You buy a $1000 scooter from Amazon and then it keeps recommending to you other good scooters for months, even after the return window for the first one is closed.
Yeah, you'd expect more from ML at this point. I wonder how much of ML research actually gets utilized in industry.
“Why is Amazon trying to sell me an X? I just bought an X. Idiots!”
Amazon is not an idiot:
You need two insights here:
1) Conditional probability is a mathematical technology that does exist.
2) Buying X is not entirely random across the population.
The ways X is not random vary based on the good [math]. Consider refrigerators.
You probably buy one every ten years. If I don't know where you are in your refrigerator cycle, my prior estimate should be 2.7e-4 probability of you buying it tomorrow.
Suppose I know you bought yesterday. In my life on earth, I have realized that buyer's remorse is a thing.
What's a SWAG for how often a purchase immediately goes wrong? Not right color? Fridge DOA? Shoot I mismeasured my kitchen? Wife just hates it? Call that 2%. If I fix it within a week, then 2% / 7 = 2.9e-3 probability of purchasing a new fridge.
That's kind of a dismissive way to say "maybe it's optimized for buyer's remorse or returns?"
Maybe it is, but I'm not totally convinced. For one it doesn't explain why Amazon would recommend literally the same SKU so often. Also, does Amazon really want to incentivize returning large items like fridges?
And the poker thing from the original post
People who are compensated strictly based on their ability to predict the future, like poker players... tend to be much better at high school math than Twitter users.
Professional gamblers in games like poker usually don't try to predict the future. They just have a small set of hands with known probability and mainly have to focus on things like sizing their bets. (Poker players also have to read human signals, but I'm not sure they explicitly assign probabilities to these).
Another explanation is just that the cost of recommending you a fridge you already own is lower than the cost of tuning the algorithm better or having multiple algorithms depending on tuples of factors (price, customer, customer behavior). If that's true, then we should expect Amazon to do less of this in the future. If Patio11's explanation is correct, then we should expect Amazon to continue to recommend these items even as the algorithms are updated to the more recent generation of AI.
The reason is much simpler, Amazon is correctly optimizing for the person who buys like 10 scooters. This doesn’t sound rational but it’s the same principles as video game IAP. God rolls a 100 sided dice and if it’s a 1 or a 2, you’re born someone who just buys an absolutely ridiculous amount of stuff. These people are rare but the system is not wrong.
Sounds like the argument that social media is basically abusing mental illnesses and people with impulsive spending behaviors. Many of the "whales" in online gaming, gambling, shopping, etc. are people who YOLO their future away due to underlying illnesses, and the MINT people abuse it while telling themselves it's creating value for the customer.
So many people complain about this behavior of recommender systems and here comes Patrick dropping some math and saying: “Well, actually there’s this and this probability for this to happen”.
Don’t piss on me and tell me that it’s raining. Before I make a purchase, especially online, I do my research and make a choice, that’s it.
I’ve never returned anything online and I’ve never needed to buy a second item after buying the first one.
If you insist that your math is right, give me a button I can press so I don’t have to care about your probabilities.
I fully agree with you. It feels like a local maximum that at the same time repulses a lot of people from further shopping (like us) and then the engineers point at the data and say: "look at these probabilities, nobody else is buying anything" - yes, because we're upset with the unempathetic UX of your website and we closed the tab.
I find this endless quoting of patio11 a bit exhausting, people just repost his ideas like it's some sort of religious artifact and eternal truth. He's a clever guy but I get a bit sceptical when a clever guy spends too much time writing clever thoughts instead of building nice things...
Yes, absolutely hilarious, that after you buy a good air fryer, one that will last 5 years+ : These company's break every shred of moral and legal lines to hell and back to make sure that what happens is "WE HEARD YOU LOVE AIR FRYERS! here is 10 more!!!"
Was puzzled by this too, but realized that chances of a repeat buy are probably higher than a near blind shot at another category. So does make sense on some level
Comments
You buy a $1000 scooter from Amazon and then it keeps recommending to you other good scooters for months, even after the return window for the first one is closed.
Yeah, you'd expect more from ML at this point. I wonder how much of ML research actually gets utilized in industry.
“Why is Amazon trying to sell me an X? I just bought an X. Idiots!”
Amazon is not an idiot:
Source: patio11 (Patrick McKenzie)
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/982208307057246209.html
That's kind of a dismissive way to say "maybe it's optimized for buyer's remorse or returns?"
Maybe it is, but I'm not totally convinced. For one it doesn't explain why Amazon would recommend literally the same SKU so often. Also, does Amazon really want to incentivize returning large items like fridges?
And the poker thing from the original post
Professional gamblers in games like poker usually don't try to predict the future. They just have a small set of hands with known probability and mainly have to focus on things like sizing their bets. (Poker players also have to read human signals, but I'm not sure they explicitly assign probabilities to these).
Another explanation is just that the cost of recommending you a fridge you already own is lower than the cost of tuning the algorithm better or having multiple algorithms depending on tuples of factors (price, customer, customer behavior). If that's true, then we should expect Amazon to do less of this in the future. If Patio11's explanation is correct, then we should expect Amazon to continue to recommend these items even as the algorithms are updated to the more recent generation of AI.
The reason is much simpler, Amazon is correctly optimizing for the person who buys like 10 scooters. This doesn’t sound rational but it’s the same principles as video game IAP. God rolls a 100 sided dice and if it’s a 1 or a 2, you’re born someone who just buys an absolutely ridiculous amount of stuff. These people are rare but the system is not wrong.
Sounds like the argument that social media is basically abusing mental illnesses and people with impulsive spending behaviors. Many of the "whales" in online gaming, gambling, shopping, etc. are people who YOLO their future away due to underlying illnesses, and the MINT people abuse it while telling themselves it's creating value for the customer.
patio11 has interesting insights, but does give off an "angry nerd" vibe
Whether poker players are predicting the future or not, I would argue Amazon is doing the same thing:
- Each potential customer can be considered a hand with a certain probability.
- Amazon is sizing their "bet" (ad budget) according to the probability that customer will convert.
I also agree with this observation about poker, and can imagine Amazon using a similar strategy: https://hw.leftium.com/#/item/39462238
Successful marketers were already teaching this decades ago: https://thegaryhalbertletter.com/newsletters/direct_marketin...
Amazon ARE idiots.
So many people complain about this behavior of recommender systems and here comes Patrick dropping some math and saying: “Well, actually there’s this and this probability for this to happen”.
Don’t piss on me and tell me that it’s raining. Before I make a purchase, especially online, I do my research and make a choice, that’s it.
I’ve never returned anything online and I’ve never needed to buy a second item after buying the first one.
If you insist that your math is right, give me a button I can press so I don’t have to care about your probabilities.
I fully agree with you. It feels like a local maximum that at the same time repulses a lot of people from further shopping (like us) and then the engineers point at the data and say: "look at these probabilities, nobody else is buying anything" - yes, because we're upset with the unempathetic UX of your website and we closed the tab.
This sounds like something written by Nassim Taleb.
I find this endless quoting of patio11 a bit exhausting, people just repost his ideas like it's some sort of religious artifact and eternal truth. He's a clever guy but I get a bit sceptical when a clever guy spends too much time writing clever thoughts instead of building nice things...
Yes, absolutely hilarious, that after you buy a good air fryer, one that will last 5 years+ : These company's break every shred of moral and legal lines to hell and back to make sure that what happens is "WE HEARD YOU LOVE AIR FRYERS! here is 10 more!!!"
Was puzzled by this too, but realized that chances of a repeat buy are probably higher than a near blind shot at another category. So does make sense on some level