When Purchase Recommendations Go Bad

nixman99 writes "An article on MSNBC describes what happens when 'View Similar Products' recommendations go bad. From the article: 'The company said it was alerted to the problem early yesterday afternoon after word began spreading among bloggers. When visitors to Walmart.com requested Planet of the Apes: The Complete TV Series on DVD, four other movies were recommended under the heading Similar Items. Those films included Martin Luther King: I Have A Dream/Assassination of MLK and Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson.'"

Comments

That's quite funny

[MountainMan101]

Amazon recommended some adult entertainment to go with the Madagascar (rated U) when I ordered the other day. My other interest was nature books, so how it put two and two together no one knows.

Re:That's quite funny

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe they figured out that if you're an adult who reads nature books and watches Madagascar, you're never going to get laid...

Re:That's quite funny

[Anonymous Coward]

Amazon.com bases their reccomendations on pages visited, not just the products which were purchased.

The Eye Of The Beholder

[nick_davison]

Connection:
Planet Of The Apes - Social Commentary.
Martin Luther King - Import changer of society.

Were you to be a glass is half full kind of person, that sounds like a connection. I could entirely accept that enough customers to trigger a connection algorithm are interested in social commentary to the degree that both titles appeal.

Were you to be a glass is half empty kind of person, clearly the system is racist.

Fortunately, we have a media that's only interested in postive and uplifting stories so they'd never focus purely on the negative, for shock value, without considering other possible alternatives.

And, for added amusement, type "Civ 4" in to Amazon and see what recommendations come up further down the list. It may too be racist. It may be a deeply humorous commentary on lonely guys playing Civ 4. Or it may be some other connection that we haven't figured out yet.

But then that's the whole point of data mining... Finding connections that humans tend to be entirely too preoccupied by their assumptions to be able to see beyond.

Re:The Eye Of The Beholder

[eclectro]

Were you to be a glass is half empty kind of person, clearly the system is racist.

Or to put it another way, if the banana is half eaten.

Re:The Eye Of The Beholder

[kamapuaa]

Connection:

Planet Of The Apes - Social Commentary.

Martin Luther King - Import changer of society.

That would explain the recommendation if it were to come up on Amazon.com, but Walmart.com used a less intelligent linking system. From AFA (another f'ing article), Wal-Mart manually assigns DVDs to categories, and then will pass on the recommendation if you're browsing from the same category. So it has nothing to do with user habits.

Re:The Eye Of The Beholder

[MuckRaker]

Maybe because back when racism was still very much overt in the early 2/3rds of the 1900s, blacks were often likened to monkeys and apes, by white people. Many racist whites/hate groups still do. Heck black soldiers fighing over in France during the World War were ridiculed by people asking could they see their {monkey} tails.

Seems like a good recommendation

[riflemann]

Why are people apologising for this recommendation? IMHO, this is actually a fairly good recommendation!

POTA is a movie about civil rights, in this case across species, not races. One species (the monkeys/gorillas) effectively enslaves another species (humans) and the base message of the movie is about the struggle for emancipation by this enslaved species.

So exactly how is a movie about enslavement and emancipation not related to real life civil rights issues?

I'm not American so I'm not really exposed to this over-the-top sensitive PC stuff, but this seems just silly to me. Franky, I find the people who did the complaining about this issue offensive and ignorant.

It actually makes good sense

[Walter Wart]

When Planet of the Apes first came out it was revolutionary. It took the Lords of Creation - White men - and put them in a situation where they were the oppressed, the minority. Someone else was in charge and no worse, perhaps better, than the astronauts. The movie asked questions and had a discussion of race in America that would have been unthinkable without the fig-leaf of science fiction.

So yes, it was appropriate. Those who are offended never looked deeper than the skin. Which is sort of the problem.

Blame

[quokkapox]

So we can blame the unthinking machines and the corporations that use them for our own cultural and racial bigotry. Nice.

what exactly is so offensive?

[theonlyholle]

I don't get it - what exactly is so offensive about those recommendations? Could it be that's only offensive in a climate that is so obsessed with political correctness that you cannot make perfectly innocent recommendation without some people reading whatever malicious intention into it? Honestly, I don't understand this, but I think it makes me a little bit happier that I'm living in Europe...

Yahoo teh racists, oh noes!

