Category Archives: Ideas

The two types of "social" sites

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I’ve had this theory kicking around in my mind since before this blog started, but since it wasn’t around then, I never posted it.

There are two types of “social” sites: those where one person naturally invites others (exosocial) and those where others are required for one to join (endosocial). Quite simply, an exosocial site attracts people as population grows, while an endosocial site attracts users only once a critical population is reached.

Why is this important? Well, an endosocial site (such as HireGeeks) requires heavy marketing as a catalyst, since no one will come until people are already there. Exosocial sites do not create such dependencies between a user and the rest of the population (though they might build one between two individual users), and are free to grow almost unchecked.

That’s why HireGeeks was a stupid shoestring business. Technically, that is some of the nicest Perl code I’ve ever written, but it means nothing if I can’t attract two separate groups of people to the site at the same time.

Classifying MBTI from a text sample

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Using text mining techniques, I am going to attempt to build a naive Bayesian classifier capable of determining a person’s Myers-Briggs type from a sample of text that they write. This should be a fairly quick project once I finish with everything else. Whether it works or not is another story. Most likely it will, but no one will use it, so I’ll never accumulate a sufficient training set. No one uses anything I create these days, despite the constantly improving quality of my creations.

Anyway, if it does work, it’s publication-worthy, as this sort of thing hasn’t been done before, as far as I can tell. It could open up a whole new approach to automated psychological testing.

Update: It’s been done by uClassify. Pretty neat stuff.

Panidealism

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I’ve found a catchy name for what I had previously referred to as the “principle of additivity” in my Treatise on the Objective Reality of Ideas (which is falling behind schedule; sorry): “Panidealism”. It’s the position that any idea, even a ridiculously stupid one, has an intrinsic inestimable value. The reasoning is fairly simple: either an idea “works”, in which case it is worth something on its own, it does not, in which case knowing that it does not is itself worth something, or we’re not sure, in which case we will ascertain and reaffirm the status of other ideas in the process of seeking it.

In other words, there is no such thing as a bad idea, hence the name. This should be somewhat intuitively familiar to other compulsive brainstormers 🙂

To give an example, suppose I said rainbows end in pots of gold. This is probably false, but if we knew it was, we would be better off, because now we can derive “rainbows do not end in pots of gold”. If we didn’t know, we’d look for rainbows, and perhaps discover, say, that they are circular when viewed from above – also a useful fact.

Infrared + Color photography

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Infrared photography reveals more of an intensity map than a full spectrum. Therefore, why not take two photos of the same scene, using the infrared image as an intensity map for the RGB image? What if we match intensity to color using a k-nearest-neighbor approach?

This should generate a “bloom” effect in a photograph, similar to the effect that is all the rage in games right now. I intend to test this hypothesis as soon as my IR filter arrives. The results will be on Myopic Photography.

Intuitive compensation

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While discussing the nature of intuition with someone online, I recalled a hypothesis I had generated earlier (when I began to lose my visual acuity):

People, or at least those with intuitive personality types, will tend to compensate for a lack of sensory acuity with an increased reliance upon thought and intuition.

More concisely, synthesis replaces sensing.

Hot cat food

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I am surprised that this seems not to have been thought of yet. After all, wouldn’t cats like a nice hot meal every so often as well? Sure, you can microwave a can of Fancy Feast, but the food isn’t designed for it.

Lifesongs

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I’ve had an interesting musical idea: essentially a musical autobiography, which I’ve referred to as a “lifesong”. Think of it as a really long leitmotif. Such a piece would capture the essence of a composer’s life, would be started as soon as a composer felt capable of undertaking such a project, and would be continuously maintained until the composer either died, in which case it should be concluded by another composer or left alone depending on the circumstances of the death, or the composer anticipated nothing more from life – that is, the composer’s purpose has been fulfilled and the composer has nothing of significance left to complete. It would include annotations detailing the life events that correspond to events in the musical score. It would not be “published” in the tradition sense until the composer’s death, but it could, and indeed should, be made available as it’s being constructed.
Why am I posting this? Because I’m ready to begin writing my own.

Update: Yay, another nonoriginal idea. Reinvention is talent screaming out for background.

Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis

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I have quite a few problems with this hypothesis. It isn’t that the hypothesis is flawed – quite the contrary, actually: this hypothesis is so obvious that it really doesn’t deserve to be named after two people who, incidentally, were not the first to discover or write about it. Another problem I have is that it’s needlessly specific. It can be summarized in three words as “language influences thought”, when a much more general hypothesis (the one I arrived at as a child and later incorporated into my psychological postulates) is “expression influences thought”. Finally, the hypothesis is needlessly unidirectional: to argue that expression is not a product of thought, formal system that it is, is ludicrous. Therefore, an even stronger statement is “expression and thought influence each other”.

I needed to be born 50 years ago, when the obvious things weren’t all discovered yet. But then, perhaps I would have died in childbirth had that happened.