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I wrote this for a related article yesterday: --- If we know that humans have all sorts of cognitive biases, how come it's ok to use that fact while at the sa

• AntiImperialist 6y ago
  With freedom, humans can control for this by learning from it. They can see that cars don't necessarily get you women despite of what the ads say. This can also be indirect learning by someone pointing it out. If you start making certain things illegal to say, you can use that against people. For example, given enough money for lawyers, you can sue people for saying that "these cars don't get you women" using the same anti-free speech regulations by finding holes and exceptions in them. History has shown that lawyers can pull this off.
  • user-the-name 6y ago
    Nonsense. There are plenty of things you are not allowed to say, and nobody is using them as "loopholes". False advertising is a crime already, for one.
    • AntiImperialist 6y ago
      >and nobody is using them as "loopholes" Yes, they are.
      • user-the-name 6y ago
        Who is using false advertising laws as loopholes, then?
        • yurielt 6y ago
          Lol just of the top of my head companies like Coca Cola and also the guy who sued red bull for actually not getting wings
          • user-the-name 6y ago
            What person was prevented from speaking there?
• zupatol 6y ago
  Some economists have tried arguing that advertising adds value to products, but I think it only hinders people from making choices based on the product's merit. It's a distortion of the market. We wouldn't lose much if advertising would just be forbidden. A traditional definition of it would probably be enough to get rid of most of it. The main problem is that huge sums of money are involved, and almost all media profit from it to some extent, so there's a huge incentive to shut down this conversation.
  • agent008t 6y ago
    Is it even possible to eliminate it altogether, down to the very last 'influencer'? As long as people care what is popular and fashionable rather than what is good there will be ways of exploiting it.
    • paulryanrogers 6y ago
      Enforcement doesn't have to be perfect to benefit society. Once it was illegal to advertise drugs to the public. After it was legalized suddenly drug company budgets were overtaken by marketing, instead of R&D. In my opinion that was a net loss for society.
      • marcinzm 6y ago
        From what I can tell 70% of drug marketing budget is about persuading doctors and not consumers so I don't see how your example applies. In fact it just shows that companies will find a way to spend marketing money to influence people given enough ROI even if they can't target consumers directly.
  • sokoloff 6y ago
    It would seem that review sites would be a massive beneficiary of a ban on advertising; whether or not they review in a Consumer Reviews (scientifically backed, generally) or Bob’s Internet Affiliate Shills or Celebrity Chris’ Favorites manner is left as an exercise to the reader.
• roenxi 6y ago
  That point is sort-of pointless. It would be fair to boil a lot of the argument there down to "People don't act randomly. They have reasons for what they are doing. I think their reasons are bad". I can't argue with that, but the alternatives are worse. If you centralise power, sooner or later the advertising exec gets control of the powerful body, and now you can't choose to resist even if you can see that what is happening is bad. A key part of the free market is precisely that the world is actually quite predictable. The fact that people sometimes make predictably bad choices doesn't especially undermine the free market. The market doesn't require people make good choices, it just redirects resources to people who make better choices than the average.
  • pjc50 6y ago
    You could deploy the same argument in favor of allowing any kind of fraudulent product or service; the full libertarian "caveat emptor" approach. However, not only is this unpopular, prohibiting fraud doesn't in and of itself result in fraudsters taking over the market. The boundary between overly enthusiastic promises and actual fraud is one that's in different places for different jurisdictions and is constantly at the forefront of litigation as people invent new fraud schemes. > "People don't act randomly. They have reasons for what they are doing. I think their reasons are bad". Sometimes the reasons are bad in very objective ways. A goes down to the market to buy a kilogram of apples. A vendor B advertises 1kg apples for a pound. He weighs them out on his scales. A hands over his pound. When he gets home he finds he has 800g of apples. Was A's reason for purchasing the apples from B good or bad? (laws against short measure have been a thing since at least Roman times; I believe they also had a few product quality laws, although the canonical example there is always German beer law from 1516)
• agent008t 6y ago
  I suppose there are both philosophical and pragmatic reasons for the current situation: 1. Philosophical - you don't want to get the threat of physical force involved unless there is a very very good reason for doing so. That is, you don't want to make things illegal. So we forbid outright lying and fraud, openly misleading customers, but allow things that you describe. If you have a private online platform, why should you not be allowed to or be compelled to moderate its content? Yes, tech companies will try to maximize user engagement, but what else should they be trying to maximize? It is up to the rest of society to develop a proper culture and information hygiene to shape their demand, and tech companies will adapt. It can develop organically and passed from generation to generation, or you can try to expedite the process through schools, media and other mechanisms that exist in a society. 2. Practical - people tend to get interested by forbidden things, and they seem to like their biases. In the Soviet Union, for example, perhaps most people were fascinated by the Hollywood movies of the 70s and the 80s, and even the way the Western brands were being advertised. They seemed 'cooler' to the Soviet products that were mostly devoid of marketing. Try to eliminate most biases, and people will vote with their feet. Arguably a better approach is to allow things, but in good faith educate people on how to best deal with them and why that is the right way of dealing with them. Same way a lot of parents today would explain to their children why they should stay away from cigarettes, for example, or wash their hands before having food.
