while I agree with most of what you said and in an ideal world ad should work in a win-win manner as you described, I have cut out as many ads from my life as possible since they are significantly net harmful in my experience.
the problem that I found, and you don’t seem to address, is that ads are not just a simple showing of “I have the stuff you may want”. It is usually an attempt of manipulation using primarily superstimulus or social engineer to maximize profit for the advertisers. e.g. for a car ad they show happy people living exciting lives which have no relation to the car but make you associate the buying of the car with non-existence social fulfillment.
It would be ok if advertisers’ incentives are aligned with ours. But usually, they are not perfectly aligned if not horribly misaligned. And I assume that companies that use “honest” ads would fail to compete against “superstimulus” ads. So the majority of ads would be the equivalence of attempted mind control which rational agent should avoid even at the price of not knowing that there are things you may want to buy.
e.g. for a car ad they show happy people living exciting lives which have no relation to the car but make you associate the buying of the car with non-existence social fulfillment.
It’s actually worse than that—the way the manipulation works is to induce you to compare the people in the ad with your own life, causing you to feel ugly, unlovable, like you’re missing out on life, etc. and then to propose the product as a relief from this deliberately induced misery.
So, this viewpoint is very harsh and I don’t know how fully I endorse it, but my gut reaction is something like this:
If you can’t benefit from positive-sum informative advertising because you are incapable of watching a 15-second ad without succumbing to mind control, this is a problem with you rather than a problem with ads. The correct response is for you to avoid ads personally (and in fact many websites that use internet advertisements give you the option to pay instead, e.g. Youtube Premium), just as a child who cannot prepare food without cutting themselves should not be given a set of steak knives. It sounds like you are doing that already, so good for you!
The correct response is not for you to try to prevent a positive-sum thing from existing for others, just as the correct response to a child getting their hands on a steak knife and cutting themselves should not be to try to ban steak knives for everyone else.
Attempts to restrict advertisements on those grounds seem isomorphic to e.g. New York Mayor Bloomberg’s infamous attempted ban on large sodas. The justification there appeared to be ‘I am incapable of existing in a world with large sodas without drinking too much soda and getting fat, therefore other people should be banned from positive-sum trade to protect me from my weakness without me needing to exert any effort.’ The argument against soda seems to me a substantially stronger argument than the equivalent argument against ads: first, I think the harms of obesity are substantially larger than the harms of advertisements; and second, I think it is easier to personally avoid exposure to internet advertisements than it is to personally avoid exposure to large sodas.
In defense of the position df fd took, you’re playing a very asymmetric game here. Advertisers are investing very large sums of money and lots of person-hours of work to figure out how to change people’s preferences with those 15-second ads. There’s not a comparable degree of investment in developing techniques for making sure your desires aren’t manipulated. I think it’s hard to be totally sure that ads aren’t subtly creating new associations or preferences that are intended to benefit the advertiser (potentially at the reader’s expense).
Taking a bigger look, I think most people would agree that the average person in the United States makes at least a few irrational consumption decisions (such as buying a large expensive car, eating an unhealthy diet, or spending money on mobile games). There are lots of things one could point to in order to try and explain why that is, but I think it’s potentially good evidence that people overall are susceptible to having their desires changed by advertising.
this is a problem with you rather than a problem with ads
Oh, I absolutely agree that this is a problem with me rather than with ads. But the problem with me is that my brain is human. I can’t totally fix the exploits in the human brain that ads target.
Given that this is a society of humans, ads seem contraindicated. I do try to avoid them, but ads are going out of my way to expose themselves to me in a way sodas mostly do not (except insofar as they are advertised).
again, I mostly agree with you. however a few thing I want to submit for consideration:
-unrelated but I am mildly miffed at the comparison of me to a child with the seeming implication of lack of knowledge, power and agency [also did you just called me weak will lol?]. Although this may not be the intended effect.
