<div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:comic sans ms,sans-serif;font-size:small;color:#000000">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..</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:comic sans ms,sans-serif;font-size:small;color:#000000"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:comic sans ms,sans-serif;font-size:small;color:#000000">bill w</div></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Sun, Jun 7, 2020 at 10:56 AM spike jones via extropy-chat <<a href="mailto:extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org">extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div lang="EN-US"><div class="gmail-m_7608273332626017297WordSection1"><p class="MsoNormal"><u></u> <u></u></p><p class="MsoNormal"><u></u> <u></u></p><p class="MsoNormal"><b>From:</b> <a href="mailto:spike@rainier66.com" target="_blank">spike@rainier66.com</a> <<a href="mailto:spike@rainier66.com" target="_blank">spike@rainier66.com</a>> <br><br></p><p class="MsoNormal"><u></u> <u></u></p><p class="MsoNormal"><u></u> <u></u></p><div style="border-right:none;border-bottom:none;border-left:none;border-top:1pt solid rgb(225,225,225);padding:3pt 0in 0in"><p class="MsoNormal">> <b>On Behalf Of </b>John Clark via extropy-chat<br><b>Sent:</b> Sunday, June 7, 2020 8:07 AM<br><b>Subject:</b> Re: [ExI] sat scores and musical tastes<u></u><u></u></p></div><p class="MsoNormal"><u></u> <u></u></p><div><p class="MsoNormal"><span class="gmail-m_7608273332626017297gmaildefault"><span style="font-size:13.5pt">>…Where is Weird Al Yankovic on this chart? He should be somewhere to the right of Beethoven but I don't see him.</span></span><span style="font-size:13.5pt"><br><br><span class="gmail-m_7608273332626017297gmaildefault">John K Clark<u></u><u></u></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><u></u> <u></u></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:14pt"><u></u> <u></u></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:14pt">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.<u></u><u></u></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:14pt"><u></u> <u></u></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:14pt">We could expand that concept and use it to sell music to people who usually aren’t in the market.<u></u><u></u></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:14pt"><u></u> <u></u></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:14pt">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? <u></u><u></u></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:14pt"><u></u> <u></u></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:14pt">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.<u></u><u></u></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:14pt"><u></u> <u></u></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:14pt">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.<u></u><u></u></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:14pt"><u></u> <u></u></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:14pt">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!<u></u><u></u></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:14pt"><u></u> <u></u></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:14pt">spike<u></u><u></u></span></p></div></div></div>_______________________________________________<br>
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