[HN Gopher] Fake Books
___________________________________________________________________
Fake Books
Author : tybulewicz
Score : 828 points
Date : 2022-10-24 05:24 UTC (17 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (lcamtuf.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (lcamtuf.substack.com)
| n10c wrote:
| > I soon discovered that all the books leaned on the same central
| argument: value is an inherent consequence of scarcity. My
| rebuttal to that was simple: it's an exception, not a rule. My
| kids' doodles are scarce, but in a gallery, they wouldn't fetch
| much. Alas, while this made for a solid Twitter quip, it wasn't
| enough for an in-depth post.
|
| Scarcity in economics refers to when the demand for a resource is
| greater than the supply of that resource. Your kids doodles
| aren't scarce because there is no demand for them.
|
| How did the author read 11 books on NFT's and not know this lol?
| The books must have been all very bad or the article author just
| skimmed thru them.
|
| Interesting article other than that tho.
| yosamino wrote:
| > The books must have been all very bad or the article author
| just skimmed thru them.
|
| It seems that you have not even bothered to skim the article...
| n10c wrote:
| How so? The author only mentions one of the books being bad.
| mypastself wrote:
| Alarmingly enough, not even the one- or two-star Amazon reviews
| caught the garbled nonsense, indicating that not even real people
| bothered to read the book in detail.
|
| I'm wondering if any person on the planet other than the author
| of the article read this best-selling book in its entirety.
| Because even the book's purported author likely didn't.
| smeagull wrote:
| If you thought it was garbage, why would you continue to pour
| your time into reading it in detail? That's just silly. You
| throw it in the bin and move on with your life.
| mypastself wrote:
| Well, if you're writing a review, you could at least warn
| other readers that the book contains nonsense.
| jcynix wrote:
| That would mean that the reviewer understood the topic and
| was capable of writing a proper critique? I'm a book lover
| who reads a lot of fiction and non-fiction and more often
| than not in the last few years I have the feeling that many
| reviews are generated by people who read a different book,
| or didn't understand the one the comment at all.
| mypastself wrote:
| Makes sense, I suppose. The reviewers of the book in
| question might then have read the part about chemotherapy
| "NFPs" and thought that the section is probably accurate
| and they just didn't understand it, so they moved on.
| Which is alarming enough by itself.
| leobg wrote:
| Well, if people don't actually invest any time and effort into
| consuming the books they buy, then perhaps it is an inevitable
| adaptation on the part of authors to also not invest any time
| and effort into creating them.
|
| (The rise of Blinkist et. al. seems to support the idea that
| many people value being able to say that they have read a book
| much more highly than actually reading it.)
| bawolff wrote:
| I suppose, but it seems like such a weird brag to say i read
| off-brand nfts for dummies.
|
| Like i totally get people lying about reading Finnegan's
| wake, but who is impressed by a weird intro to NFT book?
| Maybe it depends on social circle.
| OliveOilOnChips wrote:
| > not even the one- or two-star Amazon reviews caught the
| garbled nonsense
|
| You treat Amazon reviews as credible information?
|
| Wow!
| mypastself wrote:
| Are you saying there are zero genuine reviews on Amazon? Or
| zero genuine reviews for this particular book?
|
| I'm aware of at least one real person who occasionally writes
| honest reviews of technical books on Amazon: me.
|
| So with enough reviews for a particular one, I'd expect at
| least _some of them_ to be credible, yes. You can usually
| tell which ones are not shills or bots.
|
| E.g. in this case, those might be the reviewers who gave a
| lower rating, and had specific (rather than generic)
| criticisms.
|
| My surprise here stems from the fact that even they seemed to
| have skimmed or misread some key sections.
| jakub_g wrote:
| Not exactly the same though related: IIRC there's another scam on
| Amazon where people self-publish some ebooks which are clearly
| gibberish, put a massive price tag on it, and use hacked accounts
| to buy them. Very low effort and essentially free money, because
| no physical goods are involved. It's been discussed here a year
| ago or so.
| residualmind wrote:
| Even human-written content has become so bad it's sometimes hard
| to tell it apart from a Mark V. Shaney or Racter implementation.
| I mean, aren't our brains' language capabilites not just Markov
| chains on steroids, with billions and billions of inputs and
| weights? Why are we still using text-based content-generation
| algorithms? Can't we train some kind of AI to generate "good"
| fiction content? Like, for example, this: "Oh," said Lucy,
| peeping into the parlour, "is that our old friend, the fairy?"
| "Yes," said Mr. Bennet, looking up from his newspaper, "my sister
| has been entertaining you in the best way she can." "She has been
| telling me," said Mrs. Bennet, with a solemn laugh, "all about
| her doll's tea-party. I wish I had been there." "My dear,"
| replied her husband, "I am certain that it has been her greatest
| enjoyment. And the little girl really seems to have had a very
| good time of it." "Not more so, I am afraid, than the other
| ladies. _They_ had none of the advantages of hearing the charming
| story.
| lethrowchuck wrote:
| > I mean, aren't our brains' language capabilities not just
| Markov chains on steroids, with billions and billions of inputs
| and weights?
|
| The word "just" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Yes, our
| language capabilities are just Markov chains - the way
| engineering is just constrained nonlinear optimization and
| playing games is just tree traversal.
| Gigachad wrote:
| The generated content is all nonsensical babel when it's asked
| to do more than give a definition for a word or concept.
|
| It's grammatically correct but has no deeper meaning. And sure,
| some of the human written crap posted here is also meaningless
| blogspam.
| Roark66 wrote:
| I disagree with the author on the below: >With GPT-3, we now have
| an infinitely-scalable technology that is years away from being
| able to enrich our lives, but is already more than capable of
| drowning out all remnants of authentic content on the internet.
| And because you can leverage this to earn money or sway opinions,
| that outcome is probably hard to avoid.
|
| I can't speak for GPT-3 specifically as I haven't spent enough
| time with it, but it's open equivalent Bloom is very useful
| today. Author says it is far from being able to "enrich our
| lives". I think otherwise. The whole "AI revolution" definitely
| did enrich my life. It renewed my passion for programming in
| general. The possibilities are truly endless. From translation,
| to content summarisation and search. Then it is only a step away
| from enriching other people's lives with products that make them
| more productive, help them in execution of mundane tasks etc.
|
| I think AIs like bloom will in not to distant time allow us to
| fix the Internet to how it was before all the shitty content
| generation replaced genuine content in Google for example.
|
| Also, there is a huge potential to improve our understanding of
| what it means to think and understand complex concepts. For the
| very first time we have something that comes very close to such
| understanding. Something that doesn't have feelings, it can be
| cut, modified, transformed and studied in myriad of different
| ways.
|
| Also, believe me when I say the next AI revolution will be with
| models like Bloom that will be able to run on the edge. This is
| currently impossible due to their size, but it is very likely
| we'll find methods to optimise them significantly.
|
| Then there is potential application of such models to decision
| making. I bet there is ongoing research in that field right now.
|
| Addressing the negative side, "ability to generate garbage
| content that looks good". The ability has already existed for
| advanced adversaries. Hostile nations can simply employ people to
| "generate content". Smaller players have lots of other (inferior)
| tools. Their content doesn't have to fool people most of the
| time. It just has to fool various algorithms. Even without
| advanced AI models the search engines and social networks have
| been loosing badly in this fight. Existence of those tools will
| improve the bad actors capabilities, but it will also give good
| actors the chance to innovate with something new.
| Borrible wrote:
| Ah, remember those times when producing hundred of thousands of
| books was just a side-gig for a Professor of Management Science?
| And he didn't even faked it.
|
| https://singularityhub.com/2012/12/13/patented-book-writing-...
|
| https://patents.google.com/patent/US7266767B2/en
|
| https://www.icongrouponline.com/
| scyclow wrote:
| Am I the only one who thinks that reading all the "highest rated"
| NFT books on Amazon in an attempt to write a good-faith critique
| is hilarious?
| jollyllama wrote:
| Any chance that it's at least partially non-english speakers
| using bad translator/thesaurus app output?
| duskwuff wrote:
| No. The wording and grammar is fine; the problem is that the
| ideas being expressed with those words are nonsense.
| [deleted]
| HyperLinear wrote:
| > " I soon discovered that all the books leaned on the same
| central argument: value is an inherent consequence of scarcity.
| My rebuttal to that was simple: it's an exception, not a rule. My
| kids' doodles are scarce, but in a gallery, they wouldn't fetch
| much. "
|
| There isn't really a market for kids doodles, and with the
| barrier to entry being really low the supply is many orders of
| magnitude higher than the demand. So the central argument stays.
|
| Not a great start of the article this.
| bawolff wrote:
| Which was precisely the author's point.
| n10c wrote:
| No its not. Scarcity in economics refers to when the demand
| for a resource is greater than the supply of that resource.
| The kids doodles aren't scarce because there is little demand
| for them. On the other hand there is demand for NFT's
| (whether you think there should be or not). The comparison
| doesn't make any sense and just makes the author look dumb.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| A ghostwriter commissioned to write a book on some hot topic is,
| essentially, a poorly trained and badly optimized neural network.
| NaturalPhallacy wrote:
| You're.... you're not wrong.
| deviation wrote:
| #1 on HN and no comments? I'm curious how the ranking system here
| works... Posts with the greatest # of upvotes per minute?
| dang wrote:
| See _How are stories ranked?_ in
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html. Note that "number of
| comments" is not a factor.
|
| It's common on HN for submissions to get upvoted before
| comments come in. It's a good sign, actually, if people aren't
| rushing to post reflexive things. Good comments are reflective,
| which means they happen after people have had time to process
| information--such as by reading an article.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33303565
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
| [deleted]
| andirk wrote:
| Amazon review bots upvoting HN articles about themselves?
| kristopolous wrote:
| I wonder if it's a few keywords in there. Let me try.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33313447
|
| let's see what happens.
|
| It got 7 points and then flagged.
|
| Then again maybe this is a bad test. Perhaps just reposting
| the above story in a way to dissuade human upvoters would be
| the right approach.
|
| Then I'd have to withhold it for a couple hours and reveal it
| later
| andirk wrote:
| Good effort. Could just be some tech bro picking stuff
| sometimes. Whatever it is, I find the content some of the
| best on the net. Like and subscribe.
| wallmountedtv wrote:
| It got published about 30 minutes ago. And has gotten a lot of
| likes early on, pushing it up.
| jgaa wrote:
| I think the problem is < fake books and > Amazons fundamentally
| broken reviews system.
|
| Seems like the fake review bots are a lot smarter than the anti-
| measures applied by Amazon. And the fun part is that both parties
| are probably running on AWS ;)
| a3w wrote:
| I think the problem is [bra] fake books and [ket] Amazons...
|
| I think the problem is [left] fake books and [Quote sign]
| Amazons...
|
| Okay, on the third try I read less and more. Still, it felt
| ugly.
| thr0wnawaytod4y wrote:
| I thought it's just a fancy way to write (something and)
| something more important.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| It took me two tries too; my first guess was "I think the
| problem is not as bad as fake books and worse than Amazon's
| fundamentally broken review system", but that didn't make
| sense.
|
| The symbols < and > are being used as substitutes for the
| English words "less" and "more", which is not conventional
| at all, but is related enough to the actual meaning of the
| symbols that given context and a lot of effort, you can get
| there. I wouldn't recommend copying the notation; it
| conflicts pretty badly with the ordinary use of < and >.
| em-bee wrote:
| the big question this raises is: how will this affect self
| publishing and the need for an actual publisher.
|
| i expect that publishers are able to avoid publishing junk like
| this and therefore are still able to offer some value. whereas
| self-publishing authors will have to fight to stand out on their
| own.
| phtrivier wrote:
| "90% of everything is crap" ; but, now, 'everything' is computer-
| generated, and therefore, infinite. I'll let mathematicians study
| the convergence, while physicists conclude that "everything is
| crap", give up and get a beer, and software engineers go back to
| fixing the other 90%.
| ajot wrote:
| Totally unrelated to TFA, but to the (great, in my opinion)
| author: here's[0] an older prepping guide for non-crazy people. I
| understand that the author has published a book recently about
| the topic.