  • benjaminjosephw 6y ago
    I don't think there's anything reasonable about either of these: 1. Are the freedoms of corporations to act without the coercion of the state more important than the freedom of citizens to act without the subtle but effective coercion of corporate persuasion? The case for individual freedom doesn't always imply the absence of action by the state. 2. Would restricting manipulative practices by businesses really lead to more businesses exploring those practices? That may be the case in restricting consumer choices but would it also be true for corporate behavior? I'm not so sure.
    • agent008t 6y ago
      Corporations are just voluntary associations of people, are they not? It seems strange to allow something for an individual, but to forbid groups of people to associate with each other and carry out the same activity. I also think that calling persuasion 'coercion' is misleading. Coercion implies the threat of force or violence. You and your family still have the choice of switching off your TV, not using facebook or twitter, living your life as you want. Assuming you can live in a community of like-minded people such that there are few social costs of doing so for you and your family. I would like to see more such communities, especially among people working in tech. Restricting some practices by businesses would lead to foreign businesses and cultures becoming more attractive to consumers.
• deegles 6y ago
  As an absurd example, if someone were to invent a ray-gun that reprograms people's brains with arbitrary beliefs it would be 100% unethical and illegal to use. However, ads or fake news article that takes many exposures to reprogram you (by using the cognitive bias back channels as you mention) are perfectly fine. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
  • Mirioron 6y ago
    With the raygun there's a clear cause and effect. You can fairly easily prove that what changes beliefs is the raygun. You can't do that with ads and fake news articles. The other point is that with ads and articles you have to engage with them yourself. Something can grab your attention, but you can decide to ignore it anyway.
    • dane-pgp 6y ago
      There isn't a clear cause and effect between smoking a single cigarette and developing cancer, or even between smoking a single cigarette and addiction. For a long time, tobacco companies used such equivocation to avoid regulation of their industry. Instead, we look at the total effect (and often the intended effect) of multiple small changes, and decide whether they are a net positive for society.
      • Mirioron 6y ago
        Do we have a total effect of ads and fake news on society? Something that's actually reliable and not propaganda itself? It seems extremely difficult to be able to differentiate between an ad letting people know that a product exists and it directly influencing your decision. Or you could consider letting people know about the product existing as influencing the person, but then it's hard to argue that ads are actually bad. With tobacco it's far easier to show a correlation, because people can just not smoke. People can't just avoid the effects of advertising, because it's all around us. Even word of mouth can be an ad campaign. Also, tobacco probably is too regulated. It should be regulated to stop other people from experiencing the negative effects of somebody smoking. Limiting what flavors cigarettes can have and enormously taxing them seems like it has gone too far. People should be allowed to make their own choices in a free society.
• raxxorrax 6y ago
  I think there is much uncorroborated assertions about bias. Associating emotions to a product or getting attention is an old trick that existed before modern marketing. The smoking example can be generalized for fashion and there are mechanisms like peer pressure involved that certainly incentivize consumption. But they are not overriding your will. Addictions can, but even then I would say there is still a free will involved. > but I sense this is more of a grey zone than most people are willing to admit. I do believe ads affect me, but the scope is limited and regulation would be more draconian than my natural inclination to give products an unjust bonus for boobs. However, it may not work, because I come to the conclusion that the product must lacking if you try to sell it with dirty tricks. > Isn't this the same as the authoritarian nightmares that we've been pointing fingers at? No, because people can make up their minds, otherwise they would have a lot of cars by now. They loose that, however, if you regulate too excessively because the decision is already made for you. There are sensible reasons for regulation, so it is a gray area, but I don't see it as helpful here. Empirical counter evidence in favor of my free will for any practical purpose: There is no irresistible ad.
