> All the documentaries were getting really high ratings, so would display highly in searches, but not many people actually watched them.

This rather shows that ratings do work, but are used wrongly for giving recommendations:

If you want to create suggestions for a user, in many case the wrong answer is "suggest what has really high ratings", but rather "given the ratings that this user gave and the films that he watched, what will he also like."

The fact that these documentaries get high ratings (the same might hold for art house films) shows that there is some (niche?) audience which really loves this kind of films, but not that "John Doe" will love it, too.

It was always weird to me that GroupLens didn't spin up a team for it, but it seemed like everyone in the research group had moved on to other things and didn't want to context switch back. Someone mentioned something like "shame they didn't do this 10 years ago, a million dollars would have been nice". I think someone was doing tagging on movielens, but I don't remember the details.

I got the sense that neither Riedl nor Konstan (or any of the current grad students it seemed) wanted to pursue it (Terveen, I think, wasn't in to recommender systems at all in the first place).

I don't think the lab had any funding problems haha, so maybe that was what it came down to.

And I know I'm (possibly) a minority on hacker news, but I prefer the new system. I was giving everything I wanted to watch more 4 or 5, even when it was clearly not the case, but because I want recommendations of things I'm going to like AND actually watch

In Germany, public TV is paid for by (nearly?) every household. [0]

Forcing everyone, including poor people, to subsidize rich people's taste for documentaries seems a bit.. off?

Similar arguments apply to public libraries and opera houses, though at least there the financing is done mostly via progressive taxation.

Of course, you can argue that we sophisticated people know what's good for those unwashed masses, and if only they watched their documentaries like they are supposed to, they would soon see the light. Colour me skeptical.

[0] As far as I am concerned, private broadcasters can and should do what they feel like.

Private broadcasters do not pick material based on public interest or even their judgment of what is good. It is far more mechanical and influenced entirely by market forces. Herman and Chomsky discuss this in Chapter 1 of Manufacturing Consent.

https://ia802700.us.archive.org/31/items/pdfy-NekqfnoWIEuYgd...

I agree. And economically, if you want less of a good to be consumed, ceasing to subsidize its production with tax payer money is a good first step. If you want to go further, perhaps even tax its production.

> Private broadcasters do not pick material based on public interest or even their judgment of what is good. It is far more mechanical and influenced entirely by market forces.

How do market forces differ from public interest?

Or rather, what do you mean by 'public interest'? It's what the general public is interested in?

Market forces come from people.

Related: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/09/11/book-review-manufactur...

Market forces tend toward baseness. It takes active intent to elevate society above the lowest possible level. Just as one doesn't want to hire at the median skill level of their company lest the average continue to drop over time, a society has to aim higher than what the impulsive market optimizes for, or it will decay.

Revealed preference is just code for exploitation of vice.

Of course, there are always enlightened and sophisticated people like yourself that know better what's good for the unwashed masses.

- Good Will Hunting

edit: btw, speaking of libraries, copyrighteousness is destroying our society

Receiving education isn't about learning. At least not primary. It's about getting a piece of paper at the end.

Public libraries and free internet resources are one argument in this direction. Another: professors are usually more than happy for you to sit in on lectures, even if you don't pay any tuition.

Answers from people can be used to suggest avenues for investigation, but shouldn't make you fund expensive stuff outright. (Assuming here that homeopathy is obvious nonsense, that people still swear by.)

And, of course, public libraries and documentaries don't have to just produce good effects. In order to justify public funding, you'd need to do a whole cost-benefit analysis and look at opportunity costs.

So look at what you get from public libraries vs libraries financed from private charity _plus_ whatever other good things the public money saved could do (including just outright giving it to poor people).

I deliberately picked public libraries here as a provocative examples. I suspect they might actually pass the cost-benefit test without too much contortion of metrics and data.

I am much less sanguine about the bang-for-buck of publicly financed opera houses, theatres and symphony orchestras, which Germany is quite fond of. And of course, publicly financed radio and TV broadcasters.

Further, I generally strongly oppose charity as a component of future plans (leaving aside whether charity is good or necessary in the present). We should never be building society such that it depends on the funding whims of rich philanthropists.

Sure, there should be some kind of analysis of benefits, but some things simply have to exist for a society to be a society, because without them, the loss of their intangible and second-order benefits will cause a society to implode Idiocracy style, and nobody will know why.

Are you implying that people who have better things to do than watch documentaries are stupid?

Similarly, entertainment preferences are correlated with social class (and with income), but again, they are not perfect predictors of each other.

So a few anecdata wouldn't undermine anything here. Though in fact, your example actually strengthens the argument I am making: you are the kind of person that prefers watching documentaries over other drivel, and you are the kind of person who managed to get themselves out of poverty. That's likely because you have the preferences, habits and skills of someone who is at least middle class in a social sense, even if your income took a while to catch up.

(Keep in mind that we are talking about social class in a rather abstract fashion here. German middle class mores are different from American middle class mores.)

assuming a normal distribution, wouldn't this then be the majority of people?

Arguing from definitions won't help us. (Keep in mind that 'middle class' doesn't mean 'median income' or something statistically simple like that.)

I feel the same way. However I force myself to read things that will better me once in a while anyway. I too want to hit things with a big sword (without the pain of getting hit), and get the girl (without cheating on my wife), but the world including me is better if I do something else anyway. Which is why I do sometimes read a complex math book.