|
| [0] https://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/prep/index-old.shtml
| garyrob wrote:
| I would like to mention the concept of "Soulbound Tokens" as a
| way of attacking this problem. This is the subject of a paper
| this year by Vitalik Buterin (founder of Ethereum), E. Glen Weyl
| (economist/researcher at Microsoft Research) and Puja Ohlhaver.
|
| Here's the abstract:
|
| """ Web3 today centers around expressing transferable,
|
| trust. Yet many core economic activities--such as
| uncollateralized lending and building personal brands--are built
| on persistent, non-transferable relationships. In this paper, we
| illustrate how non-transferable "soulbound" tokens (SBTs)
| representing the commitments, credentials, and a
| "Souls" can encode the trust networks of the real economy to
| establish provenance and reputation. More importantly, SBTs
| enable other applications of increasing ambition, such as
| community wallet recovery, sybil-resistant governance, mechanisms
| for decentralization, and novel markets with decomposable, shared
| rights. We call this richer, pluralistic ecosystem "Decentralized
| Society" (DeSoc)--a co-determined sociality, where Souls and
| communities come together bottom-up, as emergent properties of
| each other to co-create plural network goods and intelligences,
| at a range of scales. Key to this sociality is decomposable
| property rights and enhanced governance mechanisms--such as
| quadratic funding discounted by correlation scores--that reward
| trust and cooperation while protecting networks from capture,
| extraction, and domination. With such augmented sociality, web3
| can eschew today's hyper-
| transformative, pluralist future of increasing returns across
| social distance. """
|
| Here's the paper:
| https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4105763
| andirk wrote:
| ML-generated content can be pretty funny. This is more an example
| of Amazon being a garbage distributor of crap; this is an example
| of fraud. I hope there's a followup of what punishments happen
| with such a grift from one the world's largest companies.
| fullstackchris wrote:
| Writing a book about NFTs (IMO a fraud based market in the
| first place) with it being full of lies is, as the author said,
| hardly a crime. It's just unethical.
|
| Amazon isn't going to read every letter of every book that it
| sells, so it's hardly their fault either.
| hot_gril wrote:
| Amazon's fault would come from displaying fake reviews for so
| long, if anything.
| andirk wrote:
| Should Target make sure their products are what they claim to
| be? If the book was subpar, oh well. If the book is loren
| ipsum [0], then that's fraud and should be followed up on.
| But people love Amazon so they can do whatever they want.
|
| [0] https://hipsum.co/
| pelasaco wrote:
| the book has 4 stars at Amazon. Positive reviews. It highlights
| another rabbit-hole: The fake reviews
| jbverschoor wrote:
| So fake sellers are selling fake books, reviewed by fake
| reviewers, and they get fake crypto moneys, with which they can
| buy fake food, and live a fake life.
|
| Fake sounds very much like reality
| pelasaco wrote:
| exactly, sad reality. I'm so happy that I didn't jump in this
| bandwagon. I used to write a lot of bitcoin code, worked in
| some pools, fpga code, etc, etc.. always loved while it was
| some revolutionary stuff, but I gave up from that literally
| when I saw people that used to sell carpet, being announced
| as "Crypto experts".. from that moment, I knew that it was
| scam.
| olalonde wrote:
| The web attracted a lot of scammers and grifters during the
| dot-com bubble as well. The web was nonetheless
| revolutionary.
| garyrob wrote:
| I would like to mention the concept of "Soulbound Tokens" as a
| way of attacking this problem. This is the subject of a paper
| this year by Vitalik Buterin (founder of Ethereum), E. Glen Weyl
| (economist/researcher at Microsoft Research) and Puja Ohlhaver.
|
| Here's the abstract:
|
| """ Web3 today centers around expressing transferable,
|
| trust. Yet many core economic activities--such as
| uncollateralized lending and building personal brands--are built
| on persistent, non-transferable relationships. In this paper, we
| illustrate how non-transferable "soulbound" tokens (SBTs)
| representing the commitments, credentials, and a
| "Souls" can encode the trust networks of the real economy to
| establish provenance and reputation. More importantly, SBTs
| enable other applications of increasing ambition, such as
| community wallet recovery, sybil-resistant governance, mechanisms
| for decentralization, and novel markets with decomposable, shared
| rights. We call this richer, pluralistic ecosystem "Decentralized
| Society" (DeSoc)--a co-determined sociality, where Souls and
| communities come together bottom-up, as emergent properties of
| each other to co-create plural network goods and intelligences,
| at a range of scales. Key to this sociality is decomposable
| property rights and enhanced governance mechanisms--such as
| quadratic funding discounted by correlation scores--that reward
| trust and cooperation while protecting networks from capture,
| extraction, and domination. With such augmented sociality, web3
| can eschew today's hyper-
| transformative, pluralist future of increasing returns across
| social distance. """
|
| Here's the paper:
| https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4105763
| M4v3R wrote:
| We knew it was coming once GPT-3 was released, but I personally
| didn't think it will come so fast in a form of printed books.
|
| I wonder how hard would it be to train a model that given a
| longer passage of text could tell with a high certainty that it's
| machine generated?
| number6 wrote:
| Then you might run into the problem that chess has right now:
| if you happen to write in a style a GPT-3 trained model would
| write you will be declared a fraud. You might argue, who writes
| in a style of said model? Obviously: The corpus of data that
| trained the model. If you are one of them part of your writing
| ends up in there. Maybe writing styles are transformed to be
| more in line with GPT-3 trained models, lets face it. AI writes
| good prose and people will read more and more generated content
| and thus adept the style.
| akiselev wrote:
| How long until we're training models to "style transfer" text
| using a latent space that doesn't distort meaning (too much)
| ala stable difussion?
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| "Photoshop for text" was the title of a HN post here just a
| few days ago. Many commenters delighted at the idea of
| being able to highlight a passage, pull down a menu and
| "Rewrite Style -> Ernest Hemingway".
|
| Nice people generally only see the immediate utility of a
| tool in front of them. It takes a certain mind-set to see
| the other "weaponised" implications.
| patrakov wrote:
| We knew it was coming once "Rooter: A Methodology for the
| Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy" was
| published back in 2005 (!!!) as a proof that peer review in
| certain "scientific" conferences and journals does not really
| exist. This article is a machine-generated nonsense generated
| by SCIgen. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCIgen for more
| details.
|
| Edit: Russian wikipedia article on that article contains
| references to even earlier, pre-computer, cases, as early as
| 1965, when meaningless texts or talks got published in
| scientific journals or conference proceedings. See
| https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korchevatel'_(stat'ia) and also
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_scholarly_publishing_s...
| freediver wrote:
| The 'book factory business oppportunity' trend spotted in the
| article is explored in depth in this excellent Dan Olson video:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biYciU1uiUw
|
| It is a great and informative watch.
| garyrob wrote:
| I would like to mention the concept of "Soulbound Tokens" as a
| way of attacking this problem. This is the subject of a paper
| this year by Vitalik Buterin (founder of Ethereum), E. Glen Weyl
| (economist/researcher at Microsoft Research) and Puja Ohlhaver.
|
| Here's the abstract:
|
| """ Web3 today centers around expressing transferable,
| financialized assets, rather than encoding social relationships
| of trust. Yet many core economic activities--such as
| uncollateralized lending and building personal brands--are built
| on persistent, non-transferable relationships. In this paper, we
| illustrate how non-transferable "soulbound" tokens (SBTs)
| representing the commitments, credentials, and affiliations of
| "Souls" can encode the trust networks of the real economy to
| establish provenance and reputation. More importantly, SBTs
| enable other applications of increasing ambition, such as
| community wallet recovery, sybil-resistant governance, mechanisms
| for decentralization, and novel markets with decomposable, shared
| rights. We call this richer, pluralistic ecosystem "Decentralized
| Society" (DeSoc)--a co-determined sociality, where Souls and
| communities come together bottom-up, as emergent properties of
| each other to co-create plural network goods and intelligences,
| at a range of scales. Key to this sociality is decomposable
| property rights and enhanced governance mechanisms--such as
| quadratic funding discounted by correlation scores--that reward
| trust and cooperation while protecting networks from capture,
| extraction, and domination. With such augmented sociality, web3
| can eschew today's hyper-financialization in favor of a more
| transformative, pluralist future of increasing returns across
| social distance. """
|
| Here's the paper:
| https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4105763
| root_axis wrote:
| I read the paper and I don't see how this solves anything that
| couldn't already be solved with basic public key cryptography.
| IMO this is just more self-aggrandizing cryptocurrency snake
| oil, dressed up in invented technobabble to make it sound
| sophisticated.
| garyrob wrote:
| Couldn't disagree more. I'm not going to argue about it here
| though. I do suggest that anyone interested in the subject
| read the paper and judge for themselves. (I have zero
| connection to the Ethereum project other than running a node
| and having bought some Ether.)
| garyrob wrote:
| I see a lot of reflexive negativity here. It reminds me of the
| kind of negativity I received on my blog when I said that
| eventually, music streaming would overtake music sales--
| including in a comment from Steve Jobs himself while Apple was
| still selling music. It also reminds me of the negativity I
| received from most people when, in (probably) year 2000, I was
| talking about the possibility that ads would be distributed to
| web sites through what I called "hubs" and by targeted by means
| of activity tracking through cookies, including from a VC who
| had recently been on the cover of Business 2.0 Magazine and
| called there the "top-performing U.S. venture capitalist for
| 1995-1999", who told me, "I don't see much money in that."
|
| Trust me, you should take a serious look at this. A lot of what
| may sound like gobbledegook to you, such as "zero-knowledge
| proofs", is definitely not gobbledegook and is likely to be
| very important as time moves on. If you don't have the
| background to understand what the authors are talking about, it
| will sound like GPT-3 nonsense. Get the knowledge if you are in
| the internet industry.
|
| [Update: I see that even this is being voted down. Well, I
| guess the downvoters just have more of a track record and more
| experience in the industry than me, and more knowledge about
| blockchain, zero-knowledge proofs, etc., so I should forget all
| about this stuff. Not. I'm trying to help out here. Don't
| downvote what you don't understand. If it isn't what you expect
| to hear, that's when you have a chance to learn something. If
| you understand it more than Buterin and Weyl do, well, tell us
| all about it, I'm all ears.]
| root_axis wrote:
| > _it reminds me of the kind of negativity I received on my
| blog when I said..._
|
| Cherry picking examples of your past predictions that may
| have turned out to be correct as a way of defending something
| in question today is obviously fallacious - hopefully I don't
| have to explain why that proves absolutely nothing.
|
| > _Trust me, you should take a serious look at this... get
| the knowledge if you are in the internet industry._
|
| Trust isn't necessary when something is actually useful.
| Explain how the technology is actually useful rather than
| demeaning the supposed lack of knowledge in others.
|
| > _Well, I guess the downvoters just have more of a track
| record and more experience in the industry than me_
|
| Sarcastically appealing to your own authority while claiming
| your critics just don't understand is another bad faith
| rhetorical tactic that is often used by cryptocurrency
| enthusiasts.
|
| > _if you understand it more than Buterin and Weyl do, well,
| tell us all about it, I 'm all ears_
|
| I read the paper, understood it, and responded with a clear
| critique to you in a different comment, your response was
| "Couldn't disagree more. I'm not going to argue about it here
| though". So what I'm getting from you is "I'm a tech expert,
| if you disagree you don't understand, I also don't have to
| prove anything or defend my position, just trust me". Sounds
| like the typical cryptocurrency grift...
| garyrob wrote:
| Not going to argue beyond what I've already said. I figured
| that the comment you are criticizing above would be useless
| (at least to you), but thought I'd try anyway just in case.
| Your response is helpful as a learning experience for me.
| aaronharnly wrote:
| I honestly can't tell if this abstract is also GPT-3 generated.
| nullc wrote:
| https://archive.org/details/EtherealVerses
| ilyt wrote:
| pwdisswordfish9 wrote:
| I honestly can't tell the same about the comment itself
| either...
| status200 wrote:
| Which part would you like to be elaborated?
| garyrob wrote:
| No, it's the real thing. Go to the paper. But somehow, copy-
| paste added typos which I am going to try and fix.
