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Have you considered that maybe GP has a better intuition about the systems effects of advertising, that you haven't fully considered? - Advertising is a major

Have you considered that maybe GP has a better intuition about the systems effects of advertising, that you haven't fully considered? - Advertising is a major driver of material consumption, much of which is unnecessary. - Material consumption drives economic growth. There's also intellectual property, and there's the service industry, but even those contribute indirectly to material consumption. - Economic growth and socioeconomic growth are unquestioned foundations of virtually every "civilized" society, but they make no sense. Growth works great... until at some point it doesn't. Obligatory Albert Bartlett video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZA9Hnp3aV4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZA9Hnp3aV4 Obligatory Eric Weinstein video segment, focusing more on what he calls "EGO"s... embedded [unacknowledged] growth obligations. (Ignore the other three people in the video... even Jordan Peterson is completely out of his league in this "discussion".) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PagNM_oxssE#t=27m47s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PagNM_oxssE#t=27m47s The only criticism I'd make against GP's claim is that the advertising industry is just one spoke in the global wheel of impossible growth and consumption. GP's claim is not nutty, it's too narrow and limited. Ogilvy and Saatchi are only footsoldiers. The only way this game of musical chairs ends without tears is if we luck into some awesome technology that leads to post-scarcity economics. That doesn't seem very likely from my perspective, except if we create AGI and AGI figures it out, but then AGI is an existential risk while economic collapse is just at worst a 100-200 year setback.

crispinb 7y ago
> The only criticism I'd make against GP's claim is that the advertising industry is just one spoke in the global wheel of impossible growth and consumption. GP's claim is not nutty, it's too narrow and limited. Ogilvy and Saatchi are only footsoldiers. Sure - guilty as charged. I was making a pretty limited somewhat rhetorical gesture. > The only way this game of musical chairs ends without tears is if we luck into some awesome technology that leads to post-scarcity economics. I don't believe this to be possible, because the global ecological crisis (of which economic crashes are minor phenotypical efflorescences) doesn't have the kind of simple single causes that short-term big-bang technological innovation can fix. It's the progressive erosion of hundreds of complex evolved systems whose components are being broken at multiple levels. The kind of technology required to 'fix' this would have to have similar types of complexities at multiple scales as are found in those complex evolved systems. That may be achievable, but given the crudeness of our current technology, surely over a timescale of centuries, not the decades we have available. The one possibility would be to slow so-called 'growth' down dramatically enough to allow evolved systems to recover, and in the meantime develop complex technologies on a slow, centuries-scale, burn. But obviously that's politically infeasible, so global ecological collapse it will be.

crispinb 7y ago

> The only criticism I'd make against GP's claim is that the advertising industry is just one spoke in the global wheel of impossible growth and consumption. GP's claim is not nutty, it's too narrow and limited. Ogilvy and Saatchi are only footsoldiers. Sure - guilty as charged. I was making a pretty limited somewhat rhetorical gesture. > The only way this game of musical chairs ends without tears is if we luck into some awesome technology that leads to post-scarcity economics. I don't believe this to be possible, because the global ecological crisis (of which economic crashes are minor phenotypical efflorescences) doesn't have the kind of simple single causes that short-term big-bang technological innovation can fix. It's the progressive erosion of hundreds of complex evolved systems whose components are being broken at multiple levels. The kind of technology required to 'fix' this would have to have similar types of complexities at multiple scales as are found in those complex evolved systems. That may be achievable, but given the crudeness of our current technology, surely over a timescale of centuries, not the decades we have available. The one possibility would be to slow so-called 'growth' down dramatically enough to allow evolved systems to recover, and in the meantime develop complex technologies on a slow, centuries-scale, burn. But obviously that's politically infeasible, so global ecological collapse it will be.