  • akalsz 6y ago
    Isn't what you're calling a free will just the influence of your previous experiences? Which would mean that there should theoretically be a way for powerful advertisers to avoid people from obtaining such experiences in the first place.
• cblconfederate 6y ago
  If you go that far then the entire legitimacy of legal systems, judicial systems, penal systems, world order etc falls apart. Free will does not really exist, but what is the alternative to pretending that it exists.
• rriepe 6y ago
  There's never not advertising/PR. The choice is between a market or a monopoly.
• raverbashing 6y ago
  It's an interesting discussion. Of course I don't think blandifying ads is the way to go. Making ads attractive is a cultural phenomenon. An implicit suggestion of fame, class, social status is fine. It's part of the game. It's an implicit suggestion in the end. But everything has a limit. What might be acceptable in an adult ad might not be so acceptable for a teenager or a kids ad. More worrying is propaganda, which is misleading/false in non-obvious ways and not explicitly an ad.
• prionassembly 6y ago
  The wider culture is supposed to counterbalance for this. Taking things to the extreme: maybe people are by default violent and will kill a few people in their lifetime to get their way. But the culture counterbalances this. Likewise everyone old enough to have a sex drive has seen enough publicity with barely-clad attractive women to know the ruse. Of course, people are still vulnerable to these things (cf. onlyfans, etc.) but at some point you have to establish that the rules are clear and if people still want to indulge the fantasy of a beautiful woman by buying a car, well, whatever. Sure, we still put backstops to this with drugs, gambling. But the use of sex as a tool for attention grabbing is way too wide a net to cast.
  • andrepd 6y ago
    >Likewise everyone old enough to have a sex drive has seen enough publicity with barely-clad attractive women to know the ruse. Clearly not, for the simple fact that they do it anyway. It works, else you wouldn't see it in ads.
    • prionassembly 6y ago
      This is what Slavoj Zizek terms the "cynical function of ideology". People can know the ruse and enjoy it anyway. No one goes to e.g. striptease joints expecting complete sexual gratification. (The following video analyzes a fragment of the movie "West Side Story" and it's fully SFW) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzztNjZqbOQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzztNjZqbOQ
      • AnHonestComment 6y ago
        You switched a critical aspect on your analogy, replacing a push-mechanism (ads) with a poll-mechanism (strip club). People voluntarily enjoy sex, but forced orgasms during rape are deeply traumatic. The aspect of the example you switched is key to why advertising is problematic — and your referenced argument doesn’t apply here, due to that difference in consent.
  • pjc50 6y ago
• swiley 6y ago
  I saw a talk a while ago that argued the sexist marketing of home computers toward boys is likely responsible for the drop in women becoming computer programmers during the 90s.
  • laurent92 6y ago
    My family is a living proof of this. I have 2 sisters, I was a boy, and yet, I am the only programmer. GW-BASIC’s evil plan with its marketing oriented towards me, its black-and-white text, and their 10 20 30 LIST instructions, or the white reference book of the Amstrad 8086 in English which, as a French boy of 7, was incredibly opaque (which I still read and memorized by heart), those were all directed towards me. Or perhaps it is time to admit that talks which are drawing inferences are just talks, and while my sisters were asking dads to draw horses, I was asking dad to offer me a drawing of a powerpoint, because things that plug to each other fascinated me. If sex creates differences in the body, it is only stunning ideology that draws us to affirm it creates no difference in average in the brain, and that everything is socially constr... No, I’m not James Damore.
    • UncleMeat 6y ago
      I was on a flight a few years ago while wearing a software company branded hoodie. The person next to me was very excited, since he was trying to get his son to like computers. He bought his son all these toys, read him books, and did activities to encourage an interest in software. His son was six. I asked if he had other children. He had a daughter who was eight. He was not doing the same things for her. Enrollment among women in computer science was growing steadily until the 80s, when it turned around and declined. Our biology has not changed during that time frame. And the core job of a software engineer hasn't really changed at that time. Other engineering disciplines did not experience the same change in trajectory. Innate biological preferences have a hard time explaining the unique trajectory experienced in software. You don't just need to demonstrate that there exist differences in the brain between men and women, but that the specific differences lead to the observed population-wide outcomes.
