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.
> 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.
I had a Bitcoin fan in his 40s tell me IRL that BTC, not blockchain, mind you, is an improvement over the gene. Something about passing information between generations. I could not follow the argument. All this time, banks have been hoarding details about our deposits, withdrawals, balances, transfers, payment and purchase histories that could have been "inherited" like genetic information by our descendents. Even worse, banks could have been making the data public so "tech" companies can collect it for free. You just cannot make this stuff up.
This sounds related to the observation that one of the powers of human civilization is move evolution out of the DNA genes and into culture. We use electricity not because we have electricity-using genes, but because we have the genes that allow us to support a culture that knows how to use electricity.
However it is beyond me to translate that into the blockchain specifically. This seems like yet another case where in the phrase "distributed ledger", the "ledger" is doing all the work and the "distributed" isn't doing much. And there isn't much work being done either; most of our "culture" isn't in ledgers. Even if you take the broad view that I do that a lot of things like our technology are actually embedded in human relationships ("Hmmm, I remember Bob knows how to solve this problem... ah yes, I bet Sally knows the solution to this... I bet Ramash could hook me up with the right part for this problem...") and things beyond just formal transfer mechanisms like "books" and "classes", ledgers still aren't carrying much of that water.
I remember SCO accusing IBM of doing something similar and IBM responding that they did not, because they could not, refute them.
Refuting bad arguments scales better than some think because arguments can be referenced or copied when they come up again and again, whereas the alternative allows BS to stand unchallenged.
Speaking of which, I should copy this for the next time that comes up.
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!
I'm actually way closer to a goldbug than a cryptocurrency advocate, and generally agree with you with what you said!
But I have definitely encountered goldbugs who just know that gold has intrinsic value, if you ask them what that is, it's just like, intrinsic dude, if you ask them what that even means they just sort of get a blank look on their face (metaphorically, since this is the internet).
Gold is super good at storing what value it has... but it is not intrinsically valuable. If society were to collapse to two people, and one had gold and the other had cows, the one with cows would have little reason to trade for the gold. This is not likely to happen, but is a good mathematical sort of way of considering the question. Food and water have much better "intrinsic" value if you really get down to it... where they go wrong as the basis for an economy is all the other attributes we want money to have.
(Personally as one "way closer to a goldbug", I favor things that are actually used. Gold freaks me out a bit because the world still treats it as very valuable even now, but it isn't actually used for much. I feel much better about things that are used because they are the best solution to some problem; see platinum and palladium for catalytic converters, for instance. On the flip side, the reason why gold isn't used much is precisely that it's considered very valuable; if the value did suddenly collapse because the general agreement about its value deteriorated, there are a lot more things we'd use it industrially for, so that might be enough to keep it valuable.)
It's not just a few goldbugs thinking the intrinsic value is all of the value, it's tons of them that think the intrinsic value provides a solid floor. At this point the currency/speculative/prestige value is almost all of the value of gold. If you had a pile of gold and it dropped down to its intrinsic value, it'd be almost the same as a drop to zero.
> At this point the currency/speculative/prestige value is almost all of the value of gold
It isn't a currency, it has no obvious potential to be a currency and if you own it you are either a government or insulted. At best, only speculative value could be a factor of these 3, and I don't think the serious money that sets the price is speculating - and gold is a terrible market to speculate in, so they probably aren't setting the price as much as going broke.
The value of gold is set by how hard/easy it is to mine.
Scarcity does not directly cause value. Scarcity can fuel speculation and prestige.
Plenty of things are hard to mine yet don't have much value, so nobody tries to mine them. The difficulty/ease of mining can provide a cap on value, but it does not provide a floor. It is not the reason something is expensive.
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.
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.
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 :).
Until it doesn't, but your point is correct. Otherwise known as the greater fool theory (usually of stock investing, but applicable anywhere fools are found). Assuming you can enter and exit with a profit, you win. Next game...
> 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).
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?