| tacon wrote:
| aliations -> affiliations
|
| hyper-nancialization -> hyper-financialization
|
| Maybe more. Did cut and paste do this?
| garyrob wrote:
| Hmm. Yeah. Let me look through and try to fix that. Very
| weird. But thanks for point it out!!
|
| [Update: I fixed the ones I could find.]
| munificent wrote:
| Copy-paste probably inadvertently stripped out the non-ASCII
| "fi" ligature characters.
| gzer0 wrote:
| This has been a concern of mine for a while; I have also
| published absolute garbage just to see how far I can take it.
| I've published music under various pseudonyms, books underneath
| different pen-names... the list goes on. I've retracted such
| publications, but it is frightening if one person like myself had
| the curiosity to try, what is already out there, and, what a
| well-funded nation-state actor could do.
|
| ----
|
| _Post-truth, like post-modernism, does not mean an absolute
| absence of truth, but a decline in confidence in common
| knowledge, making your own truth the center of your life, rather
| than a set of values shared by a community.
|
| We now believe that our own truth is somehow better than the
| "centralized" or "official" truth. We are now free from the
| institutions and authorities that controlled the truth. But this
| is an illusion, because the very definition of truth requires
| trust in something other than you._
|
| [1]
| https://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/j5gyp5/the_sear...
| hot_gril wrote:
| I did this (wrote pseudo-random crap, not using an AI) in high
| school English class for a poetry assignment. The teacher said
| it was amazing work and the best he's read in a long time. He
| even wrote about it in the progress report sent to my parents.
| I don't know if he fell for it or if he was just pulling my leg
| even harder. The man had a sense of humor.
| fl0id wrote:
| From a culture perspective, I don't think the author worries
| about nation states. They could always do that. But with GPT
| etc alsmost everybody can do that.
| spyaye wrote:
| Are you the same gzero who was featured in the Snowden leaks?
|
| If so, long time no see. Hope all is well.
| sneak wrote:
| Ahh yes, the nation-state funded military-fake-book complex,
| destabilizing nations the world over. We really need to watch
| out for nation-states using incoherent technobabble!
| archon1410 wrote:
| Yeah, not sure what the new concern here is. "Nation-states"
| always have had the ability to manufacture truth out of
| nothing, they've been doing this since before there were any
| computers. Why would they need the help of GPT-3? Why would
| they want to spam incoherent hallucinations? What would they
| gain out of that when they already have the ability to
| "manufacture consent" at scale?
|
| It's not even a democratisation of bullshit, non-state actors
| also don't need GPT-3 to spam nonsense. PR and advertising is
| all about that and has a history of hundreds if not thousands
| of years. Maybe the new thing here is that people now realise
| lying is easy.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| The commenter does have a point though; there's a lot of low
| effort high volume spam on the internet that reinforce
| certain narratives that cause division, on subjects like
| gender identity, generational differences, favorite TV shows,
| wokeism, Brexit, classism, racism, etc. There's actors on
| both sides of those debates, not because they're particularly
| leaning towards one or the other, but because the division is
| causing political shifts and internal strife.
|
| This has already led to the EU starting to fall apart - the
| UK is out of the EU, Hungary and Poland no longer meet the
| criteria for having backslid into totalitarianism or at the
| very least, no longer having a division between the legal and
| executive branches of law. And it's causing lines to be drawn
| in the US as well, with calls for secession rising. But the
| US has been an "us vs them" type of "democracy" for a while
| now, it probably didn't take much to entrench the sides more
| deeply.
|
| Anyway, that's online discourse, I'm sure it extends to books
| too, just less obviously.
| mcguire wrote:
| One interesting book is _Active Measures: The Secret
| History of Disinformation and Political Warfare_ by Thomas
| Rid. It 's a history of disinformation, propaganda, and
| related shenanigans from the Protocols of the Elders of
| Zion to the 2016 election, mostly focused on the Cold War.
|
| For the most part, it's low-effort manipulations that very
| occasionally take hold---I can remember the anti-nuclear
| protests against the deployment of the Pershing II missiles
| in Europe---but the internet and social media have dropped
| the bar for "low-effort".
| Jiro wrote:
| I am not convinced that Brexit or anti-EU sentiment is
| primarily driven by spam.
| jerrygoyal wrote:
| how much money did that make though
| cowtools wrote:
| I don't think it's that scary. I mean it's basically spam isn't
| it? The only thing new is the volume in which you can produce
| surface-level-indistinguishable spam.
|
| It is now cheaper to produce lots of flowery, meaningless text
| that is full of definitions. I suspect that the future of
| literature is more concise and externally-meaningful writing.
|
| Amazon is a terrible marketplace insofar as the rating system
| isn't sybil proof. this crap slips through the cracks.
| fullstackchris wrote:
| Yes, for now. But what will these models look like in
| something like 5-10 more years?
| colonwqbang wrote:
| Well, what does it matter? What if a market develops for
| autogenerated junk literature. People can buy and read what
| they like best. Today a lot of literature is published that
| I might consider to be "junk". But there are people buying
| and reading it and enjoying it and that's fine.
|
| Maybe it could create a new genre of literature that is
| tailored to the reader's interests.
| Eisenstein wrote:
| But that 'junk' literature you are describing that people
| like isn't inherently designed to be deceitful in the
| sense that people who want something else are its target.
|
| When you replace 'catering to a certain audience by being
| good at doing something they want' with 'catering to a
| certain audience by being good at selling them something
| they don't want' then you have created a system in which
| supply and demand is no longer operating properly.
| crispyambulance wrote:
| The fake books in the OP article are all used in garbage NFT
| scams. They're intended to produce an air of legitimacy for
| whoever publishes them. Whether they're actually sold or not
| is meaningless. It's rather all about clickbaitability and
| their use as a "legitimacy-dressing" surrounding some
| scammers' call-to-action button.
|
| I think it is somewhat scary that these things can't just be
| instantly pulled from wherever they're marketed. They're just
| "tools-of-the-trade" for scammers. They serve no honest
| purpose.
| zoklet-enjoyer wrote:
| I doubt it. Where's your proof?
| munificent wrote:
| _> I mean it 's basically spam isn't it? The only thing new
| is the volume in which you can produce surface-level-
| indistinguishable spam._
|
| An ocean is "basically water" but the experience of being
| alone in the middle of the ocean is fundamentally different
| from standing in a puddle.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| I have not yet hacked a good way to search around it though.
| It presents a _massive_ time sink for me (not to mention
| frustration) and is probably multiplied across the
| population. More and more, when I search for advice, review,
| explanation, solution, or description, I virtually
| exclusively get articles /websites/books/sources that at
| first glance (certainly as far as Google and Bing can tell)
| are _exactly_ what I am looking for. It then takes several
| minutes of reading to realize the author (human or not,
| irrelevant) does not know more about topic than I do. Then I
| go down the next one on the list, etc.
|
| Quantity CAN make a difference. When there were few such
| sources, avoiding them was annoying but easy. Today, it's
| HARD. Tomorrow, it may be impossible with today's tools, and
| I don't know that we can win such a race.
| allochthon wrote:
| For this reason, I have tended to rely more and more on
| recommendations from obviously real people these days,
| e.g., as found in comments on Reddit, or in the New York
| Times's Wirecutter. The challenge with this approach is
| that Reddit seems to be gamed more and more by industry and
| other PR "bots", which makes it hard to sift wheat from
| chaff. But if the subreddit is not on a controversial
| topic, it's still possible to find disinterested
| recommendations, or so it seems.
| Angelore wrote:
| Maybe the way to go forward would be something in the
| vein of a book club? Delegating such a monstrous task to
| one person will just bury them in the sea of information,
| so parallelization looks like a good compromise (meet up
| once a week/month and share worthwhile books you have
| found).
|
| Unfortunately, generation of garbage information can
| still far outpace such a system with few nodes...
| coldtea wrote:
| > _and, what a well-funded nation-state actor could do._
|
| Release crap books nobody will read, or fill Soundcloud with
| bad music?
| RF_Savage wrote:
| I think NKRFZ had a video about a weird genre of pro-war
| fiction that is published en mass in Russia and promoted
| quite alot, but which does not really sell.
| vanderZwan wrote:
| That assumes selling is the point. What if drowning out
| other voices is the real goal?
| coldtea wrote:
| Then they're doing a bad job at it :)
| vanderZwan wrote:
| That's good to hear at least :)
|
| But I imagine that abusing SEO to ensure search results
| don't show people the results they actually want to see
| (or maybe "need to see", but that's quite the can of
| worms to open) is a legitimate tactic in any propaganda
| machine.
| coldtea wrote:
| Pro-war fiction? That's like the standard movie for several
| decades from Rambo to Michael Bay's epics and Top Gun
| Maverick, and in movie form that has far wider appeal,
| 10000x the audiences, and is way more glamorous! "weird pro
| war fiction" would be very low in effectiveness...
| OOPMan wrote:
| The original Rambo was actually anti-war. Did you even
| watch it?
| floxy wrote:
| Everyone should read the book (First Blood by David
| Morrell). I haven't watched the movies, since in my mind
| Stallone is type-cast as someone who doesn't seem smart
| enough to play Rambo. But my recollection from 30+ years
| ago is that the book is an excellent page-turner and
| might be the originator of the thriller genre. Also,
| _spoiler alert_ Rambo dies at the end of the book.
| rideontime wrote:
| michael bay and top gun, sure, but rambo? I don't
| remember that having a particularly pro-war attitude.
| OOPMan wrote:
| That's because it's about PTSD.
|
| I suspect the commenter is either ignorant or just
| decided to roll in all the terrible sequels...
| oriolid wrote:
| Reminds me of the "long tail effect". One work of weird
| pro war fiction is not enough, but different customised
| propaganda for every niche might be something.
| parentheses wrote:
| It can't be hard to curate and edit the output of the AIs. I
| imagine that is already happening. AI does the heavy lifting
| making the cost of production possibly an order of magnitude
| lower. Couple that with some other AI tools like unifying voice
| across many sections and fixing grammar mistakes, a nation-
| state could create a very effective propaganda machine to
| manipulate their enemies with basic language proficiency.
| tomglynch wrote:
| Has the same author published many other books?
| wallmountedtv wrote:
| No.[1] Also their name "Matt Martin" is suspiciously generic,
| making it hard to search for other than the direct link given
| in the article to the Amazon listing.
|
| 1: https://www.amazon.com/Matt-Martin/e/B09R7QSRN8/
| DoneWithAllThat wrote:
| I find it to be pretty obviously ML generated. As in even the
| parts about NFTs are written in a style that is patently
| obviously not authored by a human. I'm sure the difference will
| become less noticeable over time but for now AI-authored prose is
| easy to spot.
| tommica wrote:
| Its a scary concept - internet and books being nothing but
| generated content is going to be a sad world.
| colordrops wrote:
| Or maybe people will start paying attention to references and
| provenance, and start looking into sources of information -
| maybe even more widespread use of cryptographic signatures.
| Misinformation has always been out there, and so there are
| tools to deal with it. Perhaps now is our chance to make these
| tools wide spread.
| gzer0 wrote:
| In an ideal world, I would hope for your statement to be
| correct. However, our society has changed the value of
| recognizing duty to recognizing choice. As long as
| individuals are aware of the choice they are making, they are
| justified. The fear of truth is caused by the following
| dilemma: either you choose for yourself or someone else will
| choose for you. Because of this fear, choosing correctly
| becomes less important than choosing freely. The choice is
| justified by the idea of inner truth, in which the role of
| subjective experiences can outweigh the role of objective
| experiences.
|
| A choice is not justified just because it is a choice. But
| without an objective criterion of correction, every choice is
| irrelevant, because the subjective criterion is also a
| choice. It can be changed to justify each of the choices,
| however inconsistent and contradictory they may be. To say
| that everything is valid is to say that fact checking is a
| farce. The loss of discernment is an unexpected result of the
| emancipation of reason.
| protontorpedo wrote:
| I'm pretty sure this comment was generated by a language
| model. If that's the case, congratulations.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| At the 20th Century, when we got a book from some
| philosopher entirely written on this style, we didn't
| have to wonder that.