• mrfredward 6y ago
  Cognitive biases are a real problem for free markets, but the question isn't whether free markets are perfect, it's how they compare to the alternatives. People can make poor choices because of cognitive biases, or they can have choices made for them by other people with cognitive biases. The other people can be unelected, unaccountable leaders, or leaders that are chosen by voters, and politics seems to be where cognitive biases are worst. In general, I would rather suffer for my own cognitive biases than the biases of elected officials and voters, but that's not to say I advocate for free markets in every scenario, because there is a lot more to consider than individual choice in that discussion.
• indigochill 6y ago
  I studied "strategic communication" in college (a mix of PR, advertising, marketing, whatever) and I distinctly remember a mentor saying, "When you're selling a drill, you're not selling a drill. You're selling the hole." The point is, people don't buy things for their own sake. They buy them for what they think the thing can do for them. Any car will get you to point B, but some people will go for a cheap, utilitarian car because they want to save money (or maybe the utilitarian aesthetic is their thing), while others will go for the flashy car for that feeling of sex appeal (even if women don't suddenly fall all over a new car owner, the feeling of confidence is a social benefit to the buyer, even if that's not worth the asking price). More generally, though, all communication has this sort of color to it. We see anti-privacy legislation being touted as protecting children and fighting crime. Small talk is not really about sports. So I don't think it's realistic to legislate persuasion. I would probably be behind making formal logic a part of public school curriculum, though, so people are better equipped to discern for themselves when persuasion they're exposed to is nonsense (among other benefits).
  • Siira 6y ago
    Formal logic does not help with critical thinking that much. You need to teach Bayesian thinking, which seems a daunting task.
    • bonoboTP 6y ago
      I think explicit instruction is quite ineffective either way. What you need is teaching by immersion, through examples. Science should not be taught as a series of facts and formulas but as riddles, arguments, why do we think this or that, what does this or that experiment tell us. How could one misinterpret it? Let's try and present this information to influence the reader's thinking: half of you to one direction, half of you in the opposite. Simiarly in history class, can we weave the narrative to make country X look good in this ancient war? What political slogan could country B come up with to counter that narrative? What facts would you emphasize regarding the Black Plague as a communist or as a Catholic? In math, would you market a more fuel efficient car by telling the percentage difference in miles per gallon or liters per 100 km? These are obviously just some examples, but the point is that critical thinking is a cross-cutting concern and cannot be segregated into one class. It should be constantly invoked. Instead of listing fact X, explain how people figured it out. Why did people not see it before and what did they think instead? Was it universally accepted immediately or what were the criticisms? The thing is, though, this is extremely difficult to teach. You'd need extraordinary teachers with lots of background knowledge, since such debates and brainstorming can quickly go astray of the standard curriculum and quite easily end up in difficult and perhaps unknown territory. Perhaps you could do this with an Internet connected laptop and a projector, diving into Wikipedia rabbit holes in real time. But this would be different each year, and you'd have no way of ensuring a standard curriculum. If you don't make things required for the test, many students just won't listen, no matter how engaging the class may be. Such teachers would demand higher salaries to be competitive with places that can also make great use of the limited supply of critical thinkers. Maybe it's offensive but teachers as a demographic aren't that smart in most countries,since the requirements are pretty low to graduate and the social reputation of the profession is also quite low. But even if you find great teachers, it's even more difficult to test, as it's open ended, not objective and not standardizable.
• qwerty456127 6y ago
  > It's as if there's a line between actively lying ("Studies show that men who buy this car will find many many women attracted to them") and just putting it there suggestively I doubt pretty girls in ads are actually supposed to mean the goods they advertise make a man more attractive. Who (except teens) would believe that, consciously or subconsciously? You just get attracted yourself and that's enough, simply seeing a pretty girl fires the hormones and neurotransmitters making you feel good about what she advertises, no semantic load necessary.
  • nitrogen 6y ago
    It's strictly not semantic, it's happening at an instinctive level. These backdoor hacks into the legacy code of our brains are the problem.
