we'll receive more animal/friends-updates and less from pages. Even though some of the pages you'll probably follow/liked because they're so damn informative, more informative than your ever bullshitting friends :)
Anyhow, recap. So Facebook changed the algorithm to show people the most interesting stories and hence they tweaked the algorithm in such a way…
Dit artikel van murblog van Maarten Brouwers (murb) is in licentie gegeven volgens een Creative Commons Naamsvermelding 3.0 Nederland licentie .