relevance score

about

what's the difference between a "relevance score" vs an importance rating, as seen in gwern's website, for example?

in gwern's own words:

Using my interactive sorting tool Resorter, I’ve ranked pages in deciles from 0–10 on how important the topic is to myself, the intended reader, or the world. For example, topics like embryo selection for traits such as intelligence or evolutionary pressures towards autonomous AI are vastly more important, and be ranked 10, than some poems or a dream or someone’s small nootropics self-experiment, which would be ranked 0–1.

at face value, this makes sense, but what if that poem, dream, or nootropics experiment turns out to make an impact on you and become a major experience in your life? something that started with a low apparent importance can grow and become something else.

that's why i call it relevance. it points to it being more fleeting, contextual. what's important today (getting a job, making ends meet) might be completely unimportant in a different context (when you're financially stable and are dealing with family/emotional challenges, for example). and this applies both at an individual level, but also at a societal level.

when i use "relevance", i'm pointing to the cognitive process of recursive relevance realization, which we're always engaged in, re-evaluating what is relevant now, and why.

if something tends to stay relevant for a long time, it's likely something important for us. if it seems super important at some point, but after some time it loses its grip on us, how important was it really? or was it just pointing to something deeper, that's more important to us?

i.e. relevance is more short-term. importance is more long-term. importance can be (sort of) measured by how relevant something stays/becomes for you over time.

well, that's my perspective and how i'm choosing to use the term. it's a starting point. more nuance needed/welcome over time as we continue to use this pattern. :)

relevance score visualizations

i still have to figure out why the digital garden plugin i'm using isn't allowing me to show the relevance score property on my notes. i have been tending so far to 234 notes that already have assigned relevance scores over 80 (max 100), and i'm slowly planting more and more of them (mostly design & lab notes were processed so far, so the index below is missing a ton of stuff from alchemy, art, player and regen, that are less developed).

i intend to fix this soon, but in the meantime, while i'm also building other views to help navigate this information - the 025 🗺 topics & references MOC and viable pathways' 05 - core references & resources pages - this is a useful visualization for navigating this research garden by identifying what i deem as most relevant from the areas above:

*i've hid anything below 80 relevance score since - well, they're not as relevant at the moment, and therefore shouldn't clutter this visualization.

1) index

2) map

(under development, version in-progress below)