-If I make take my point to the extreme, say on one side of the spectrum we have what you describe “win-win” situation on the other imagine a chip in your brain that stimulates your pleasure centre when you think of buying the product. I am sure we agree that there is no need to regulate the good end of the spectrum and there is an urgent need to fight against the bad end. now obviously we need to draw the line somewhere, and everyone would be affected differently and predisposed to draw the line differently. And I found the current state of advertising in general way over my line, I am glad to hear your experience is different. But to quote banksy:
People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.
[...]
Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.
You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.
this beg the question: am I entitled to live my life free of ads if I wanted to? I am not talking about space where I consent to see ads to walking into like youtube. I am asking: am I entitled to walk outside and see no banner ads, watch movies with no product placement.
Anyway, my crux is that ads have at least 2 parts to them, “good” information and “bad” social manipulation. and we may disagree on whether the current ratio of them in ads is worthy of banning or not [inherently subjective I believe]. But surely we agree that if we can turbocharge the good part and minimize the bad part we should try to do that. we may disagree on how to do that though. I am partial to some kind of tax for preference.
They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.
I’m very suspicious of this line of reasoning, since I could also say: “those men kissing in public didn’t ask for my permission to put themselves in front of me”.
This isn’t a knock-down rebuttal or anything, I just wanted to note this.
Fair enough (and apologies for the rudeness). I do think I’d draw a pretty sharp distinction between ‘ads dropped in public spaces where you cannot avoid seeing them’ vs. ‘ads on webpages that you watch in lieu of paying for things’ - the latter seems much easier to avoid and much less likely to be harmful.
(And as I understand things OP seems to be mostly working on the latter?)
You have not produced evidence that billboards are generally ‘criminal mind control’, only that they violate norms for shared spaces for people like Banksy. Ultimately this boils down to local political disagreement, rather than some clever ploy by The Advertisers to get into your brain.
You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you.
This is strictly true in the sense that advertisement is negative cost and negative value, but that is exactly why it is used as a tool for producing otherwise difficult to coordinate public goods.
To quote David Friedman:
Consider one example of the public good problem: radio and television broadcasts. By producing and broadcasting an entertaining program, I provide a benefit to everyone who listens to it. Since I cannot control who listens to it I cannot, as in the case of ordinary production, collect my share of that benefit by charging for it. The public in question is a large and disorganized one so it is clear, on theoretical grounds, that programs cannot be privately produced.
Yet they are. Some clever person thought up the idea of combining a public good with positive production cost and positive value with a public good of negative cost and negative value and giving away the package: program plus advertisements. As long as the net value is greater than zero and the net cost less than zero, people listen to the program and the broadcaster covers his costs.
while I agree with most of what you said and in an ideal world ad should work in a win-win manner as you described, I have cut out as many ads from my life as possible since they are significantly net harmful in my experience.
the problem that I found, and you don’t seem to address, is that ads are not just a simple showing of “I have the stuff you may want”. It is usually an attempt of manipulation using primarily superstimulus or social engineer to maximize profit for the advertisers. e.g. for a car ad they show happy people living exciting lives which have no relation to the car but make you associate the buying of the car with non-existence social fulfillment.
It would be ok if advertisers’ incentives are aligned with ours. But usually, they are not perfectly aligned if not horribly misaligned. And I assume that companies that use “honest” ads would fail to compete against “superstimulus” ads. So the majority of ads would be the equivalence of attempted mind control which rational agent should avoid even at the price of not knowing that there are things you may want to buy.
It’s actually worse than that—the way the manipulation works is to induce you to compare the people in the ad with your own life, causing you to feel ugly, unlovable, like you’re missing out on life, etc. and then to propose the product as a relief from this deliberately induced misery.
So, this viewpoint is very harsh and I don’t know how fully I endorse it, but my gut reaction is something like this:
If you can’t benefit from positive-sum informative advertising because you are incapable of watching a 15-second ad without succumbing to mind control, this is a problem with you rather than a problem with ads. The correct response is for you to avoid ads personally (and in fact many websites that use internet advertisements give you the option to pay instead, e.g. Youtube Premium), just as a child who cannot prepare food without cutting themselves should not be given a set of steak knives. It sounds like you are doing that already, so good for you!