|
| Those were simpler times.
| OnuRC wrote:
| Yes and getting that or any book was so hard or
| impossible for the most of the worlds population. So much
| privilege, but let's compare wrongly that era to AI
| generated content era
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| That's indeed post-modernism for you. Didn't Jean
| Baudrillard say something similar about communication (the
| ecstasy of communication?) in which the wanton act itself
| substitutes for the meaning of the act. We've grown to
| prefer simulations. Form over function. Seeming right
| instead of virtue. Meaningful choice is another casualty.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| I don't see how references and providence will solve that
| problem. References are trivial for machine-generated content
| to add. And the providence of a new author and a new AI are
| the exact same.
|
| Unless your plan is to require a PhD to publish a book on
| Amazon on something.
| colordrops wrote:
| References are used to trace back to source material. Once
| you've verified that the source material is truthful, you
| have started building trust in the author. Over time you
| can trust this author without verifying every single datum
| they publish. This is how trust works. We do it all the
| time to more or less of a degree. No PhD required. What's
| the issue here?
| thriftwy wrote:
| Machine may easily add references to truthful sources
| from what is bogus content.
| colordrops wrote:
| If it's machine generated or not doesn't matter. It's
| whether the content derives properly from truthful
| sources. If it's machine generated but true, so what?
| HWR_14 wrote:
| That doesn't sound like a solution for machine-generated
| content. That's a solution for misinformation. Different
| problem.
|
| Although machine generated content will make the
| misinformation problem much worse.
| colordrops wrote:
| True, but if you can still discerb truth from
| misinformation, perhaps it won't be so sad
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| I think there's a good chance it was ghost written by a content
| farm for someone who wanted to publish a book in a popular
| category to make a quick buck. I recently learned that this is a
| soft-scam technique advocated for by a couple of guys called the
| Mikkelson Twins. They say you can make money by publishing
| audiobooks on audible by finding a popular topic on audible, then
| hiring a ghost writing service to write your book, then hire a
| voice actor to record it, publish it on audible, and then you too
| can become fabulously wealthy as the Mikkelson Twins claim to be.
| Except what the Mikkelson Twins actually make money on is selling
| you on a "money making course" where they tell you to do the
| above. So there's all kinds of people trying to follow this
| method out there, it seems.
|
| This excellent video [1] from Dan Olson at Folding Ideas is in my
| opinion a fascinating deep dive in to this whole scam. I don't
| want to spoil everything in the video, but Dan does an
| _exceptional_ job exploring how this ghost writing works, and why
| it produces the kind of nonsense writing that looks like GPT-3
| but is actually being done by an overworked human who is trying
| to write an entire novel in three weeks or so on a topic they
| haven't had time to properly research.
|
| [1] https://youtu.be/biYciU1uiUw
| arbuge wrote:
| Homer Simpson's adage that "you're both right" might really
| apply in this case.
|
| Outsourcing to a content farm might very well result in lots of
| the text being rendered by GPT-3 and similar generative AIs.
| The two are certainly not mutually exclusive.
| derefr wrote:
| > Except what the Mikkelson Twins actually make money on is
| selling you on a "money making course" where they tell you to
| do the above. So there's all kinds of people trying to follow
| this method out there, it seems.
|
| How do people still become wealthy selling "money making
| courses", when enough people have created "money making
| courses" that they are, themselves, a commodity?
| gernb wrote:
| You make courses about how to make money making courses.
|
| This reminds me of an episode of Reply All. They ordered some
| cheap Rolex rip off, it was even worse than they expected.
| They found out they were all being sold on shopify and that
| if you sign up for a new account on shopify you'll fairly
| quickly start getting spam emails helping you setup a shop of
| all this crap. Then they'd try to sell you on lessons on how
| to make it more successful. I forgot if the rabbit hole went
| deeper.
|
| https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/dvhe3l
| svnt wrote:
| Well, see, that's just it: once they become fungible then the
| value inevitably follows.
| ankaAr wrote:
| The offer of idiots always grow
| [deleted]
| beckingz wrote:
| The secret to getting rich quick is to get other people to
| pay you for the secret to getting rich quick.
| [deleted]
| kayxspre wrote:
| Probably because the ultimate end of these course isn't to
| make money by yourself, but by engaging in an MLM and let it
| work.
|
| There's a company engaging in MLM sales paying some news
| agencies to promote its scheme every day during the news (a
| subtle sponsor, so to speak; it's on regular TV so
| SponsorBlock won't help). As my family watched the news from
| this channel often, I would recognize how it works. It would
| promote an online course along the lines of "Make Money with
| a Smartphone" and advertised the course it claimed to cost
| $249.99 at $2.49 (price may vary, depending on who is the
| presenter, though the course are the exact same).
|
| The news program is careful not to show the names of the
| ultimate company offering it, only presenting that this
| person will be teaching. Sharp-eyed viewer, however, can
| notice that those adverts intend to direct the prospective
| "client" to an MLM.
| lupire wrote:
| John Oliver (just the presenter, ha!) on Last Week Tonight
| also did an episode about easy it is for a scam to get a
| fawning advertorial piece on local TV news segments.
| latexr wrote:
| As the saying goes, there's a sucker born every minute1.
|
| An important feature of these scams is to frame success and
| failure as being _entirely_ in your hands: it's not the
| system's fault that you didn't achieve success, it's yours
| and yours alone, you didn't want it bad enough. Someone who
| falls in that hole is bound to do it again, this time for a
| different grift which looks easier. They'll do as much as it
| takes until they strike gold, go bankrupt, or finally
| understand it's all a scam. That last one can take a long
| time to come.
|
| In sum, money making courses don't need an infinite supply of
| new chumps when they can keep reeling in the same ones. Offer
| some discounts and rewards for bringing in new members, and
| you've gone full MLM2.
|
| 1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There%27s_a_sucker_born_every
| _...
|
| 2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-level_marketing
| derefr wrote:
| Oh, no, I do get why people would buy into money-making
| courses. I'm basically wondering why the market for money-
| making courses isn't a winner-take-all market, with the
| wealthiest course-creators spending their advertising
| budgets (that they earned by building their money-making-
| course empire when the field was more green) to outcompete
| upstarts in the money-making course market. Presumably,
| people can only be actively _trying_ the techniques of one
| of these courses at a time -- so why aren 't most people
| focused on learning + putting into practice, the techniques
| of a few very popular courses?
| WalterBright wrote:
| > so why aren't most people focused on learning + putting
| into practice, the techniques of a few very popular
| courses?
|
| Because that entails hard work.
| derefr wrote:
| No, I meant, why aren't a few very popular courses the
| only ones people _hear_ about, such that they 're _de-
| facto_ only focused on those? Money buys advertising /
| brand recognition; why aren't there big-name money-
| making-course brands that are outcompeting the new
| upstarts? Why isn't the market consolidating around the
| guys who won big first and then reinvested in making
| their brands the biggest?
| duped wrote:
| Because the techniques don't work, and when people are
| conned once they are likely to fall for the next con
| artist selling fundamentally the same thing but with
| different branding.
|
| A lot of the marketing behind these scams is that they're
| different than everything you've tried before - the point
| being is that the number of people who fall for these
| scams isn't enormous, but they will fall for scams over
| and over again. Just probably not from the same person
| selling it.
|
| It's the same as any kind of cult messaging. It's not
| surprising that the size of a cult designed to exploit
| people has an upper limit, but it is shocking that the
| same people will join multiple cults time after time.
| derefr wrote:
| But if you know that, then -- as a cult leader -- why not
| come up with a scalable approach to _founding cults_ ,
| that all share underlying infrastructure (marketing,
| accounting, etc) but just use different figure-head cult-
| leaders, different language, and different outreach
| techniques; and so form distinct isolated cult
| communities? Different _marques_ of the same company, in
| other words -- like how every "competing" soap or cereal
| in the grocery store aisle is still making the same
| company money in the end.
|
| (I do know at least two real exampless of this meta-
| approach to scamming: 1. there are meta content-farms,
| which hire people and train them to run seemingly-
| independent content-farm YouTube / TikTok / etc channels;
| and 2. there are serial Kickstarter/IndieGogo scammers,
| that follow a loop of forming a new shell company, hiring
| a new actor to pitch a fake idea, steal people's money
| for it, and disappearing.)
|
| And, while they're at it, why not constantly seek to
| acquire the pitch+content from smaller, nascent money-
| making course creators, and run their content through
| your existing business engine? Why not be the EA of
| scams?
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| You know the old saying: there's a sucker born every minute.
| hex4def6 wrote:
| What gets me is; if this was a money making opportunity, and
| it truly is as simple as they make it out to be, aren't they
| literally creating their own competitors in this space by
| revealing their secret? I'm sure the argument is something
| like "the market is so vast, that helping others do the same
| won't affect my income stream", but that suggests The correct
| answer is to scale up, not populate the landscape with
| completion.
| narag wrote:
| Well, it's only logical: what they propose is barely legal
| and sooner or later, more sooner than later, the scheme
| will be burnt, so it's better to teach others to make a
| quick buck than staying in the same place for too long.
| dspillett wrote:
| I don't think legality is a significant part of the
| problem - I simply doubt there is really a lot to make
| regardless of legality.
|
| Most get-rich-quick schemes are really either "make a few
| pennies here or there, a few $/EUR/PS if you are lucky, a
| few 100 if _very_ lucky" or "make-a-bit-slowly-with-lots-
| of-effort" or both. The rest not included in that "most"
| are even more completely bunkum, you 'll never make
| anything unless maybe you join the pyramid and resell the
| scheme.
|
| There is more easy money to be made selling make-money-
| easily schemes to those that lack critical thinking, than
| there is to be made via the schemes themselves. Even if
| no one you sell the scheme to makes anything, even if
| they all make a loss in the grand scheme of things, the
| scheme seller still has some revenue.
|
| A scheme seeming illegal/immoral/both might make some
| marks easier to catch, as they think they are being
| clever by knowing that crime does in fact sometimes pay
| so their guard is further lowered due to confirmation
| bias on this matter.
| mughinn wrote:
| As far as I understood from the video, the Mikkelsen Twins
| did get rich from that money making scheme, until Audible
| basically found out and started trying to stop them (most
| of the books they "published" are not in the page anymore).
| They milked the cow dry then they made a money making
| course and created a new way to get money
|
| And now with the competition basically no one who bought
| their course can actually make money
| lupire wrote:
| They are so rich that they are retired but want to pay it
| forward. But it's not free because they only want to teach
| people who take it seriously and respect the idea.
| monktastic1 wrote:
| Can't tell if this is a joke, but the most likely
| explanation isn't nearly so noble. They realize that the
| stream for this particular scam has already run dry
| (thanks to Audible catching on), but realize that others
| don't know that yet.
| Joker_vD wrote:
| The argument can also be that it actually benefits them by
| making other people richer and therefore, increasing the
| amount of their own customers (and the amount of money
| those customers are willing to spend).
|
| _insert a random comment about how "market economy is not
| a zero-sum game"_
| derefr wrote:
| As the recent dive in the British economy proves,
| increasing spending is not necessarily _good_ for a
| market ;)
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| Yes. It turns out that there's a whole lot of aspects of
| their scheme that would turn off any informed rational
| person. But there's enough people who fail that test to
| keep a constant flow of new customers buying in to their
| scheme.
| masklinn wrote:
| In fact much as with "obvious" scams, this becomes a
| feature: non-marks deselect themselves from the pool at
| no cost to the scammer, which means the scammer has a
| much higher average "prospect quality" than a random
| sampling would give.
| Freak_NL wrote:
| It's sort of like the spelling and grammar mistakes in
| spam mail.
| nicbou wrote:
| You sell a money making course course generator and sell that
| kreeben wrote:
| Or, alternatively, you create a money making course
| generator generator. If that goes well your next project
| should be a generator generator generator.
| hoistbypetard wrote:
| Money making course course generator as a service.
| MMCGGaaS. It's the next big thing.
| WalterBright wrote:
| There's a famous old ad where someone put an ad in the
| newspaper that said "Learn how to make money, send $10 to
| XXXX". Sending the $10 in got you a letter that said:
| "place an ad in the newspaper that says "Learn how to make
| money, sent $10 to [your address]."
| coldtea wrote:
| Well, first, we're 8 billion (or 350 million in the US),
| which is a big market, and there's a sucker born every
| minute.
|
| Second, money making courses, don't work. So people tend to
| buy another and another, to get to the mythical "good" one...
| calibas wrote:
| Just send me $49.99 and I'll teach you my fool-proof method
| for how to steal $49.99 from an unwitting dupe.
| helsinkiandrew wrote:
| This is a brilliant (but very sad) video. The ghost writers get
| about $2500 for a 10,000 word book researched and written in a
| month. I guess this is cheaper than using GPT-3 and having to
| prune out the flights of fancy/complete nonsense that GPT-3 can
| sometimes generate.
| Dave3of5 wrote:
| > The ghost writers get about $2500 for a 10,000 word book
| researched and written in a month
|
| Actually they get $250 for 25,000. The $2500 is what they
| should get.