  • bonoboTP 6y ago
    Nobody would believe drinking Coke will make you live free and happily. Still their marketing messaging is about connecting Coke with a youthful, carefree, liberating experience, friends, fun. You wouldn't think eating candy bars will make you athletic. But they market it with athletes and active people playing soccer etc. They don't show some fat dude sitting in the dark in front of the computer shoving candy and chips and coke in his face and becoming diabetic. The associations can be immediate if repeated often enough. When picking a product you don't reason "okay this will make my life X", but you feel a familiarity, a draw, a positive emotion. Not necessarily consciously. But especially after a stressful day, in the supermarket you will be more prone to emotional, autopilot handling.
  • webmaven 6y ago
    > I doubt pretty girls in ads are actually supposed to mean the goods they advertise make a man more attractive. Who (except teens) would believe that, consciously or subconsciously? How about chewing gum and mint ads? Many try for messages that are essentially "don't get cock-blocked by your bad breath" or something similar. And they work.
  • monort 6y ago
    Research shows, that car can influence attraction. https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/c86a/142c0ae2d70d95f6292af634b6bbc7d43a05.pdf https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/c86a/142c0ae2d70d95f6292af6...
• coding123 6y ago
  I see the rest of society buying and liking the typical brands such as: Tide, Kraft, Nabisco, Pepsi-co, what have you and I shutter. It's really weird but I started to have an adverse reaction to all the companies that actually advertise and I'm always on the look out for companies that use few ingredients and in general have no commercials. And this has changed me so much. Even seeing that stereo typical hot-rod style cars that you are clearly described as attracting women - I actively dislike people that show off even. I have never had an FB account. I don't know where I'm going with this but yeah, cognitive biases and such and controlling people. I guess just trying to say, it doesn't work on everyone - not identically and as expected at least.
  • sjg007 6y ago
    You are a different class of consumer. But you too are actively marketed at.
• olalonde 6y ago
  > If we know that humans have all sorts of cognitive biases, how come it's ok to use that fact while at the same time we insist there's some kind of free market? Of course humans aren't perfectly rational but I'd argue it's still a good assumption to make, as a society, because the alternative leads to a very disturbing path. Ultimately, assuming individuals don't really know what's best for themselves can be used to justify all kinds of authoritarian measures from limiting speech to straight up enslavement.
  • gibolt 6y ago
    Jumping from ads to enslavement is one of the biggest stretches I've seen on HN...
    • olalonde 6y ago
      It might seem like a stretch to us, but it was actually used to justify slavery in the past. As early as Aristotle who thought that slaves didn't have the ability to think properly and therefore needed masters to tell them what to do.
      • Der_Einzige 6y ago
        Hell, I'd go right before Aristotle. The whole allegory of the cave from Plato/Socrates is most likely the first non-religious justification in western philosophy (which was promulgated) which explains this "the people on the bottom deserve it and are correctly segmented" idea. Idiot farmers, who are not educated and don't see reality for how it is (only shadows on the wall), cannot be trusted to run your state. Only those who see reality for how it is (those who are dialectically educated in a school) should be anywhere near power. I think that even today, this notion of "you are low/stupid therefor we should not listen to you" is almost everywhere in the west.
• rimiform 6y ago
  Something like Lynx (called Axe here) is probably a great example for a different reason, being that it would not exist were it not for the very advertising that promotes it. The aversion for natural body odour (that is, not 'sweaty' smell) is given by advertising, same with the aversion for 'bad breath'. Banning advertising would kill these products, because they add no value except to solve the problem they created.
• stickfigure 6y ago
  There is absolutely no limit to this. Putting on a suit for a financial job interview exploits the cognitive biases of interviewers. Tattoos exploit the cognitive biases of hipsters. Putting hockey-stick growth projections in pitch decks exploits the cognitive biases of VCs. Equity grants (pretty much always) exploit the cognitive biases of startup employees. Driving a fancy car exploits the cognitive biases of (a very large portion of) the dating market. Human beings are not computers. No aspect of human behavior is perfectly logical or rational. You simply cannot ban emotional appeals in principle, because all appeals have an emotional component. This way lies a dystopia far more terrible than "grandpa shared some nonsense on facebook".
  • mistermann 6y ago
    > You simply cannot ban emotional appeals in principle, because all appeals have an emotional component. This way lies a dystopia far more terrible than "grandpa shared some nonsense on facebook". True enough. But are you implying (not saying you are, just asking) that ~"nothing can be done"? "Banning emotional appeals....This way lies a dystopia..." is just one option - might there be other approaches that could improve the situation?
