I just got a spam email from a company in China offering to sell me crystalline fructose. I have bought far more than my share of crystalline fructose (that’s how I originally did the Shangri-La Diet) and I live in China part of the year. How in the world did they know?
Seth: i don’t see any contact info anywhere on your site so I apologize for posting this here, but I found your experiment pertaining to “standing on one leg” and it’s correlation with sleep to be absolutely fascinating. I would greatly appreciate it if you would write more posts or conduct more experiments pertaining to sleep/energy as I really found your approach of seeking optimal levels to be very refreshing and unique.
“How in the world did they know?”
They didn’t. Your spam filters, however, did know, and because they are strongly biased against marking legitimate email as spam (i.e., reporting a false positive), they started letting related spam flow into your inbox.
In more detail, when you bought far more of your share of crystalline fructose and when you were in China, you trained your spam filterers that those topics are more likely to be legitimate by marking legitimate email containing those topics as “not spam.” Thus when spammers sent you spam about every conceivable topic — and they do — the subsets of that spam mentioning crystalline fructose and China were less likely to meet your filter’s it’s-spam threshold, and some of those spams slipped into your inbox.
So the spammers don’t know anything about you, other than your email address. But they do send spam about everything, and your spam filter selects the subset of everything that is similar to your past legitimate email, thus creating the illusion that the spammers are targeting your interests.