Seeking Relevance by Seeing People Differently


Each person we communicate with is unique, yet we share and are loosely connected by topics of interest. Instinctively we are drawn to communities that share our deepest desires. Leaders and trend setters pave the way for community formation by defining it’s core and identity.

Defining ourselves by what we love

Imagine a human abstraction which ignores social standing, location, native language, wealth, and fame. Instead this representation focuses only on interests and depth, individual style and persona, and as much background knowledge and expertise of a person as possible.

Organic Community Growth and Separation

This way of seeing people as intelligent decision engines with complex interwoven desires masks out all non-essential information to the problem at hand, seeking relevance. Fluid communication is the result of series of questions and answers orbiting a central topic. Perhaps a better analogy is like asteroids orbiting the rings of Saturn, which ripple with waves as moons soar past.

Layered discussions arise as elementary interests are brought together into cross topic molecules. The result is communication between the intersection of those groups (and) or between members of the separate communities (or). In this way compound topics are aggregated into new elements and elements are broken up into separate fragments. Topic granularity is a function of time varying interest, knowledge, and definitions of the crowd. Conflicts are easily settled by individual capacity to “fork” any element*.

Today’s Social Search

Our current methods of social search champion successful curators or popular people. It’s etched into our biology and being to seek masters in fields related to our survival and satisfaction. We are drawn to speakers who we perceive capable of enriching our lives with their generosity, knowledge, and resources^. Topical authority is earned by the individual, yet granted by the community.

Network Health Requires Intelligent Routing

As the social network of humanity matures, the amount of cumulative knowledge generated and curated within it increases. Even now, at this nascent stage of the social web, individuals are incapable of perceiving the information and opportunities that swell around them with respect to a hyperfine niche.

Eager problem solvers in universities, startups, and big corporations wrestle with algorithms to bring order to exponentially growing data**. I’d like to step back and study how information finds us, and how we personally judge relevance.

Why does specific information reach us? What shape and form of message are we most open to at a given time? Is there an upper bound to relevance? If relevance is uniquely defined by each individual, each algorithm must be tuned to each person^^.

Here are a few fundamental assumptions I believe are in common to the finest relevance solutions:

  • Ultimately the user must be in control of the filter
  • Understanding the dynamic social network and the individual is an iterative effort
  • Time and location are tied to relevance. Solutions which take too long are penalized
  • We should never be satisfied or settle for good enough when it comes to the quality of relevance

Notes:
*= thanks to git/github, open source, and historic processes for the forking analogy

^= In many instances of late, I’ve read the most potent ability of investors is their ability to introduce a new business to those mutually beneficial partners, be they follow on investors, new marketing channels, or customers. The network and introductions are proving more valuable and efficient than cash.

**= Brilliant folks are working to bring order to perceived chaos with semantic efforts, social search based on network interaction, feed subscription entities, and physical location. My6sense and my friend Louis Gray who’s their brand new VP, Hunch, and Google magic immediately come to mind. Facebook and Google ads, along with Amazon suggestions are also driven by relevance as a bottom line to performance.

^^= Supersets of algorithms may give more relevant suggestions at the cost of generality. Explore the million dollar Netflix suggestion algorithm prize for examples of this.

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  • http://twitter.com/emerigent/lists/memberships Emeri Gent [Em]

    Seeing a difference is what I mean by “making a difference”, but for me it is important to see how different I am without aiming to change the other. That way I can appreciate the difference and examine in light of this appreciation, what is my difference. This is not a narcissistic self-examination, it is merely a reality check which in turn rescues the word “diversity” from its present social meaning.

    Relevance is interesting in itself because for me the opposite of it is indifference. The opposite of irrelevance for me is disruption. I want to examine relevance first (in an emergent rather than academic context), and I begin with this book:

    Relevance: Communication and Cognition by Sperber and Wilson
    http://books.google.com/books?id=2sOKgpYuX4wC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false

    This is what Wikipedia entry says about Sperber and Wilson’s book :

    “Relevance theory is a proposal (by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson) that seeks to explain the second method of communication: implicit inferences. It argues that the human mind will instinctively react to an encoded message by considering information that it conceives to be relevant to the message. By “relevance” it is meant whatever allows the most new information to be transmitted in that context on the basis of the least amount of effort required to convey it.”

    So the link I make between relevance and disruption is this “making a difference” as a way of shaking relevance through our own filter and sieve, so that clarity is emerging on the other end and we are in turn creating order from the volcanic chaos of thoughts and ideas in our universe, that continue to be thrown into the atmosphere of human thinking. Let me call that attention volcano as the word “media”.

    I will still like to keep the association of “irrelevance and indifference” by my side and I don’t want to think or over-think this, because firstly I will go nuts if I do and secondly in allowing the edge of chaos to settle, I recognize the existence of self-organization as an emerging property, a new pattern or order will emerge from the disruption which for me is relevant in an emergent sense.

    Seeing a difference IMHO is a pathway to emergent creation of meaning, but this is not a shared meaning, for I think that blind obedience is an indifference, in that even as I write these thoughts out, the moment I have hit the send button, I want to disrupt it – why do I need to disrupt other people’s thinking, when I have not sifted the relevance of my own thinking, and this is called “metacognition”.

