Netflix’s Secret Special Algorithm Is a Human - The New Yorker

Speculation about the limits of data-driven decision making

"[...] In short, I do think that there is a sophisticated algorithm at work here—but I think his name is Ted Sarandos.

I presented Sarandos with this theory at a Sundance panel called “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Trust the Algorithm,” moderated by Jason Hirschhorn, formerly of MySpace. Sarandos, very agreeably, wobbled a bit. “It is important to know which data to ignore,” he conceded, before saying, at the end, “In practice, its probably a seventy-thirty mix.” But which is the seventy and which is the thirty? “Seventy is the data, and thirty is judgment,” he told me later. Then he paused, and said, “But the thirty needs to be on top, if that makes sense.”"

Netflix’s Secret Special Algorithm Is a Human - The New Yorker