Bitcoin is the first (and most stable) theoretically unseizable currency. You can store bitcoin in your brain, get persecuted by your national government for criticizing their actions, travel across a border, get kidnapped, offer up a decoy wallet, get released 3 years later, wander into a town with an internet cafe, and theoretically, you could have access to your funds within hours, without the consent of or dependence on any other centralized entity.
Is this a fantasy that few if any people will ever utilize? Sure.
Is it also super cool? I think so.
I think the main demand of bitcoin is "money that isn't subject to federal reserve policy". No fiat currency in the world is effectively accomplishing that today.
(Note: I had to stop using brainwallets three bubbles ago because I had recurring nightmares of getting a brain injury and losing access to my funds. Don't recommend it.)
>Bitcoin is the first (and most stable) theoretically unseizable currency
This is an absolute farce. Maybe talk to us when there are no longer reports of being able to easily scam someone out of all of their money with a non-reversable transaction just by sending them an image with a script in it.
At least with fiat currency you have a chance of getting the transaction reversed! Most people will not trust a currency where this is not possible, or at least they will hold it with a centralized trusted custodian who can offer transaction reversal—which defeats the purpose!
Sure, but there’s no way for the delayed settlement mechanism to handle fuzzy real-world judgment calls (such as a dispute about whether a service was rendered or not) without resorting to a centralized oracle of some sort—and then you’ve broken trustlessness and may as well have avoided blockchain altogether and saved yourself the transaction fees.
> Bitcoin is the first (and most stable) theoretically unseizable currency.
Bitcoin is subject to federal policy as much as anything is: as much as secret Swiss bank accounts.
You imply evasion works. But that certainly doesn't mean it is federally legal, legal with the IRS, or legal for whatever other reasons. You have the risk of serious consequences if you are caught breaking the laws that apply to you.
Your argument implies that you can break the law without getting caught, but we already have surprising crypto counterexamples against that.
Also, the market is slowly being split into legitimate trading (via centralised platforms with KYC rules) and illegitimate trading (for stolen bitcoins, or bitcoins tainted by tumbling with illegal bitcoins). As that plays out, it seems likely to become more difficult to actually trade your crypto without some laundering costs and risks.
Keeping a number in your head or hiding some gold in your secret location are the same thing.
A number in your head is portable. So with the exception of the 'border crossing' use case, I agree they are functionally the same thing.
I suspect a lot of more of the 0.1% have gold hidden than many would expect. I've met two eccentric 100 millionaires that advocated for hiding gold as a wealth preservation mechanism. I think this is becoming the primary non-trading use case for Bitcoin - met both of those individuals through conversations about crypto.
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
Except that holding Monero is of rather less clear value. Sure, the ability to take $100, turn it into Monero, and turn it back into almost $100 that cannot be trivially traced to the original $100 is of some value. But this value is there for people who have no particular interest in Monero-the—asset. They want Monero-the-mixer.
If I put $100 into Monero and hold it, I’m betting that Monero is still worth something in the future. That’s a risky bet. For example, the Treasury department could sanction Monero. Or the next great mixer could come along and supplant Monero, making my old Monero mostly useless.
The whole point of currency is to use it. If you are buying a currency to hold on to it, then it is a terrible currency and there is a disincentive to use it as one, thus making it useful only for speculation. I know that there was a pivot when people realized Bitcoin and Ether are not practical for their purported use as currencies, where they are now claimed to 'hold value', but that is ridiculous. They were designed to be currencies and they suck at it. You can make up any reason you want, but if you want a cryptocurrency that has value as a currency then in my view Monero is an example of one, because it has a valued use case.
ON the international currency market, one traditional role of the US dollar is exactly "store value". You trade your currencies on the FX market during your day, and comes close to "close of your trading", you exchange all your positions for US dollars, to keep in store for your quiet period. Comes the following day, you trade out your dollars for other currencies. Then the cycle continues.
Does this mean that the US dollar is a terrible currency? No. If another currency meets the same stability criterion, it can (and probably is) used as a short-to-medium term value store.