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| From the video, it is $2500 for a 25,000 word book, written
| in 25 days. That is $100 per day writing 1000 words per day.
| If this takes you 8 hours per day, that is $12.50 per hour.
| If you can do this every month, that is $30,000 per year. A
| comfortable wage for some people, and poverty wages for
| others. It also seems like a difficult pace to research a
| topic and write 1000 words per day, and seems like miserable
| work.
| helsinkiandrew wrote:
| Yes, sorry - 25000 words, too late to edit my comment. But
| it sounds like miserable work, writing on something you are
| an expert in, or are interested it sounds like a great way
| to improve your skills and make a bit of money. But
| researching, writing, and editing content on a made up
| topic for some charlatan book publishers sounds aweful.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _If this takes you 8 hours per day, that is $12.50 per
| hour._
|
| It probably hardly takes 8 hours a day. More like 3-4 or
| even 2. 8 hours for 1000 words is for much higher quality
| 1000 words...
| elefanten wrote:
| 10,000? Could it be 100,000?
|
| I have to write 10,000 words overnight occasionally in my
| role.
|
| If it's $2500 for 10k words, maybe I should be
| ghostwriting...
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| "I apologize for such a long letter - I didn't have time to
| write a short one." -- Mark Twain
| mkl wrote:
| What role do you have that requires that kind of output?
| elefanten wrote:
| Corporate strategy consulting. 1 day to write 5k-10k
| words on a topic you have to research from scratch is not
| uncommon. It's all within a broad field of expertise and
| a sector you're familiar with, but could be products /
| companies / deals you'd never heard of.
|
| I think the point here was that the ghostwriting is of
| really low quality. Overnight 10k reports are never
| groundbreaking or enlightening additions to human
| knowledge, but they need to be 90%+ accurate and polished
| enough to inform.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Are those 5k-10k words completely new, or are document
| templates part of this count?
|
| I know from experience (of on-line commenting; don't
| judge) this word count is entirely possible to achieve,
| but I can't imagine sustaining it long-term, as a part of
| a job.
| lupire wrote:
| Rocket Lawyer (computerized legal doc-writing services)
| generates thousands of words per day, for one customer,
| on demand, easily.
|
| Just choose the templates and fill in your names and
| numbers.
| helsinkiandrew wrote:
| Sorry it was 25,000 - that includes research
| Raed667 wrote:
| 10,000 words on a random subject that you probably never
| heard about before?
| Sirened wrote:
| College students regularly do this, it's called "not
| showing up to lecture and writing the final paper
| anyways" :P
| coldtea wrote:
| You'd be surprised...
|
| It's not that they care about much fidelity to the
| subject or going deep anyway.
|
| And half of the work or more is rewritting (sometimes not
| even that) other sources, like online articles and such
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| In the video it's $2,500 for 25,000 words. I think the 10k
| words was a typo in the above comment.
| sarchertech wrote:
| That's also the average ghost writing rate. Not the rate
| the content farm he uses pays the ghost writers.
| Kiro wrote:
| It's the same thing. Ghost writers are using GPT-3 (know this
| for a fact).
| moss2 wrote:
| > I think there's a good chance it was ghost written by a
| content farm for someone who wanted to publish a book in a
| popular category to make a quick buck.
|
| The article literally says
|
| > My first theory was that the writing must have been
| outsourced to a content farm, where multiple individuals worked
| on portions of the text without caring to understand the
| context. But the explanation had a flaw: there's nothing you
| can find on the internet if you search for "NFP chemotherapy"
| or "NTF Strategic Development Group". The text didn't merely
| describe a garbled version of our reality; it invented its own.
| dEnigma wrote:
| Only that it's indeed possible to find information about NFP
| chemotherapy online, e.g. here
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29285366/ Of
| these patients, 44 were treated with HAIC and 20 with
| sorafenib. HAIC involved cisplatin (50 mg fine powder in 5-10
| ml lipiodol) and a continuous infusion of 5-fluorouracil (FU)
| (1,500 mg/5 days), which is referred to as new 5-FU and
| cisplatin therapy (NFP).
| coldtea wrote:
| > _The article literally says_
|
| Yes, and the parent literally generalizes this one-off
| observation, puts it in context, and gives examples and even
| a source with a deep dive on the issue.
| glenstein wrote:
| I don't understand how you think this is responsive to the
| issue of fabrication. The article already considered the
| possibility of the human content farm and concluded it was
| unlikely on the basis of information that was completely
| fabricated.
|
| The fact that the commenter proceeded to generalize, show a
| link, etc is not responsive to that. A responsive answer
| would be along the lines of "well, a content farm might
| fabricate too because _____."
| thom wrote:
| "If you find that interesting, you might find this
| interesting" seems like a perfectly reasonable motivation
| for an HN comment. I think it's worth forgiving that and
| enjoying the broader horizons rather than treating HN
| threads as a way for lots of smart people to try and
| craft the most definitive statement about one narrow
| issue, while policing any deviation therefrom.
| jefftk wrote:
| _> "If you find that interesting, you might find this
| interesting" seems like a perfectly reasonable motivation
| for an HN comment._
|
| But that's not the form of the comment. It begins with "I
| think there's a good chance it was ghost written by a
| content farm"!
| thom wrote:
| If I were a content farm I'd probably use text cut and
| pasted from text models, but I'd never heard of the
| Mikkelson Twins and it was interesting to learn about
| them.
| coldtea wrote:
| yes, so? can't we parse beyond the opening statement of
| the comment, and see the rest of its content?
|
| can't a comment not reiterate in its opening statement
| what the author already said (to e.g. show the
| commentor's aggrement)?
|
| this is too formulaic and pedantic a response
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| My rationale was that, before I had seen this very well
| produced video, I was not familiar with the way that
| content farms operated. The idea that words being
| fabricated means it must be GPT-3 seems spurious to me. A
| person in a huge hurry, with a poor grasp of the English
| language, could easily generate fabricated words.
|
| The video I linked is extraordinary in its level of
| research and quality, and interesting on its own merits.
| If someone is not fully aware of the extent to which
| content farms squeeze out content, it's easy to assume
| some weird prose is GPT-3. I felt the articles dismissal
| of the idea of a content farm was too quick, and perhaps
| they or the readers might not be familiar with how they
| operate. And so I provided a summary as well as a link to
| this very high quality investigative source.
| latexr wrote:
| > A responsive answer would be along the lines of "well,
| a content farm might fabricate too because _____."
|
| That is precisely what the original commenter did:
|
| > (...) exploring how this ghost writing works, and why
| it produces the kind of nonsense writing that looks like
| GPT-3 but is actually (...)
| coldtea wrote:
| Well, it's "responsive" for me. In fact it's your comment
| that was off-topic and meta, the parent was perfectly on
| topic and responding on the issue.
|
| > _A responsive answer would be along the lines of "well,
| a content farm might fabricate too because _____."_
|
| A responsive answer doesn't need to have a particular
| formula, much less that one. It just needs to be relevant
| to the issue and provide more information and/or the
| commentor's own take (could be just their feelings about
| the issue too).
| [deleted]
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| I suspect the first few chapters were well-written and
| researched with the rest slowly filling up with bulk filler; I
| find that with a lot of books, I read the first few chapters,
| get the gist of it and stop reading. I suspect a lot of people
| do that.
|
| That said, there's a few books in my library / to-read list
| that are great content cover to cover. Timeless classics, etc.
| andreyk wrote:
| I've watched the video as well and wholeheartedly agree! His
| 'Line Goes Up' documentary about crypto is also exceptional;
| very critical but in educated and actually nuanced ways
| (https://youtu.be/YQ_xWvX1n9g).
| masklinn wrote:
| If you haven't gone through the entire Olsonverse yet, don't
| sleep on "in search of a flat earth". That was my gateway
| video to Folding Ideas and it remains stellar.
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| That was my first too! Really wonderful creator and I did
| find myself going through his whole back catalog after
| that! And I agree with the comment upstream, "Line Goes Up"
| is a masterpiece.
| pasdechance wrote:
| Absolutely agree with you.
| pretext wrote:
| It seems the aforementioned Mikkelson Twins are acting like
| meta-parasites: their scam is to sell the way how to scam
| somebody out of money.
| planetsprite wrote:
| I get the feeling it was outsourced to a content farm, which
| outsourced itself to GPT-3
| smilespray wrote:
| ...which then outsourced itself to GPT-2...
| kmeisthax wrote:
| Given the way that OpenAI sources their training corpus and
| the amount of people using GPT-3 I would not be surprised
| if GPT-4 winds up getting trained on a large amount of
| GPT-3 output.
|
| Think about it - the best niche GPT-3 has is generating
| plausible spam. If you just need a lot of text, but you
| don't care about what it says[0], you're going to write it
| using the cheapest possible tool. OpenAI's training corpus
| is sourced through web crawls, so all of that spam is
| destined to get recycled back into the next generation of
| GPT.
|
| [0] For example, if you want to be able to post a bunch of
| political spam that looks like genuine comments on a web
| forum. See GPT-4chan[1] as a practical example of this.
|
| [1] A tweaked version of GPT-3 using 4chan's politics board
| as training corpus.
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| GPT-3 is lounging on a beach somewhere while GPT-2 does all
| the hard work!
| coldtea wrote:
| or, judging from the usual IQ and age difference between
| those doing the actual work and their managers, probably
| the inverse...
| warbler73 wrote:
| Wow! Fantastic article. With AI generated stuff I expect we are
| going to see 99% of the book market saturated with generated
| nonsense, then collapse as a market for lemons.
| rjmunro wrote:
| Depends what you mean by "99% of the book market". I'm sure the
| major publishers will not start publishing generated nonsense,
| and I suspect the small players self-publishing nonsense on
| Amazon will go away in time.
|
| Of course major publishers may be duped into unintentionally
| publishing AI generated or part AI generated content by bad
| authors, but if it's good enough to get through their editing
| processes, it will hopefully be non-nonsense.
| dEnigma wrote:
| Contrary to what the article says it IS possible to find
| information about NFP chemotherapy on the internet. E.g.:
| Of these patients, 44 were treated with HAIC and 20 with
| sorafenib. HAIC involved cisplatin (50 mg fine powder in 5-10 ml
| lipiodol) and a continuous infusion of 5-fluorouracil (FU) (1,500
| mg/5 days), which is referred to as new 5-FU and cisplatin
| therapy (NFP). [1]
|
| [1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29285366/
| duskwuff wrote:
| Correct. However, the "NFP" in that paper refers to a specific
| drug regimen, and bears no resemblance to the nonsensical
| dosing methodology described in the book. (I mean, come on,
| "Eastern methods of measurement"??)
| Tade0 wrote:
| This is nothing new really.
|
| The Bogdanoff brothers, before their time as rulers of France and
| the crypto world with a fair, but iron fist gained notoriety by
| publishing works which were largely gibberish:
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogdanov_affair
|
| NFTs and the like were especially fascinating because it was a
| game of rock-paper-scissors in terms of cunning, meaning someone
| could be so cunning that they appeared gullible to those
| ostensibly one level of craftiness higher, so you never knew if
| someone was shilling something because they were _that_ gullible
| or _that_ cunning.