    • kongolongo 6y ago
      Maybe but as of yet there doesn't appear to be any clearly net positive solutions (IMO) that can both curb emotional appeal and cognitive biases without introducing harms themselves.
      • s1artibartfast 6y ago
        These is always enducation. Teaching people to identify the biases and analyze their emotional reactions. I cant think of any downside here.
        • mistermann 6y ago
          Teaching people things like logic, critical thinking, psychological biases, etc so they understand it when in abstract thinking mode when the topic is just that is one thing - teaching people to be able to practice it during realtime conversations of unrelated object level discussions (say, politics) is something else entirely. > I cant think of any downside here. I can imagine many people who may see a downside of a population who is broadly capable of skilful critical thinking. I don't think it's an accident that we only talk about the crucial need for it, but never talk about actually doing something about it.
• benlivengood 6y ago
  Education is the best mitigation. Knowing that we have biases helps us recognize when it is happening. Most of the pushback to advertising that I've seen uses either asceticism or anti-consumerism language instead of cutting to the heart of what's going on.
• jacques_chester 6y ago
  The law of Equity in various countries constantly evolves to cope with exactly these kinds of fuzzy logic questions. Just today, in fact, I read this article: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3697726 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3697726 Recent scholarship engaging with the impact of digital technology on contract law has suggested that practitioners and researchers will need to give proper consideration to the ‘role of equitable remedies in the context of contracts drafted in whole or part in executable code’. More generally, a raft of challenges stem from the increasingly active role digital technologies play in contractual relations. Faced with these challenges, instinct may dictate attempting to tame the technological beast with a variety of regulatory responses spanning the full spectrum of possibilities, from legal requirements to voluntary codes of conduct or standards. While regulatory action may be a priority from a public policy perspective, the seeming trustworthiness of algorithms, and the consequent reliance placed on them by contracting parties carry the inherent risk of lack of autonomy and fully‐informed independent decision‐making that, in Australia at least, is addressed by equity through the doctrine of undue influence. This article explores whether this traditional doctrine can adapt to operate alongside regulation in dealing with some of the challenges presented by algorithmic contracting. Specifically, it focuses on those contracts where algorithms play an active role not only in the execution, but in the formation of the contract, as these are the “algorithmic contracts” that challenge the very fundamentals of contract law.
• missedthecue 6y ago
  There's this problem in the sciences and higher academe where we give things names that sound like something but mean another. For instance, Einstein's Special Theory of Relatively is a common example. Ask the average person on the street what it means and they'd say, "Well of course I know what it means, after all, it means that everything is relative." Well obviously that's not what it means. What it means is that the speed of light is rather impossibly constant. Likewise, economics has this same issue. "Free Market" does not mean everyone has complete free will and has total immunity to persuasion. "Free Markets" defines a philosophy of trade where individuals can own and sell property. Whether or not people are 'easily affected by suggestion' as you put it, has got no impact on the concept of free markets.
  • pdonis 6y ago
    > Whether or not people are 'easily affected by suggestion' as you put it, has got no impact on the concept of free markets. Yes, it does. A free market is not just about individuals owning and trading property. A free market requires that all trades are voluntary. If people are forced, for example by law, to make trades they would not freely choose to make, you do not have a free market: forced trades are not voluntary. But if people are manipulated into making trades they would not freely choose to make if they knew the information the manipulator is hiding from them, those trades are not voluntary either.
    • missedthecue 6y ago
      You are correct that if you are compelled by the government to do something it's not a free market. But if coca-cola convinces you to try a new flavor through a marketing campaign, it does not eliminate the free market. It was your choice the whole time.
      • pdonis 6y ago
        > if coca-cola convinces you to try a new flavor through a marketing campaign, it does not eliminate the free market. If the marketing campaign is open, and I'm aware that that's what it is, and it doesn't make any actual false claims (puffery is another matter--that's basically unavoidable), then yes, it's my choice whether or not to be convinced. If the "marketing campaign" is really efforts behind the scenes to present me with misleading information and to disguise the motives behind it, that's something different. It is true that efforts of the latter sort are not new. What impact new "persuasive technologies" have on the frequency or success rate of such nefarious tactics is, I think, an open question.
• erichocean 6y ago
  The solution is to ban all advertising, everywhere, for everyone, for any reason, without exceptions. People should affirmatively seek out sales materials, not be inadvertently subjected to them.