The power of inference: biometric psychography and large language models
undertherose.substack.com · 1,348 words · saved by 1 readers
More expressive bits + better algorithms = more knowledge. And who benefits?
Knowledge is almost never raw data. Knowledge is usually gained through reasoning about raw data to arrive at some new fact or conclusion. This reasoning process, a.k.a. inference, is vital to almost every meaningful piece of knowledge that can be gained. Knowing someone's browsing history, at face value, is not why it's interesting to gather that data. It's what you can infer about their personality from their browsing history that is interesting. Inference can be surprisingly powerful. Knowing an American's gender, zip code and birth date is enough, in 84-97% of cases, to infer their…
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