This is a good idea, but coming up with good horoscopes and judging their quality is hard. What if every time you give a horoscope, you also ask how good the previous one was? So if on one day the horoscope says to pay attention to X, on the next day you’re asked whether you noticed anything important about X (and if so, then more people are told to pay attention to it).
Oh, this gives me an idea on what you could do instead of random groupings: Have some simple learning algorithm divide everyone into some fuzzy set of categories given ONLY the data abut how good they rank previous pieces of advice. Just have some highly ranked standard pieces that new people are given at the start and group people for whom the same ones worked in the same group. Then when a new piece is entered into the system it tests it against all the different groups and tend to give it to those in the same groups as the ones it worked for in the original test.
The “pices” could be different things: quotes, advice, statements about your personality, predictions, whatever.
One thing that’s important to note is that you can be in any number of groups; A “rank maximally good” rock would be placed in ALL groups. The groups would not be anything made to mimic some specific human word but just unsupervisedly lerned from the raw data. In practice the groups might turn you to correlate to things like “optimistic” and “likes quotes” but also things like”guillable” or “wont actually follow the advice just votes based of what sounds good”. Oh, and while I’m saying things like being “in” or “not in” a group it obviusly shuldnt be a binary thing just a probablility of geting pices belonging to that group.
I was thinking something similar. Kind of like non-mutually-exclusive, dynamically-assigned star signs based on what you find useful.
That does also suggest that you could use the system prescriptively instead of simply descriptively. If it places you in the “talented slacker” category, and you’d rather be in the “fastidiously disciplined” group, you could opt to receive the Fastidiously Disciplined horoscope, and try to change your working habits to facilitate the Fastidiously Disciplined advice.
It’s not obvious to me how to do this and still gather information from the user without interfering with the scores for their chosen category. Having them guess after the fact how well the “slacker” horoscope would have worked for them seems clearly sub-optimal, especially since there’s an obvious pressure for them to say that it wouldn’t’ve.
I bet it would be useful to sort people by “what do you most want to improve about yourself?” It seems every LWer has at least one thing (and some, many).
People who choose “nothing” would end up getting horoscopes centering around Dunning-Kruger, confirmation bias, etc.
Well, they wouldn’t be labelled with meaningful English titles, but you could give them arbitrary names for ease of reference. A bit like actual star signs, only empirically informed.
Good idea, but I’m not sure if it can be worked into an rss feed, and if not it’ll be tricky to implement. I plan on asking a more tech-savvy friend about it later tonight, though.
If we did do this, it seems to me that it’d need at least two dimensions: Likelihood of the advice working, and usefulness of the advice when it does work. The second might actually be more important than the first, for this purpose—if something works consistently, it seems like it’d be better to establish it as a habit rather than being intermittently reminded of it and otherwise ignoring it. (And we could certainly publish a list of suggested habits if the data points that way for enough things.)
Good idea, but I’m not sure if it can be worked into an rss feed, and if not it’ll be tricky to implement. I plan on asking a more tech-savvy friend about it later tonight, though.
I would say that the whole thing, setting up the server, RSS feeds, and some basic statistics gathering, excluding the database of horoscopes themselves, is a one- or two-weekend project for a reasonably experienced web programmer. Javascript and forms won’t work in all RSS readers, but links will. So an entry in the RSS feed would look like this:
Today’s horoscope: You will notice a place you ought to visit today
Yesterday’s horoscope was: You will start a conversation with a stranger today This horoscope was: untrue unhelpful true awesome
And you do some server-side magic at the destination to gather stats about who clicks on which links, filter out duplicates, and decide what to put in the feed next.
This is a good idea, but coming up with good horoscopes and judging their quality is hard. What if every time you give a horoscope, you also ask how good the previous one was? So if on one day the horoscope says to pay attention to X, on the next day you’re asked whether you noticed anything important about X (and if so, then more people are told to pay attention to it).
Oh, this gives me an idea on what you could do instead of random groupings: Have some simple learning algorithm divide everyone into some fuzzy set of categories given ONLY the data abut how good they rank previous pieces of advice. Just have some highly ranked standard pieces that new people are given at the start and group people for whom the same ones worked in the same group. Then when a new piece is entered into the system it tests it against all the different groups and tend to give it to those in the same groups as the ones it worked for in the original test.
The “pices” could be different things: quotes, advice, statements about your personality, predictions, whatever.
One thing that’s important to note is that you can be in any number of groups; A “rank maximally good” rock would be placed in ALL groups. The groups would not be anything made to mimic some specific human word but just unsupervisedly lerned from the raw data. In practice the groups might turn you to correlate to things like “optimistic” and “likes quotes” but also things like”guillable” or “wont actually follow the advice just votes based of what sounds good”. Oh, and while I’m saying things like being “in” or “not in” a group it obviusly shuldnt be a binary thing just a probablility of geting pices belonging to that group.
I was thinking something similar. Kind of like non-mutually-exclusive, dynamically-assigned star signs based on what you find useful.
That does also suggest that you could use the system prescriptively instead of simply descriptively. If it places you in the “talented slacker” category, and you’d rather be in the “fastidiously disciplined” group, you could opt to receive the Fastidiously Disciplined horoscope, and try to change your working habits to facilitate the Fastidiously Disciplined advice.
It’s not obvious to me how to do this and still gather information from the user without interfering with the scores for their chosen category. Having them guess after the fact how well the “slacker” horoscope would have worked for them seems clearly sub-optimal, especially since there’s an obvious pressure for them to say that it wouldn’t’ve.
I bet it would be useful to sort people by “what do you most want to improve about yourself?” It seems every LWer has at least one thing (and some, many).
People who choose “nothing” would end up getting horoscopes centering around Dunning-Kruger, confirmation bias, etc.
Yea. Only problem is the groups wouldn’t be labelled since they were autonomously discovered and and thus finding it would be a bit hard.
Well, they wouldn’t be labelled with meaningful English titles, but you could give them arbitrary names for ease of reference. A bit like actual star signs, only empirically informed.
yea, that’d probably be a good idea.
Good idea, but I’m not sure if it can be worked into an rss feed, and if not it’ll be tricky to implement. I plan on asking a more tech-savvy friend about it later tonight, though.
If we did do this, it seems to me that it’d need at least two dimensions: Likelihood of the advice working, and usefulness of the advice when it does work. The second might actually be more important than the first, for this purpose—if something works consistently, it seems like it’d be better to establish it as a habit rather than being intermittently reminded of it and otherwise ignoring it. (And we could certainly publish a list of suggested habits if the data points that way for enough things.)
I would say that the whole thing, setting up the server, RSS feeds, and some basic statistics gathering, excluding the database of horoscopes themselves, is a one- or two-weekend project for a reasonably experienced web programmer. Javascript and forms won’t work in all RSS readers, but links will. So an entry in the RSS feed would look like this:
And you do some server-side magic at the destination to gather stats about who clicks on which links, filter out duplicates, and decide what to put in the feed next.