As someone who also works on Ads at Google, I have to take the opposite stance; I view advertising as a blight upon the face of humanity, something to destroy if we can at all figure out how to do so. I comfort myself knowing that Google Ads is arguably the best of what’s an awful ecosystem, and that I work in what’s arguably the ‘least bad part of advertising’, which is fraud and abuse protection. At least the systems I work on make things less terrible.
However, the ‘least bad part of advertising’ is still not ‘good’.
My favorite analogy for advertising right now is weaponry; specifically, guns. Advertising is like a handgun. Sure, it can be used for good, and sure, in the right hands it’s fine, safe even. However, the default for a handgun is that it is Unsafe, and you have to put forth effort to “use it for good” because it’s entire purpose is to kill living things. That’s advertising—its entire purpose is to alter people’s mental state without their permission. Sure, you can “use it for good”, and sure, you can make it ‘safe’. But it’s a lot easier to use it for abuse and clockwork orange scenarios.
I’ll be switching teams in the next few months to be out of Ads. Hopefully I can find something positive to work on.
its entire purpose is to alter people’s mental state without their permission
I think that’s the core of our disagreement? Here’s an example I think is about maximally sympathetic: in non-pandemic times I help organize a contra dance. There are people who would like our dance, but don’t know contra dancing exists, don’t know that they would like it, or don’t know about our dance in particular.
If I place ads, and some people see them and decide to come to our dance, do you have a problem with that? Or is it that you think most advertising doesn’t work that way?
> its entire purpose is to alter people’s mental state without their permission
I think that’s the core of our disagreement?
Yes, and I think that would be a better path to attack my position. There’s two attack vectors in that quoted line—“alter peoples mental state without their permission”, and “permission”. I would recommend avoiding the first attack vector; that will be an exceedingly difficult sell to me.
Permission on the other hand is already a partially open attack vector, and you’re much, much more likely to change my mind by that route. Examples:
I have very little objection to the ads on the Google web search interface. I don’t notice them, but I do sometimes click on them. The reason I have no objection is because “I was actively looking for something”, and the ads are almost always topical and don’t drown out real results. In other words, I gave implicit permission by searching for the thing that was being advertised to me.
I have very little objection to the ads within the Amazon search interface. Again, it’s because I was explicitly looking for the thing in question, and typically the ads presented are factual results that answer my query.
In both those cases, permission isn’t some implicit, distant concept; I explicitly make the choice not just to navigate to the site in question, but to request specific results from the site, knowing that the ads would be there.
IMO, that’s quite different from pretty much all other advertising: I’m not giving ‘implicit permission’ to view dildo or BMW ads when I go to news sites, or when I click around at random places on the internet. I don’t click on an interesting link because I have an explicit, well defined target. When I’m browsing, it’s like I’m walking in a park seeing the sights, or walking around Burning Man looking at the art. My expectation is that people won’t bother me and that I won’t constantly have ads shoved in my face.
Instead, I have to keep up both adblock and a hostban list just so I won’t be bombarded with unrequested solicitations. I’m explicitly opting out, yet advertisers continue to try to find ways to bypass that, in spite of my explicitly stated preferences.
I think it would be possible to greatly clean up the ecosystem by effectively banning ‘push mode’ advertising, and strictly only allowing pull modes such as my two examples above. Sure, it would mean a hell of a lot less advertising, and a LOT of companies would have to find new ways to survive. But those companies (and people) will figure something out. Some of them might even succeed because they have excellent products that people actually want, instead of due to huge propaganda budgets.
I’m not convinced I fully understand your distinction, let alone that we could codify it sufficiently to make it into law.
Regarding ‘codify into law’, that’s not an excuse, and it disregards how the US legal system works. If we can codify slander, if we can codify “harm”, if current advertising companies can codify “unacceptable ad”, we can codify this.
If you visit a model railroading site, are ads for model locomotives push or pull?
Firm push, but only because of the physical realities of the current system.
The fact of the matter is that by default, visiting a site isn’t a directed action. Clicking on links may take you anywhere, and links may be obfuscated. My preference would be that any/all landing pages should be clean, and ads only shown for explicit searches requesting explicit content. As a second best, I’d take ‘only show ads on explicit navigation after page landing’.
