Ask the Mechanical Turk

[andygates]

Now here's a fascinating article: The premise is that you can use Amazon's Mechanical Turk to argue with you.  If you're a nerdy reader, you'll already know that the Turk is an automatic job outsourcing engine: it passes small jobs to people who are paid small amounts for usually small efforts.  Newsworthy uses include the attempt to find adventurer Steve Fossett's crashed plane in satellite photos: a Turk user would get a photo, and the question "is there any wreckage in this picture?". 

What the author has done is ask the Turk to challenge his philosophical argument.  He's asked it for the one thing machines really suck at: an opinion.  And it turns out he got plenty, which makes me think that this could be a great way to, say, refine a thesis for logical holes, inconsistencies and oversights.  The best part is, he got good quality opinions for a dollar a pop, without alienating his friends or drowning in friendly agreement and Usenet-style argumentative biff. 

It's still a funny creature, the Turk, but this is a novel use that makes me smile.  Now, I don't just have to listen to the voices in my head.

Comments

[jarkman.livejournal.com]

I thought it was an interesting idea, but it fundamentally hadn't worked for him.

He'd started from a moderately confused proposition, and after consulting the Turk he was still exactly as confused, precisely because the Turk answered the question he asked instead of straightening him out.

I think you're right, there must be things the technique is good for, but he is not the poster boy for it.