My friend Candido sounded very frustrated yesterday. The prime reason is that, in every water cooler conversation, people instead of using, "The weather is warmer today" conversation starter, resort to, "I love mexican food".
He goes on, "Caucasian, black, chinese, indian, doesn't matter, they all start with the same thing, "I love mexican food". These folks are not intending anything bad. But, he hates being stereotyped, even in water cooler conversations.
Society has a million stereotypes, which function as cognitive shortcuts.
"You are a boy. So, you must like to play only with cars and trucks."
"You are an engineer. So, you cannot be an extrovert."
This percolates all the way, from society to capitalism. The products sold, the recommendation engines, a vast majority of them, want to box you in into neat categories.
Nothing wrong with categorization, but most of the time, it is way off, if categorization is based on broad categories.
So, for relevance and recommendation engines to be meaningful, they ought to have fine-grained interest categories. I call it the 'micro-interest'. But these are wicked hard for machines to derive from, as they lack the richness of interpretation of human beings.
Knowing Candido, I know he is interested in a wide variety of things, from Michael Buble to Tintin Comics, the delicate tango of privacy and publicity to Entrepreneurship.
Yet, most of the Systems have is, a myopic view of him: 35-year old Professional Single Male from Spain (yes, he is actually not from Mexico, but from Spain).
When the machine 'learns' his subtle micro-interests, he is ready to check out relevance engines. BTW, he does not want to have yet another online account.
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