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You’re taking away a lot of agency from people who prefer natural diamonds. Yes, of course their marketing campaign set off the industry, but the reason it work

by dsacco 9y ago

You’re taking away a lot of agency from people who prefer natural diamonds. Yes, of course their marketing campaign set off the industry, but the reason it worked is because many people are already predisposed to prefer natural things over artificial things. What you’re calling “emotional baggage” is a subjective preference for some things over other things. It’s only doublespeak if you subscribe to a literalist form of communication that most people do not use. “Fake” isn’t a neutral word because it’s not intended to be - some people actually do prefer natural diamonds, just as some people really do prefer non-GMO food. It doesn’t matter if the reason they have that preference is due to artificial scarcity or a marketing campaign, the point is that they have that preference and many will keep it even if they are very informed on the matter. People are not hyperrational in the development of their preferences. The point I’m trying to make here is that while I agree people shouldn’t spend ostentatious amounts of money on items with artificial scarcity, I think litigating the use of the word “fake” is effectively a strawman and a sideshow when we’re discussing De Beers. In my opinion, while lab-made diamonds are more fiscally responsible, they’re not less silly as a purchase than natural diamonds if you dislike the capitalist insertion of a jewelry preference. It’s just local maxima: if you buy a lab-grown diamond you’re still buying a diamond. You’re still buying into that “emotional baggage”, as you put it, you’re just being a bit more fiscally savvy about it. If we assume people are not born with a desire for diamonds, then there is a credible argument buying synethic ones is still feeding a desire you (and I!) find fundamentally disagreeable.