I’m still confused about what you consider to be pulled. If I click on a link within the model railroading site to their page about locomotives, would locomotive ads in the response be push or pull?
These extremely short responses discarding the bulk of my content feel less like you’re attempting to understand, and more like you’re attempting to get me to draw bright lines on a space I have repeatedly indicated is many different shades of grey. Disconnecting from the discussion for now.
I don’t mean to butt in. Hopefully this interjection is not unfriendly to your relative communicative intentions… but I found the back-and-forth personally edifying and I appreciate it!
Also, I do love bright lines. (I like weighing tests better, but only if the scales are well calibrated and whoever is weighing things is careful and has high integrity and so on.)
In places, it seemed like there was a different gestalt impression of “how morality and justification even works” maybe? This bit seemed evocative in this way to me:
Your example also reads to me like a classic justification for ‘everyone having guns’: “but what if I’m attacked by a rabid dog? If I have my gun I can protect myself! See, guns are ok to have!” Just because it’s possible to point out a positive use case, doesn’t mean that the remainder of the field is also positive.
Then this bit also did:
The point is that the target gets to decide what’s acceptable and what isn’t, not the… publisher, [or] advertiser, the distinction does not matter. The point is that the target does not get to decide.
For me, both of these feel like “who / whom” arguments about power, and exceptional cases, and how the powerful govern the powerless normally, and the justifications power uses, and the precedent of granting such power, and how precedents can cascade weirdly in black swan events, and how easy or difficult it is to resist seemingly-non-benevolent exercises of power, and to what degree appeals are possible, and so on.
I read Jeff as trying to break the question of “ads” down into a vast collection of cases. Some good some bad. Some fixable, some not. Some he might be personally able to change… some not?
Then he constructed at least one case that might be consistent with, and revelatory of, an essentially acceptable (and not unbenevolent?) exercise of a certain kind of power. One case could exist that was good for everyone in that one case… because it is full of puppies and roses for everyone (or whatever).
The “power” here is basically “the power to choose at the last second what some parts of a website (that in some sense ‘has been asked for by the person the website copy will be sent to’) might look like”?
If you object even to this one quickly constructed “best possible use” of such a website editing power, despite the puppies and roses… that would mean that it isn’t “the results as such”, but (groping here...) more like “who or how are the results decided”?
Which… maybe who and how any economic event is decided is more important than what the result in particular is for that event? Or not?
But if that’s the crux then it seems useful to know, and the example did suggest to me that this might be close to the crux. If the “best possible ad” is actually “bad because of who/whom structural factors”, then… well… that’s interesting?
However also this makes the larger logical case less likely to be something where an answer can be found that any sane person would obviously agree to. It seems likely that humans will dispute about structural stuff “forever”?
The entire effective altruism movement is sort of (epistemically) “humble” here, and takes as a sort of premise that it is uniquely EFFECTIVE (compared to other, plausibly “lesser” ways of being altruistic) because it actually uses evidence and clear thinking to figure out specific local positive cheap ways to measurably “do the most good for others” (thereby helping many people, one life at a time, with specific local plights, despite limited resources).
Gather data. Run numbers. Do single local “likely best” intervention. Update. Repeat.
By contrast to obviously locally improving little tragic problems in the world one case at a time… the “structural who/whom stuff” is notoriously hard to reason about in a clear and universally convincing way.
One thing maybe to say is that I admire Jeff’s seemingly very honest commitment to giving money away to help others efficiently.
Separately, I admire his search for flaws in the way he makes the money being donated. And I upvoted Dentin’s original comment early on, because it seemed central to Jeff’s search for critical takes on his current professional work.
Behaviorally, if you and he both continued to work in ads at Google, I don’t think I would personally judge either of you (much?) worse. If you stop with ads. If Google stops with ads… I think still “the ads will flow” in the economy by some method or other no matter what? And when I worked at Google, I worked on weirder things, and every time I met someone in ads I tried to thank them for giving me the opportunity to not hew too directly to instantaneous market signals.
