Comment by timoth3y
1 day ago
What meaningful connections did it uncover?
You have an interesting idea here, but looking over the LLM output, it's not clear what these "connections" actually mean, or if they mean anything at all.
Feeding a dataset into an LLM and getting it to output something is rather trivial. How is this particular output insightful or helpful? What specific connections gave you, the author, new insight into these works?
You correctly, and importantly point out that "LLMs are overused to summarise and underused to help us read deeper", but you published the LLM summary without explaining how the LLM helped you read deeper.
The connections are meaningful to me in so far as they get me thinking about the topics, another lens to look at these books through. It's a fine balance between being trivial and being so out there that it seems arbitrary.
A trail that hits that balance well IMO is https://trails.pieterma.es/trail/pacemaker-principle/. I find the system theory topics the most interesting. In this one, I like how it pulled in a section from Kitchen Confidential in between oil trade bottlenecks and software team constraints to illustrate the general principle.
Can you walk me though some of the insights you gained? I've read several of those books, including Kitchen Confidential and Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, and I don't see the connection that the LLM (or you) is trying to draw. What is the deeper insight into these works that I am missing?
I'm not familiar with he term "Pacemaker Principle" and Google search was unhelpful. What does it mean in this context? What else does this general principle apply to?
I'm perfectly willing to believe that I am missing something here. But reading thought many of the supportive comments, it seems more likely that this is an LLM Rorschach test where we are given random connections and asked to do the mental work of inventing meaning in them.
I love reading. These are great books. I would be excited if this tool actually helps point out connections that have been overlooked. However, it does not seem to do so.
> Can you walk me though some of the insights you gained?
This made me realize that so many influential figures have either absent fathers, or fathers that berated them or didn't give them their full trust/love. I think there's something to the idea that this commonality is more than coincidence. (that's the only topic of the site I've read through yet, and I ignored the highlighted word connections)
> we are given random connections and asked to do the mental work of inventing meaning in them
How is that different from having an insight yourself and later doing the work to see if it holds on closer inspection?
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I like design that highlights words in one summary and links them to highlights in the next. It's a cool idea
But so many of the links just don't make sense, as several comments have pointed out. Are these actually supposed to represent connections between books, or is it just a random visual effect that's suppose to imply they're connected?
I clicked on one category and it has "Us/Them" linked to "fictions" in the next summary. I get that it's supposed to imply some relationship but I can't parse the relationships
100 books is too small a datasize - particularly given it's a set of HN recommendations (i.e. a very narrow and specific subset of books). A larger set would probably draw more surprising and interesting groupings.
> 100 books is too small a datasize
this to me sounds off. I read the same 8, to 10 books over and over and with every read discover new things. the idea of more books being more useful stands against the same books on repeat. and while I'm not religious, how about dudes only reading 1 book (the Bible, or Koran), and claiming that they're getting all their wisdom from these for a 1000 years?
If I have a library of 100+ books and they are not enough then the quality of these books are the problem and not the number of books in the library?