I don't really see any crypto-currency work well, they're thinly traded, so there's a lot of inherent volatility in the pricing. It is also getting increasingly harder to exchange crypto-currencies for more traditional currencies.
> ON the international currency market, one traditional role of the US dollar is exactly "store value". You trade your currencies on the FX market during your day, and comes close to "close of your trading", you exchange all your positions for US dollars, to keep in store for your quiet period.
Come again? The international currency market doesn’t really close overnight, and the people who store value in USD are generally Americans or other people or entities who generally store value as USD.
And that latter part is the whole point. When you save up for retirement, or plan your business, or prepare a balance sheet, or plan for a college education, everything is denominated in dollars (or your local currency).
If you want to store money for any future use, you want an asset that has a somewhat predictable return relative to the dollar. If you are a drug dealer who collected $1M (in USD or its equivalent in Bitcoin, Monero, casino chips, whatever), you may well launder or mix it through something else, but your goal is to end up with approximately $1M for when you want to buy more wholesale drugs, pay employees, buy a fancy yacht, etc. Storing $1M as Monero is making a huge bet that it will still be worth $1M when it’s needed.
> ON the international currency market, one traditional role of the US dollar is exactly "store value".
I do know that 'store of value' is the term I used, but it is in reference to the people who hold Bitcoins in expectation of rising price, and the fact that they would claim it 'stores value' while being extremely volitile is indicative of their lack of understanding or their lack of honesty in representing their motives.
People who shelter their dollars overnight are most likely not expecting a return on it.
> The whole point of currency is to use it. If you are buying a currency to hold on to it, then it is a terrible currency and there is a disincentive to use it as one, thus making it useful only for speculation.
Tell that to anyone who saves money for any purpose. They may not literally hold USD in their private Fed account or as cash under a pillow, but they are nonetheless storing dollars (as bonds, money markets, savings accounts, etc).
I think you misunderstood my point. Holding on to currency and expecting it to increase in value is terrible for the economy because it stops economic activity. People don't buy dollars because they will be worth more later -- they buy them because if they need to they can use them. Also, bonds are not dollars, they are bonds.
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!
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.
>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.
What does "The full faith and credit of the the United States government" mean? You can't redeem dollars bills for anything from the govt as far as I know.
You can only buy bonds from the government in dollars, the government only pays interest on those bonds in dollars, and the bonds are only redeemed for dollars when they mature.
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).
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... :/
> 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.
> 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.
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.
This is just a very narrow frame to view these concepts from. It's not per say wrong, it's a useful model much of the time, but it's silly to insist that it is the only way to look at things and will needlessly cut off useful avenues of analysis. For instance, things can have value, even if they are never a part of a transaction. My work ethic has economic value to me, and if I were to lose it my income would be reduced by 100%, but it's impossible for me to sell it because it is impossible for anyone else to possess it; it's price is undefined. Similarly, no one has ever paid the algae and plants to produce oxygen, and no one has ever paid the sun to shine. But without these ecosystem services, the GDP of the world would be reduced by 100%.
If these examples are too abstract for your taste, there are many other examples. No one pays for volunteer work (by definition), but there's lots of volunteer work that, if people stopped doing it, our society would grind to a halt. One example is open source software; most of the work which goes into it is unpaid, yet our industry cannot function without it. Another is parenting; most people aren't compensated for having & raising children - indeed, it costs them huge amounts of money - but there is no economy without people performing this function.
I submit there are more things in the economy than are dreamt of in this philosophy.
> No one pays for volunteer work (by definition), but there's lots of volunteer work that, if people stopped doing it, our society would grind to a halt. One example is open source software;
I contribute every day to Open Source software. The "pay" I get is not in terms of salary, there are many other benefits.
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.
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).
Sounds like you might become a fan of the Austrian School theory of subjective value and (in the context of Crypto currency) of Mises's regression theorem of money.
