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The truly scary idea is that there’s no conspiracy of capital even. What if the advertising dollars aren’t evil, what if we can’t blame them? What if the prob

The truly scary idea is that there’s no conspiracy of capital even. What if the advertising dollars aren’t evil, what if we can’t blame them? What if the problem is that garbage and trash fires are just what people want, and the ad dollars just follow the success? I like the idea that there’s some kind of... imbalance? mis-structure to blame? That it’s somebody’s fault or the system is wrong somehow.

pryelluw 8y ago
It's pretty naive to try and think that people are not the issue. They are. Advertising simply exploits the flaw.
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- throwaway-571 8y ago
  Advertising is people too. It’s people all the way down. We decided child labor was morally unacceptable, so why not advertising?
  - pryelluw 8y ago
    Id say comparing advertising with child labor proves how biases distort perception.
    - JohnFen 8y ago
      I think you missed his point. What I heard him saying is that in the past, other commonly accepted practices were eventually deemed unacceptable and ended. There's no reason the currently accepted practices of the advertising industry can't follow a similar trajectory.
      - pryelluw 8y ago
        No, I got that. My point is that child labor is a bit too extreme for comparisons sake. Smoking and the tobacco industry would be more inline with advertising.
  - hopler 8y ago
    Who decided that? In the USA we decided that domestic child labor is unacceptable, so we outsourced it to Africa and Asia.
    - pryelluw 8y ago
      Is it a surprise to anyone that all the major advertising companies are more than willing to meet the demands of nations that do not deem child labor as a negative? Not at all. Its why these companies need to be regulated. Sadly, regulation tech is taboo because that means VC s wont be able to make money as easily.
  - grimjack00 8y ago
    We decided child labor was unacceptable _outside certain limits_. I was helping customers in the family deli at 11-12 years old, and that's perfectly legal as long as time/task regulations are followed.
  - m463 8y ago
    I think "advertising" is a deliberately ambiguous term nowadays (like justice or freedom) 50 years ago, advertising was a broadcast medium. A sign, a jingle, a page in a magazine with a photo and a pitch. But nowadays advertising is two-directional, probably more accurately defined as surveillance and profiling of individuals. For example, if you run the Target app on your phone and look at the "advertisements" for a product, it is very likely the price will go up if you walk into the store and look again.
carnagii 8y ago
Human cognition is riddled with exploitable defects. Biologically we are basically just highly pretentious and neurotic monkeys. All of human history is full of people looking for someone to blame for their condition (gods, devils, spirits, corporations, etc) but it never changes. Keep in mind, from an evolutionary perspective we are exactly the same people who were burning witches at the stake and throwing people in lakes to determine their criminal culpability a few hundred years ago. We just have a different set of superstitions and delusions now.
- xyzzy123 8y ago
  I get it, is that a thing you want to fix though, or to prevent? Education or regulation or something else, if we take as a given that the market has failed? I wrote a comment twice (and deleted it as inflammatory, it’s a fact about reality that is largely counterproductive to debate) where I pointed out that Donald Trump is the president of the U.S. and it’s wonderful or terrible depending on your point of view. I don’t want to derail all conversation into irrelevance but what if the “wrong thing” is what people want? What do we even want anyway? Is “exploitation of cognitive errors” just a thing we say when people decide they want things we think are dumb? The true horror: what if this is the least worst thing people want?
  - carnagii 8y ago
    > is that a thing you want to fix though, or to prevent? wanting to fix is pretty obvious. capable of fixing is a different story. biologically there is no fix (genetic engineering maybe? but that is super sci-fi). so we can try to correct with technology or social conventions but those fixes never change the underlying biological defects so how effective can they really be? Look at the social engineering aspects of organized Christianity. How well did those work? Look at the social engineering aspects of the U.S. experiment like universal education and literacy. How well did those work? It is a little bleak but in reality universal literacy has been a complete failure (in the U.S. at least). Probably 80% of the population is at the level of what used to be called "knowing your letters" but they are functionally illiterate (they have never done any significant amount of reading in their life, and aren't really capable of it). That is not a popular opinion, at least not for public consumption, so we can't even begin to address the issue because we refuse to acknowledge that it exists.

pryelluw 8y ago

It's pretty naive to try and think that people are not the issue. They are. Advertising simply exploits the flaw.

