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I invite you to ponder the question: would a worldwide ban of all advertising have a greater or smaller impact on environment-destroying activity than banning o
by alembic_fumes 9mo ago
I invite you to ponder the question: would a worldwide ban of all advertising have a greater or smaller impact on environment-destroying activity than banning of all air travel?
I would argue for "greater", and from that it rather naturally follows that advertisement and marketing indeed kills humanity.
- simianwords 9mo agoSure but its just people buying things.. so what?
- OAIToTheMoon 9mo agoWhy do your recent comments defend OpenAI so strongly?
- simianwords 9mo agoI'm specifically defending advertisement here.
- satvikpendem 9mo agoI dislike this framing. Criticizing an argument is not defending, and it certainly doesn't mean the critic likes the opposing side of the argument. Seems like you're the one with the bias, having created your account just today for this one specific post.
- OAIToTheMoon 9mo agoOK. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46640744 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46640744, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46641035 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46641035, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46644216 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46644216, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46645814 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46645814
- simianwords 9mo agolol idk what you want to imply but ok
- amitav1 9mo agoThe way you phrased this makes it sound like he's a shill, but his takes about AI don't seem unusually complementary.
- aduantas 9mo agoBillions of people buying things has unintended negative consequences. Advertising exists to amplify desire to increase buying. It doesn't take a high intelligence to perceive the problem.
- charcircuit 9mo agoPeople buy things because it provides them value. Increasing buying means that more value is being delivered to humanity. Advertising makes the world a better place.
- robotpepi 9mo agoyou really don't see the problem with what you say? are you trolling?
- charcircuit 9mo agoThe problem that I didn't compare the improvement to humanity to the damage to the environment?
- robotpepi 9mo agothe first sentence "People buy things because it provides them value." is very false. that's central to many of the problems with marketing.
- satvikpendem 9mo agoHow is it "false?" Why would people buy anything otherwise?
- hexaga 9mo agoBecause advertising works. Full stop. It doesn't matter if it is valuable or not. It just works. Definitely not with P(buy this crap) = 1. But the effect is still there and real and measurable and google has made colossal amounts of money out of exploiting it. It might as well be a magic spell. You show the user the thing, and they buy/subscribe/click-through with some probability according to massive ML model that knows everything there is to know about them. Yes - people are capable of making decisions in their own self interest. But there exists a gap where not _all_ of peoples' decision making process is the aforementioned. And that gap can be exploited, systematically. The existence of that gap is the actual problem. At scale, you can own a nontrivial quantity of human agency because that agency is up for grabs. Google / similar make their money by charging rent on that 'freely exploitable agency'. Not by providing value to people. The very idea is ridiculous. Value? How are you going to define a loss function over value? ML models on click-through or whatever else don't figure out how to provide value. They find the gap. The gap is made of things like: 'sharp, contrasting borders _here_ increase P by 0.0003', 'flashing text X when recently viewed links contain Y increase P by 0.031', etc and so on.
- SketchySeaBeast 9mo agoCan we un-confound those factors? Advertising sells us cheap plane trips, and it looks like leisure is reason for the majority of flights.