I don't understand why so many people are addicted to outrage, anger and fear. For a while I played along but then I quickly realized that all this stuff is manufactured to manipulate people. Now I can't even stand watching CNN or watching a campaign ad.
I suspect fear and outrage releases some natural addictive brain chemicals. The fear and outrage porn industry certainly resembles an addictive substance scene.
At some point you should start getting bored with it. Same with porn. For a while it's interesting but then it just gets boring. Obviously I have no first hand experience watching pron. I only repeat what I hear from others :-)
Thing is that while the addictive use becomes 'boring' after a while (desensitized), an addict will still continue doing it. Often will go more extreme trying to compensate. Goes for porn, heroin, adrenaline and probably social media.
They do! Fear, anger, and outrage create a rush that stimulates your reward circuits with dopamine, in the same way that a thrill ride or a good workout do:
They also cause the release of cortisol, that depresses your immune system, unlike healthy behaviors like spending time with your friends or taking a good walk in a park.
Humans are at their core emotional creatures. You don't get engagement with logic and facts. Instead you go after emotional stories. It takes immense mental effort to see through these stories and to hold back the immediate emotional responses. Many people have no clue that they are being manipulated in this way.
I came to the US in 2000. At first I found the constant excitement in TV news interesting but after two or three years I noticed that I couldn't handle it anymore. It just wasn't comfortable for me.
Is it maybe that most people have checked out too and only a small but loud minority is addicted to all the nonsense? On Facebook it seems it's only a few people that constantly post web links or engage in flame wars. Most people I know are very quiet.
Just because they are quiet doesn't mean they aren't impacted.
I know someone who only ever posts about gardening, and yet I know for a fact she reads almost everything people post. Her husband on the other hand is constantly posting and commenting on far-right posts. They are still influenced the same way, they just express it differently.
That's by design and intentional. Anything you say online can be used to convict you in some obscure court of public opinion where your viewpoint didn't align with the mainstream viewpoint.
There is also the symmetrical problem of not reacting strongly to a story that deserves it. Plenty of people, it seemed, were quite non-reactive about the Snowden disclosures. It just wasn't an exciting news story, whether you were for or against him.
(This, I think, is the real lesson of computing in the modern era, that subjects will not object to being surveilled if they don't notice it. The abstract argument against it is predicated on possible future action, and the inability to stop it.)
This has its roots in our evolutionary history. Missing something positive might have meant missing dinner. Missing something negative might have meant being dinner.
I feel the same way, but it took time to get there. At first, it was more exciting to be plugged in... then you start to notice the patterns, and the lack of anything substantive. For some of us, that leads to disengagement, but maybe that's because we already prefer to focus on other issues?
I formed an opinion on a political event this year. I was right, but I didn't back my call and it cost me $40k - in the sense that I knew what to do (sell, shift to $) and I had the opportunity to do it, but I had a "doesn't matter to little guys like me" perspective. Last time I'm going to be disengaged....
Not long. We're at the stage where virtual assistants are being deployed through the population. As soon as people find reliable ways to ensure their loyalty, a strategic turn will make them unstoppable.
Phillip DeFranco isn't perfect, but he's graduated from YouTube punk to what passes as a "moderate" there. (I think he's a good way to keep track of the middle of opinion in new media there.) He's also decided to start his own online news network.
I don't think they will, they'll turn off the news completely and follow "news" about other stuff instead. Sports, video games, hobbies, they'll ignore current events and politics or anything else they might find anxiety inducing.
I suppose it is possible that a critical mass of people will give up. That seems unlikely to me, too many care for better or worse. The people that care will either remain poorly informed for gradually get more informed and by our electing of Trump it seems quite likely misinformed with reign for some time. (I am not trying to politicize this, but trump got huge help from crazy news sources like breitbart)
That would be fantastic. I'd love a plugin like that.
There is a problem in curation / moderation though. Who do you trust with correcting headlines? The public, with voting? Easily manipulated still.
Another problem this doesn't correct is the selection of what events to report on. To use an example from the article, terrorism would still dominate your news feed.
For the terrorism example you could have a nifty bot that keeps track of worldwide terror stats and local terror stats and report something like: odds of dying in terror attack rise from .00005% to .00006% (obv made up number) after {city} attacks. Would have to figure out how to do this while still respecting those who were affected though.