| acdha wrote:
| It's new in the sense that it's never been easier to do at
| scale. The Bogdanov scandal was novel in part because that kind
| of thing was uncommon. We appear to rapidly be entering an era
| where the opposite is true, and it seems highly dangerous to
| have misleading information be universally available at lower
| cost.
| thih9 wrote:
| Perhaps this book was written by the blog post author and this is
| an attempt at covert content marketing?
| krosaen wrote:
| A lot of this hinges on fake reviews. It seems like it should be
| a solvable problem, but then I read about things like scammers
| going so far as to actually order their bogus products to real
| addresses of unsuspecting people (not caring what the confused
| recipients do with it) just so they can get a "verified purchase"
| review. Maybe they get caught, but by then, the damage is done.
|
| I bought an electric leaf blower off amazon a couple years ago -
| the reviews seemed authentic and it seemed like the obvious one
| to buy. The thing had the power of like two hair dryers - I took
| the time to write a negative review but by then the product no
| longer seemed to be listed.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _I soon discovered that all the books leaned on the same
| central argument: value is an inherent consequence of scarcity.
| My rebuttal to that was simple: it's an exception, not a rule. My
| kids' doodles are scarce, but in a gallery, they wouldn't fetch
| much_
|
| Well, how about "value is an inherent consequence of scarcity
| with respect to demand"?
| PebblesRox wrote:
| Or maybe "scarcity is a multiplier of value."
| svnt wrote:
| Author seems to understand supply and demand -- they are making
| the point that the NFT perspective doesn't include a rationale
| for demand.
| coldtea wrote:
| Demand doesn't need to have a rationale (in the sense of
| "real needs" or "utility value" or something of the like) to
| work in raising value. It just needs to exist!
| svnt wrote:
| Yes, but if the demand doesn't establish itself in some
| other context that serves a narrative (whether cultural,
| material, tax shelter, or other) the dynamics of the
| underlying market tend to be in the realm of tulips and
| postage stamps.
| yason wrote:
| Or to generalise, where supply and demand meet is called value.
| viridian wrote:
| The intersect of supply and demand is necessarily the price
| equilibrium. Value is only equal to price if the buyer and
| seller both have equal information and neither is operating
| under any sort of constraints that force certain market
| behavior.
|
| Your generality may often be true in certain contexts, but
| increasingly, one should operate under the assumption that
| the seller has a significant informational advantage over the
| buyer, and this advantage will be used to capture additional
| value.
| B1FF_PSUVM wrote:
| "Spam begets (strong) AI" was my guess a few years ago. Of course
| it will be full-cycle, and we already have (weak) AI begotten
| spam.
| ipeev wrote:
| What actually surprises me is that the author bought 11 paper
| books from Amazon about NFTs. You really need 11 books to
| understand or write about a single concept? It is a highly
| controversial ongoing topic. Those 11 books most likely become
| obsolete exactly on the day after they were written.
|
| Good catch on the one fake book! But I am surprised it was only
| one. Maybe the author started from that one and will write about
| the others later.
| seba_dos1 wrote:
| The author didn't want to "understand a single concept" this
| way, but rather, as they say themselves, "get familiar with the
| best-articulated arguments put forward by the proponents of
| this tech".
| HWR_14 wrote:
| The author bought 11 paper books because they wanted to make
| money posting a meta-review of the literature analyzing the
| arguments from all of them together. While they probably
| understood the points after a single book, they would have
| lacked the complete coverage (and the marketing hook).
|
| I would expect someone writing that to have read the 11 most
| popular books.
| nextlevelwizard wrote:
| Off topic: Why is everything posted here all of a sudden begging
| for my email? It feels like every article I click after reading
| few sentences I get a box begging to sign up for some stupid ass
| mailing list as if after spending 10 seconds reading their words
| I had become a fan and absolutely needed more of their bullshit
| in my life.
|
| If I am interested in hearing more about you, I will find a way
| to subscribe to your shit otherwise all you manage to do is to
| get me frustrated and leave.
|
| This time I couldn't even get to reading, I opened the article
| and had to answer an IM. By the time I got back I was treated
| with full screen "Type your email to subscribe" box that couldn't
| even be dismissed without clicking small "Let me read first"
| link.
|
| Why is simple blog design such ass these days? Why can't I just
| read the content without being bombarded with pop ups, pop overs,
| and other crap that has nothing to do with the actual content?
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| Have JavaScript off by default in uBlock. Substack is quite
| readable without JS; and no popups.
| nextlevelwizard wrote:
| I used to run NoScript back in the day, but way too many
| websites are just beyond broken without JS. I'm just not
| going to bother reading bad sites, I am not losing anything
| of value.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Welcome to substack! "But it is better than medium!"
| nine_k wrote:
| Have you tried paying? Publishers need food, too. So do some
| authors who write in a (semi)professional capacity and spend
| significant time writing.
| nextlevelwizard wrote:
| What are you on? Are you implying that these people are
| collecting emails to sell them?
|
| If your content is worth money you will make money, but most
| content is definitely not worth even my time.
| parentheses wrote:
| There will come a time when only experts on a given topic will be
| able to separate fact from fiction.
|
| I would expect that AI will get good at internally consistent
| content _first_, so this work would make sense on its own even if
| it's nonsense in actuality. Talk about bubbles.
| [deleted]
| jerf wrote:
| One of the things that has kept me out of the cryptocurrency
| space is that when their advocates discuss value, they speak in
| pure nonsense.
|
| A big part of that problem is that value is very difficult to
| discuss. On the one hand you have the classic goldbug that
| insists that gold has "intrinsic value", which is some sort of
| platonic ideal thing that gold simply ambiently has and defies
| any attempt to nail down what it grounds out in. On the other
| hand you have cryptocurrency advocates claiming that all value is
| arbitrary and/or based entirely on scarcity. In that context,
| observing that my kid's doodles are scarce but not valuable is
| not a cute tweet; it is a complete and utter demolishing of the
| argument.
|
| (I think one of the things education can accidentally (mis)teach
| is that short arguments are always worthless and arguments must
| always be long. This is false. A good grounding in mathematics
| can help with internalizing this. It is completely possible to
| demolish entire massive argument edifices in 10-20 of the correct
| words, and the fact that the "other side" has deployed literally
| hundreds of thousands of words does not make them right if the
| foundation is rotten.)
|
| Value is intrinsically a dynamic process. It grounds out in human
| desires, which are intrinsically temporal, variable, and fickle,
| and this makes a _lot_ of people uncomfortable as they seek
| either a more solid _or_ a more completely ethereal /arbitrary
| base. However, there is no other sensible way to think about
| value, however complex and ever-shifting this may be, and it is
| neither mathematically solid, nor an amorphous vapor of no
| consequence subject to one strong person's Nietzschian will.
| hackernudes wrote:
| If you make up what people say and then argue with them it's
| pretty easy to win.
|
| The "classic goldbug" insists that gold has properties that are
| good for a currency (does not degrade, can be divided, does not
| rely on a trusted third party, has scarcity) and it has been
| used as currency for a long time in civilisation. I take
| "intrinsic value" for commodities to mean "has use aside from
| being a currency", for example gold is used in jewelry (does
| not tarnish, is soft, is pretty?) and electronics. The non-
| intrinsic value would be its use as a currency. If a goldbug
| argues all the value of gold is intrinsic, they are confused
| because the price of gold would probably be much lower if it
| had no use as a currency.
|
| Bitcoin-bugs make similar claims to gold, plus it can be sent
| over the internet and is more scarce than gold. As for
| intrinsic value for Bitcoin, it doesn't really have one I
| guess. Or maybe you could make an argument about other things
| built on top of its blockchain like smart contracts or
| timestamping services?
|
| In summary, I agree that an argument of value from "pure
| scarcity" is bad, but I don't think it is a common belief!
| LordDragonfang wrote:
| >Bitcoin-bugs
|
| Might I suggest: bitbugs.
|
| (Also, "Don't let the bitbugs byte")
| JamesSwift wrote:
| > observing that my kid's doodles are scarce but not valuable
| is not a cute tweet; it is a complete and utter demolishing of
| the argument.
|
| Scarcity is not quantity. Its the relationship between supply
| and demand. In your scenario, supply (1 kid doodling) meets
| demand (1 person wants them), so the value doesnt move from 0
| (which is how much you would pay for the doodles).
| [deleted]
| bryananderson wrote:
| That's the previous commenter's point, isn't it? The crypto
| advocates claim that crypto has intrinsic value simply
| because of its scarcity (supply-side only). The commenter's
| rebuttal is that if this were true, their kid's doodles would
| be extremely valuable, yet they are not because only the
| parent treasures them (demand-side).
|
| With gold, one can come up with a plausible story for the
| demand side of the argument that it has intrinsic value:
| gold's combination of beauty and scarcity has made it a
| potent status symbol across many eras and cultures (not to
| mention its industrial uses).
|
| With crypto, it's much harder to imagine what the demand side
| of the story is. There's a finite supply of Bitcoin, and
| people demand it because... well, it's not because they can
| pay for anything with it. They mostly seem to demand it
| because they believe someone else will pay them more for it
| in the future. And what do we call it when an asset has
| nothing going for it besides that hope?
|
| I'm still waiting for a compelling story about why demand for
| Bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency will persist beyond the
| current vogue, which is driven by the notion that "it's gonna
| be huge in the future". How long can people keep the faith,
| and what happens to demand if and when they stop?
| Eisenstein wrote:
| I have contended that the only use for cryptocurrency which
| provides value for people is for anonymous transactions for
| which cash is not an option or a poor option. The only
| cryptocurrency that can do this that I know of is Monero.
| Therefore Monero will have lasting value. Whether you can
| make money speculating on it is dubious, which is probably
| why not many people do.
|
| * Note: I am speaking regarding the markets I know; I
| cannot say anything regarding economies suffering rapid
| inflation or which lack access to banking
| aaroninsf wrote:
| A-class critique of the grounding of value.
|
| I will add that there seems to be a substantial correlation
| between people who are made uncomfortable by the reality of
| socially-constructed value,
|
| and the social construction of many other "foundational"
| things, such as "truth" and its relationship to natural
| language,
|
| which flows naturally into self-delusional "originalism" when
| it comes to interpreting say the Constitution. Or for that
| matter the Bible.
|
| which in turn are deeply correlated with autocratic-leaning and
| socially-conservative politics which favor rigid hierarchies
| and privilege authority and respect for it, over other values
| (such as equity, compassion, etc.)
|
| I find it remarkable how many people are made uncomfortable
| even in otherwise well -educated circles by the premise that in
| natural language meaning is negotiated and collaborative and
| requires not absolutes of the universe but rather agents who
| maintain representations and models of one another's states,
| beliefs, intentions, etc., against which every utterance is
| measured and its meaning triangulated.
|
| I guess if you got a degree in EECS rather than say CogSci it's
| possible to never encounter even anemic instrumental models of
| this in a pragmatic linguistics class... :/
| Nav_Panel wrote:
| > Value ... grounds out in human desires
|
| You wouldn't believe how rare it is for me to meet someone who
| agrees with this. I'm in leadership at a web3 company and I
| need to reiterate this point over and over again. NFTs don't
| have intrinsic value OR arbitrary value. ERC20s don't have
| intrinsic value OR arbitrary value. If it doesn't tie back into
| user psychology, it's not worth anything.
|
| Interesting historical note is that one of Freud's original
| metaphors for understanding the nature of desire was the
| unconscious "investor" or "capitalist" who outlays affective
| charge to the conscious "entrepreneur", who relates to objects.
| This is known in the literature as Freud's "economic metaphor",
| which I've found immensely helpful in my own understanding.
| namaria wrote:
| 'Intrinsic value' is an oxymoron. 'Value' is a social
| construct.