    Relevance then for me becomes disruption because of one huge human factor – that I DO NOT KNOW. This factor is applicable to all. One of the people I learned that “I do not know” is from the thinking of Richard Feynman. Sykes wrote a really good book which I recently opened up and it gave me a really good appreciation for the way Feynman thought about the world.

    “No Ordinary Genius” by Christopher Skyes
    http://books.google.com/books?id=1HxzLaPYo2IC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false

    The big takeaway for me from this book is hearing Feynman’s attitude about mathematics. First he thought of mathematics in an emergent way which is different to how Freeman Dyson see’s mathematics (in its rich historical context). Second he saw it as a means of understanding our world and made a great point that those who do not understand mathematics are missing a large part of the language which helps us explain our world. From this I extrapolated that we all have a missing language that prevents us from understanding the world, so hence the reality of how much we do not know.

    Kent Anderson looks at disruption in scholarly research and he has this beautiful article on disruption with an equally wonderful discussion from people whose thinking on this subject is worth taking a peek at:

    “Is it Disruption if you have done it yourself? by Kent Anderson”
    http://bit.ly/8pYWiT

    What I like about Anderson’s piece is that it puts into relationship present day talk about the “black swan” and “innovators dilemma” in a context that pays respect to emergence as literally an emergent form of thought that is becoming relevant in the 21st Century. What I have learned so far is that my own blindness to mathematics means that I have to learn to see that difference (if I ever can) and that is the hard work ahead of me, (hence I don’t have time to change anyone else, my plate is rather full just being a student of all of this).

    If I needed evidence of the importance of understanding mathematics, I can find it many places but one good example is a 1990 paper by Ralph Linsker based on “Perceptual Neural Organization”

    Perceptual Neural Organization by Ralph Linsker
    http://psychology.stanford.edu/~jlm/pdfs/LinskerAnnRev90.pdf

    I look at that paper and I don’t have the mathematic language to dig deeper. I know it is relevant to me because my innate intelligence recognizes that this relevant to me, but I am illiterate to decipher its meaning beyond the meaning that is written in plain english. This brings me back to the meaning of diversity (or seeing a difference in an intelligent way) and it absolutely reinforces to me the importance and relevance of EDUCATION.

    I have written this because I am following my river of thought and because my “One Thing” is called “FREEDOM”. I don’t want my thinking to disrupt your flow, because that would be like someone wanting to build a dam and turn the stream into a reservoir of a particular ideology. The core principle in how I see relevance is that I don’t want to change you and I don’t want you to change me, because change happens to us whether we want it to or not. Nobody as I understand it as to date found the elixir of immortality and if they found it, what would the point be of appreciating the wonder of life.

    What is most relevant to me is that I don’t know, and in the process of not knowing, I am developing a new appreciation for uncertainty, for the unknownable and in understanding that for me, Socrates refrain “To Know Thyself” is a form of personal disruption and not social irrelevance. Then again, I also know that I have not yet read Albert Camus “The Rebel” – and so I clearly have a little more reading to do in this regard and perhaps that is my next decision point, knowing that in reading Rollo May, I discovered the difference between a revolutionary and a rebel :

    Wikipedia “The Rebel”
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rebel_%28book%29

    If I am irrelevant to society that is fine by me for I don’t want to disrupt society or to be a revolutionary. I do want to understand myself thought as a rebel and so I still need to read Camus, and I also recognize that I may benefit from reading John Locke (which a good lady recommended me some time ago).

    [Em]

  • http://www.victusspiritus.com/ Mark Essel

    So many wonderful references, and so little time to feast upon them. Why not add to that list with these Richard Feynman Lectures. I’ve added them not so that you watch them, but to remind myself to explore them later.

  • http://twitter.com/Ovurmind Viktor Ovurmind

    Feynman is a great disruptive force of nature . I found two loops here – one of virtuous nutrition and one of viscous consumption. In clockwise I move forward when relevance dines on disruption and disruption feeds relevance. In anti-clockwise I move backwards in that irrelevance dines on indifference and indifference feeds irrelevance. Now good sir, I am off to pick up a copy of Albert Camus, “The Rebel” :-)

    [v.o.M.]

  • http://www.missi.com/ Peter Beddows

    Came here today Mark from the link you posted in Mark Susters’ post of today on Bothsidesofthetable regarding “Make the Internet Smarter at Helping Us” (http://bit.ly/dRy9my).

    Between the observations posted by @msuster, the comments you posted on @msuster’s post, your article above and the comments posted here by @EmeriGent, it becomes very easy to recognize just how very hard, even daunting it is to come up with a reliable method for filtering results by relevance.

    Though much work is obviously going on to answer this pain-point, this is probably the closest demand we have yet reached – versus creating effective robots – where the solution lies in creating or adapting practical AI (artificial intelligence) as the foundation to the solution.

  • http://www.victusspiritus.com/ Mark Essel

    Glad you enjoyed the time cost of covering the posts. They’re only loose ideas until a team(s) start building and testing them under the relentless judgment of people with tight schedules and real demands.

  • http://www.missi.com/ Peter Beddows

    True dat!