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Show HN: An anti-book recommendation tool, to help you escape your echo chamber

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Re: Show HN: An anti-book recommendation tool, to help you escape your echo chamber

#211

Post by padolsey »

fbelzile wrote: post #59
padolsey wrote: post #2

Hi HN. I made a tool that allows you to discover what books you are least likely to have come across or enjoyed, but are nonetheless highly rated. These books will likely challenge you if you tend to read quite narrowly. Briefly, for each book entered we find the rarest but highest rated intersections and provide those to you. The query can be summarised as: which highly rated books are least read (and enjoyed) by pe…

Seems like a cool idea! Did you think about referral sales (Amazon Associates) as a way to fund the project instead of Patreon? I have no affiliation or experience with either, just genuinely curious if you chose one over the other. Affiliate sales seems like a good fit for this kind of service.

I'm trying out Amazon affiliates yeh, tho no commissions as yet .. :/ I'm also exploring commercial licensing and API access possibilities.

Re: Show HN: An anti-book recommendation tool, to help you escape your echo chamber

#212

Post by bonoboTP »

not2b wrote: post #156
kevinpet wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried to read "The End of Policing". I got half way through chapter 1 before the author stated, as support for his argument, that The Bell Curve was "overtly racist". Now, you could argue that lots of racists like that book, that the authors might be motivated by bias, etc etc, but no credible reviewer at the time it came out would call it "overtly racist". This is retroactive moving of the goal posts, and the word…

I suspect that the author is using the term "racist" differently than you use it. The Bell Curve explicitly argues that some racial groups are inherently, biologically less intelligent than others. In the author's view, that in itself is overtly racist (because it argues that one racial group is genetically inferior to another racial group), no matter how much intellectual argument is presented or how gently it is st…

It could be argued that they use it precisely because of the ambiguity. The word retains an aura of taboo and evil and one of the worst things a person can be. Then you redefine it to use it against a broader set of people but continue to harvest the power of the previous connotation. A variant of the euphemism treadmill. Instead of dropping a tarnished word and transitioning to a clean fresh one to describe the same thing, you keep using the tarnished word but for a different thing.

Closely related is the "motte and bailey" tactic: depending on the situation you sometimes use the word in an milder sense (new meaning of racist, "we are all a little bit racist", it's just unconscious biases or beliefs about any difference between races), but when people aren't looking you switch definitions (old definition, worst possible thing, "some races must be subjugated and kept away from our social circles as they are subhuman and incapable of participation by their nature and will poison our bloodline").

Indeed many critics of the new social justice movements would have this as the main argument: that SJ uses equivocation in this way as the rule, not the exception.

Re: Show HN: An anti-book recommendation tool, to help you escape your echo chamber

#213

Post by bonoboTP »

cortesoft wrote: post #179
kevinpet wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried to read "The End of Policing". I got half way through chapter 1 before the author stated, as support for his argument, that The Bell Curve was "overtly racist". Now, you could argue that lots of racists like that book, that the authors might be motivated by bias, etc etc, but no credible reviewer at the time it came out would call it "overtly racist". This is retroactive moving of the goal posts, and the word…

This seems to all hinge on an overly specific definition of 'overt'.... while it's definition is something done openly with no attempt to hide, sometimes it is used for effect, to say something unintended is actually so apparent that it almost seems like it must have been done intentionally. You might want words to be narrowly defined and used, but that isn't how language works.

It's redefining words to retain "the punch", while being able to use it widely.

This is how Google now ended up being called "white supremacist" for firing a black AI ethicist (it was retweeted by a director of AI at Nvidia).

You can say (with a straight face?) that's just how language evolves, but I would find that deeply cynical.

