Book Ratings and Recommendations

Goodreads star ratings can be misleading as measures of “book quality,” and research from Hannes Rosenbusch suggests that for many professionally published books, differences between readers often matter more than differences between books. The episode also explores how to model reader preferences, why reviews often reveal more about the reviewer than the text, and how LLMs can aid computational literary research while still falling short of human editors in creative writing.

Guest

Hannes Rosenbusch: Hannes Rosenbusch lurks in the cafés of Amsterdam, writing obscure novels about the afterlife. To advance his scientific research, he frequently lures psychology students into the laboratories beneath Roeterseiland Campus. Most of his colleagues question the validity of his experiments and publications. He has a German accent and caffeine-induced muscle spasms.