[ExI] sat scores and musical tastes

[William Flynn Wallace]

When I buy a book on Amazon I get a selection of books other people bought
who bought my book.  It's always books, but it could just as easily be
music or clothes or anything.  Or if I buy music it could recommend books.
All you need is the data, and Amazon has it from hundreds of millions of
people.  I don't know how Spike can make any money from it but Amazon can.
What seems to be needed is a different massaging of the data Amazon already
has, looking for correlations between books bought and music bought (and
any other combination one can think of).  I have no way to do this.  If you
present the idea to Amazon they will just steal it and say they were
already doing that..

bill w

On Sun, Jun 7, 2020 at 10:56 AM spike jones via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

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> *From:* spike at rainier66.com <spike at rainier66.com>
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> > *On Behalf Of *John Clark via extropy-chat
> *Sent:* Sunday, June 7, 2020 8:07 AM
> *Subject:* Re: [ExI] sat scores and musical tastes
>
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> >…Where is Weird Al Yankovic on this chart? He should be somewhere to the
> right of Beethoven but I don't see him.
>
> John K Clark
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> I am thinking of that chart again, and how to use it.  We don’t need to be
> told how smart we are, since we already have our SAT scores (or ACT or
> equivalent.)  We want to use the chart to figure out who would be a genre
> of music we might like, as I did with Sufjan over on the right side of the
> chart.
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> We could expand that concept and use it to sell music to people who
> usually aren’t in the market.
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> Rather than correlate music genres with SAT scores, we could correlate it
> with taste in cars, political attitudes (that one might be really
> interesting) favorite sports, personal wealth, favorite foods, and so
> forth, but really what we need is some way to reduce each of these things
> to a number.  SAT scores do that for us, but how would we reduce any of
> this other stuff to a single number so we can graph that metric on the
> horizontal axis?
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> Even SAT score is multidimensional (more than just the two main ones, math
> and English skill) so it could be we are mostly fooling ourselves if we
> pretend that can be effectively reduced to one number.  How can we express
> favorite sports in one number?  Of those categories I named, personal
> wealth might be the one which most readily reduces to one number.
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> This looks like a terrific sociology experiment: get a bunch of undergrads
> to choose a factor, try to correlate music groups with it.  Then we create
> a multi-dimensional matrix with their data, use our mathematical tricks we
> enginerds worked so hard to master, let proles find themselves in that
> multi-space by entering in the computer their favorite sports, their
> favorite cars, personal wealth, political preferences and so on, then
> calculate music groups they might like.
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> In the meantime… we now have in our extremely valuable database… some
> extremely valuable data.  We know their favorite cars and how much money
> they have.  We have their email @.  We send the richest proles focused
> advertising for their favorite cars, we make a cubic buttload.  Or rather I
> do, but I will say nice things about you for giving me the idea to start
> with.  Thanks BillW!
>
>
>
> spike
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