Of Netflix and diagnoses

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  • 24/10/2017

    This is from an article discussing the difficulties in recommending people to content they might like. The bigger picture is the dismal state of online journalism / news and polluters not paying. But Netflix’s understanding about how fine scale a taxonomy has to be, struck a chord with me. This is exactly the problem of diagnosis in some areas of medicine.

    The latter is my favorite. Four years ago, I realized the size and scope of Netflix’s secret weapon, its suggestion system, when reading this seminal Alex Madrigal piece in The Atlantic. Madrigal was first in revealing the number of genres, sub-genres, micro-genres used by Netflix’s descriptors for its film library: 76,897! This entails the incredible task of manually tagging every movie and generating a vast set of metadata ranging from “forbidden-love dramas” to heroes with a prominent mustache.

    This reminds me of the old story about how impressed somebody was, after being shown some small computing device that could ‘think’ using powerful algorithms. The observer did however ask about the aircraft hanger size machine that came with it: that was necessary to implement all the code for the exceptions to this universal reasoning machine, he was told.

    Lots of room too, for fake news and fake diagnoses.