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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”

by 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.
  - vanderZwan 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. Oh really? And you did not think of explaining this completely non-standard usage of the word "productive" until now? Who is not being "productively precise" in their argumentation here? I'm done with this debate. Your style of discussion is basically building up a giant Rube Goldberg machine of words for something that is extremely simple at the core, which is turning it into an endurance run of who can keep up with the walls of text the longest. That is neither convincing, nor respectful of the person you are debating with to.
    - dsacco 9y ago
      > I'm done with this debate. Your style of discussion is basically building up a giant Rube Goldberg machine of words for something that is extremely simple at the core, which is turning it into an endurance run of who can keep up with the walls of text the longest. That is neither convincing, nor respectful of the person you are debating with to. Sorry, that wasn’t my intention. But respectfully, I disagree. I don’t think this topic is at all simple, and I find nuance to be a helpful perspective.
aepiepaey 9y ago
The use of fake/real is definitely manipulative. Especially for people who are not (yet) particularly invested/interested, it signals that the "fake" ones are flawed and objectively worse in terms of quality, because of the parallel to fake (counterfeit) goods which often are. Instead of fake, calling them synthetic or artificial would be more neutral choices. For "real" you could use "natural(ly occurring)" or similar.
- avisser 9y ago
  "Look at that asshole eating fake ice out of his freezer. Go get some real glacier ice, shithead!"

by dsacco 9y ago

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.
- vanderZwan 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. Oh really? And you did not think of explaining this completely non-standard usage of the word "productive" until now? Who is not being "productively precise" in their argumentation here? I'm done with this debate. Your style of discussion is basically building up a giant Rube Goldberg machine of words for something that is extremely simple at the core, which is turning it into an endurance run of who can keep up with the walls of text the longest. That is neither convincing, nor respectful of the person you are debating with to.
  - dsacco 9y ago
    > I'm done with this debate. Your style of discussion is basically building up a giant Rube Goldberg machine of words for something that is extremely simple at the core, which is turning it into an endurance run of who can keep up with the walls of text the longest. That is neither convincing, nor respectful of the person you are debating with to. Sorry, that wasn’t my intention. But respectfully, I disagree. I don’t think this topic is at all simple, and I find nuance to be a helpful perspective.

aepiepaey 9y ago

The use of fake/real is definitely manipulative. Especially for people who are not (yet) particularly invested/interested, it signals that the "fake" ones are flawed and objectively worse in terms of quality, because of the parallel to fake (counterfeit) goods which often are. Instead of fake, calling them synthetic or artificial would be more neutral choices. For "real" you could use "natural(ly occurring)" or similar.

avisser 9y ago
"Look at that asshole eating fake ice out of his freezer. Go get some real glacier ice, shithead!"