I totally agree but .. I feel companies evolve in an environment they do not control. If companies could just offer goods and services at a fair price without arsing around and be successful, I feel like we'd have a ton of such companies. I could be overly cynical.
I'm Dan, CTO at Condorsay. We've built a tool that helps you make decisions, alone or with others.
* Summary
The short version of our tool:
- pick a goal (something to decide)
- pick factors important to the decision (helped by GPT-3)
- pick options (helped by GPT-3)
- use pairwise ranking to learn what you or a group think of the options
- see the results, including text notes (if you made the decision with others) and dissenters (people who disagree with the group)
NOTE: it does require a Google login to get past the "factors" screen. However, you get 5 decisions for free, so you can do everything for free. I read login makes HN cranky, but that is how our tool works. (A decision has to be owned by a user in the DB. Also, we are protecting against someone burning tons of money on GPT-3 calls.) Please don't be cranky.
* Motivation
We believe that decision-making could be improved by a tool that puts structure around it.
Some benefits:
- clarity: structure and record your decisions, alone or in a group
- focus: force hard choices with pairwise comparison
- revealed preferences: you actually don't always know what you think, but you learn through the simplest possible gut-level calls (pairwise choices). By the end, the results make sense, even if they aren't what you thought at first.
Further benefits if you’re making a decision in a group:
- alignment: get a group of people on the same page, by having the most important discussions quickly (i.e., where people disagree)
- independence: express your preferences before you see anyone else’s, to avoid information cascade
- asynchronicity: coordinate people in our increasingly remote-work world, mobile-friendly
Happy to talk about paired-choice decision-making algorithms, AHP, GPT-3, or other TLAs (three-letter acronyms).
* Background
James, Andrew, and I worked on Barometer, an effort to use Facebook measurement to promote or demote ads to help defeat Trump in 2020. Even in that effort, we picked what to do next in various different ad-hoc ways. James thought, "Why isn't there a good tool for this?" and convinced us we should try to build it.
I look forward to your feedback and questions. Please don't be cranky.
This is prisonner's dilemma / tragedy of the commons. The best-performing ads made more money, anyone who didn't grab attention enough would be strongly pushed towards grabbing more attention by industry norms. It was rational for every individual to grab more attention, but it was bad for the group.
Police kill about 1000-1200 people per year in the U.S., depending on who's counting. See for example the Washington Post data. So it's not just tens over a decade.
"The University of Minnesota Department of Computer Science & Engineering takes this situation extremely seriously. We have immediately suspended this line of research."
I thought you meant split the infra pieces into different software components (process, machine, etc.), not split them by domain. Can you give an example, and why it's good to split by domain?
Used to bother me too, as a mathematician. Then I learned about linguistics. If enough people use words a certain way, then it's vernacular. Sadly, I think this usage is long accepted.