My Comment on Schwartz Video: Too many choices – Intelligent Recommender System is one option.

It was exciting to watch the video of Schwartz giving his opinion about choices. Somehow, he’s got the point that sometimes too many choices can hinder someone to make decision, or make someone regrets the decision she / he makes. However, it’s inevitable that “world” has provided us many choices, and we have to make decision upon those choices.

Regarding this matter, there is a technological approach called intelligent recommender system. It observes the reality that sometimes people rely on others to make decision. People have other people’s opinion as their based to make decisions. One method used is collaborative filtering. Collaborative filtering works by grouping people base on their similar taste upon certain things, and whatever these people think of something based on their experiences and taste, the opinion are passed through to someone else that need the recommendation of those same certain things. Imagine we could build a recommending society that consists of all people of world, and then we could recommend each other. It sounds good enough. It might shorten the time taken to decide something. Somehow it works quite well, despite the fact that it also needs some enhancement – like the value of the recommendation, the trust, etc (and the dedicated researchers are working on them).

My conclusion is: people do make problems – in this case, by making many choices available, then make people are more confused to decide – but people also try to build solutions of the problem. Human is blessed with the capability of learning from mistakes. So………. Keep the spirits alive…… keep creative….. :-)