Google’s non-ad contribution to the lives of generic humans is plausibly sort of staggeringlypositive (search, email, and maps plausibly generate almost $30k/yr/person in consumer surplus!) compared to HOW LITTLE it extracts from most people. If Martians were going to copy the Earth 1000 times and delete either “Google+Bing” or “the Fed”, or both, or neither, as an experiment, I think my life would be sadder in copies without a decent search engine than in the copies without the Fed. I think?
If neither of you personally solve all of the inchoate structural problems inherent in the global information economy of earth in 2021… that’s not surprising, and I don’t think it makes you much worse than everyone else who is also not solving those problems. And donating a lot to actually effective charities is obviously relatively rare, and relatively great. If someone is going to Be Part Of A Structural System which causes me to sometimes see dildo ads on the internet (which might inevitable so long as the 1st amendment exists (and I don’t want to give up the 1st amendment)), I’d rather it was people who can have pangs of conscience, and seek to minimize harm, and who are proud that “At least the systems I work on make things less terrible.”
And (though I might be engaging in cognitive dissonance and just trying to end on a positive note) maybe people in the world can also fix “the structures” too, somehow, perhaps a bit at a time, with similar sorts of the (relatively humble) kinds of reasoning as is used to fight polio and malaria and so on?
Or is it that you think most advertising doesn’t work that way?
Not the OP, but this seems obviously true to me, so much that I wonder how could anyone see it otherwise. I can’t remember the last time I saw an ad that merely gave me facts about something.
This may be a crazy idea, but perhaps an ethical way to do ads would be if the person who wants to advertise something would provide a list of facts, and an independent editor would create the corresponding announcement. Like, you could give a description of contra dance, plus time and place, and an URL to find out more, but you wouldn’t be allowed to also add images of half-naked women, flashing lights, or annoyingly loud screams. You wouldn’t be able to out-scream the other advertisements, or the content the advertisements are attached to. I imagine that for a reader this would be a more pleasant experience, and the factual information would still be there; I would be even more willing to read it. (But maybe annoying people works better for the advertiser, because the readers may have a less pleasant experience, but they will be more likely to remember. Emotional things are easier remembered, even if the emotion is negative.)
Sorry, what I was trying to find out was whether Dentin was opposed to even this maximally sympathetic case. Like, is their view idea that commercial persuasion is fundamentally unethical, or that it is typically unethical in practice?
Here’s another version of your example: Some people aren’t watching nearly enough snuff and torture videos. There are people who would like to watch them, but don’t know it exists. If I place ads for torture and snuff videos and some people decide to click on them while other people don’t, is that a problem?
As I mentioned earlier, advertising is like weaponry. Your example also reads to me like a classic justification for ‘everyone having guns’: “but what if I’m attacked by a rabid dog? If I have my gun I can protect myself! See, guns are ok to have!” Just because it’s possible to point out a positive use case, doesn’t mean that the remainder of the field is also positive.
And to be clear, I consider your example to be about as likely as the rabid dog example. Sure, in a world with perfect targeting it could be done, but we’re not in that perfect world, and consumers have a vested interest in keeping it that way. The new privacy initiatives are a big part of that.
If I place ads for torture and snuff videos and some people decide to click on them while other people don’t, is that a problem?
In that case I expect users to find viewing these ads incredibly unpleasant, on average, much more so than either the example I gave, or advertising in general?
(And almost all publishers would not be willing to work with an ad network that placed this kind of ad on their page)
You might find it unpleasant, but it’s it the job of Simurgh Followers to spread the Truth Of The Endbringers to everyone! Surely if people just watch enough of it, they will be converted.
The point is that the target gets to decide what’s acceptable and what isn’t, not the advertiser. The current system makes the advertiser the judge, and that’s not ok, even if we have managed to construct a sorta functional system that mostly takes care of the worst abuses.
There are a lot of decisions I can make to influence the ads I see. On facebook I can give quite detailed feedback. In the Google ecoystem I can tell google the interests for which I want to see ads. In many cases I can decide whether an app gets access to an identifier to give me customized ads or random ads.
