5 ms·

This is the kind of attitude that makes many hate tech workers.

rcme 3y ago
Why? I think the emphasis was on “marketing noise,” i.e. something no one wants or needs that is forced into peoples’ eyeballs against their will through paid advertising channels.
- Waterluvian 3y ago
  And what do all the so-called elites that work at FAANG do?
  - rcme 3y ago
    People at Amazon, Apple, and Netflix do sell products (although they also have advertising divisions).
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - McAtNite 3y ago
    Make the channels that those ads are pushed through. Both are fundamentally negative for people in the long run, but I think the superiority complex comes from the naive idea that if you’re the place the garbage is sent to then it’s somehow better. There’s probably a lot of TV execs who felt the same way.
- brailsafe 3y ago
  So like, 100% of the ultimate source of income for tech workers.
- kethinov 3y ago
  There is a perception among the broader public that techies want to automate all the jobs away and don't really care what the people displaced do to earn a living afterward. Bland, inadequate platitudes thrown out advising people to just go find a marketable skill in the new economy ignore the fact that the number of potential occupations that you can make a decent living doing has been shrinking for decades. If you're not a programmer, a doctor, or possess some other rare skill, you're fucked. And of course the whole point of a marketable skill is that it's only marketable because other people don't have it. At some point we're going to have to go through the stages of grief as a society and accept that it's unsustainable to deny a middle class lifestyle to anyone who doesn't possess rare skills, especially when the list of skills considered rare shrinks decade after decade thanks to automation. A continuously growing underclass with continuously declining prospects is a recipe for violence and revolution if we don't start taking this problem more seriously. There are many possible answers. Universal basic income gets thrown around a lot. I like that idea, but I think it needs to be paired with wage subsidies for low wage jobs too. If basically every job is on the path to becoming low wage some day, we have to regard that as the market failure that it is and stop letting the market near-unilaterally decide the price of labor.
  - blibble 3y ago
    > If you're not a programmer, a doctor, or possess some other rare skill, you're fucked. it's coming for these too > A continuously growing underclass with continuously declining prospects is a recipe for violence and revolution if we don't start taking this problem more seriously. the complete breakup of Microsoft, OpenAI, Google and Amazon will be on the political agenda in 2028 failing a political solution: violence will follow there was a post yesterday that wished GPT-4 was never invented... it's one of Nick Bostrom's black marbles https://nickbostrom.com/papers/vulnerable.pdf https://nickbostrom.com/papers/vulnerable.pdf by the end of the decade we're all going to be wishing it had never been invented
  - LudwigNagasena 3y ago
    It’s ridiculous to spin being able to spend less labor in total for the same amount of goods as a bad thing for society. It is a Pareto improvement. If it leads to people being overall worse off, you should blame the governance, not “techies”.
    - kethinov 3y ago
      The governance is certainly the main issue, but bad governance is easier to sustain when those who aren't impacted are more likely to go around denying the problem.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
derefr 3y ago
The word "noise" is doing important work here. This particular job can be automated because, in many advertising transactions, nobody really cares what marketing copy says. The people writing it don't care; the people reading it certainly don't care. It just needs to give a certain gestalt impression, the same way that AI images can give a certain gestalt impression. Which is to say, this isn't just something that AI could automate; this is a job that could have been outsourced to much-lower-paid human workers in (English-speaking) developing nations decades ago. There is no reason anybody should have been making $80/hr doing this job in the first place; there wasn't $80/hr of labor going on, nor was there a moat to doing the job that qualified only a rarified number of people that could then demand $80/hr. Instead, the wage being paid was a path-dependent coincidence of how most companies see marketing as a profit-center, and therefore want to offer "incentive pay" for marketing jobs; and how these same companies happened to consider copywriting — really just marketing-adjacent — as a "marketing job." Coupled with the fact that any given company doesn't usually need very many copywriters, and so doesn't focus on what sort of per-headcount cost-optimizations would be needed to "scale" their copywriting.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
wendyshu 3y ago
Let me try to steelman instead: my hypothesis is that copywriting for marketing emails A) has little value and B) can be done by humans much more cheaply than $80/hr. In regards to B), I know there are people doing that job that make a fraction of that wage. Is the author that much faster or does the author write "better" text? I'm skeptical of "better" because of A). But maybe someone has A/B tested marketing emails and can tell us that the text makes a difference?

rcme 3y ago

Why? I think the emphasis was on “marketing noise,” i.e. something no one wants or needs that is forced into peoples’ eyeballs against their will through paid advertising channels.

