[Funny] Even Clippy can be blamed on the use of non-Bayesian methods

lukeprog

From this 2001 article:

Eric Horvitz... feels bad about [Microsoft Office's Clippy]... many people regard the paperclip as annoyingly over-enthusiastic, since it appears without warning and gets in the way.

To be fair, that is not Dr Horvitz's fault. Originally, he programmed the paperclip to use Bayesian decision-making techniques both to determine when to pop up, and to decide what advice to offer...

The paperclip's problem is that the algorithm... that determined when it should appear was deemed too cautious. To make the feature more prominent, a cruder non-Bayesian algorithm was substituted in the final product, so the paperclip would pop up more often.

Ever since, Dr Horvitz has wondered whether he should have fought harder to keep the original algorithm.

I, at least, found this amusing.

From this 2001 article:

Eric Horvitz... feels bad about [Microsoft Office's Clippy]... many people regard the paperclip as annoyingly over-enthusiastic, since it appears without warning and gets in the way.

To be fair, that is not Dr Horvitz's fault. Originally, he programmed the paperclip to use Bayesian decision-making techniques both to determine when to pop up, and to decide what advice to offer...

The paperclip's problem is that the algorithm... that determined when it should appear was deemed too cautious. To make the feature more prominent, a cruder non-Bayesian algorithm was substituted in the final product, so the paperclip would pop up more often.

Ever since, Dr Horvitz has wondered whether he should have fought harder to keep the original algorithm.

I, at least, found this amusing.

I withdrew my vote after jsalvatier made his comment. It made me think more about it, and the fact that I have a general problem with voting too often for things that are funny instead of things that genuinely help the signal to noise ratio. I also saw the extremely high total vote as worrisome. If the vote had at the time been +10 or +15 or so I might not have felt as much of a need to withdraw my vote.

I suspect that similar thought processes occurred with other people.

Yes, this is what I assumed had happened and was commenting on. Maybe I just pay too much attention to karma because I'm green as grass, but I don't think I've ever cast a vote without thinking through what I find valuable about the post and how that compares to its current total. The fact that apparently a lot of people cast what I would call impulse votes is making me reevaluate exactly what it is that 'karma' is measuring.

Edit: Oh, I just realized - the anti-kibitzer hides karma scores as well as usernames. Probably there's a large subset of voters who ... (read more)

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[Funny] Even Clippy can be blamed on the use of non-Bayesian methods

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[Funny] Even Clippy can be blamed on the use of non-Bayesian methods

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