

How writing creates value - Alex3917
http://alexkrupp.typepad.com/sensemaking/2010/06/how-writing-creates-value-.html

======
kalid
Interesting article, though I think the rationale (find an algorithmic engine
to identify quality content) a bit forced. Solving that problem seems similar
to building an AI capable of interpreting what a human being would think. Far
simpler is to use ratings people already have (book reviews, links to sources
they like, forum discussions, up/down votes, etc.) and highlight those.

For example, you could look at the top 100 hacker news links each month and
get a large amount of insight/interesting stories/. I think people enjoy
browsing, discovering and voting -- I'm not sure I'd really want a machine
that just gave me the most interesting links (hn services as that, with the
added gem of perhaps discovering something off the beaten path).

I did like the part about focusing on insight, and calling that out as a
specific trait. I find that is one of the few transferrable skills -- facts,
while interesting, are fragile; ways of thinking about the world can be more
permanent.

~~~
Alex3917
"Solving that problem seems similar to building an AI capable of interpreting
what a human being would think. Far simpler is to use ratings people already
have (book reviews, links to sources they like, forum discussions, up/down
votes, etc.) and highlight those."

Being right 100% of the time would require some AI that's way more advanced
than anything existing today, but the thing is that you really only need to be
right 25% of the time to create something that's an order of magnitude better
than what exists today. For example, let's say you have this article:
<http://www.alternet.org/drugs/21673/>

Being able to identify a set of people, 25% of whom would find that article
worth reading, shouldn't be very difficult. In addition to all of the rating
systems you mention, you can also do some basic things like tracking their
reading history, asking them some questions before and/or after presenting
them with article recommendations, etc.

In fact, the two things I would most go out of my way to avoid would be A)
trying to figure out what people will like based on what other people with
similar taste like and B) pulling specific facts out of articles and trying to
analyze them or compare them with other articles. These two approaches seem
like incredibly hard problems to solve, and they don't seem at all necessary
to create something that's an order of magnitude better than what we have
today.

The trick is getting humans to do as much of the work as possible. For
example, one could create a delicious-like tagging system whereby people would
tag articles with other articles they should read if they liked/disliked or
agreed with or disagreed with the original article. Once you have a shared
vocabulary to talk about the problem, getting a good solution isn't that hard
even if not all the tools are 100% formalized.

~~~
hooande
How is that delicious-like tagging system different than trying to figure out
what people will like based on what other people with similar tastes like? It
seems that a recommendation system with sufficient input would easily be able
to identify the 25% of people whom would find an article worth reading.

~~~
zackattack
Here's the thing, I don't care about what the vast majority of people think is
interesting, insightful, funny, or informative, because I've already obtained
those insights. I want to hear what people whom I respect think is cool, and
that is actually the principal value of Twitter for me. Tweets from my
favorite friends, and people whose mind I respect, go straight to my phone. I
want to be alerted with that information ASAP.

------
petercooper
A long piece but one of the few I've read in full lately - this is a great
article and if you're interested in ideas and semi-formal concepts relating to
communicating ideas, I heartily recommend it.

------
emef
He writes about algorithmically filtering articles on sites like reddit and
hacker news.

To me, part of the appeal to these sites are that links and content are driven
by the users, and not by what someone else wants me to read.

I'm sure this could highlight interesting stories, but I think it starts to
break apart the community these social networking sites provide.

~~~
Alex3917
I'm not knocking hacker news at all. My point though was that let's say you
only want to read articles that are counterintuitive, contrary to your current
beliefs, contain facts that you don't already know, etc. With enough computing
power and a little human mediation this should be doable, but it's not
something you can get from sites like HN currently.

~~~
greyman
How can a computer know what my beliefs are? ;-)

Overall, I agree with you. It should be possible to define some objective
criteria about what is interesting, and then some algorithm could check all
the new articles from mainstream dailies, weeklies and monthlies, and return
let's say up to 150 articles monthly which should be interesting. That I think
could be an useful service.

For example, Vanity Fair has 1 or 2 articles monthly which are interesting,
but I don't have time to read VF every month to see if I discover something
good...if some algo can do that pre-selection, that would help.

------
mark_l_watson
This gave me an idea: decades ago I became interested in a natural language
processing theory known as Conceptual Dependency Theory (never was very useful
to me though, and I was like a dinosaur caught in a tar pit: my fascination
with the theory kept me in a stuck state).

Anyway, CDT attempts to extract structured information from text and I thought
that _if_ CDT worked, then you could measure something Alex talked about in
the article: rating text as interesting if it introduced novel concepts.

------
voidfiles
One issue with this article is that while a majority of big ideas get
committed to paper at some point; writing is just one medium in which to
transmit ideas.

I like the emphasis behind the article, but we need to get off this idea that
writing is the thing, when really its ideas that matter.

------
zackattack
Awesome article man. I was actually thinking of the humor dichotomy in the
shower this morning (things are either funny cuz it's true, or funny cuz
they're not true) but then I concluded that my definition was stupid because
everything is either true or not true.