Waterluvian 3y ago
And what do all the so-called elites that work at FAANG do?
- rcme 3y ago
  People at Amazon, Apple, and Netflix do sell products (although they also have advertising divisions).
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- McAtNite 3y ago
  Make the channels that those ads are pushed through. Both are fundamentally negative for people in the long run, but I think the superiority complex comes from the naive idea that if you’re the place the garbage is sent to then it’s somehow better. There’s probably a lot of TV execs who felt the same way.
brailsafe 3y ago
So like, 100% of the ultimate source of income for tech workers.
kethinov 3y ago
There is a perception among the broader public that techies want to automate all the jobs away and don't really care what the people displaced do to earn a living afterward. Bland, inadequate platitudes thrown out advising people to just go find a marketable skill in the new economy ignore the fact that the number of potential occupations that you can make a decent living doing has been shrinking for decades. If you're not a programmer, a doctor, or possess some other rare skill, you're fucked. And of course the whole point of a marketable skill is that it's only marketable because other people don't have it. At some point we're going to have to go through the stages of grief as a society and accept that it's unsustainable to deny a middle class lifestyle to anyone who doesn't possess rare skills, especially when the list of skills considered rare shrinks decade after decade thanks to automation. A continuously growing underclass with continuously declining prospects is a recipe for violence and revolution if we don't start taking this problem more seriously. There are many possible answers. Universal basic income gets thrown around a lot. I like that idea, but I think it needs to be paired with wage subsidies for low wage jobs too. If basically every job is on the path to becoming low wage some day, we have to regard that as the market failure that it is and stop letting the market near-unilaterally decide the price of labor.
- blibble 3y ago
  > If you're not a programmer, a doctor, or possess some other rare skill, you're fucked. it's coming for these too > A continuously growing underclass with continuously declining prospects is a recipe for violence and revolution if we don't start taking this problem more seriously. the complete breakup of Microsoft, OpenAI, Google and Amazon will be on the political agenda in 2028 failing a political solution: violence will follow there was a post yesterday that wished GPT-4 was never invented... it's one of Nick Bostrom's black marbles https://nickbostrom.com/papers/vulnerable.pdf https://nickbostrom.com/papers/vulnerable.pdf by the end of the decade we're all going to be wishing it had never been invented
- LudwigNagasena 3y ago
  It’s ridiculous to spin being able to spend less labor in total for the same amount of goods as a bad thing for society. It is a Pareto improvement. If it leads to people being overall worse off, you should blame the governance, not “techies”.
  - kethinov 3y ago
    The governance is certainly the main issue, but bad governance is easier to sustain when those who aren't impacted are more likely to go around denying the problem.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

derefr 3y ago

The word "noise" is doing important work here. This particular job can be automated because, in many advertising transactions, nobody really cares what marketing copy says. The people writing it don't care; the people reading it certainly don't care. It just needs to give a certain gestalt impression, the same way that AI images can give a certain gestalt impression. Which is to say, this isn't just something that AI could automate; this is a job that could have been outsourced to much-lower-paid human workers in (English-speaking) developing nations decades ago. There is no reason anybody should have been making $80/hr doing this job in the first place; there wasn't $80/hr of labor going on, nor was there a moat to doing the job that qualified only a rarified number of people that could then demand $80/hr. Instead, the wage being paid was a path-dependent coincidence of how most companies see marketing as a profit-center, and therefore want to offer "incentive pay" for marketing jobs; and how these same companies happened to consider copywriting — really just marketing-adjacent — as a "marketing job." Coupled with the fact that any given company doesn't usually need very many copywriters, and so doesn't focus on what sort of per-headcount cost-optimizations would be needed to "scale" their copywriting.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

wendyshu 3y ago

Let me try to steelman instead: my hypothesis is that copywriting for marketing emails A) has little value and B) can be done by humans much more cheaply than $80/hr. In regards to B), I know there are people doing that job that make a fraction of that wage. Is the author that much faster or does the author write "better" text? I'm skeptical of "better" because of A). But maybe someone has A/B tested marketing emails and can tell us that the text makes a difference?