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throwaway-571 8y ago
Advertising is people too. It’s people all the way down. We decided child labor was morally unacceptable, so why not advertising?
- pryelluw 8y ago
  Id say comparing advertising with child labor proves how biases distort perception.
  - JohnFen 8y ago
    I think you missed his point. What I heard him saying is that in the past, other commonly accepted practices were eventually deemed unacceptable and ended. There's no reason the currently accepted practices of the advertising industry can't follow a similar trajectory.
    - pryelluw 8y ago
      No, I got that. My point is that child labor is a bit too extreme for comparisons sake. Smoking and the tobacco industry would be more inline with advertising.
- hopler 8y ago
  Who decided that? In the USA we decided that domestic child labor is unacceptable, so we outsourced it to Africa and Asia.
  - pryelluw 8y ago
    Is it a surprise to anyone that all the major advertising companies are more than willing to meet the demands of nations that do not deem child labor as a negative? Not at all. Its why these companies need to be regulated. Sadly, regulation tech is taboo because that means VC s wont be able to make money as easily.
- grimjack00 8y ago
  We decided child labor was unacceptable _outside certain limits_. I was helping customers in the family deli at 11-12 years old, and that's perfectly legal as long as time/task regulations are followed.
- m463 8y ago
  I think "advertising" is a deliberately ambiguous term nowadays (like justice or freedom) 50 years ago, advertising was a broadcast medium. A sign, a jingle, a page in a magazine with a photo and a pitch. But nowadays advertising is two-directional, probably more accurately defined as surveillance and profiling of individuals. For example, if you run the Target app on your phone and look at the "advertisements" for a product, it is very likely the price will go up if you walk into the store and look again.

carnagii 8y ago

Human cognition is riddled with exploitable defects. Biologically we are basically just highly pretentious and neurotic monkeys. All of human history is full of people looking for someone to blame for their condition (gods, devils, spirits, corporations, etc) but it never changes. Keep in mind, from an evolutionary perspective we are exactly the same people who were burning witches at the stake and throwing people in lakes to determine their criminal culpability a few hundred years ago. We just have a different set of superstitions and delusions now.

xyzzy123 8y ago
I get it, is that a thing you want to fix though, or to prevent? Education or regulation or something else, if we take as a given that the market has failed? I wrote a comment twice (and deleted it as inflammatory, it’s a fact about reality that is largely counterproductive to debate) where I pointed out that Donald Trump is the president of the U.S. and it’s wonderful or terrible depending on your point of view. I don’t want to derail all conversation into irrelevance but what if the “wrong thing” is what people want? What do we even want anyway? Is “exploitation of cognitive errors” just a thing we say when people decide they want things we think are dumb? The true horror: what if this is the least worst thing people want?
- carnagii 8y ago
  > is that a thing you want to fix though, or to prevent? wanting to fix is pretty obvious. capable of fixing is a different story. biologically there is no fix (genetic engineering maybe? but that is super sci-fi). so we can try to correct with technology or social conventions but those fixes never change the underlying biological defects so how effective can they really be? Look at the social engineering aspects of organized Christianity. How well did those work? Look at the social engineering aspects of the U.S. experiment like universal education and literacy. How well did those work? It is a little bleak but in reality universal literacy has been a complete failure (in the U.S. at least). Probably 80% of the population is at the level of what used to be called "knowing your letters" but they are functionally illiterate (they have never done any significant amount of reading in their life, and aren't really capable of it). That is not a popular opinion, at least not for public consumption, so we can't even begin to address the issue because we refuse to acknowledge that it exists.