> The author himself is falling to the "Advertising Trap" of click-baiting his potential audience. Maybe? It's provocative, but I felt (and still feel) it's an

> The author himself is falling to the "Advertising Trap" of click-baiting his potential audience. Maybe? It's provocative, but I felt (and still feel) it's an accurate metaphor. The thing that made me start thinking of advertising in these terms is a bit of trivia I picked up (from IIRC Scott Alexander's blog posts) on why big mammals like whales get much less cancer than they should per models that correlate cancer rates with body size and metabolism. Turns out, one hypothesis is that those big animals do get more cancer, and their larger bodies allow the cancer to get proportionally larger - so large, that it eventually develops its own cancer, and gets killed by it. This image of a cancer growing on another cancer was a good fit for a bunch of personal experiences I had observing social media content marketing people who happened to work in the same room as I did at the time (a spin-off from a startup I worked for), and also fit well with stories about A/B testing services, whose UI encouraged mistakes invalidating results in just the right way to make them think they're getting good value from the testing service. That made me start thinking in these terms, and from there I slowly developed a general cancer analogy, which I then put in the article you just read. WRT. cancer-on-cancer thing, the article doesn't mention it at all, though it was partly the thought behind this fragment: > It also allows the advertisers to scam each other on attribution, which isn't surprising if you consider that lying is literally their job. Cancer cells don't play well with each other unless they have to. I'll need to update the article and include a paragraph about the meta-cancer thing.