Supporting and challenging resources

[nileshtrivedi]

Ideas from a twitter thread:

Make an "Anti-book" recommender that makes it easy to find resources that challenge a particular opinion (IdeaSet?).

e.g. We hear "follow your passion" everywhere, but in "So Good They Can't Ignore You", Cal Newport makes his case against it

LearnAwesome's knowledge graph separates "books" from the "ideas" that book contains. Which means this feature ("books that challenge the ideas in this book") will be easy to implement. This can be an awesome refinement of the "Related Items" feature.

Our "Related Items" is currently implemented via Item#related_items which looks up other items belonging to the same IdeaSet. For eg: the same person may have written book, given a TED talk and been on a podcast interview. This allows users to find the item in their favorite format.

We also already have the Recommendation model with an integer score (0 to 5?) which stores if an Item or an Expert has recommended an IdeaSet.

To represent "supporting" as well as "challenging" resources, there are two options: (a) Allow negative scores in Recommendations or (b) Add a kind column with values like "supports", "challenges". But two issues with this: A book may both support AND challenge an idea. And a favorable view isn't quite the same as "supporting" which needs to add more arguments, evidence etc to the discussion and not simply be "this was really well-written!". This needs some thinking through.

Additional tasks:

• Create UI on each items/show page for supporting/challenging resources
• Crawl the internet (how?) or manually curate data (how?) for this and import via a script