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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Readit News
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.
See also the "Gish gallop" [1], a strategy that relies on spewing out a huge number of specious arguments and half-truths that are each individually time-consuming to refute, and to which the correct response is usually just to refuse to engage with the bullshit.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop
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.
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!
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.)
Might I suggest: bitbugs.
(Also, "Don't let the bitbugs byte")
It doesn’t matter that there’s no logic to it, as long as enough people share the same delusion it becomes self-propagating.
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).
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?
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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.
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.
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... :/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32857769
> It's important to note that price, the last traded price, and value are all distinct concepts. The last traded price is the only one of these we can measure ahead of time, so we often use it as a metanym for these other concepts. ...
> When the oil futures went negative, it wasn't the case that the value of oil was negative - this was about the structure of the market and the sorts of positions people were caught in when the pandemic hit. We continued to consume oil throughout the pandemic, and so I'd say we continued to value it.
> Another example would be, if a rancher has a lot of cow poop, they might pay a farmer to take it away. You could say that the cow poop has a negative price on it. But the farmer is going to make use of it as fertilizer; from the farmer's perspective, this is a commodity that has value.
> It's true though that there are a million theories of value and it's impossible to say what something's value is definitively, you can only make a decision about what is value is to you.
I'd expand that you actually have to define what value means to you, relative to the context in which the discussion is taking place. You'll likely find yourself considering value from different perspectives in different situations; I find myself doing so.
That way lies the enablement of massive fraud.
https://consultingbyrpm.com/blog/2014/03/on-bitcoin-and-ludw...
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In general any speculation have been in very weird headspace recent years. Have to see if it continues, but moving forward things might be different.
Is this the regurgitative didactic method I keep hearing 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.
----
Post-truth, like post-modernism, does not mean an absolute absence of truth, but a decline in confidence in common knowledge, making your own truth the center of your life, rather than a set of values shared by a community.
We now believe that our own truth is somehow better than the "centralized" or "official" truth. We are now free from the institutions and authorities that controlled the truth. But this is an illusion, because the very definition of truth requires trust in something other than you.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/j5gyp5/the_sear...
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.
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.
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.
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.
Release crap books nobody will read, or fill Soundcloud with bad music?
If so, long time no see. Hope all is well.
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.
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.
This excellent video [1] from Dan Olson at Folding Ideas is in my opinion a fascinating deep dive in to this whole scam. I don’t want to spoil everything in the video, but Dan does an exceptional job exploring how this ghost writing works, and why it produces the kind of nonsense writing that looks like GPT-3 but is actually being done by an overworked human who is trying to write an entire novel in three weeks or so on a topic they haven’t had time to properly research.
[1] https://youtu.be/biYciU1uiUw
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.
How do people still become wealthy selling "money making courses", when enough people have created "money making courses" that they are, themselves, a commodity?
An important feature of these scams is to frame success and failure as being entirely in your hands: it’s not the system’s fault that you didn’t achieve success, it’s yours and yours alone, you didn’t want it bad enough. Someone who falls in that hole is bound to do it again, this time for a different grift which looks easier. They’ll do as much as it takes until they strike gold, go bankrupt, or finally understand it’s all a scam. That last one can take a long time to come.
In sum, money making courses don’t need an infinite supply of new chumps when they can keep reeling in the same ones. Offer some discounts and rewards for bringing in new members, and you’ve gone full MLM².
¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There%27s_a_sucker_born_every_...
² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-level_marketing
This reminds me of an episode of Reply All. They ordered some cheap Rolex rip off, it was even worse than they expected. They found out they were all being sold on shopify and that if you sign up for a new account on shopify you'll fairly quickly start getting spam emails helping you setup a shop of all this crap. Then they'd try to sell you on lessons on how to make it more successful. I forgot if the rabbit hole went deeper.
https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/dvhe3l
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.
Second, money making courses, don't work. So people tend to buy another and another, to get to the mythical "good" one...
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Actually they get $250 for 25,000. The $2500 is what they should get.
I have to write 10,000 words overnight occasionally in my role.
If it’s $2500 for 10k words, maybe I should be ghostwriting…
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That said, there's a few books in my library / to-read list that are great content cover to cover. Timeless classics, etc.
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.
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.
https://www.marginalia.nu/shitty-book/pencil2.webp
https://www.marginalia.nu/shitty-book/fadeout.webp
https://www.marginalia.nu/shitty-book/pencil.webp
Appears they're printing these on demand on essentially bleached office-grade paper. The orange tint is from the white balance being off.
Seems to be related to the system of third party sellers. Every shop I'm aware of that uses this model has problems with this type of bait-and-switch bullshit.
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.
Because they act as a platform an the platform makes a living by its transactions and not by the quality of the content.
I really hope Amazon's sea of garbage devours Amazon before it destroys the remaining un-Amazon-ified online retailers through unfair competition.
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.
Amazon pays users who publish hundreds of reviews. It gives Amazon credibility to other users.
Tools on amazon have same problem, so many fakes, they get reported and company just pops up with different name.
I took a look through it cause I thought it would actually interesting, and found it to be this type of fake book that looks to be instructional on the surface, but in reality is not actually educational in the least, and in fact dead wrong in many places.
I posted a couple excerpts on Twitter here, 3-tweet thread. https://twitter.com/zefhous/status/1281679975339274241
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 ;-)
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.
Why do you put that in quotes?
> I've seen videos advertising magical electric heaters, which will "recycle" 85% of the energy used for heating and thus will save you lots of money. It's simple physics that warm air coming out at the front of such a device will be sucked in at its back again, but there's nothing to "recycle" here, to somehow save energy.
You sure they couldn't be talking about a heat pump which does have "above 100%" efficiency in a sense?
Because the "energy crisis" is actually a political crisis, i.e. the failure of governments to build enough alternate generators, like solar and wind power during the last decade or two.
> You sure they couldn't be talking about a heat pump [...]
I'm really sure, because the videos show people unpacking a small electrical heater after telling you that "a student" or "an engineer" developed this glorious device in their spare time, ... And last but not least because we built our house with a heat pump and heat exchanging ventilation[*] more than a decade ago, so I'm aware of the concepts.
[*] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plate_heat_exchanger
Edit: complete a sentence.
> It's been months since I bought the book, "How to scam people online." It still hasn't arrived yet.
https://singularityhub.com/2012/12/13/patented-book-writing-...
https://patents.google.com/patent/US7266767B2/en
https://www.icongrouponline.com/