[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.

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 don't and can't take relative totals into account until someone comments on it.

Of course, if someone considers that a good reason to reverse their vote I don't know why they would be using the anti-kibitzer in the first place.

I still don't think anyone here should feel good about paying attention to current total while deciding whether to upvote or downvote. Share evidence, not conclusions. The net karma a comment ends up at should be the result of aggregating our valuations, not a result of, say, whether those who thought it should be at +100 voted before or after those who thought it should be at +2.

Edit: it's clear to me now that I don't have a good solution to my perceived problem.

2JoshuaZ15y

I think that karma is a useful feedback but only at a very approximate level. If a post is heavily upvoted or heavily downvoted it is likely to be higher quality. But this is extremely approximate. The posts I've had most upvoted are rarely what I would consider my highest quality remarks. For example, this comment was relevant but I don't see any reason why it is at +24 other than some sort of bandwagon effect.

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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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