[Rightcoast]

Check out the "also try" recommendations. :)

http://images.search.yahoo.com/search/images?p=kid s+with+guns&sm=Yahoo!+Search&toggle=1&ei=UTF-8&fr= FP-tab-web-t

Are bad recommendations from trolls bad?

[CurbyKirby]

... or funny?

E.g. http://www.speakeasy.org/~curby/swg/text/jellypong .gif

I vote for funny.

Well the Civ 4 example is insulting

[SmallFurryCreature]

The Marthin Luther King example can indeed be seen as both being about racism and the fight against it. The original Planet of the Apes was using the sci-fi trick of turning the roles around to give its message.

Star Trek (the episodes that are not pure action or particle of the week thrillers) does this a couple of times. I am reminded of the color difference episode where we meet two races locked in a fight to the death, the one being black/white and the other being white/black.

TNG had an episode to show how stupid judging people on their sexual preferences is but showing a race that is purely homosexual (a 1 gender species that still used two people to procreate is off course the ultimate same sex race) with the sexual weirdos being those who tended to have heterosexual feelings.

This is indeed the eye of the beholder, it took me a while to figure it out even what the problem was. Apparently blacks are apes.

Re:Well the Civ 4 example is insulting

[thesandtiger]

If one grows up being compared to monkeys as a way of demonstrating that they are less than paler people, and more generally as a paternalistic term used to put one in one's place, one gets somewhat sensitive to monkey related stuff.

Sometimes this can be very blatant - Howard Cosell saying "Would you look at that monkey run?" when describing a black football player. Sometimes this can be less blatant, and a "clever racist" (if there is such a thing) will try to say "Well, Planet of the Apes is social commentary and so is MLK, so it's just those darkies being overly uppity again!) And, yes, sometimes it can be absurd - I have some friends who attend a church that insists they boycott King Kong because it is, and I quote, "An interracial love story designed to show the black man's unquenchable and self-destructive desire for white women."

So, I'd say it's somewhat disingenuous to say "Gosh, I don't know why people would get so upset that someone is comparing Monkeys Gone Wild with Martin Luther King! It's so absurd!" It comes off as rather false.

For further reading, I recommend "How to Rent a Negro" - pretty funny take on a less than funny subject.

Re:Well the Civ 4 example is insulting

[jcnnghm]

Howard Cosell was not a racist. He used to call lots of small, quick players "monkeys", including white players. (Don't quote me on this, I remember hearing at one point he used to refer to his own children and grandchildren as "monkeys" as well.) Further, Cosell didn't even understand why what he said could be considered inapropriate at first. Blatant racism - hardly. The trouble is that true racists hear something and then decide that the person is a racist based upon themselves.

This reminds me of the South Park episode about the flag, with the black figure hung and a bunch of white figures around the black figure. The boys don't see anything wrong with it because they don't see white people hanging a black guy, they see 4 guys hanging another guy. Chef sees it as blatant racism. Racism is in the eye of the beholder.

I took King Kong to be a movie about capturing a giant ape. If you see racism in the pairing of Planet of the Apes and MLK, or in King Kong, perhaps you should take a look in the mirror, because the real racist may be closer than you think.

Re:Well the Civ 4 example is insulting

[Jerf]

There are really two types of racism.

Real racism is not in the eye of the beholder. Real racism is when you irrationally use the characteristics you believe are true of a "race" to judge a member of that race. It becomes especially destructive when the characteristics believed true are false and derogatory, and especially destructive when it involves judging the value of a person (something not intrinsically wrong in certain contexts... "would I hire this person?" "is that person going to try to kill me?" we make value judgements every day).

This is as close to an emprically verifiable term as you can ever get when dealing with humans, assuming you can get at the inner state of the person.

The second type of racism is in the eye of the beholder, and it has gotten to the point where "That's racist!" is one step shy of "I don't like that!", only much, much meaner. The distinguishing characteristic of this kind of "racism" is that if the accuser can come up with any reason that the accusee might be doing or saying something for a racist reason, regardless of how likely or even how true that reason is, the accusee can be presumed racist, and should therefore be vilified. Fortunately, I think we're very near the point where that accusation will have been so overused that it will be diluted into nearly no effect.

As a homework exercise, estimate the probability that this form of racism will ever be "eliminated", and consider the consequences of your answer.