vanderZwan 9y ago
> You’re taking away a lot of agency from people who prefer natural diamonds. No, I'm not. I'm stating the fact that the language used by De Beers is manipulative. Whether or not people fall for that manipulation is a separate argument. I did not bring consumers into the equation, you did. And speaking of manipulative language, I would appreciate it if you didn't try to spin it as if I'm the one talking down to them.
- dsacco 9y ago
  It’s only manipulative to take advantage of people’s desires for “real” diamonds insofar as it is manipulative to take advantage of people’s desires for “real” luxury items of any sort that can be faked. In other words: calling it manipulative isn’t productive, because that is essentially how the entire luxury industry works. We can make hyperrealistic imitation handbags and watches, but people still prefer the real items over the “fake” ones, regardless of how close they are in literal quality. More abstractly, to call a marketing campaign emphasizing the “realness” of a luxury item manipulative is to say that people could be manipulated by it. I disagree that people are manipulated into their desires for these items, even if their desires are not financially rational.
  - vanderZwan 9y ago
    > In other words: calling it manipulative isn’t productive, because that is essentially how the entire luxury industry works. The fact that an entire industry relies on fallacies does not make calling out those fallacies counter-productive. On the contrary.
    - dsacco 9y ago
      “Productive” here means that there is no distinguishing feature of the diamond industry in particular with respect to the luxury industry. In other words, the criticism of the diamond industry is not productively precise. Of course, you can productively criticize the entire luxury industry, sure, I don’t disagree with that. More to the point, what exactly is the fallacy? That the “real” products are better? They are better for some definition, you just don’t share the same definition of “better” as the people buying them. That’s the problem: the claim of superiority is not falsifiable, and it’s normative. It’s valid to say that synthetic diamonds are better according to some metrics like flawlessness, but that isn’t the metric everyone values. Many people demonstrably want “as flawless as possible for the ‘real’ diamond I can afford.” That desire is not based on a fallacy, it’s based on different priors. People are approximately never perfectly price-efficient in their purchasing decisions, which means there’s some amount of irrationality everywhere. A desire to buy an inefficiently priced luxury item with artificial scarcity and status associations is price-irrational but it can make sense in general. In your view, there should be a rigorous notion of “the metric” to optimize for across various products, but that notion is fundamentally at odds with how humans operate culturally. To put it bluntly, many people know and don’t care that synthetic diamonds are better in many respects, just as many people know and don’t care that a “franken-Rolex” can be better than an actual Rolex in many respects. They still want the “real” version, and from there they’ll optimize further. Like I said, I think there are legitimate criticisms of the diamond trade, but in my opinion they’re glossed over when we get preoccupied talking about what constitutes “real” versus “fake” and whether or not people should want the “real” thing.
saiya-jin 9y ago
Look, it doesn't matter how you wrap the diamond shit and how you dance around the words - diamond business is extremely amoral and has 0 sympathy from anybody rational. We need to end it in its current form (very specifically DeBeers), because it's the right and highly moral thing to do. Mankind will be truly a bit better without it. Empty words on internet forum don't mean anything, so here is simple action for all of us - share this truth with your inner circles if you haven't already, explain and lead with example. I did buy engagement ring to my fiancee with moonstone and moissanite in it - and it looks better than diamond. She actually picked it and she is perfectly OK with this decision. If woman can't be persuaded no matter how you stack up the facts, take a good hard look at her personality - actually maybe she's not somebody you want to spend rest of your short life with.
ryandrake 9y ago
> You’re taking away a lot of agency from people who prefer natural diamonds. Yes, of course their marketing campaign set off the industry, but the reason it worked is because many people are already predisposed to prefer natural things over artificial things. Predisposed is a pretty strong word. Do you think people are born with a preference for “natural” diamonds? I happen to believe that most preferences you hold are learned throughout life, perhaps even manufactured by others.
- dsacco 9y ago
  No, many people are predisposed to like luxury items due to instilled cultural values, not because of an innate utility. But that was part of my point: to honestly criticize the diamond industry, we should criticize the entire market of veblen goods in general.
  - vanderZwan 9y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism
    - dsacco 9y ago
      If you're going to leave the debate like you said you would, just do so. But don't reply to my comment with nothing but an irrelevant Wikipedia link - that's extremely dismissive. It's also intellectually insulting, because it presumes that the other party is so poorly informed that the mere mention of a dialectic phenomenon should be enough to enlighten them. This is not whataboutism because I'm not excusing the diamond industry's behavior by distracting the conversation to irrelevant examples. Instead, I'm generalizing the diamond industry as part of a greater phenomenon to demonstrate that the problem isn't just the diamond industry, it's the way human beings are incentivized to operate with respect to status symbols in general. Simply replying with that link tells me that you believe my points can be reduced - and similarly dismissed - simply by labeling them with whatever the term is for the (perceived) fault in the argument. That's about as constructive as saying something is an ad hominem without any effort to explain why, or to declare something is fake news without providing more information. You're not debating in good faith. Moreover, what's the point? You must know you're not going to convince me with a low effort comment sending me to a Wikipedia page describing one of the many possible ways an argument can be fallacious. You didn't even both to explain why it applies (which, again, it doesn't). So why are you even bothering with this?
stordoff 9y ago
"Fake" carries a negative connotation of being an inferior facsimile/fraudulent in some way/a lesser product. It takes no agency away from people to indulge in those irrational preferences to insist that emotive language shouldn't be used to deepen those preferences and suggest an inaccurate view of what lab-grown diamonds are.
nathan_long 9y ago
> “Fake” isn’t a neutral word because it’s not intended to be - some people actually do prefer natural diamonds, just as some people really do prefer non-GMO food. "Fake" means something isn't what it's claimed to be. A piece of glass cut to look like a diamond is a fake. You make like it or not, but it isn't a diamond. A diamond is a mass of carbon in a particular structure, and glass isn't. A lab-grown diamond is not fake. It is, in fact, a diamond. If people want to distinguish between "natural" vs "synthetic" or "mined" vs "grown" diamonds, fine. But "fake" is truly a misleading term here.

by dsacco 9y ago

vanderZwan 9y ago

> You’re taking away a lot of agency from people who prefer natural diamonds. No, I'm not. I'm stating the fact that the language used by De Beers is manipulative. Whether or not people fall for that manipulation is a separate argument. I did not bring consumers into the equation, you did. And speaking of manipulative language, I would appreciate it if you didn't try to spin it as if I'm the one talking down to them.