They also don't understand the basic concept of losses. "It's only a loss if you sell" is alive and well in the Bitcoin space. They'll even argue this if you teach them the difference between realized and unrealized losses.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
We have a super-robust set of tools for this for fiction; I'm still chewing through the list generated by 'all Pulitzer prizes for fiction written during my lifetime' - and all of them have been quite good. ('the Orphan Master's Son' so far has been my least favorite, though it was still really quite good. And because these were chosen /at the time/ you get a glimpse into what people were thinking at the time. Mailer's "The Executioner's Song" was a wonderful book in it's own right, but I think was also a historical slice of 'the discourse' at the time.)
For Movies, I find that Ebert aligns a lot with my taste. If he says it's good, it's really good. I mean, that doesn't help with recent movies, but there's more than enough of the old good stuff. (There's a lot to be said for consuming old media; it gives it time for critical opinion to stabilize. )
I mean, of course, all of these methods will leave out a lot of really good stuff. But... that's kind of the point; there's way more media than I can consume. There are professional reviewers that can give you more really good media than you could consume in a reasonable lifetime. I'm not quite halfway through the 'Pulitzer prizes awarded in my lifetime' list, and I've started a few years back. (I mean, I was 40 or so by the time I started, and so I had read a few of the books just 'cause they were popular books that people recommend. McCarthy's "The Road" is exactly the sort of thing I like, so I read it before on another person's recommendation. But still, like, you see some really great work outside your genre; I'm not normally a romance novel kinda guy, but Lurie's "Foreign Affairs" was absolutely beautiful, and absolutely not a thing I would have read without this project.)
I haven't completely solved the problem for technical books, just 'cause people who have good up to date knowledge of an area have often built up that knowledge over time. they read some books but those books are long out of date, they've brought their skills up to date with mailing lists, which they then vet based on their knowledge of the reputation of the person posting.
I mean, I think it's pretty easy for the non-perishables, "The C Programming Language" is a thing you should read if you work with computers. But which tomb on docker is up to date enough and pretty good? that can be a difficult question to answer, and is often answered based on the author's reputation for other technical work they do, which usually tells me something about the accuracy of the book, but doesn't tell me if it's well written or if it's up to date enough. (On the other hand, if you are well known for writing a big part of the subsystem I wanna learn, eh, I don't feel too bad about giving you money for a book even if I later decide that the book is not written in a way I find engaging, like, you earned it and I'll buy another book.) And... I dunno. often you can get sample chapters, and that gets you a pretty good idea of how engaging the writing is.
I mean, one way to address it is to start at the base... "go read the gang of four design patterns books, and then use your knowledge of object orientedness to make sense of modern object-oriented configuration management systems" - which does make some sense. But still, I should spend the time to find the tech book awards that match up with my taste.
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.
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.
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.
If the product is what's desired, why does the creator or the intent of the creator behind it matter? Danielle Steele has written same erotic story for decades and still sells millions. Hallmark makes the same kind of movie every Christmas involving a city girl tired of the city and a farm boy or lumberjack who wants to settle down. I don't see what's wrong with the next big erotic hit or regurgitated romance flick being composed and directed by an AI.
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.
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...
Rambo is a franchize. Why not roll in all the sequels? All those were huge when we were kids, and Rambo was synonymous with "macho super-soldier killings thousands on his own with bazookas", not "PTSD soldier back home from Vietnam is persecuted by local authority figures".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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".
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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 _____."
"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.
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.
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.
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).
Also that, but they still claim that that's what produced the book in OP, a possibility OP only brought up to pretty conclusively rebut. Which means they went on a tangent with their comment based on what they knew without actually finishing the paragraph it was based on.
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).
> 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?
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.
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?
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.
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?
Being a scammer doesn’t mean you’re a criminal mastermind.
It takes capital, time, and work to become “the EA of scams”, at which point you’re inviting further scrutiny on yourself, meaning even more work (and staff, who you’ll have to trust) to not be in hot water with the law.
Scammers, like the people they scam, are mostly after a quick easy buck. You’re posing “why not” questions as if there’re straightforward to accomplish. They’re not. They take effort and risk without a guarantee of success. Most scammers don’t become “the EA of scams” for the same reasons most game companies don’t become EA.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
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"
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.
