Well, I am quite a bit of libertarian myself, but not to such extent.
The independent labs still need big G to wield big stick to protect trademarks. And perhaps still need anti-trust law.
Furthermore, there is a bit of problem with advertisement. Free speech is extremely important, but advertisement makes me think of Langford’s basilisk . In the universe of Langford’s basilisk stories—are you protecting people from themselves by getting rid of the basilisks? Clearly not. But what if the people felt as if it was their free will, to buy product, after seeing a basilisk? As a part of basilisk’s function? The Heinlein’s approach assumes strong notion of free will.
The modus operandi in advertisement is that you do not have free will. In the advertisement based version of Newcomb, omega makes ads so that that you’ll buy 2 boxes. The first for a million, and the second for a thousand. And they both will be empty. But you’ll be happy. (note, that’s meant to be humour).
(Note that I currently deal with ads from the other side—the selling side. And I myself made ads for living. So my hidden agendas are towards advertising, not against. And i’m somewhat exaggerating evil impact of ads here. The ads don’t work on everyone, but they certainly do bias your ‘free will’ in the ways that you’d rather not. And yes, we sell great products using ads, too)
In the universe of Langford’s basilisk stories—are you protecting people from themselves by getting rid of the basilisks? Clearly not.
I think I might not be understanding your post correctly, but in the universe of these stories, seeing the nastier basilisks literally kills you instantly. Getting rid of the basilisks absolutely protects people—see for instance comp.basilisk FAQ.
The point is that you have to censor images out there to protect people. And in our universe, seeing the basilisks makes you buy stuff. When does it cross from protecting people from basilisks, to protecting people from themselves?
Well, statistically. I am not sitting thinking what exact hue will break your brain better, but I put damn good effort into doing some advertisment video, right now, for cinemas. (the rendering runs take a while, which makes me go on lesswrong, which makes me addicted to lesswrong, vicious cycle). And i use fractals a lot to model natural phenomena for ads. Thats my specialization (besides game programming).
When I was considering whether or not I objected to various types of advertising, it seemed like a substantial question to consider would be information asymmetry, since that seems to be a substantial part of ads.
For instance take the following advertisement:
Buy one get one free.
And then much later in small print Items ring up at 50% off regular price. (After all, it doesn’t help you sell as much of a profit if they just buy one, there is no reason to specifically call attention to this.)
And then not even stated on the page And by “regular price”, we mean what other people might consider a fake price that the goods are at only the legally minimum required amount of time so that we can claim that they have been discounted, because people love getting discounts and we know this.
Or for anecdotes, the “regular price” of a store brand of Diet soda I buy frequently is now 1.19. I don’t think I actually remember ever seeing it at that price. It is always at a “discount” However, it is now more expensive than it used to be. They can raise the price and discount at the same time.
It seems like in general, a lot of these kinds of sales tactics are specifically related to information asymmetry.
Now, this kind of information asymmetry can be reduced.
For instance, consider an app where you can scan the barcode and get a rescalable graph of the price which shows the information about the price over time, or if you wanted to be thorough, information about the price over time at rival stores.
That’s just going from one data point to two, and retail establishments are already objecting because it is hurting their sales. Imagine if you could instantly generate a three dimensional graph which compared the past year of prices over time at 10 stores and the reason for discounting. All of that is publicly available information. And it wouldn’t require any new hardware to make such an app. So it seems very likely it might happen in the future.
Then you could have customers who upon seeing your ad would say: “Well, I could buy this TV here at Best Buy at 50% off for 400 dollars, but Belmont TV is probably going to have it for 300 dollars when they have their birthday sale in a few days, so I’ll wait and then ship it from there.”
This app seems like it would be a good thing to have.
That’s a bit longer than I thought it would be, but it does seem to cover the bases. What do you think?
When does it cross from protecting people from basilisks, to protecting people from themselves?
Can you clarify why that transition is particularly significant?
Often when people use the phrase “protecting people from themselves” it’s meant to connote that this is something we shouldn’t do, as contrasted with protecting people from one another, which (it is implied) we should do. Is that what you’re trying to connote here?
If so, then I don’t think such a line is terribly significant.
Protecting people from one another can be a higher priority in cases where the incentives for harming others are higher than the incentives for harming oneself (which is frequently true in the real world) but that’s ultimately just a shortcut, not a fundamental dividing line. Useful in practice, but problematic to generalize a theory from.
I totally agree; I was more referring to the problem with libertarianism. Example:
Someone makes ads for some quack cure. For example, radium. People die. Libertarianism says, it’s those people’s problem, we can’t protect them from themselves.
Someone makes basilisk fractal that only works on some people. Some people die. Libertarianism agrees that information killed them.
Now, for some reason the former falls under their own will, and the latter, under non their own will (even though it is their neural network killing them).
Then genes are discovered, that strongly correlate with susceptibility to the advertising. Or parenting style. Or school environment. And suddenly, in both instances, people die, because they were shown carefully constructed visual (and auditory, for tv ads) input, due to their innate proneness to being damaged by inputs.
(I myself don’t really make marketing concepts, I just do some of the art.)
edit: okay, i’ll steel man this a little… it can be argued, that the people who die of ads, they could have somehow compensated for their innate failure, while people who die of basilisks can’t. Well, suppose one can do basilisk-training, with a milder basilisk, which makes one much more immune to effects of basilisk. But most people don’t do that, because they don’t need it.
That distinction [which libertarianism makes] does strike me as inconsistent and arbitrary. (and if one is to evaluate values of different types of information, etc etc, that’s utilitarianism).
