21 Lessons for the 21st Century

by Yuval Noah Harari

An algorithm might help. You can tell it which previous movies each of you really liked, and based on its massive statistical database, the algorithm can then find the perfect match for the group. Unfortunately, such a crude algorithm is easily misled, particularly because self-reporting is a notoriously unreliable gauge for people’s true preferences. It often happens that when we hear lots of people praise some movie as a masterpiece, we feel compelled to watch it, and even though we might fall asleep midway through, we don’t want to look like philistines, so we tell everyone it was an amazing experience.7 Such problems, however, can be solved if we just allow the algorithm to collect real-time data on us as we actually watch movies, instead of relying on our own dubious self-reports.