Absurd recommendations

Why on Earth does The Scarlet Letter, a book owned by 8,000 on LT, recommend Robert Anton Wilson Explains Everything: Or Old Bob Exposes His Ignorance, a volume held by 32 and having no similarity in tags or subjects? It's also suggested by The Analects and The Pilgrim's Progress, among others, catapulting high onto my recommendations list.

No idea.

The Scarlet Letter recs claim to be based on tags, despite the two works sharing only "unread" as a tag.

While looking into this I noticed that the "suggested combinations" for The Scarlet Letter are completely broken, with random suggestions for everything from The Color Purple to The Odyssey and Little Women. Not recommendations -- suggested combinations. This is a disaster waiting to happen.

2: How is the whole suggested combinations thing supposed to work? 'Cause I see absurd suggested combinations pretty often, and I thought that was the norm. Guess not?

For the Scarlett Letter probably some publisher probably put out a series and used the same ISBN for each one.

ETA: To add probably as I'm just conjecturing.

Did you see how many ISBNs The Scarlet Letter has? I bet that one or more of them is from a publisher that reused one ISBN for their whole collection of "classic literature" or something. Which is why the whole list of suggested combinations are there...I suspect. Yes, serious pain, but as long as publishers are idiots there's very little LT can do.

Maybe someone with a lot of time and energy could go through the whole list (and the same list for others in the suggested combinations), figure out which ISBN is producing the problem, and suggest to the owner that in this case, no ISBN is better than the right one! But I'm not that person. You might post this in Combiners, (well, you're a combiner yourself, aren't you, lorax?).

ETA - jjwilson - Jinx!

suggest to the owner that in this case, no ISBN is better than the right one!

Sadly that's not allowed -- Tim has asked us not to contact other Thingamabrarians to ask them to change their data.

Oh, I didn't know that. Pity. I wouldn't mind myself, but I can see his point.

7>

I wouldn't mind either; I think the problem is some people were confrontational about it, along the lines of "Your data is bad. Fix it" rather than 'You might want to change this for reasons XYZ'.

See http://www.librarything.com/talktopic.php?topic=39637 ; ISBN 1559029838 causes all the English classics Aerie sold in Wal-Marts for 50 cents a book to suggest each other as combinations. I'm not going to delete it, since that is the ISBN printed on the book, and I'm far from the only one with that ISBN in the system.

Thanks! I had read your thread before, but didn't remember.

9>

Thanks.

It's still a disaster waiting to happen, though.

I think I got that Robert Anton Wilson book too, but made it go away.
Perhaps not as absurd or strange as the other recommendations mentioned, but it's slightly annoying that an audio book narrated by Charlton Heston, David Hume: Scotland, and owned by only 3 people, is showing up as the top or one of the top recommendations for people with a lot of philosophy books, and in the top ten on several book pages (for philosophy books, 18th century books, etc.). Presumably this is because of the tags assigned to the audiobook?

Hmmm, I have both "Old Bob" and the David Hume cassette high in my recommendations as well. Do these books have something in common that could help finding what causes this?

I think I know why now; look at the tags for David Hume:

18th Century(1) Adam Smith(1) Afterlife(1) An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding(1) An Enquiry Concerning the Principle of Morals(1) Aristotle(1) Audiobook(1) Authority(1) Benevolence(1) biographical(1) Biography(1) Britain(1) Cancer(1) Causation(1) Commerce(1) Community(1) Complex Ideas(1) Crime(1) Death(1) Descartes(1) Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion(1) Economics(1) Edinburgh University(1) Empiricism(1) english history(1) english philosophy(1) Essays Moral and Political(1) Existence(1) Experience(1) Free Market Economy(1) Free Trade(1) Free Traders(1) George III(1) God(1) Good and Evil(1) Government(1) Historian(1) Human Beings(1) Human Nature(1) Humanity(1) Humans(1) hume(1) Hume-Mans(1) Immanuel Kant(1) Immorality(1) Individualism(1) Intelligent Design(1) Interest Rates(1) Isaac Newton(1) Liberties(1) Liberty(1) locke(1) Man(1) Mankind(1) Mercantilism(1) Mercantilists(1) Miracles(1) Money(1) Moral Rationalists(1) Morality(1) Motion(1) National Debt(1) Paris(1) Perception(1) Perfection(1) Philosophy(3) Physics(1) Political Essays(1) Politics(1) Private Economies(1) Public Interest(1) read(1) Reason(1) Reasoning(1) Religion(1) Rights(1) rousseau(2) Savings(1) Self Interest(1) Senses(1) Simple Ideas(1) The Wealth of Nations(1) Thomas Jefferson(1) Tories(1) Trade(1) Treatise of Human Nature(1) Virtue(1) Whigs

and for the more commonly recommended one, Old Bob:

1930s(1) Alan Watts(1) allegory(1) Allen Ginsberg(1) Anal Territorial Circuits(1) antisemitism(1) audio(1) Audiobook(1) autobiography(1) Belief Systems(1) Biosurvival Circuits(1) Blackmail(1) Brainwashing(1) British Empire(1) Brooklyn(1) Buddha(1) Buddhism(1) Buggery(1) Catholicism(1) Childhood(1) cia(2) Cloud Busting(1) Cocaine(1) Conditioning(1) Confucius(1) consciousness(3) Consciousness Change(1) conspiracy(1) conspiracy theory(1) Corporal Punishment(1) counterculture(1) Criminals(1) crowley(1) Cut Ups(1) Dao De Jing(1) Deep Meditation(1) Definitions(1) Definitions of Jewishness(1) Discordian(1) Discussion(1) Don Quixote(1) Dublin(1) E-Prime(1) Emergency Services(1) Engineering(1) espionage(2) essays(1) Extra Terrestrials(1) Fantasies(1) Fenollosa(1) Films(1) Finnegans Wake(1) Floatation Tanks(1) fnord(1) Fundamentalist Materialism(1) Game Theory(1) Garrison Beach(1) General Semantics(1) Genetic Engineering(1) God(1) Government(1) great depression(1) Guilt(1) Gurdjieff(1) Haiku(1) Happiness(1) Hemp Rope(1) Holy Communion(1) Homer(1) Homosexuality(1) Hugh Heffner(1) Human Lifespan(1) Humour(1) I Love Lucy(1) Ideograms(1) Illuminatus(1) Imagery(1) Imagist(1) Imprints(1) Incubi(1) Industrial Espionage(1) Infophilia(1) Infophobia(1) Information(1) Interest Rates(1) Internet(2) interviews(1) Ireland(1) is(1) j(1) Jahweh(1) James Joyce(1) Jewishness(1) Jumping Jesus Phenomena(1) Jumping Jesus Phenomenon(1) June 16 1904(1) jung(1) Knowledge Doubling(1) Korjipsky(1) Language(1) Law of Fives(1) lectures(1) Leopold Bloom(1) Life Expectancy(1) Life Extension Research(1) Lifespan(1) Lineage(1) Literary Style(1) Literature(1) London(1) Los Angeles(1) lovecraft(1) lsd(1) LSD Research(1) Mammals(1) mantra(2) Marijuana(1) Marriage(1) Marshall McLuhan(1) Marx(1) Meditation(1) Men in Black(1) Mind Manipulation(1) Mind Over Matter(1) Moby Dick(1) Mormonism(1) Movies(1) Multiple Scleroscis(1) mystery(1) Nanotechnology(1) New Religions(1) New York(1) Nietzsche(1) nlp(1) Nora Barnacle(1) novel(1) Novina(1) oddities(1) Optimism(1) Optimists(1) Oral Bio Survival Circuits(1) Orgone Box(1) Parapsychology(1) Perception(1) Perjoratives(1) Pessimism(1) Pessimists(1) Peyote(1) philosophy(4) Phone Tapping(1) Phooka(1) Picasso(1) Playboy(1) Polio(1) Pooka(1) Post Polio Syndrome(1) Pot(1) pound(1) Prostitutes(1) Prostitution(1) psychology(2) Quantum Mechanics(1) Rabbits(1) Racism(1) raw(1) Raymond Chandler(1) Re-Imprinting(1) Reality Tunnels(1) Religions(2) Repetition(1) robert anton wilson(2) Ronald Reagan(1) Rosicrucianism(1) Salvidor Dali Tarot Deck(1) School(1) Science(1) Sciences(1) Self-Fulfilling Prophesies(1) Semantic Circuits(1) Semantics(1) Sexuality(1) Shakespeare(1) Shrodinger's Cat(1) Sin(1) Sister Kenny(1) snafu(1) Socio Sexual Circuits(1) Speech(1) Spiritual Transformation(1) Stand Up Comedy(1) Succubi(1) Synchronicity(1) T.S. Eliot(1) Taboos(1) Tao Te Ching(1) The Church of the Sub-Genius(1) The Imagists(1) The Irish(1) The New Inquisition(1) The Unexplained(1) Therapy(1) Time(1) Timothy Leary(1) Ulysses(1) unread(1) Usury(1) Valium(1) Vico(1) Wilhelm Reich(1) William Burroughs(1) Words(1) Writing(1) Zero Sum Games

Apparently if even one person tags a book with a wide enough variety of tags, it will drive it high into the recommendations.

Ugh. I'm now getting recommended several Cliff Notes - owned by less than 15 people - because I own King Lear. ?!?! They aren't even for King Lear, but for other books. I don't understand why the algorithm would pick up these relatively rare books based on relatively common ones - there must be so many other, better connections that could be made; I have a lot of books, and I'm sure they have better overlaps than this. These Cliff Notes don't have that many tags, either, so it doesn't seem to be like the cases above. Is the recommendations engine over-weighting things that have been recently added or tagged, or something?

Sorry, this is not a major issue; I'm just letting off some steam. I do find recently, though, that most of my new automatic recommendations have been rather fluffy. Maybe I need to buy some more books, and give it something else to work with.

If every one of the cliff notes owners also owned King Lear then that's a pretty high association even if the association isn't strong in the other direction. Maybe the algorithm doesn't keep track of associations in both directions but blends the two to save space or processor, or maybe there's a bug and it's using the association in the wrong direction.

16. They don't all own King Lear. Maybe one or two people do. I'm guessing that it's generating the recommendations based on the tag "literature" that has been applied to the Cliff Notes by someone (but not by very many users either, from what I can tell). If you look at the work page for King Lear you'll see some of the things that are being recommended; 7 of the top-10 recommendations are Cliff Notes for unrelated books (ok, one of those 7 is Cliff Notes for another Shakespeare play).

This discussion highlights the reason I was very disappointed when the revamped recommendations combined all of the types together in one list (users with your books, special sauce, tags, LC Subjects). I always found that the "users with your books" algorithm (and its cousin special sauce) produced very interesting and relevant selections whereas tags and LC Subjects produced a few interesting books, but much trash. As I recall, Tim's response to complaints about this change was basically that more is better and with 1000 recommendations you're bound to find something you'll like.

To me, this misses the point. I'm not going to read a book just because it's on an LT recommendations list. I'm going to check it out further first. A longer list just means more checking, especially if the selections are less focused (as illustrated in the above posts).

18, Yeah, now that rec's have been revamped and the homepage has come along, I pay more attention to the "recent recommendations" that show up on my homepage than to the list as a whole (since the bulk of the list doesn't change much). If the most recent suggestions are mostly bad, I'm less likely to check out the recommendations page at all.

And another one:

From Homer to Joyce, A Study Guide to Thirty-six Great Books by Jules Alan Wein J. Sherwood Weber, with 5 copies in the system goes to number 6 on my recommendations because I hold such distinctive works as the Scarlet Letter and Gulliver's Travels, both of which recommend it. Again it comes with a huge batch of tags:

'alecestis'(1) 'candide'(1) 'crime and punishment'(1) 'don quixote'(1) 'essays'(1) 'faust part i'(1) 'gargantua and pantragruel'(1) 'gulliver's travels'(1) 'hamlet'(1) 'hippolytus'(1) 'king lear'(1) 'madame bovary'(1) 'medea'(1) 'moby dick'(1) 'nicomachean ethics'(1) 'odyssey'(1) 'oresteia'(1) 'paradise lost'(1) 'tartuffe'(1) 'the adventures of huckleberry finn'(1) 'the bible'(1) 'the canterbury tales'(1) 'the decameron'(1) 'the divine comedy'(1) 'the misanthrope'(1) 'the miser'(1) 'the prince'(1) 'the republic'(1) 'the scarlet letter'(1) 'the theban plays'(1) 'the wasteland'(1) 'ulysses'(1) 'war and peace'(1) 01/2008(1) aeneid(1) aeschylus(1) aristotle(1) arthur waldhorn(1) arthur zeiger(1) boccaccio(1) books about books(2) bought(1) cervantes(1) chaucer(1) dante(1) De rerum natura(1) dostoevsky(1) eliot(1) euripides(1) flaubert(1) goethe(1) hawthorne(1) homer(1) iliad(1) j. sherwood weber(1) joyce(1) jules alan wein(1) Literature(2) lucretius(1) machiavelli(1) melville(1) milton(1) moliere(1) montaigne(1) plato(1) rabelais(1) Reference(1) shakespeare(1) sophocles(1) study guide(1) swift(1) tolstoy(1) toread1(1) twain(1) virgil(1) voltaire(1)

This is a really annoying bug, that one user's tagging can put a book into the recommendation list of the most popular books on the system and everyone's recommendation list, and it's one that's just begging to be abused.