The Probabilistic Age

A fascinating post on the Long Tail blog with a probabilistic take on systems such as Google and Wikipedia.

Because these systems operate on the alien logic of probabilistic statistics, which sacrifices perfection at the microscale for optimization at the macroscale.

Which, basically, means that these types of system are a bit les reliable at the details level to gain effectiveness in it’s growing, scaling, ability. He believes it’s so different from our usual way of thinking that it’s giving us problems dealing with those systems. We have to start approaching them with a different mindset, taking the information with a grain of salt knowing that it’s the price to pay for such breath of information.

One Comment

anonymoose December 19, 2005

Wikipedia rules.

Check out this joint google/wikipedia search
thingy I found: http://www.blinkpop.com.

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