At least on the internet you could argue that people give their permission by choosing to visit the sites (as opposed to avoiding them, or paying for an adfree experience). But maybe people aren’t giving their permission because they underestimate the power of ads and are not making a conscious choice?
Curious what you think of JeffTk’s argument about the counterfactual - would universal paywalls be better?
As someone who also works on Ads at Google, I have to take the opposite stance; I view advertising as a blight upon the face of humanity, something to destroy if we can at all figure out how to do so. I comfort myself knowing that Google Ads is arguably the best of what’s an awful ecosystem, and that I work in what’s arguably the ‘least bad part of advertising’, which is fraud and abuse protection. At least the systems I work on make things less terrible.
However, the ‘least bad part of advertising’ is still not ‘good’.
My favorite analogy for advertising right now is weaponry; specifically, guns. Advertising is like a handgun. Sure, it can be used for good, and sure, in the right hands it’s fine, safe even. However, the default for a handgun is that it is Unsafe, and you have to put forth effort to “use it for good” because it’s entire purpose is to kill living things. That’s advertising—its entire purpose is to alter people’s mental state without their permission. Sure, you can “use it for good”, and sure, you can make it ‘safe’. But it’s a lot easier to use it for abuse and clockwork orange scenarios.
I’ll be switching teams in the next few months to be out of Ads. Hopefully I can find something positive to work on.
I think that’s the core of our disagreement? Here’s an example I think is about maximally sympathetic: in non-pandemic times I help organize a contra dance. There are people who would like our dance, but don’t know contra dancing exists, don’t know that they would like it, or don’t know about our dance in particular.
If I place ads, and some people see them and decide to come to our dance, do you have a problem with that? Or is it that you think most advertising doesn’t work that way?
Yes, and I think that would be a better path to attack my position. There’s two attack vectors in that quoted line—“alter peoples mental state without their permission”, and “permission”. I would recommend avoiding the first attack vector; that will be an exceedingly difficult sell to me.
Permission on the other hand is already a partially open attack vector, and you’re much, much more likely to change my mind by that route. Examples:
I have very little objection to the ads on the Google web search interface. I don’t notice them, but I do sometimes click on them. The reason I have no objection is because “I was actively looking for something”, and the ads are almost always topical and don’t drown out real results. In other words, I gave implicit permission by searching for the thing that was being advertised to me.
I have very little objection to the ads within the Amazon search interface. Again, it’s because I was explicitly looking for the thing in question, and typically the ads presented are factual results that answer my query.
In both those cases, permission isn’t some implicit, distant concept; I explicitly make the choice not just to navigate to the site in question, but to request specific results from the site, knowing that the ads would be there.
IMO, that’s quite different from pretty much all other advertising: I’m not giving ‘implicit permission’ to view dildo or BMW ads when I go to news sites, or when I click around at random places on the internet. I don’t click on an interesting link because I have an explicit, well defined target. When I’m browsing, it’s like I’m walking in a park seeing the sights, or walking around Burning Man looking at the art. My expectation is that people won’t bother me and that I won’t constantly have ads shoved in my face.
Instead, I have to keep up both adblock and a hostban list just so I won’t be bombarded with unrequested solicitations. I’m explicitly opting out, yet advertisers continue to try to find ways to bypass that, in spite of my explicitly stated preferences.
I think it would be possible to greatly clean up the ecosystem by effectively banning ‘push mode’ advertising, and strictly only allowing pull modes such as my two examples above. Sure, it would mean a hell of a lot less advertising, and a LOT of companies would have to find new ways to survive. But those companies (and people) will figure something out. Some of them might even succeed because they have excellent products that people actually want, instead of due to huge propaganda budgets.
I’m not convinced I fully understand your distinction, let alone that we could codify it sufficiently to make it into law.
If you visit a model railroading site, are ads for model locomotives push or pull?
Regarding ‘codify into law’, that’s not an excuse, and it disregards how the US legal system works. If we can codify slander, if we can codify “harm”, if current advertising companies can codify “unacceptable ad”, we can codify this.
Firm push, but only because of the physical realities of the current system.
