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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   3970 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for March 3, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I watched Linus Techtip’s (that’s his full name name right?) video on dash cams. Made me realize how essential it is to have trustworthy people in our consumer economy. It’s time-consuming and difficult determining online which dash cam you can trust to work and be cost-efficient. Amazon doesn’t have an incentive to give you a working product and the old site:Reddit google trick can even be astroturfed. But Linus is trustworthy, and just as importantly both his reputation and financial incentives rely on his trustworthiness.

How amazing would it be if we had a Linus-type person for every economic decision! With all of our technology and media, we still find that the necessary ingredient is just some trustworthy dude who knows a reasonable amount giving his opinion.

i’m trying to figure out a way to build a public database of problem-solving and good decision-making, with filters so people can view their own echo chamber, and/or other people’s echo chambers.

So StackExchange?

No, even more organized and structured. Every problem would have a tree of entries: who the problem affects negatively (or positively), who doesn’t see it as a problem, what causes the problem, was the cause an attempted solution for another problem, what solutions have been tried before or theorized, how well have those solutions worked, what problems would these solutions cause, etc.

You are going to run into the curse of dimensionality really fast. Perhaps I am not exactly understanding your vision, but there are a potentially infinite number of said trees. And thus to me seems like your solution is worse than a high-effort curated (aspirational) "database of problem-solving" like StackExchange. Maps abstract/obscure away details for a reason.

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