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 $/€/£ 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Or, alternatively, you create a money making course generator generator. If that goes well your next project should be a generator generator generator.
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]."
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).
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.
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.
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.
Same with most AI image generating models. In 10 years 99% of images on the internet will be AI generated. Would it not regressive for the models to train on their own outputs? Should regulation require AI generated media label itself, or is it the responsibility to train detectors which can intuit the difference between the models and reality better than humans can?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 ;-)
> 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.
> 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?
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.
> 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, ...
Certainly energy crisis is of political nature, but let's say Germany invested massively in the renewables. It's just not the best source of energy in most places in terms of return on investment. Not to mention the intermittency problem. If they just didn't close their nuclear reactors, Germany would be in much better position to weather off the crisis.
France and Germany recently agreed to help each other over the winter. While France will provide gas to Germany, Germany will provide electricity to France (the country with all these nuclear reactors ;-0)
Regarding the "return on investment" nuclear power is way more expensive than other forms of energy, if you add the (hidden) cost of storage and disposal of nuclear waste. Which could have been known for a long time, cf.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
"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%.
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.
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.
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 ;)
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 >.
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]
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"??)
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.
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.
"""
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.
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.)
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.]
> 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...
[Replaced the comment I had here earlier after thinking about it a bit more. I initially responded too reflexively.]
The comment you are criticizing above was not meant for you. It was to give a counterpoint to your dismissal so that other people wouldn't lose their chance to learn about this just because a few naysayers on HN think they know better.
My pointing out some of my past experiences with naysayers was not offered as proof of being right, since you are correct that it isn't. I was partly offering my personal experience that naysayers shouldn't be assumed to be right. They may be, but shouldn't be assumed to be. Prominent examples include famous dismissals on HN of the original iPod and of DropBox.
In fact, in my experience, the greatest opportunities are when the naysayers are rampant in response. It's related to the famous saying from Howard Aitken: "Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats."
Also, I do have a track record (not remotely as cherry-picked as you might want to assume it to be—in act I could give more supporting examples and I don't have many misses at this level). While it's not proof, it is evidence that some people (not you) might want to consider in judging whether they want to spend their time reading a paper like this, instead of rejecting it only because of comments from people who do not display any kind of relevant track records or any other basis for assuming their comments should be seriously considered.
I understand that you think you know better, and that's fine. I would have bet a substantial sum of money that my comment would have no influence on your dismissal. Still, as I said in my earlier response, I did learn something from your comment in terms of how some people might react to certain approaches, so, thank you.
I won't have any other comments in response to you in this thread, period. Life's too short.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
> 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.
>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"?
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Clicked expecting this to be about the history (https://officialrealbook.com/history/) of jazz fake books, which eventually evolved into the Real Book!
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
> " 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.
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.
The author wasn't responding to economists who were using the word in that sense, he was responding to bitcoin evangelists who often claim that the value in bitcoin comes from its limitted issue (without reference to demand).
I have certainly heard bitcoin evangelists make such claims, so i really dont think it is a strawman argument.
If you want to take the metaphor further, there is really no barrier to entry for starting a cryptocurrency and supply of cryptocurrencies in general far outstrip demand. So it is very similar to a kids doodle.
> Late last year, at the peak of the non-fungible token (NFT) craze, I purchased about a dozen highest-rated NFT books on Amazon. I did this because I wanted to publish a balanced critique of NFTs; I figured the most honest approach would to get familiar with the best-articulated arguments put forward by the proponents of this tech.
Its quite clear from the first few lines of the article that the author did not intend to debunk some silly claims but to respond to the best ones. Using a definition of scarcity that does not reference demand to write off NFT's entirely shows that the author has no idea what hes talking about.
> If you want to take the metaphor further, there is really no barrier to entry for starting a cryptocurrency and supply of cryptocurrencies in general far outstrip demand. So it is very similar to a kids doodle.
Yes, but people don't want just any cryptocurrency. They want Bitcoin, ethereum, etc whos demand is greater then the supply. So no its actually similar to a kids doodle.
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.