[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 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.

It seems to me that your suggested policy would result in comment-placement effects being even stronger than they are now. What score should a comment end up with if 50 people consider voting on it and they all think it should have a score of +2?

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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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