The fact of the matter is that by default, visiting a site isn’t a directed action. Clicking on links may take you anywhere, and links may be obfuscated. My preference would be that any/all landing pages should be clean, and ads only shown for explicit searches requesting explicit content. As a second best, I’d take ‘only show ads on explicit navigation after page landing’.
I’m still confused about what you consider to be pulled. If I click on a link within the model railroading site to their page about locomotives, would locomotive ads in the response be push or pull?
These extremely short responses discarding the bulk of my content feel less like you’re attempting to understand, and more like you’re attempting to get me to draw bright lines on a space I have repeatedly indicated is many different shades of grey. Disconnecting from the discussion for now.
I don’t mean to butt in. Hopefully this interjection is not unfriendly to your relative communicative intentions… but I found the back-and-forth personally edifying and I appreciate it!
Also, I do love bright lines. (I like weighing tests better, but only if the scales are well calibrated and whoever is weighing things is careful and has high integrity and so on.)
In places, it seemed like there was a different gestalt impression of “how morality and justification even works” maybe? This bit seemed evocative in this way to me:
Then this bit also did:
For me, both of these feel like “who / whom” arguments about power, and exceptional cases, and how the powerful govern the powerless normally, and the justifications power uses, and the precedent of granting such power, and how precedents can cascade weirdly in black swan events, and how easy or difficult it is to resist seemingly-non-benevolent exercises of power, and to what degree appeals are possible, and so on.
I read Jeff as trying to break the question of “ads” down into a vast collection of cases. Some good some bad. Some fixable, some not. Some he might be personally able to change… some not?
Then he constructed at least one case that might be consistent with, and revelatory of, an essentially acceptable (and not unbenevolent?) exercise of a certain kind of power. One case could exist that was good for everyone in that one case… because it is full of puppies and roses for everyone (or whatever).
The “power” here is basically “the power to choose at the last second what some parts of a website (that in some sense ‘has been asked for by the person the website copy will be sent to’) might look like”?
If you object even to this one quickly constructed “best possible use” of such a website editing power, despite the puppies and roses… that would mean that it isn’t “the results as such”, but (groping here...) more like “who or how are the results decided”?
Which… maybe who and how any economic event is decided is more important than what the result in particular is for that event? Or not?
But if that’s the crux then it seems useful to know, and the example did suggest to me that this might be close to the crux. If the “best possible ad” is actually “bad because of who/whom structural factors”, then… well… that’s interesting?
However also this makes the larger logical case less likely to be something where an answer can be found that any sane person would obviously agree to. It seems likely that humans will dispute about structural stuff “forever”?
The entire effective altruism movement is sort of (epistemically) “humble” here, and takes as a sort of premise that it is uniquely EFFECTIVE (compared to other, plausibly “lesser” ways of being altruistic) because it actually uses evidence and clear thinking to figure out specific local positive cheap ways to measurably “do the most good for others” (thereby helping many people, one life at a time, with specific local plights, despite limited resources).
Gather data. Run numbers. Do single local “likely best” intervention. Update. Repeat.
By contrast to obviously locally improving little tragic problems in the world one case at a time… the “structural who/whom stuff” is notoriously hard to reason about in a clear and universally convincing way.
One thing maybe to say is that I admire Jeff’s seemingly very honest commitment to giving money away to help others efficiently.
Separately, I admire his search for flaws in the way he makes the money being donated. And I upvoted Dentin’s original comment early on, because it seemed central to Jeff’s search for critical takes on his current professional work.
Behaviorally, if you and he both continued to work in ads at Google, I don’t think I would personally judge either of you (much?) worse. If you stop with ads. If Google stops with ads… I think still “the ads will flow” in the economy by some method or other no matter what? And when I worked at Google, I worked on weirder things, and every time I met someone in ads I tried to thank them for giving me the opportunity to not hew too directly to instantaneous market signals.
Google’s non-ad contribution to the lives of generic humans is plausibly sort of staggeringly positive (search, email, and maps plausibly generate almost $30k/yr/person in consumer surplus!) compared to HOW LITTLE it extracts from most people. If Martians were going to copy the Earth 1000 times and delete either “Google+Bing” or “the Fed”, or both, or neither, as an experiment, I think my life would be sadder in copies without a decent search engine than in the copies without the Fed. I think?