The correct response is not for you to try to prevent a positive-sum thing from existing for others, just as the correct response to a child getting their hands on a steak knife and cutting themselves should not be to try to ban steak knives for everyone else.
Attempts to restrict advertisements on those grounds seem isomorphic to e.g. New York Mayor Bloomberg’s infamous attempted ban on large sodas. The justification there appeared to be ‘I am incapable of existing in a world with large sodas without drinking too much soda and getting fat, therefore other people should be banned from positive-sum trade to protect me from my weakness without me needing to exert any effort.’ The argument against soda seems to me a substantially stronger argument than the equivalent argument against ads: first, I think the harms of obesity are substantially larger than the harms of advertisements; and second, I think it is easier to personally avoid exposure to internet advertisements than it is to personally avoid exposure to large sodas.
In defense of the position df fd took, you’re playing a very asymmetric game here. Advertisers are investing very large sums of money and lots of person-hours of work to figure out how to change people’s preferences with those 15-second ads. There’s not a comparable degree of investment in developing techniques for making sure your desires aren’t manipulated. I think it’s hard to be totally sure that ads aren’t subtly creating new associations or preferences that are intended to benefit the advertiser (potentially at the reader’s expense).
Taking a bigger look, I think most people would agree that the average person in the United States makes at least a few irrational consumption decisions (such as buying a large expensive car, eating an unhealthy diet, or spending money on mobile games). There are lots of things one could point to in order to try and explain why that is, but I think it’s potentially good evidence that people overall are susceptible to having their desires changed by advertising.
Oh, I absolutely agree that this is a problem with me rather than with ads. But the problem with me is that my brain is human. I can’t totally fix the exploits in the human brain that ads target.
Given that this is a society of humans, ads seem contraindicated. I do try to avoid them, but ads are going out of my way to expose themselves to me in a way sodas mostly do not (except insofar as they are advertised).
again, I mostly agree with you. however a few thing I want to submit for consideration:
-unrelated but I am mildly miffed at the comparison of me to a child with the seeming implication of lack of knowledge, power and agency [also did you just called me weak will lol?]. Although this may not be the intended effect.
-If I make take my point to the extreme, say on one side of the spectrum we have what you describe “win-win” situation on the other imagine a chip in your brain that stimulates your pleasure centre when you think of buying the product. I am sure we agree that there is no need to regulate the good end of the spectrum and there is an urgent need to fight against the bad end. now obviously we need to draw the line somewhere, and everyone would be affected differently and predisposed to draw the line differently. And I found the current state of advertising in general way over my line, I am glad to hear your experience is different. But to quote banksy:
this beg the question: am I entitled to live my life free of ads if I wanted to? I am not talking about space where I consent to see ads to walking into like youtube. I am asking: am I entitled to walk outside and see no banner ads, watch movies with no product placement.
Anyway, my crux is that ads have at least 2 parts to them, “good” information and “bad” social manipulation. and we may disagree on whether the current ratio of them in ads is worthy of banning or not [inherently subjective I believe]. But surely we agree that if we can turbocharge the good part and minimize the bad part we should try to do that. we may disagree on how to do that though. I am partial to some kind of tax for preference.
I’m very suspicious of this line of reasoning, since I could also say: “those men kissing in public didn’t ask for my permission to put themselves in front of me”.
This isn’t a knock-down rebuttal or anything, I just wanted to note this.
Fair enough (and apologies for the rudeness). I do think I’d draw a pretty sharp distinction between ‘ads dropped in public spaces where you cannot avoid seeing them’ vs. ‘ads on webpages that you watch in lieu of paying for things’ - the latter seems much easier to avoid and much less likely to be harmful.
(And as I understand things OP seems to be mostly working on the latter?)
You have not produced evidence that billboards are generally ‘criminal mind control’, only that they violate norms for shared spaces for people like Banksy. Ultimately this boils down to local political disagreement, rather than some clever ploy by The Advertisers to get into your brain.
This is strictly true in the sense that advertisement is negative cost and negative value, but that is exactly why it is used as a tool for producing otherwise difficult to coordinate public goods.
To quote David Friedman:
Relevant: the non-adversarial principle of AI alignment