Re: Show HN: An anti-book recommendation tool, to help you escape your echo chamber

#214

Post by bonoboTP »

chordalkeyboard wrote: post #182
kevinpet wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried to read "The End of Policing". I got half way through chapter 1 before the author stated, as support for his argument, that The Bell Curve was "overtly racist". Now, you could argue that lots of racists like that book, that the authors might be motivated by bias, etc etc, but no credible reviewer at the time it came out would call it "overtly racist". This is retroactive moving of the goal posts, and the word…

> So I tried to read the tripe, but the arguments are not persuasive unless you already believe what they are trying to convince you of. What the gp describes only works if you are tolerant of other people's errors to some extent. You can't let a few things like you describe derail you. Remember your own beliefs, it may be the case that you are right and the inaccuracy you discovered is a linchpin in their incorrect…

The more I read such works and try to abstract away from their exaggetared use of words, the more I find it to be like those inflatable air "houses" or potemkin villages. Once you take away the punch, the urgency and the strength of the words themselves, there's little left.

The thing is, you can try to project something sensible onto them, ie steelman them, but you will end up with something the authors would disagree with.

You may just as well say you should read Scientology, and you will surely find common points to agree on etc. I mean, it's perhaps still useful to try that, I've read some Scientology materials myself and left with more knowledge about the specifics of Scientology, but I didn't get closer to believing it. Perhaps I can empathize with why it can hook people, we could call that understanding in a sense.

Re: Show HN: An anti-book recommendation tool, to help you escape your echo chamber

#215

Post by smurf_t »

I always thought that recommendation engines should be customized and adjusted by the user. It seems that social platforms are forcing what they think is relevant on me, and I have stopped using some social platforms for this reason. In some cases, I wrote scripts to fetch content (e.g. tweets, rss feeds) and apply my own methods to track topics, or bust the bubble. When the timeline started to show irrelevant topics to my interest (that changed over time), or non-eye opener topics, I usually start leaving the platform as a user.

Re: Show HN: An anti-book recommendation tool, to help you escape your echo chamber

#217

Post by bonoboTP »

chordalkeyboard wrote: post #183
Viliam1234 wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is generally good to try seeing things from the other person's perspective, but it is also possible that sometimes the other person is simply wrong . Just because an idea is wrong, that doesn't magically prevent millions of people from following it.

the idea here is to understand why people believe something that is (consider by you to be) wrong.

That can have lots of reasons,like they grew up with it, were indoctrinated in school/college when they had little experience or critical thinking skills and stay due to sunk cost fallacy or tribalism, or it satisfies some deep psychological need to feel superior or virtuous etc. Plenty of reasons besides them analytically arriving at a position through a lot of thinking.

Re: Show HN: An anti-book recommendation tool, to help you escape your echo chamber

#218

Post by bonoboTP »

AntiImperialist wrote: post #207
azeirah wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe that it's important to understand the perspective of someone you fundamentally disagree with. Or, well, you described it more accurately, it's a bit deeper than disagreement, it's an entirely different epistemology! Like waaayy different

The problem is most people don't have those perspectives. Their beliefs don't come from their life experience or that of their family handed down to them. It comes from marketing material. Therefore they're highly inconsistent in their beliefs and what they believe they believe does not have anything to do with them or how they actually live their lives. So, if you want to understand what they think they're about, yo…

And that's also true of most high brow, abstract school stuff. Like evolution. Even in countries where creationism isn't a thing and everyone "believes in" evolution, most of them couldn't describe a logically workable mechanism of evolution, they know a cartoon version but believe it because they "know" that "evolution" is true.

But would you say it makes no sense to read books on evolution just because most people who believe in evolution don't believe in it for the reasons outlined in advanced books?

Why did schools end up teaching evolution? For scientific reasons? To suppress religion in some freemasonry conspiracy?

You can ask the same about the race topics.

Re: Show HN: An anti-book recommendation tool, to help you escape your echo chamber

#219

Post by iamacyborg »

heavyset_go wrote: post #168
JKCalhoun wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, we need more engines like yours. Instead, Amazon, Spotify, etc. simply steer me toward the more mainstream genre-media that I already know about. Oh you like Grandaddy? You'll like the Pixies. Oh you like the Pixies? You'll like Radiohead. Oh you like the Radiohead? You'll like Nirvana. Please, I want to go the opposite direction.

Last.fm recommendations are great for this.

Yeah, last.fm remains significantly better than Spotify for listening reccs. Better yearly stats too.
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