BenAlbahari comments on Undiscriminating Skepticism - Less Wrong

97 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 14 March 2010 11:23PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (1329)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: BenAlbahari 15 March 2010 03:34:39AM 6 points [-]

The ordering algorithm currently works in two steps:

  1. Expertise Relevance: If the topic of expertise the expert has matches the topic of the question, the expert quote ranks higher (sub ordering: a rarer topic match gets a higher rank than a common topic match, e.g. a match for "climatology" would outrank a match for "science".)
  2. Expertise Depth: An expert quote with more sub-arguments out-ranks an expert quote with fewer sub-arguments.

Like many algorithms (such as collaborative filtering), the algorithm starts working better as the content is filled out, e.g.:
http://www.takeonit.com/question/5.aspx

P.S. I just tagged that question with the topic "War" so now Bin Laden bubbles to the top. Keep the feedback coming. It's incredibly helpful.