dsacco 9y ago
It’s only manipulative to take advantage of people’s desires for “real” diamonds insofar as it is manipulative to take advantage of people’s desires for “real” luxury items of any sort that can be faked. In other words: calling it manipulative isn’t productive, because that is essentially how the entire luxury industry works. We can make hyperrealistic imitation handbags and watches, but people still prefer the real items over the “fake” ones, regardless of how close they are in literal quality. More abstractly, to call a marketing campaign emphasizing the “realness” of a luxury item manipulative is to say that people could be manipulated by it. I disagree that people are manipulated into their desires for these items, even if their desires are not financially rational.
- vanderZwan 9y ago
  > In other words: calling it manipulative isn’t productive, because that is essentially how the entire luxury industry works. The fact that an entire industry relies on fallacies does not make calling out those fallacies counter-productive. On the contrary.
  - dsacco 9y ago
    “Productive” here means that there is no distinguishing feature of the diamond industry in particular with respect to the luxury industry. In other words, the criticism of the diamond industry is not productively precise. Of course, you can productively criticize the entire luxury industry, sure, I don’t disagree with that. More to the point, what exactly is the fallacy? That the “real” products are better? They are better for some definition, you just don’t share the same definition of “better” as the people buying them. That’s the problem: the claim of superiority is not falsifiable, and it’s normative. It’s valid to say that synthetic diamonds are better according to some metrics like flawlessness, but that isn’t the metric everyone values. Many people demonstrably want “as flawless as possible for the ‘real’ diamond I can afford.” That desire is not based on a fallacy, it’s based on different priors. People are approximately never perfectly price-efficient in their purchasing decisions, which means there’s some amount of irrationality everywhere. A desire to buy an inefficiently priced luxury item with artificial scarcity and status associations is price-irrational but it can make sense in general. In your view, there should be a rigorous notion of “the metric” to optimize for across various products, but that notion is fundamentally at odds with how humans operate culturally. To put it bluntly, many people know and don’t care that synthetic diamonds are better in many respects, just as many people know and don’t care that a “franken-Rolex” can be better than an actual Rolex in many respects. They still want the “real” version, and from there they’ll optimize further. Like I said, I think there are legitimate criticisms of the diamond trade, but in my opinion they’re glossed over when we get preoccupied talking about what constitutes “real” versus “fake” and whether or not people should want the “real” thing.

saiya-jin 9y ago

Look, it doesn't matter how you wrap the diamond shit and how you dance around the words - diamond business is extremely amoral and has 0 sympathy from anybody rational. We need to end it in its current form (very specifically DeBeers), because it's the right and highly moral thing to do. Mankind will be truly a bit better without it. Empty words on internet forum don't mean anything, so here is simple action for all of us - share this truth with your inner circles if you haven't already, explain and lead with example. I did buy engagement ring to my fiancee with moonstone and moissanite in it - and it looks better than diamond. She actually picked it and she is perfectly OK with this decision. If woman can't be persuaded no matter how you stack up the facts, take a good hard look at her personality - actually maybe she's not somebody you want to spend rest of your short life with.

ryandrake 9y ago

> You’re taking away a lot of agency from people who prefer natural diamonds. Yes, of course their marketing campaign set off the industry, but the reason it worked is because many people are already predisposed to prefer natural things over artificial things. Predisposed is a pretty strong word. Do you think people are born with a preference for “natural” diamonds? I happen to believe that most preferences you hold are learned throughout life, perhaps even manufactured by others.

dsacco 9y ago
No, many people are predisposed to like luxury items due to instilled cultural values, not because of an innate utility. But that was part of my point: to honestly criticize the diamond industry, we should criticize the entire market of veblen goods in general.
- vanderZwan 9y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism
  - dsacco 9y ago
    If you're going to leave the debate like you said you would, just do so. But don't reply to my comment with nothing but an irrelevant Wikipedia link - that's extremely dismissive. It's also intellectually insulting, because it presumes that the other party is so poorly informed that the mere mention of a dialectic phenomenon should be enough to enlighten them. This is not whataboutism because I'm not excusing the diamond industry's behavior by distracting the conversation to irrelevant examples. Instead, I'm generalizing the diamond industry as part of a greater phenomenon to demonstrate that the problem isn't just the diamond industry, it's the way human beings are incentivized to operate with respect to status symbols in general. Simply replying with that link tells me that you believe my points can be reduced - and similarly dismissed - simply by labeling them with whatever the term is for the (perceived) fault in the argument. That's about as constructive as saying something is an ad hominem without any effort to explain why, or to declare something is fake news without providing more information. You're not debating in good faith. Moreover, what's the point? You must know you're not going to convince me with a low effort comment sending me to a Wikipedia page describing one of the many possible ways an argument can be fallacious. You didn't even both to explain why it applies (which, again, it doesn't). So why are you even bothering with this?

stordoff 9y ago

"Fake" carries a negative connotation of being an inferior facsimile/fraudulent in some way/a lesser product. It takes no agency away from people to indulge in those irrational preferences to insist that emotive language shouldn't be used to deepen those preferences and suggest an inaccurate view of what lab-grown diamonds are.

nathan_long 9y ago

> “Fake” isn’t a neutral word because it’s not intended to be - some people actually do prefer natural diamonds, just as some people really do prefer non-GMO food. "Fake" means something isn't what it's claimed to be. A piece of glass cut to look like a diamond is a fake. You make like it or not, but it isn't a diamond. A diamond is a mass of carbon in a particular structure, and glass isn't. A lab-grown diamond is not fake. It is, in fact, a diamond. If people want to distinguish between "natural" vs "synthetic" or "mined" vs "grown" diamonds, fine. But "fake" is truly a misleading term here.