Well, I am quite a bit of libertarian myself, but not to such extent.
The independent labs still need big G to wield big stick to protect trademarks. And perhaps still need anti-trust law.
Furthermore, there is a bit of problem with advertisement. Free speech is extremely important, but advertisement makes me think of Langford’s basilisk . In the universe of Langford’s basilisk stories—are you protecting people from themselves by getting rid of the basilisks? Clearly not. But what if the people felt as if it was their free will, to buy product, after seeing a basilisk? As a part of basilisk’s function? The Heinlein’s approach assumes strong notion of free will.
The modus operandi in advertisement is that you do not have free will. In the advertisement based version of Newcomb, omega makes ads so that that you’ll buy 2 boxes. The first for a million, and the second for a thousand. And they both will be empty. But you’ll be happy. (note, that’s meant to be humour).
(Note that I currently deal with ads from the other side—the selling side. And I myself made ads for living. So my hidden agendas are towards advertising, not against. And i’m somewhat exaggerating evil impact of ads here. The ads don’t work on everyone, but they certainly do bias your ‘free will’ in the ways that you’d rather not. And yes, we sell great products using ads, too)
I think I might not be understanding your post correctly, but in the universe of these stories, seeing the nastier basilisks literally kills you instantly. Getting rid of the basilisks absolutely protects people—see for instance comp.basilisk FAQ.
The point is that you have to censor images out there to protect people. And in our universe, seeing the basilisks makes you buy stuff. When does it cross from protecting people from basilisks, to protecting people from themselves?
Well, statistically. I am not sitting thinking what exact hue will break your brain better, but I put damn good effort into doing some advertisment video, right now, for cinemas. (the rendering runs take a while, which makes me go on lesswrong, which makes me addicted to lesswrong, vicious cycle). And i use fractals a lot to model natural phenomena for ads. Thats my specialization (besides game programming).
When I was considering whether or not I objected to various types of advertising, it seemed like a substantial question to consider would be information asymmetry, since that seems to be a substantial part of ads.
For instance take the following advertisement:
Buy one get one free.
And then much later in small print Items ring up at 50% off regular price. (After all, it doesn’t help you sell as much of a profit if they just buy one, there is no reason to specifically call attention to this.)
And then not even stated on the page And by “regular price”, we mean what other people might consider a fake price that the goods are at only the legally minimum required amount of time so that we can claim that they have been discounted, because people love getting discounts and we know this.
Or for anecdotes, the “regular price” of a store brand of Diet soda I buy frequently is now 1.19. I don’t think I actually remember ever seeing it at that price. It is always at a “discount” However, it is now more expensive than it used to be. They can raise the price and discount at the same time.
It seems like in general, a lot of these kinds of sales tactics are specifically related to information asymmetry.
Now, this kind of information asymmetry can be reduced.
For instance, consider an app where you can scan the barcode and get a rescalable graph of the price which shows the information about the price over time, or if you wanted to be thorough, information about the price over time at rival stores.
Basically, like the app in this link, but even more so: http://www.psfk.com/2012/01/amazon-retail-showroom.html since that only compares to Amazon’s current prices.
That’s just going from one data point to two, and retail establishments are already objecting because it is hurting their sales. Imagine if you could instantly generate a three dimensional graph which compared the past year of prices over time at 10 stores and the reason for discounting. All of that is publicly available information. And it wouldn’t require any new hardware to make such an app. So it seems very likely it might happen in the future.
Then you could have customers who upon seeing your ad would say: “Well, I could buy this TV here at Best Buy at 50% off for 400 dollars, but Belmont TV is probably going to have it for 300 dollars when they have their birthday sale in a few days, so I’ll wait and then ship it from there.”
This app seems like it would be a good thing to have.
That’s a bit longer than I thought it would be, but it does seem to cover the bases. What do you think?
Can you clarify why that transition is particularly significant?
Often when people use the phrase “protecting people from themselves” it’s meant to connote that this is something we shouldn’t do, as contrasted with protecting people from one another, which (it is implied) we should do. Is that what you’re trying to connote here?
If so, then I don’t think such a line is terribly significant.
Protecting people from one another can be a higher priority in cases where the incentives for harming others are higher than the incentives for harming oneself (which is frequently true in the real world) but that’s ultimately just a shortcut, not a fundamental dividing line. Useful in practice, but problematic to generalize a theory from.
I totally agree; I was more referring to the problem with libertarianism. Example:
Someone makes ads for some quack cure. For example, radium. People die. Libertarianism says, it’s those people’s problem, we can’t protect them from themselves.
Someone makes basilisk fractal that only works on some people. Some people die. Libertarianism agrees that information killed them.
Now, for some reason the former falls under their own will, and the latter, under non their own will (even though it is their neural network killing them).
Then genes are discovered, that strongly correlate with susceptibility to the advertising. Or parenting style. Or school environment. And suddenly, in both instances, people die, because they were shown carefully constructed visual (and auditory, for tv ads) input, due to their innate proneness to being damaged by inputs.
(I myself don’t really make marketing concepts, I just do some of the art.)
edit: okay, i’ll steel man this a little… it can be argued, that the people who die of ads, they could have somehow compensated for their innate failure, while people who die of basilisks can’t. Well, suppose one can do basilisk-training, with a milder basilisk, which makes one much more immune to effects of basilisk. But most people don’t do that, because they don’t need it.
That distinction [which libertarianism makes] does strike me as inconsistent and arbitrary. (and if one is to evaluate values of different types of information, etc etc, that’s utilitarianism).
Yup, the distinction you’re describing sounds pretty inconsistent and arbitrary to me as well.