Hacker News Reader

Comment by moss2 | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

View on HN

>The article literally says

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.

I don't understand how you think this is responsive to the issue of fabrication. The article already considered the possibility of the human content farm and concluded it was unlikely on the basis of information that was completely fabricated.

The fact that the commenter proceeded to generalize, show a link, etc is not responsive to that. A responsive answer would be along the lines of "well, a content farm might fabricate too because _____."

"If you find that interesting, you might find this interesting" seems like a perfectly reasonable motivation for an HN comment. I think it's worth forgiving that and enjoying the broader horizons rather than treating HN threads as a way for lots of smart people to try and craft the most definitive statement about one narrow issue, while policing any deviation therefrom.

> "If you find that interesting, you might find this interesting" seems like a perfectly reasonable motivation for an HN comment.

But that's not the form of the comment. It begins with "I think there’s a good chance it was ghost written by a content farm"!

If I were a content farm I'd probably use text cut and pasted from text models, but I'd never heard of the Mikkelson Twins and it was interesting to learn about them.

yes, so? can't we parse beyond the opening statement of the comment, and see the rest of its content?

can't a comment not reiterate in its opening statement what the author already said (to e.g. show the commentor's aggrement)?

this is too formulaic and pedantic a response

> A responsive answer would be along the lines of "well, a content farm might fabricate too because _____."

That is precisely what the original commenter did:

> (…) exploring how this ghost writing works, and why it produces the kind of nonsense writing that looks like GPT-3 but is actually (…)

Well, it's "responsive" for me. In fact it's your comment that was off-topic and meta, the parent was perfectly on topic and responding on the issue.

>A responsive answer would be along the lines of "well, a content farm might fabricate too because _____."

A responsive answer doesn't need to have a particular formula, much less that one. It just needs to be relevant to the issue and provide more information and/or the commentor's own take (could be just their feelings about the issue too).

My rationale was that, before I had seen this very well produced video, I was not familiar with the way that content farms operated. The idea that words being fabricated means it must be GPT-3 seems spurious to me. A person in a huge hurry, with a poor grasp of the English language, could easily generate fabricated words.

The video I linked is extraordinary in its level of research and quality, and interesting on its own merits. If someone is not fully aware of the extent to which content farms squeeze out content, it’s easy to assume some weird prose is GPT-3. I felt the articles dismissal of the idea of a content farm was too quick, and perhaps they or the readers might not be familiar with how they operate. And so I provided a summary as well as a link to this very high quality investigative source.

Also that, but they still claim that that's what produced the book in OP, a possibility OP only brought up to pretty conclusively rebut. Which means they went on a tangent with their comment based on what they knew without actually finishing the paragraph it was based on.

Only that it's indeed possible to find information about NFP chemotherapy online, e.g. here https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29285366/

  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).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com