I don’t disagree with any of the object-level claims, but I think the framing is confused and could be greatly improved.
One way to think about this is, what would the world would be like if we didn’t allow advertising?
I don’t think that is what you are doing in this essay. Instead you are proposing other methods by way which advertising could work. That’s what Kevin does and I think his essay is better because he is explicit that this is what he is doing. Once you have explicitly said that ads contain information, maybe then it is good to talk about the hypothetical to explain how important information is. But asserting your hypothetical using your model of the world seems to me rhetorically poor. If you don’t understand how you disagree with other people, perhaps there is no other approach, but in this case you do know.
Asking people to make open-ended investment in hypotheticals could be useful, but how? If people have coherent theories, then they should find it easy to think about hypotheticals without changing their minds. If people have incoherent theories, maybe it is useful to get them to notice that by having them consider hypotheticals. But I don’t think that you’re doing that. Also, this seems very difficult, probably only viable in an interactive way. If the writer of a static essay knows exactly how the audience theories are incoherent, eg, because they hold two contradictory theories, then it is probably better to write down the contradiction explicitly. For an example of this logical structure, Kevin does this with tricking vs Homo economicus. But that’s not the same rhetorical structure, because his audience doesn’t actually believe that. (I dub this rhetorical move the Robin Hanson.)
I’ve recently had several conversations around whether advertising is harmful, and specifically whether ads primarily work by tricking people into purchasing things they don’t need.
It would probably be better to expand on this. There are several separate questions. Ads have two obvious costs, the cash to the advertiser and the attention to the audience. Why do advertisers buy ads? Is it to trick the audience, or to inform? That is the topic of the essay, explicitly bracketing off of the attention cost. But, reading the responses, not explicit enough.
I don’t disagree with any of the object-level claims, but I think the framing is confused and could be greatly improved.
I don’t think that is what you are doing in this essay. Instead you are proposing other methods by way which advertising could work. That’s what Kevin does and I think his essay is better because he is explicit that this is what he is doing. Once you have explicitly said that ads contain information, maybe then it is good to talk about the hypothetical to explain how important information is. But asserting your hypothetical using your model of the world seems to me rhetorically poor. If you don’t understand how you disagree with other people, perhaps there is no other approach, but in this case you do know.
Asking people to make open-ended investment in hypotheticals could be useful, but how? If people have coherent theories, then they should find it easy to think about hypotheticals without changing their minds. If people have incoherent theories, maybe it is useful to get them to notice that by having them consider hypotheticals. But I don’t think that you’re doing that. Also, this seems very difficult, probably only viable in an interactive way. If the writer of a static essay knows exactly how the audience theories are incoherent, eg, because they hold two contradictory theories, then it is probably better to write down the contradiction explicitly. For an example of this logical structure, Kevin does this with tricking vs Homo economicus. But that’s not the same rhetorical structure, because his audience doesn’t actually believe that. (I dub this rhetorical move the Robin Hanson.)
It would probably be better to expand on this. There are several separate questions. Ads have two obvious costs, the cash to the advertiser and the attention to the audience. Why do advertisers buy ads? Is it to trick the audience, or to inform? That is the topic of the essay, explicitly bracketing off of the attention cost. But, reading the responses, not explicit enough.