Often, it's hard to tell which is which. I prefer to cultivate an attitude more like the South Park children than the current attitudes of people who are hypersensitive about the second type of racism. This is the first I've heard that "of course" King Kong is a stand-in for black people. Personally, I thought he was just a giant monster. Since this accusation is a "projection" type accusation, I am inclined to think this is the second kind of "racism."

(Incidentally, the second type of "racism" is not itself really racist. It's just evil, in every sense of the term, especially including how it destroys the one afflicted with it. No apology for that belief.)

Essential .NET purchase recommendation

[enkafan]

On Amazon.com, when browsing for Essential .NET Amazon.com was nice enough to tell me that fellow purchasers also wore "Clean Underwear". I was a bit disturbed that Eddie Bauer felt it was needed to specify that the underwear I was buying was in fact clean.

Amazon...

[IainMH]

I love 'The West Wing'. In fact, I like it so much that I've got every single dvd box set (1-6). All purchased from Amazon.

So what did they recommend to me?

This. Yeah - great thanks.

Hanlon's Razor? Interesting...

[Aphrika]

Isn't this a corruption of Hanlon's Razor which states that:

"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity"

In this case, it could be construed that either the system, or the people making the malicious links are the stupid element - both could come to the racial conclusion by misinterpreting the data. Alternatively, the system might be too smart, working in a logical way such that elements in subject matter for both Planet of the Apes and Martin Luther King both deal with social commentary, alienation and segregation.

Either way, the comments by the spokesperson that the system was malfunctioning and not working as it was supposed to are probably incorrect; it work exactly as it was programmed, but it was either too stupid or too smart for us to comprehend adequately.

Evil Walmart

[thunderpaws]

The only reason this story is getting attention is Walmart is the current American icon of corporate evil and greed. America is a nation of victims who have nothing better to do than blame their personal failures on everyone else. This story should be humorous.

Why?

[t_allardyce]

Instead of making the unlikely assumption that Walmart has a racist policy based on the recommendation of 3 films buy a computer, did anyone stop to ask why the system did this? I mean perhaps the films do have something in common, does anyone star in more than one of them? Do they have the same release date/year? or DVD release date? Do they share composers, directors or crew? Are they all catogorised under "American History"? Maybe the most fucking obvious reason is that several people who bought Planet of the Apes also bought these other films!!

The press is always ready for a scandel and never ready to actually follow it up with some investigative journalism. I guess its cheaper to just re-broadcast a video feed and pay the royalties or print something direct from AP.

Let me be the first to say...

[User 956]

Walmart doesn't care about black people.

Re:Let me be the first to say...

[Wilson_6500]

That mistakenly implies that Walmart cares about everyone else. I don't think Walmart cares about anyone.

Well, I'll say it -- I'm offended!

[KFu7]

I guess I shouldn't be surprised that most of the posters here don't "get it." But I guess I still can be.

Forgive me for lecturing, but I'll stereotype a bit here and suggest that the majority of /. readers don't fall into the group of people who can see offense in this situation either out of ignorance, or unfamiliarity with minorities and their history. I know there's a large contingent out there that believes the white male is an "oppressed" group in America due to affirmative action, Title IX, or other assorted anti-harassment and anti-discrimination laws or rules. I'm sure the strain must be unbearable...

I love this site and my fellow slashdotters and I come here every day -- but sometimes things are just wrong.

I Am Not A Conspiracy Theorist (IANACT?) but there could be something more sinister at work here than some computer algorithm linking the social commentary of "The Planet of the Apes" with Martin Luther King's role in the civil rights struggle. Discrimination and offensive racial stereotyping are not dead issues -- they often lie just beneath the surface because there are many who still believe that some people are inferior to others simply because of their ethnicity, skin color or gender. And speaking as an African American (and I don't get up on this soapbox often, folks), this was offensive and I am not amused.

We all know the posters on this site wouldn't let Microsoft off the hook so easily or rush to defend them so quickly if the folks in Redmond were behind this.

Now, let the bashing begin! Who needs positive karma?

Strange recommendations

[base_chakra]

A few years ago, Amazon offered me this bizarre, yet strangely appropriate, recommendation. I believe the screenshot I took speaks for itself (yes, it's real and undoctored):

http://img241.imageshack.us/img241/8897/sa6iz.png