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Fake Books

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Re: Fake Books

#151

Post by mypastself »

OliveOilOnChips wrote: post #132
mypastself wrote: post #40

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.

> not even the one- or two-star Amazon reviews caught the garbled nonsense You treat Amazon reviews as credible information? Wow!

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.

Re: Fake Books

#152

Post by glenstein »

coldtea wrote: post #102
moss2 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 c…

> The article literally says Yes, and the parent literally generalizes this one-off observation, puts it in context, and gives examples and even a source with a deep dive on the issue.

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 _____."

Re: Fake Books

#153

Post by pelasaco »

jbverschoor wrote: post #135
pelasaco wrote: post #116

the book has 4 stars at Amazon. Positive reviews. It highlights another rabbit-hole: The fake reviews

So fake sellers are selling fake books, reviewed by fake reviewers, and they get fake crypto moneys, with which they can buy fake food, and live a fake life. Fake sounds very much like reality

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.

Re: Fake Books

#154

Post by viridian »

yason wrote: post #104
coldtea wrote: post #101

> 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"?

Or to generalise, where supply and demand meet is called value.

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.

Re: Fake Books

#155

Post by kreeben »

nicbou wrote: post #118
derefr wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

You sell a money making course course generator and sell that

Or, alternatively, you create a money making course generator generator. If that goes well your next project should be a generator generator generator.

Re: Fake Books

#156

Post by thom »

glenstein wrote: post #152
coldtea wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The article literally says Yes, and the parent literally generalizes this one-off observation, puts it in context, and gives examples and even a source with a deep dive on the issue.

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 fab…

"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.

Re: Fake Books

#157

Post by viridian »

sjamaan wrote: post #60

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.

Re: Fake Books

#158

Post by marginalia_nu »

shp0ngle wrote: post #146
marginalia_nu wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Affects older books too. I've found books that were very obviously printed scans of library books, including dog-ears, missing pages and the odd pencil lines. https://www.marginalia.nu/shitty-book/pencil2.webp https://www.marginalia.nu/shitty-book/fadeout.webp https://www.marginalia.nu/shitty-book/pencil.webp Appears they're printing these on demand on essentially bleached office-grade paper. The orange tint is from…

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.

Re: Fake Books

#159

Post by ankaAr »

derefr wrote: post #46
TaylorAlexander wrote: post #16

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 yo…

> 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?

The offer of idiots always grow

Re: Fake Books

#160

Post by [deleted] »

derefr wrote: post #46
TaylorAlexander wrote: post #16

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 yo…

> 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?

[deleted]
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