> I agree psychological tricks can be used by advertising ("one weird trick to...") but it's not a major practice to advertise when they are vulnerable. That m

> I agree psychological tricks can be used by advertising ("one weird trick to...") but it's not a major practice to advertise when they are vulnerable. That might be a current technical limitation, I'm sure facebook is working on that as we speak. A breakthrough or two in psychology, some improvements in data gathering and crunching, and no user would have a chance against professionals whose job it is to find what exactly to show and when to induce that sale. Humans generally can't exactly install firewalls in their heads and keep it up to date, not against a motivated onslaught. > can't afford them is this a problem with advertising or people's finical responsibility? With truly effective persuasion techniques, lines of 'responsibility' will become gray. If you drive through and intersection and somebody shone a bright light and blinded you temporarily, are you responsible for the accident? If you go about your day and somebody distracted you while their partner pick-pocketed your wallet, are you responsible for not guarding your valuables? If herbalife salesman cornered you in a coffee shop and (using half-truths, exaggerations, outrageous promises, pushing on your greed and confusion, social proofs and other sales-fu) sold you a garage-full of product, are you responsible of that mistake? Um, I was going to create a series of less and less clear-cut examples, but run out of imagination, hopefully idea is legible. > It seems there are businesses that are bad (or you don't agree with), but you are projecting advertising as the root of the problem. I'm sure I was imagining worst examples when writing that, but incentives mostly push towards selling more of the stuff you make, regardless of its effect, even for benign businesses. There are exceptions I'm sure, but I expect they are driven by external forces -- regulations, owner's direction that is not profit related, etc. In presence of truly effective ad tech and barring any friction (like regulation, social blowback, etc), actors who use it will eat those who don't. Markets are red in tooth and nail. Release the hypnodrones!