If neither of you personally solve all of the inchoate structural problems inherent in the global information economy of earth in 2021… that’s not surprising, and I don’t think it makes you much worse than everyone else who is also not solving those problems. And donating a lot to actually effective charities is obviously relatively rare, and relatively great. If someone is going to Be Part Of A Structural System which causes me to sometimes see dildo ads on the internet (which might inevitable so long as the 1st amendment exists (and I don’t want to give up the 1st amendment)), I’d rather it was people who can have pangs of conscience, and seek to minimize harm, and who are proud that “At least the systems I work on make things less terrible.”
And (though I might be engaging in cognitive dissonance and just trying to end on a positive note) maybe people in the world can also fix “the structures” too, somehow, perhaps a bit at a time, with similar sorts of the (relatively humble) kinds of reasoning as is used to fight polio and malaria and so on?
Not the OP, but this seems obviously true to me, so much that I wonder how could anyone see it otherwise. I can’t remember the last time I saw an ad that merely gave me facts about something.
This may be a crazy idea, but perhaps an ethical way to do ads would be if the person who wants to advertise something would provide a list of facts, and an independent editor would create the corresponding announcement. Like, you could give a description of contra dance, plus time and place, and an URL to find out more, but you wouldn’t be allowed to also add images of half-naked women, flashing lights, or annoyingly loud screams. You wouldn’t be able to out-scream the other advertisements, or the content the advertisements are attached to. I imagine that for a reader this would be a more pleasant experience, and the factual information would still be there; I would be even more willing to read it. (But maybe annoying people works better for the advertiser, because the readers may have a less pleasant experience, but they will be more likely to remember. Emotional things are easier remembered, even if the emotion is negative.)
Sorry, what I was trying to find out was whether Dentin was opposed to even this maximally sympathetic case. Like, is their view idea that commercial persuasion is fundamentally unethical, or that it is typically unethical in practice?
Here’s another version of your example: Some people aren’t watching nearly enough snuff and torture videos. There are people who would like to watch them, but don’t know it exists. If I place ads for torture and snuff videos and some people decide to click on them while other people don’t, is that a problem?
As I mentioned earlier, advertising is like weaponry. Your example also reads to me like a classic justification for ‘everyone having guns’: “but what if I’m attacked by a rabid dog? If I have my gun I can protect myself! See, guns are ok to have!” Just because it’s possible to point out a positive use case, doesn’t mean that the remainder of the field is also positive.
And to be clear, I consider your example to be about as likely as the rabid dog example. Sure, in a world with perfect targeting it could be done, but we’re not in that perfect world, and consumers have a vested interest in keeping it that way. The new privacy initiatives are a big part of that.
In that case I expect users to find viewing these ads incredibly unpleasant, on average, much more so than either the example I gave, or advertising in general?
(And almost all publishers would not be willing to work with an ad network that placed this kind of ad on their page)
You might find it unpleasant, but it’s it the job of Simurgh Followers to spread the Truth Of The Endbringers to everyone! Surely if people just watch enough of it, they will be converted.
The point is that the target gets to decide what’s acceptable and what isn’t, not the advertiser. The current system makes the advertiser the judge, and that’s not ok, even if we have managed to construct a sorta functional system that mostly takes care of the worst abuses.
You mean the publisher, right?
Publisher, advertiser, the distinction does not matter. The point is that the target does not get to decide.
There are a lot of decisions I can make to influence the ads I see. On facebook I can give quite detailed feedback. In the Google ecoystem I can tell google the interests for which I want to see ads. In many cases I can decide whether an app gets access to an identifier to give me customized ads or random ads.
At least on the internet you could argue that people give their permission by choosing to visit the sites (as opposed to avoiding them, or paying for an adfree experience). But maybe people aren’t giving their permission because they underestimate the power of ads and are not making a conscious choice?
Curious what you think of JeffTk’s argument about the counterfactual - would universal paywalls be better?