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It's unfortunate that despite of the popularity of social networks and plenty of other services that leverage network effects, the review and recommendation systems that are supposed to help users make the right decisions haven't changed much. Thumbs-up and thumbs-down or likes and unlikes signal two things: popularity and polarization. If a YouTube video has 400 thumbs-up and 500 thumbs-down it means that the video is popular as well as polarized, but it doesn't tell me whether I will like it or not. The star review system also signals two things - on average how good something is and whether it's significant or not. There are multiple problems with this approach. An item with 8 reviews, all 5 stars, could be really bad compared to an item that has 300 reviews with 3.5 stars. Star ratings alone, without associated descriptive reviews, wouldn't make much sense if there aren't enough people who have reviewed the item. Also, relying on an average rating alone coul...

What if a cricket team gets two batsmen to replace Sachin Tendulkar and still collectively get 100 runs out of them or have two not-so-great bowlers to replace Shane Warne and still get the other side out? If an eventual goal is to score, say 300+ runs in an ODI match does it matter how the runs are scored? What if you could find four players scoring 50 runs each instead of counting on Sehwag and Tendulkar types to score a century and lose miserably when they don't? This is not how people think when it comes to cricket. That's also not how people used to think when it came to baseball until Billy Beane applied radical thinking to baseball, sabermetrics , now popularly known as Moneyball . On Base Percentage (OBP) became one of the most important metrics since then. As yet another provocative aspect of Moneyball suggests, only thing that matters is whether a hitter puts a ball in play or not. Once the ball is in play the hitter does not control the outcome of that play. In cr...