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Billions of people buying things has unintended negative consequences. Advertising exists to amplify desire to increase buying. It doesn't take a high intellig

Billions 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 ago
People 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 ago
  you really don't see the problem with what you say? are you trolling?
  - charcircuit 9mo ago
    The problem that I didn't compare the improvement to humanity to the damage to the environment?
    - robotpepi 9mo ago
      the 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 ago
        How is it "false?" Why would people buy anything otherwise?
        hexaga 9mo ago
        Because 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.
        satvikpendem 9mo ago
        Yes? Of course advertising works, I'm not sure who's even debating that point. But the fact is, people wouldn't click on an ad, look at a product, add to cart, enter their credit card, and checkout if that product was not bring them value. You're acting as if people are forced to perform this series of actions which is simple false, hence why I implied the parent's comment is nonsensical. You have cause and effect reversed. The only reason the ML model can predict whether someone will buy a product is because people have bought it in the past. Why did they buy it? Because it provides them value. The ML prediction is descriptive, not prescriptive. I can similarly create an ML model to predict the weather, that does not mean my model causes the weather which is basically what you're saying.
        hexaga 9mo ago
        No person is forced, because a person's agency does not solely consist of the gap. It doesn't matter. The argument isn't: 'advertising is bad because it forces some specific person to do a thing they don't value'. The argument is: 'advertising is bad because it forces things to happen, and those things are bad'. It's not a moral argument, but a practical one: agency is being extracted on massive scale, and being used for what? Human beings might as well abstract away into point sources of agency for all it matters to the argument being made. If you can extract 0.1% of the agency of anyone who looks at a thing, and you show it to 3 billion people, _you have a lot of agency_. If you then sell it to the highest bidder, you find yourself quickly removing "don't be evil" from the set of any principles you may once have had. My overarching point is that value-as-decision-mediator is meaningless in this calculus. It's the part of the equation that doesn't matter, the part you can't manipulate, the part that _is not a source of manipulable agency_. It's not relevant. I'm not saying it doesn't exist, or that it doesn't affect peoples' decisions: I'm saying it _doesn't matter_. It can be 99.99% of how you make your decisions, and it _still doesn't matter_. As long as that 0.01% gap exists. > The only reason the ML model can predict whether someone will buy a product is because people have bought it in the past. Yes. This is how you gather evidence that something works. It is not the reason it works. The ML model _knows about the spell_ because people have let it affect them in the past. But the spell works because it's magic. It doesn't need anything other than: Y follows X. > The ML prediction is descriptive, not prescriptive. I can similarly create an ML model to predict the weather, that does not mean my model causes the weather which is basically what you're saying. Not all models describe actions which are possible for you to take. Weather models are basically not like that. Advertising models _are_. You aren't in a position where you can meaningfully manipulate the weather, if only you knew how exactly to manipulate it to maximize your profit. It's a vacuous argument in general. Models are just knowledge. Obviously some knowledge is useful, some isn't, some is dangerous, some isn't, some can be used by specific people, some can be used by any, etc. It's not the model that is causing things to happen. It's a machine that uses the knowledge in the model, where the model describes actions possible for the machine to take. It is automated greed. The fundamental concern is not that knowledge is bad, or that ML models are bad. It is that someone is in the position of having a tap on vast, diffuse sources of agency, and have automated the gathering of knowledge in using it to maximize profit, causing untold damage to everything, with the responsibility laundered through intermediary actors.
    - adventured 9mo ago
      You can't argue with a philosophy of death. Humans must dramatically modify their environment to thrive. What they want: human modification of the environment to entirely stop. Human regression is actually what they're after.
- card_zero 9mo ago
  Weird thought: if advertising is misleading harassment, perhaps it doesn't even increase consumption overall, but only consumption of the things being advertised. Perhaps people would buy more, from the market as a whole, if left in peace and given impartial advice about products only when they seek it.

Billions 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 ago

People 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 ago
you really don't see the problem with what you say? are you trolling?
- charcircuit 9mo ago
  The problem that I didn't compare the improvement to humanity to the damage to the environment?
  - robotpepi 9mo ago
    the 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 ago
      How is it "false?" Why would people buy anything otherwise?
      - hexaga 9mo ago
        Because 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.
        satvikpendem 9mo ago
        Yes? Of course advertising works, I'm not sure who's even debating that point. But the fact is, people wouldn't click on an ad, look at a product, add to cart, enter their credit card, and checkout if that product was not bring them value. You're acting as if people are forced to perform this series of actions which is simple false, hence why I implied the parent's comment is nonsensical. You have cause and effect reversed. The only reason the ML model can predict whether someone will buy a product is because people have bought it in the past. Why did they buy it? Because it provides them value. The ML prediction is descriptive, not prescriptive. I can similarly create an ML model to predict the weather, that does not mean my model causes the weather which is basically what you're saying.
        hexaga 9mo ago
        No person is forced, because a person's agency does not solely consist of the gap. It doesn't matter. The argument isn't: 'advertising is bad because it forces some specific person to do a thing they don't value'. The argument is: 'advertising is bad because it forces things to happen, and those things are bad'. It's not a moral argument, but a practical one: agency is being extracted on massive scale, and being used for what? Human beings might as well abstract away into point sources of agency for all it matters to the argument being made. If you can extract 0.1% of the agency of anyone who looks at a thing, and you show it to 3 billion people, _you have a lot of agency_. If you then sell it to the highest bidder, you find yourself quickly removing "don't be evil" from the set of any principles you may once have had. My overarching point is that value-as-decision-mediator is meaningless in this calculus. It's the part of the equation that doesn't matter, the part you can't manipulate, the part that _is not a source of manipulable agency_. It's not relevant. I'm not saying it doesn't exist, or that it doesn't affect peoples' decisions: I'm saying it _doesn't matter_. It can be 99.99% of how you make your decisions, and it _still doesn't matter_. As long as that 0.01% gap exists. > The only reason the ML model can predict whether someone will buy a product is because people have bought it in the past. Yes. This is how you gather evidence that something works. It is not the reason it works. The ML model _knows about the spell_ because people have let it affect them in the past. But the spell works because it's magic. It doesn't need anything other than: Y follows X. > The ML prediction is descriptive, not prescriptive. I can similarly create an ML model to predict the weather, that does not mean my model causes the weather which is basically what you're saying. Not all models describe actions which are possible for you to take. Weather models are basically not like that. Advertising models _are_. You aren't in a position where you can meaningfully manipulate the weather, if only you knew how exactly to manipulate it to maximize your profit. It's a vacuous argument in general. Models are just knowledge. Obviously some knowledge is useful, some isn't, some is dangerous, some isn't, some can be used by specific people, some can be used by any, etc. It's not the model that is causing things to happen. It's a machine that uses the knowledge in the model, where the model describes actions possible for the machine to take. It is automated greed. The fundamental concern is not that knowledge is bad, or that ML models are bad. It is that someone is in the position of having a tap on vast, diffuse sources of agency, and have automated the gathering of knowledge in using it to maximize profit, causing untold damage to everything, with the responsibility laundered through intermediary actors.
  - adventured 9mo ago
    You can't argue with a philosophy of death. Humans must dramatically modify their environment to thrive. What they want: human modification of the environment to entirely stop. Human regression is actually what they're after.
card_zero 9mo ago
Weird thought: if advertising is misleading harassment, perhaps it doesn't even increase consumption overall, but only consumption of the things being advertised. Perhaps people would buy more, from the market as a whole, if left in peace and given impartial advice about products only when they seek it.