Can Gladwell predict the next hit song or movie?
And while on the topic of Malcolm Gladwell, check out this fascinating article from the New Yorker (thanks Stan for forwarding). In the October 16 issue, Gladwell looks at two intriguing efforts aimed at predicting the success of a song or movie. While a song can be mathematically reduced and mapped to a “hit†cluster and a movie’s probable box office outcome determined by a neural network, Gladwell discovers there’s a large gap between predicting success and actually creating one:
Gladwell himself commented on the article in his own blog:
” I wrote a piece for the The New Yorker a few weeks ago about a group of people who have created a neural network that predicts (or tries to predict) the box office of movies from their scripts. The piece drew all kinds of interesting responses, a handful of which pointed out obvious imperfections in the system. Those criticisms were entirely accurate. But they were also, I think, in some way beside the point, because no decision rule or algorithm or prediction system is ever perfect. The test of these kinds of decision aids is simply whether–in most cases for most people–they improve the quality of decision-making. They can’t be perfect. But they can be good. ”
Read more here…
Gladwell is the author of:
