Read the books people you dislike dislike

I know the title is hard to parse. Let use some parenthesis: Read [the books [people [you dislike] dislike]].
That is, there are people you dislike, they dislike some books, you possibly will like these books.
Pietro Speroni reports that A right winged newspaper: Human Events online, asked a panel of 15 conservative scholars and public policy leaders to help us compile a list of the Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th centuries. (here the list) and how “The list have it all, it�s the most complete list of texts I found that were really important to understand the world we are living in”. The rationale behind is: if neocons believe these books are harmful and since I think neocons are harmful, I should read these books. While this is ok on real world, this reasoning does not work in Trust-aware Recommender Systems, topic in which I’m phding. In online communities (in which it is easy to create fake identities) this is subject to a simple attack and anyone could easily game the system. The idea: since I get recommended the items disliked by people I dislike, the user I dislike could pretend to “dislike” the item she wants I get recommended. Ex: a neocon identity could pretend to dislike the book “why bush is right” (hopefully this does not exist and it is just an example) and I get recommended it. For this reason, in algorithms I designed, I decided that the opinions of people you dislike should not influence your recommendations at all, they are simply discarded because otherwise they are able to influence your recommendations and hence game the system. Well, not sure, I’m good in explaining it (English is hard…). Maybe you want to check some papers of mine in which hopefully I was helped in writing in a clearer way. Since we are speaking of books, maybe you want to check the list of books I’ve read (actually it is not at all complete or updated, I was trying to keep it with allconsuming.net and to decentralized publish it also in semantic web formats (RSS | XML) but in fact I created it once and never updated … maybe in a short future there will be a tool that will allow me to keep a list of read books, with comments and to automatically publish it on my blog, in that case I’ll probably try again to keep it updated. Or such a tool is already there? If so, please let me know).
The list of books that neocons think are harmful is

# The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Freidrich Engels
# Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler
# Quotations from Chairman Mao by Mao Zedong
# The Kinsey Report by Alfred Kinsey
# Democracy and Education by John Dewey
# Das Kapital by Karl Marx
# The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan
# The Course of Positive Philosophy by Auguste Comte
# Beyond Good and Evil by Freidrich Nietzsche
# General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money by John Maynard Keynes
# The Population Bomb by Paul Ehrlich
# What Is To Be Done by V.I. Lenin
# Authoritarian Personality by Theodor Adorno
# On Liberty by John Stuart Mill
# Beyond Freedom and Dignity by B.F. Skinner
# Reflections on Violence by Georges Sorel
# The Promise of American Life by Herbert Croly
# Origin of the Species by Charles Darwin
# Madness and Civilization by Michel Foucault
# Soviet Communism: A New Civilization by Sidney and Beatrice Webb
# Coming of Age in Samoa by Margaret Mead
# Unsafe at Any Speed by Ralph Nader
# Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir
# Prison Notebooks by Antonio Gramsci
# Silent Spring by Rachel Carson
# Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon
# Introduction to Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud
# The Greening of America by Charles Reich
# The Limits to Growth by Club of Rome
# Descent of Man by Charles Darwin
(I copied the list from Pietro Speroni’s reading list)

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *