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Fake Books

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Re: Fake Books

#221

Post by derefr »

Joker_vD wrote: post #83
hex4def6 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 com…

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"

As the recent dive in the British economy proves, increasing spending is not necessarily good for a market ;)

Re: Fake Books

#222

Post by lupire »

f311a wrote: post #63

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 writ…

> the majority of reviews are written by people who have published more than hundreds of reviews.

Amazon pays users who publish hundreds of reviews. It gives Amazon credibility to other users.

Re: Fake Books

#223

Post by jerf »

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.

Re: Fake Books

#224

Post by tacon »

garyrob wrote: post #206

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 ec…

aliations -> affiliations

hyper-nancialization -> hyper-financialization

Maybe more. Did cut and paste do this?

Re: Fake Books

#225

Post by munificent »

cowtools wrote: post #24
gzer0 wrote: post #10

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. ---- Pos…

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…

> I mean it's basically spam isn't it? The only thing new is the volume in which you can produce surface-level-indistinguishable spam.

An ocean is "basically water" but the experience of being alone in the middle of the ocean is fundamentally different from standing in a puddle.

Re: Fake Books

#226

Post by munificent »

tacon wrote: post #224
garyrob wrote: post #206

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 ec…

aliations -> affiliations hyper-nancialization -> hyper-financialization Maybe more. Did cut and paste do this?

Copy-paste probably inadvertently stripped out the non-ASCII "fi" ligature characters.

Re: Fake Books

#227

Post by ted_bunny »

jerf wrote: post #223

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…

"Mathemetics"

Is this the regurgitative didactic method I keep hearing about?

Re: Fake Books

#228

Post by PebblesRox »

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 maybe “scarcity is a multiplier of value.”

Re: Fake Books

#229

Post by jehb »

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.

> Crap like this devalues the rest of the "for dummies" books.

I'd argue Wiley already did that themselves. They sell the Dummies brand to any company with a large checkbook. See:

- https://www.intel.com/content/dam/support/us/en/programmable...

- https://www.oracle.com/a/ocom/docs/oracle-cloud-erp-for-dumm...

- https://www.ibm.com/downloads/cas/GB8ZMQZ3

Re: Fake Books

#230

Post by crispyambulance »

cowtools wrote: post #24
gzer0 wrote: post #10

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. ---- Pos…

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…

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.

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