| Nav_Panel wrote:
| The conclusion I came to is that "intrinsic value" is
| fundamentally an extroverted (object-oriented) rather than
| introverted (subject-oriented) concept, to use Jungian
| terminology. In other words, the subject projects their
| psychological evaluation "into" the object. The path to
| reconciling the two usages of language is to scope the
| subject, e.g.:
|
| - to human beings (subject), food (object) has "intrinsic"
| value
|
| - to Americans, US dollars have "intrinsic" value
|
| - to Redditors, karma has "intrinsic" value
|
| etc
|
| Interesting aside -- this is also how falling in love works
| (overvaluation of the object via the subject's projection
| of value).
| NaturalPhallacy wrote:
| > _You wouldn 't believe how rare it is for me to meet
| someone who agrees with this. I'm in leadership at a web3
| company and I need to reiterate this point over and over
| again. NFTs don't have intrinsic value OR arbitrary value.
| ERC20s don't have intrinsic value OR arbitrary value. If it
| doesn't tie back into user psychology, it's not worth
| anything._
|
| I came to a similar conclusion: The sole criterion for the
| viability of a currency is acceptance in trade.
|
| This simple truism explains every currency that "works" and
| every one that didn't all at once.
|
| It can be a terrible currency, but if it's generally accepted
| in trade, too bad. Governments can mandate it, but that won't
| always save it. Just look at Zimbabwe dollars. They were
| official. And all but worthless. USD is accepted worldwide,
| even though its based on less than even a shitcoin, and 90%
| of it doesn't physically exist according to the Fed
| themselves.
| duped wrote:
| > USD is accepted worldwide, even though its based on less
| than even a shitcoin
|
| The full faith and credit of the the United States
| government is pretty solid.
|
| > and 90% of it doesn't physically exist according to the
| Fed themselves.
|
| That's how debt works
| crooked-v wrote:
| > It is completely possible to demolish entire massive argument
| edifices in 10-20 of the correct words, and the fact that the
| "other side" has deployed literally hundreds of thousands of
| words does not make them right if the foundation is rotten.
|
| See also the "Gish gallop" [1], a strategy that relies on
| spewing out a huge number of specious arguments and half-truths
| that are each individually time-consuming to refute, and to
| which the correct response is usually just to refuse to engage
| with the bullshit.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop
| ted_bunny wrote:
| "Mathemetics"
|
| Is this the regurgitative didactic method I keep hearing about?
| jerf wrote:
| Ah yes, sorry, fixed. Meant to spell "mathememetics"
| correctly.
| pwdisswordfish9 wrote:
| Mathememetics, the study of the spread of ideas that seem
| rigorous, but aren't.
| Aeolun wrote:
| While I fully agree with your point, the next time I see some
| collective delusion of a pyramid scheme I'll buy in early.
|
| It doesn't matter that there's no logic to it, as long as
| enough people share the same delusion it becomes self-
| propagating.
| namaria wrote:
| That's no better then buying all lottery tickets you can get
| your hands on.
| PeterCorless wrote:
| This is what makes marks so unremarkable.
| bluGill wrote:
| How do you know if things are early though? Some go longer
| than others, so you can see some quack getting attention and
| buy in - just in time to be the last fool as everyone else
| realizes it is garbage. Or it can continue to go up - you
| have no way to know.
| sam0x17 wrote:
| If my grandparents know about it it's too late
| jjkaczor wrote:
| For myself, personally - that's an easy metric...
|
| By the time I hear about something, it's too late.
| hoosieree wrote:
| I bought some cryptocurrencies on Coinbase about a year
| ago. Today I figured was as good a time as any to cash
| out. My net loss was about 70%.
|
| I'm fortunate that this was a small amount relative to my
| net worth to count as a fun "experiment" and not a
| significant chunk of the money I need to survive.
|
| Based on this N=1 experiment, I now feel justified in
| suggesting more profitable and environmentally friendly
| endeavors, such as lighting half your money on fire.
| BossingAround wrote:
| There are ten, if not hundreds, failed pyramid schemes
| for every one on which you could make money. The schemes
| are not made for you. The way to earn money off of
| pyramid schemes is to _create_ one.
|
| Whether bitcoin is just a pyramid scheme or not, only
| time will tell. I don't believe so, but I'm not an
| economist, so who am I to say :).
| skybrian wrote:
| Some human desires are more predictable. You can ground out
| _some_ value in basic human needs: food, clothing, shelter.
| They imply land value (for example, agricultural land) and
| energy usage (heat, transport, production) though not in a
| straightforward way. And various security measures can be
| valuable because any of the above could be taken away.
|
| This doesn't imply stable prices, though. Far from it!
| trompetenaccoun wrote:
| The article as well as your comment (which doesn't even
| reference what is discussed in the blog post) are perfect
| examples for how narratives form in this strange new world.
| None of it has anything to do with NFTs or cryptocurrency
| except for the name. Everywhere people consume media, be it on
| Twitter or Amazon, they're bombarded with scams and nonsensical
| computer-generated content. Those not inclined to dig deeper
| soon start to believe the fake stuff is what the idea is really
| about.
|
| There has always been misinformation, but not on this level.
| Only a few years back, when someone wanted to write a scam
| book, they still had to actually sit down and write it, no
| matter how carelessly. Now that this isn't needed anymore, it
| amazes me that someone would as much as look at - let alone buy
| and read - books on buzzword topics by random unknown authors.
| Same goes for the consumption of social media feeds.
| WalterBright wrote:
| The value of something is simply what other people are willing
| to pay for it.
| Phiwise_ wrote:
| The marginal revolution is dead. Long live the marginal
| revolution!
| maxbond wrote:
| You're conflating price and value. I'm going to repost a
| comment I made a month ago.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32857769
|
| > It's important to note that price, the last traded price,
| and value are all distinct concepts. The last traded price is
| the only one of these we can measure ahead of time, so we
| often use it as a metanym for these other concepts. ...
|
| > When the oil futures went negative, it wasn't the case that
| the value of oil was negative - this was about the structure
| of the market and the sorts of positions people were caught
| in when the pandemic hit. We continued to consume oil
| throughout the pandemic, and so I'd say we continued to value
| it.
|
| > Another example would be, if a rancher has a lot of cow
| poop, they might pay a farmer to take it away. You could say
| that the cow poop has a negative price on it. But the farmer
| is going to make use of it as fertilizer; from the farmer's
| perspective, this is a commodity that has value.
|
| > It's true though that there are a million theories of value
| and it's impossible to say what something's value is
| definitively, you can only make a decision about what is
| value is to you.
|
| I'd expand that you actually have to define what value means
| to you, relative to the context in which the discussion is
| taking place. You'll likely find yourself considering value
| from different perspectives in different situations; I find
| myself doing so.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > You're conflating price and value.
|
| The negotiated final price _is_ the value.
|
| > When the oil futures went negative, it wasn't the case
| that the value of oil was negative
|
| The value of the futures is different than the value of the
| oil itself. Besides, the end result of a future is taking
| delivery. Most futures contract buyers have no intention of
| taking delivery, and have no way to take delivery. That
| explains the negative value of those futures.
|
| > I'd expand that you actually have to define what value
| means to you, relative to the context in which the
| discussion is taking place. You'll likely find yourself
| considering value from different perspectives in different
| situations
|
| That doesn't change at all the fact that the value is
| determined by what someone is willing to pay for it. That
| value is different for different people, as you say.
| maxbond wrote:
| What I meant was, the _definition_ of value is different
| for different people, as well as yourself in different
| situations. The magnitude of that value will also differ,
| of course.
|
| You're free to define value to always be price, it's a
| matter of opinion and by my own logic it's a valid thing
| to do, but separating the two concepts makes things much
| clearer when market effects distort the price of
| something who's value doesn't seem to have changed.
| r00fus wrote:
| The issue is the aggregation of such a volatile concept such
| that entire markets can be based on such pricing model.
|
| That way lies the enablement of massive fraud.
| mcguire wrote:
| I have here a pencil. My buddy is willing to give me $100 for
| it, so its value is $100, right? But I'll sell it to you for
| only $50. Bargain!
| maxbond wrote:
| If your buddy throws in a an option to sell for 1 pencil at
| $100, then you've got a deal!
| ZoomZoomZoom wrote:
| Either you're being manipulative, or just don't get that
| there's a market for your pencil, and it's not just your
| buddy, so his role in establishing the price is much less
| important than you present.
|
| Of course, all of this is about price, not value.
| kibwen wrote:
| By far the most _valuable_ substance in the world is oxygen,
| without which everyone here would be dead within moments, and
| yet (nearly) nobody here has ever paid a single cent for it
| (apologies to scuba divers).
| [deleted]
| jcynix wrote:
| It's virtual evolution at work, i.e. spam evolution. It's the
| _Internet Gold Rush_ (i.e. "make money fast" at work), which we
| have watched getting "more professional" in the last ten to
| twenty years. And because those companies which supply resources
| (ebook platforms, search engines, but also hardware for crypto
| mining like graphics cards etc) to those "virtual miners" profit
| from what's going on, we won't see that fixed in the upcoming
| years.
|
| Generating books instead of spam emails looks more professional
| so gullible people, who meanwhile (hopefully) did learn that the
| Nigerian prince isn't a prince, will buy such books (it's written
| in a book, and book writing is real work you know, so it must be
| true) to learn about all those fancy new concepts they hear
| about.
|
| It's actually not that different from all these ads you see,
| especially if you actually watch recent youtube ads. Due to the
| current "energy crisis" and the upcoming winter, I've seen videos
| advertising magical electric heaters, which will "recycle" 85% of
| the energy used for heating and thus will save you lots of money.
| It's simple physics that warm air coming out at the front of such
| a device will be sucked in at its back again, but there's nothing
| to "recycle" here, to somehow save energy.
|
| BTW, anybody interested in my upcoming book on quantum heating?
| Quantum heating will even earn you money, because it will
| generate certain energy efficient by-products which you can sell
| at your favourite online retailer ;-)
| guerrilla wrote:
| > "energy crisis" and the upcoming winter,
|
| Why do you put that in quotes?
|
| > I've seen videos advertising magical electric heaters, which
| will "recycle" 85% of the energy used for heating and thus will
| save you lots of money. It's simple physics that warm air
| coming out at the front of such a device will be sucked in at
| its back again, but there's nothing to "recycle" here, to
| somehow save energy.
|
| You sure they couldn't be talking about a heat pump which does
| have "above 100%" efficiency in a sense?
| jcynix wrote:
| > Why do you put that in quotes?
|
| Because the "energy crisis" is actually a political crisis,
| i.e. the failure of governments to build enough alternate
| generators, like solar and wind power during the last decade
| or two.
|
| > You sure they couldn't be talking about a heat pump [...]
|
| I'm really sure, because the videos show people unpacking a
| small electrical heater after telling you that "a student" or
| "an engineer" developed this glorious device in their spare
| time, ... And last but not least because we built our house
| with a heat pump and heat exchanging ventilation[*] more than
| a decade ago, so I'm aware of the concepts.
|
| [*] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plate_heat_exchanger
|
| Edit: complete a sentence.
| guerrilla wrote:
| > Because the "energy crisis" is actually a political
| crisis, i.e. the failure of governments to build enough
| alternate generators, like solar and wind power during the
| last decade or two.
|
| Aha, I see. A bit late for that now though, so now it's an
| energy crisis. I wish it were seen as a political crisis
| but pretty much everyone here just blames Russia and there
| aren't many (if any in some countries) consequences...
|
| > I'm really sure, because the videos show people unpacking
| a small electrical heater after telling you that "a
| student" or "an engineer" developed this glorious device in
| their spare time, ...
|
| Amazing that this shit is legal...
