The Role of Recommendations

So, on blogging, I was reading an post by Kurt Jacobson on avoiding mob rule in determining music quality. I have thoughts on the issue and want to have a conversation. I don’t actually know the guy, so through the medium of blogging we just both shout our ideas out into the ether.

The basic idea he’s hitting on is social proof. It’s essentially the fact (and I say fact because there’s enough research to make it pretty much indisputable) that human perception and preference is highly malleable, and one of the biggest influences is what they see other people doing.

In music recommendation this played out in a recent study on recommendations in an artificial culture. One group was given a bunch of songs and asked to rank them. Another group was given the same task, but they were given feedback on how much other people liked the same songs.

The results from the first group were fairly consistent. This suggests that there are some inherent qualities of songs that are consistent across listeners. (The test was conducted on a “teen-interest” site, so there was probably some perceptual preference similarity among samples.) With the introduction of social influence, scores became much more erratic and predictability dropped.

Jacobson’s argument is essentially Britney Spears is crap and if we let the mob decide what good music is, we’ll have a sort of dysgenic collapse as the masses all follow each other into a collective mediocracy.

There’s certainly something to that argument. The consistency in preferences without social influence says that there is some sort of inherent quality to music. (Whether this quality would hold up under a more diverse sample population is debatable.) If I am wanting to recommend a song to someone who has none of the social feedback, I am going to want to use the consistent sample set because I can predict with less error that they’re going to like the song.

The idea though that technology should somehow try to correct for humanity’s herding instinct is philosophically dangerous and ultimately counter productive. Most people don’t want you to correct for their weaknesses. They want you to give them what they want. In fact, the bulk of people would find the technologist’s assertion that they need their preferences accommodated for slightly insulting.

One of the things I would have liked to see in the study was means for the data. They put data in terms of market share which is interesting, but I would like to know if the average rating was higher. There was the recent study on how a $2.50 placebo is 25% more effective than a $.10 one. I wouldn’t be surprised if the user enjoyment of music with high community approval was higher than when the song was heard in isolation. It isn’t just that people take cues from their environment, but that their actual experience is different.

So instead of trying to somehow fight against social proof, instead use it and try to introduce systemic constraints to encourage novelty.

Imagine a site where people nominate songs for song of the day. A song of the day can never have been a song of the day before. (Or to have more variety, disallow the top 10 each day from future consideration.) The criteria for deciding the song for the day is based on votes from all the users. There’s some sort of mechanism where the more often a user is correct the more their opinion counts. I’d have to think on the details, but you essentially develop experts within a particular genre whose natural preference profiles are very similar to a stereotype. This would bias the results toward reproducibility.

The details would need some thinking, but the basic idea is you want to use social proof to increase a user’s enjoyment while somehow encouraging the introduction of novel ideas. There’s already a hugely implemented system dealing with this exact problem: the stock market. You want to find a resource before anyone else knows about it (find novel music) and after you’ve invested in it, you want to see it perform as well as possible (have as many people rank it as possible). I think a site based around that concept would be interesting.

I don’t disagree that there is such a thing as great art. I’m just not convinced that computers are capable of recognizing that on their own. The best that we can do is set things up so that hopefully the human capability to recognize beauty is captured as much as possible and leveraged.