{"id":277,"date":"2019-11-07T01:36:22","date_gmt":"2019-11-07T01:36:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/cscw2019\/?p=277"},"modified":"2019-11-07T01:36:24","modified_gmt":"2019-11-07T01:36:24","slug":"soylent-not-the-beverage-the-ms-word-add-in","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/cscw2019\/2019\/11\/07\/soylent-not-the-beverage-the-ms-word-add-in\/","title":{"rendered":"Soylent: not the beverage, the MS Word add-in"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"> Moderate googling did not reveal any mention of Soylent data being used to train AIs, which surprises me\u2026\u00a0 The fact that I hadn\u2019t heard of Soylent before this paper also surprised me\u2014why isn\u2019t it so popular that \u201cSoylent\u201d is a household name?\u00a0 (Well, it kind of is, but it\u2019s in reference to the soy-based beverage in the minimalistic bottles.)  Why aren\u2019t there headlines about machine learning algorithms being trained on Soylent-sourced edits?\u00a0 Perhaps it is another case of the DVORAK keyboard: the problem that Soylent solves is not so big that people want to use it, even if the savings are guaranteed.  We\u2019d rather ask an office-mate to proof-read our memo than the anonymous crowd, even if the crowd costs less than five minutes of Jorge-down-the-hall\u2019s time. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">It\u2019s a testament to the effectiveness of <em>Soylent<\/em> that the authors had their own paper crowd-proofed (p. 317) and shortn\u2019d (p. 322).\u00a0 The paper reads like an advertisement, and this reader is sold&#8230;sold on its effectiveness, that is.\u00a0 Not <em>so<\/em> sold that I can see myself ever trying it out.  I would rather ask Jorge, and anyway, Microsoft Office is so pass\u00e9. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The Find-Fix-Verify method impressed me.\u00a0 On average, 30% of one Mechanical Turker\u2019s raw edits on an open-ended task are poor\u2014too many Turkers and <em>Eager Beavers<\/em> or <em>Lazy Turkers<\/em>\u2014but when an editing task is divided into parts (e.g. on Crowdproof, one set of Turkers <em>finds<\/em> the passages with problems; another <em>fixes<\/em> the problems they find in said passages; and a third <em>verifies<\/em> those fixes in a voting system), you see the end result become far less noisy.\u00a0 The job will take longer, but the gains in accuracy are well worth it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/lh3.googleusercontent.com\/uQubrd2XQsOTzxLAPh1zYoLkZsnEKK3xmOivreHv2DIyMlCCAlWsXoQMU7lW-G8BUolMXUgvWS-12cOwqRMK0E45BOYy-AW0maVhj3KWc7sajv17wUBGNIkBAfB4TrDcaFhk1-Ey\" alt=\"\" \/><figcaption>OG Mechanical Turk<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/lh5.googleusercontent.com\/5KEjvMHIPoqbo-t2WicMHPk3rgy_uKRgCM9FmTwy_sTDfjWj2teWrAL9Unsg_yqGN3Di9W4eT-4Leffr0CEADGwfUokXH6c6Nwu2wCK7acNOVH_cYxaw2bgkCzf56Ii-uzjvB0sF\" alt=\"\" \/><figcaption>The better-known cousin of MIT&#8217;s Soylent<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Moderate googling did not reveal any mention of Soylent data being used to train AIs, which surprises me\u2026\u00a0 The fact that I hadn\u2019t heard of Soylent before this paper also surprised me\u2014why isn\u2019t it so popular that \u201cSoylent\u201d is a household name?\u00a0 (Well, it kind of is, but it\u2019s in reference to the soy-based beverage&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":266,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-277","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/cscw2019\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/cscw2019\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/cscw2019\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/cscw2019\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/266"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/cscw2019\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=277"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/cscw2019\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":278,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/cscw2019\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277\/revisions\/278"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/cscw2019\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=277"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/cscw2019\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=277"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/cscw2019\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=277"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}