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > BTW, anybody interested in my upcoming book on quantum
| heating? Quantum heating will even earn you money, because it
| will generate certain energy efficient by-products which you
| can sell at your favourite online retailer ;-)
|
| As a seller of magic electric recycling heaters who you just
| bankrupted, let me repay you in kind: everyone, you can easily
| DIY this "quantum heating" thing: it's just an automated
| pipeline of GPT-3 to LeanPub and purchasing ads that show up in
| Quanta Magazine (hence "quantum"), where you run GPT-3 locally
| so you can keep your home warm with the heat generated by your
| PC.
| tkk23 wrote:
| How is this different from email spam? People will stop trusting
| random sources for books. Established publishers will make sure
| that only vetted authors are able to access the market. The only
| problem is that it's difficult for new publishers and fringe
| authors to enter the market.
| Gigachad wrote:
| Because you didn't pay money to receive the email spam. I
| suppose the main detail is that many people will just eat the
| loss on a scam book and devalue their trust in Amazon rather
| than bothering to refund and return it.
| danwee wrote:
| Reminds me of the joke:
|
| > It's been months since I bought the book, "How to scam people
| online." It still hasn't arrived yet.
| beardyw wrote:
| Time to produce a book about fake books ... click.
| beardyw wrote:
| Seriously, I knew someone involved in "published as remainder"
| business in the 70s. First get good photos, pay someone to
| write some text, put on sale at inflated price, then put on
| sale at amazing discount.
| stingtao wrote:
| A book-formed content farm
| sjamaan wrote:
| Isn't the "For Dummies" series some sort of trademark? I'm amazed
| they didn't get sued for using the name. Crap like this devalues
| the rest of the "for dummies" books.
| viridian wrote:
| That book seems to be an actual for "dummies book", written by
| a doctor of business analytics who teaches at Santa Clara
| University, for what it's worth. She also authored "DeFi for
| dummies".
|
| If I had to read any of these books, there's a good chance that
| the for dummies one is the _least bad_ of the 12, but odds are
| you are better off reading 0 of these books.
| jehb wrote:
| > Crap like this devalues the rest of the "for dummies" books.
|
| I'd argue Wiley already did that themselves. They sell the
| Dummies brand to any company with a large checkbook. See:
|
| -
| https://www.intel.com/content/dam/support/us/en/programmable...
|
| - https://www.oracle.com/a/ocom/docs/oracle-cloud-erp-for-
| dumm...
|
| - https://www.ibm.com/downloads/cas/GB8ZMQZ3
| michaelt wrote:
| Although the author shows the covers of 11 books, only one of
| them - "NFT for Beginners" - is full of GPT-3-looking nonsense.
|
| The "NFTs for Dummies" book is presumably not nonsense, or at
| least no more so than the subject matter demands.
| aaron695 wrote:
| nix23 wrote:
| I have a book from amazon (it's about a Seawolf submarine) the
| book is so bad, the story so lame, and the mix of themes (music-
| taste with a rescue), kind of artificial...it's almost comical
| and i bet it's mostly written by a AI who cobbled text
| together...an absolute low effort book.
| adriantiral wrote:
| sposeray wrote:
| NotYourLawyer wrote:
| It reads like a lot of the auto-generated content / Amazon
| affiliate link farms that google ranks so highly when I search
| for product reviews.
|
| Everything is awful online nowadays.
| narahs wrote:
| And this is how publishers/publishing houses stand to gain a
| renewed relevance in a world of self publishing and digital
| platform technologies.
| peter303 wrote:
| Submit GPT-3 written journal articles to vanity journals. They
| deserve each other.
| jcynix wrote:
| Every so often in the last n years I stumbled over "books" which
| simply contain regurgitated wikipedia content.
|
| And, of course, all those web pages collecting amazon reviews
| which simulate product review pages. Or, before that, just link
| farms to products so people could collect referer compensation.
|
| All this is some form of spam, which simply uses search engines
| to spread instead of email. So the "books" reported here (while
| somehow "fascinating" just look like the next step of spam/scam
| evolution to me.
|
| And yes, I see that they are more problematic the "better" they
| get generated, because more people will think they are genuine
| works.
| femto wrote:
| I wrote one of those books. That is, a Wikipedia article I
| largely wrote was plagiarised and published in a book by a
| scammer. Some time later my words on Wikipedia were tagged as
| having been plagiarised from the scammer's book. It was clear
| from wiki timestamps and publication dates what really
| happened, so it got fixed, but it's irritating that one needs
| to waste time on things like that (and as far as I know the
| book is still on Amazon).
| sybercecurity wrote:
| Similar things happened in the past as well. At conferences
| or trade shows you could find booths selling CDs/DVDs of
| online content like IETF RFC's, government publications, etc.
| I could see it as useful for people that had
| infrequent/spotty network connectivity, but mostly it was
| preying on people who were unaware of how to obtain these
| documents on their own.
|
| Occasionally you could find print versions as well, which
| were sometimes a deal if you took the cost of toner/paper
| into consideration.
| jcynix wrote:
| > as far as I know the book is still on Amazon
|
| I would have expected that. Amazon neither has the staff with
| expertise to investigate claims nor much interest in removing
| products that earn them a nice share. Knowledge is fungible
| nowadays, and in these cases of "fake books" its volatile
| too.
|
| It's the virtual gold rush on the Internet and companies
| which supply resources (ebook platforms, search engines, but
| hardware for crypto mining like graphics cards etc too) to
| those "miners" profit from what's going on.
| hk__2 wrote:
| > I would have expected that. Amazon neither has the staff
| with expertise to investigate claims nor much interest in
| removing products that earn them a nice share
|
| If the book attributes its content to Wikipedia, it's
| perfectly legal. The issue then becomes "should Amazon
| remove low-quality products from their website?" (and the
| underlying issue is "what does 'low-quality' mean?"), and
| the response is no because they want to act as a platform.
| jcynix wrote:
| > If the book attributes its content to Wikipedia, it's
| perfectly legal.
|
| Sure, but I remember seeing books which didn't attribute
| their source. I only noted the "similarity" while
| searching for info on certain topics. Sorry, I didn't
| document them, because I just thought, ok, the next scam.
| anderspitman wrote:
| It's crazy to think that the internet may have already peaked, at
| least in certain ways. 5 years ago I could Google anything and
| was confident (maybe more than I should have been) of getting
| close to the best answer, whether looking for a product
| recommendation or just general knowledge. That confidence has
| seriously eroded the past couple years.
|
| That said, I'm optimistic that we can keep finding solutions to
| new problems. Maybe it wouldn't be so bad to make purchasing
| decisions closer to the way we used to, by asking our friends
| what they recommend. That's essentially how appending " reddit"
| to a google search works today, but even that is vulnerable to
| manipulation.
|
| I'm hoping that social media of the future builds in better tools
| for polling our network for recommendations, and for
| incentivizing us to respond to our friends' queries.
| allochthon wrote:
| I'm hoping that eventually we'll get around the idea of a
| crowd-sourced search engine (mostly manually curated)
| maintained in the manner of Wikipedia, backed by a solid user
| reputation system to dissuade spammers.
|
| This will import Wikipedia's serious flaws. But I'm hopefully
| that they can gradually be mitigated.
| disqard wrote:
| A lot of the underpinnings of such a manually-curated
| knowledge base _did_ exist in the early 2000s, in the form of
| Yahoo! Directory.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Directory
| [deleted]
| AaronBBrown wrote:
| Clicked expecting this to be about the history
| (https://officialrealbook.com/history/) of jazz fake books, which
| eventually evolved into the Real Book!
| zefhous wrote:
| A couple years ago we ordered an "on-demand" printed book from
| Amazon for an old public domain book. It came misprinted, with a
| book on "Mobile Solar Power" right in the middle of it.
|
| I took a look through it cause I thought it would actually
| interesting, and found it to be this type of fake book that looks
| to be instructional on the surface, but in reality is not
| actually educational in the least, and in fact dead wrong in many
| places.
|
| I posted a couple excerpts on Twitter here, 3-tweet thread.
| https://twitter.com/zefhous/status/1281679975339274241
| f311a wrote:
| Amazon is full of fake/generated/auto translated books in every
| category. Just search for any programming language and sort it by
| release date.
|
| I don't understand why they don't fix this problem. It's pretty
| easy to fix and all those sales don't generate a significant
| amount of revenue for Amazon considering the negative experience
| for clients.
|
| Such books are pretty easy to spot since the majority of reviews
| are written by people who have published more than hundreds of
| reviews.
| jhoechtl wrote:
| > I don't understand why they don't fix this problem.
|
| Because they act as a platform an the platform makes a living
| by its transactions and not by the quality of the content.
| JHer wrote:
| But there are other platforms out there (especially for
| books) that people will prefer if they make it easier to find
| high-quality content. I'm with the poster you replied to; it
| would make sense for Amazon to go after these fake products.
| Finnucane wrote:
| It's a particularly bad problem for books, but it's a
| problem for every product category. Unless Amazon sees
| people abandoning them in large numbers (personally, I
| haven't ordered from them in years) they're not going to
| change.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| That's exactly it, it doesn't hurt them enough that the
| products they sell are low quality. For every one person that
| returns a book (which costs Amazon money), there's a dozen
| that just won't bother, it's not worth the hassle for them.
| YurgenJurgensen wrote:
| Going into full tinfoil hat territory: I wonder whether those
| products are the equivalent of the 'deliberate' spelling and
| grammatical errors we're all told end up in spam emails to pre-
| filter out people who probably won't fall for the scam. Amazon
| doesn't want customers who care about quality, because they
| leave bad reviews and have a higher return rate.
| TazeTSchnitzel wrote:
| Amazon is full of low-effort products in every category. If you
| search for certain consumer goods you'll get several different
| brand names for the same white-label product, for instance. And
| lots of people buy them! It's not just an easily-ignored spam
| problem...
|
| I really hope Amazon's sea of garbage devours Amazon before it
| destroys the remaining un-Amazon-ified online retailers through
| unfair competition.
| silvestrov wrote:
| It is the same problem with Facebook: does Mark Zuckerberg
| leave FB before it crashes (or accepts that The Metaverse is
| a complete failure).
|
| Does Jeff Bezos change direction and drop the "everything
| store" strategy by realizing that most of everything is trash
| and he is destroying the Amazon brand?
|
| To misquote him: your garbage is my opportunity.
|
| He enables competition to use brands as a strategy: we make
| sure everything we sell is the best. If you shop at our
| place, you will not be wasting your time.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Affects older books too. I've found books that were very
| obviously printed scans of library books, including dog-ears,
| missing pages and the odd pencil lines.
|
| https://www.marginalia.nu/shitty-book/pencil2.webp
|
| https://www.marginalia.nu/shitty-book/fadeout.webp
|
| https://www.marginalia.nu/shitty-book/pencil.webp
|
| Appears they're printing these on demand on essentially
| bleached office-grade paper. The orange tint is from the white
| balance being off.
|
| Seems to be related to the system of third party sellers. Every
| shop I'm aware of that uses this model has problems with this
| type of bait-and-switch bullshit.
| shp0ngle wrote:
| yeah I saw that too. They take the books from archive.org,
| it's public domains books.
|
| It's essentially legal, and I think it's not that scammy
| honestly. People want these books on paper, nobody prints
| them anymore or has the texts.
|
| edit: I also saw some people selling the OCR from these
| books, which is far worse. You need to guess the original,
| especially if it has some latin/german inside English.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| I honestly think it would be fine if they were a bit more
| clear about what you're buying. As it is, you're typically
| getting nearly no information beyond the title and the
| publisher.
|
| Making available rare out of print books is a noble goal.
| thn-gap wrote:
| I wonder if having a swarm of people buy these items, then
| returning them since they clearly don't match the expected
| result from the description, would hurt the sellers enough so
| they would stop doing this sort of scam.
| svnt wrote:
| Unfortunately I doubt it. If they are just printing on-
| demand low-quality books it seems they'd not be badly hurt
| as their variable costs are cheap paper and cheap ink.
|
| If you could find a book that broke their machine, sort of
| a Legends of Stuxnet, then you'd get somewhere.
|
| Or if you figured out their business and determined if they
| sold so many they placed a bulk order for a printing, then
| place that many orders, they place the bulk order, you stop
| buying, and then do the mass return.
| lupire wrote:
| > the majority of reviews are written by people who have
| published more than hundreds of reviews.
|
| Amazon pays users who publish hundreds of reviews. It gives
| Amazon credibility to other users.
| ilyt wrote:
| They don't give a shit as long as it's moving volume.
|
| Tools on amazon have same problem, so many fakes, they get
| reported and company just pops up with different name.
| gexla wrote:
| Edit: Commented in wrong browser tab. Apologies.
| kuu wrote:
| Where does this appear in the article? I think you're not
| answering the proper article or I am veeery confused
| [deleted]
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