I don’t think there’s any good reason to depend on birthday or actually follow the zodiac; it would be simpler to just have a few horoscopes for each day and show them randomly.
Actually, one interesting variation on this theme would be a website which keeps a database of all of the rationalist horoscopes, lets people get accounts and rate individual horoscopes by usefulness, and uses that information to predict which other ones that user would find the most useful. That would be a lot more helpful than going randomly or by birthday.
The basic idea can definitely be implemented in more sophisticated ways, though I’m not sure how quickly one would hit the point of diminishing returns.
At this point I think there’s a clear advantage to having everyone using the same database; more feedback in the same place means we’ll more quickly figure out how good the horoscopes are, so that the horoscope-choosing script is better calibrated and we have the data we need to know what kind of horoscopes we need to write more of.
The code as written does allow for several tumblrs to draw from and report to the same database, so if there’s an advantage to having different people see different horoscopes even though each group has the same probability of seeing any given one, that can be implemented easily enough, but I’m not sure that’s the case.
I don’t think there’s any good reason to depend on birthday or actually follow the zodiac; it would be simpler to just have a few horoscopes for each day and show them randomly.
Actually, one interesting variation on this theme would be a website which keeps a database of all of the rationalist horoscopes, lets people get accounts and rate individual horoscopes by usefulness, and uses that information to predict which other ones that user would find the most useful. That would be a lot more helpful than going randomly or by birthday.
The basic idea can definitely be implemented in more sophisticated ways, though I’m not sure how quickly one would hit the point of diminishing returns.
At this point I think there’s a clear advantage to having everyone using the same database; more feedback in the same place means we’ll more quickly figure out how good the horoscopes are, so that the horoscope-choosing script is better calibrated and we have the data we need to know what kind of horoscopes we need to write more of.
The code as written does allow for several tumblrs to draw from and report to the same database, so if there’s an advantage to having different people see different horoscopes even though each group has the same probability of seeing any given one, that can be implemented easily enough, but I’m not sure that’s the case.
I suggested something like this in the interest checking post: http://lesswrong.com/lw/5rb/rationalist_horoscopes_lowhanging_utility/47i7