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> very, very toxic things for society, like human behavior modification (ad) systems I'm curious... since all advertising has the goal of modifying human behav
by arbuge 5y ago
> very, very toxic things for society, like human behavior modification (ad) systems
I'm curious... since all advertising has the goal of modifying human behavior by definition (from the state of not buying your product/service, to buying it), would you consider all advertising to be toxic by your criterion?
And if not, where do you draw the line exactly?
- gfodor 5y agoI don't draw any lines. That's generally not necessary. However, there are some systems that are clearly on one side of the line where I would consider it unethical to work on them. The point isn't that I expect others to agree with me on this, but simply that I expect them to think about this and form opinions about it.
- burnished 5y agoThis seems like a kind of simple 'gotcha' question, right? Drawing an imaginary line and asking some one pick a point where it magically changes, when it doesn't work like that. Some advertising is done as product discovery. You make something good, you want people to know about it. Some advertising is done to convince you to purchase regardless of its value proposition using psychological tricks. Or, since they were talking more generally about manipulating human behaviors, we can include 'dark patterns'.
- Thiez 5y agoThe gotcha question goes back a long time. See "Loki's Wager".