Or for clickbait science headlines immediately report the statistical significance of the cited paper/credibility of journal based on the number of citations that journal recieves from other scientists.
Some types of articles would be tougher than others for sure but that doesn't mean we couldn't grab at the low hanging fruit.
Dopamine. We market excitement and adventure to children like sugar (along with sugar, which is what's actually being sold a lot of the time), then most of them get into the workforce and discover that most jobs are bullshit and while the political system is nominally a democracy, most corporations and public institutions are authoritarian dictatorships. Some people accept this and can be bought off with holidays or being consumers, more intelligent ones who can't can be redirected into being angry at Those People.
In general, you can sell 3 things: 1) fear, 2) greed, and 3) sex. 30% percent of Internet content is porn. So you have number 3 covered. Selling greed is hard, so lets do fear.
Also, almost all of the B2B sector is selling greed (cyber-security being a notable exception), as is every ad-supported business out there. The whole financial industry as well.
"I'm sure we all agree that we ought to love one another and I know there are people in the world that do not love their fellow human beings, and I hate people like that!"
I encourage everyone to read the Lapham essay. The medium article under discussion here presents details, Lapham's essay talks about the historical forces driving the culture of fear. The problem I have with this meta discussion is that it also inclines to make one fearful. At least in this instance we're talking fearfully about fear itself.
For my part, I've begun to recognize that any news that provokes me to outrage was designed specifically for that end. This at least converts anger and despair at the state of the world to annoyance at the media outlet that would stoop to courting outrage. It leaves me with precious little news to read.
Exactly, I can't believe how meta the whole "This Is How Your Fear and Outrage Are Being Sold..." tile is. They are using your fear and outrage at other peoples fear and outrage to sell your clicks or attention to someone else. It's about like the, "my narrow media sources tell me that you live in a media bubble that isn't like my own!" argument de absurdum.
Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear.
Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.
But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful, it's that they're unconscious. They are default settings.
They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing.
And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom.
The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it.
But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving and [unintelligible-- sounds like "displayal"]. The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.
That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.
> The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.
What is the argument for why this is better than the alternatives? Self-sacrifice can also be a worship.
> and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.
It seems to have a religious "give until it hurts" type of mentality. Because giving doesn't really "count" unless it hurts. Otherwise you're just a rich dude donating money and that's not as edgy as a poet giving his last hot-pocket. Seems very Christian in nature..
But personally, if I were ever poor and starving - please, to whoever has resources (looking at you Bill Gates) - I will be equally grateful for all donations.
No, I just think it's paradoxical to free your mind of fixation only to fixate on something else (relentlessly helping others).
I don't think being happy, or contributing to society requires a fixation on giving - or for it to be uncomfortable. Bill Gates seems to be a pretty generous dude, but I don't think he makes being Jesus-like his identity. So in a certain sense, I think working smarter not harder is a healthier and more sustainable mentality.
Where do trying to be "Jesus-like", relentlessness, or replacing one fixation with another come into it? That's the bias I'm talking about; you're making a leap from one extreme to another that's unsupported by anything in the discussion, or the referenced text.
> The really important kind of freedom involves .. being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.
Are we not reading the same thing? Is this sentence not the crux of the entire message? It seems to me - by the word choice used - that DFW finds sacrifice to be "petty and unsexy" - yet does it to a repetitive extent for the sake of real freedom. I'm making the observation that that also sounds like a type of worship. Maybe it's totally off base, but I don't see why the point is confusing. It's pretty simple actually.
I don't think the author denies that this is a form of worship. Immediately before the above excerpt, Wallace says:
"Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship -- be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles -- is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive."
Meh DFW is the last person you ought to listen to for advice. [1] It's just demotivational-speak paraded around as if it were some profound wisdom, just to assuage ego of your average reader with Liberal arts degree. So that she/he can fool herself by believing that they are better than others because they "truly care"...
“truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them” is just meaningless babbling that you would expect from a writer who needs to sell empty wisdom to demotivated readers. In reality Power and Knowledge are essential if one aims to enable true change.
Microprocessors, Internet, Green Revolution, T-Cell therapy, China & India over the last 2 decades ..... You know the stuff that actually required knowledge and power. Not some feel goodery truthiness.
Yeah, this is the typical dismissal of anything not STEM!!STEM!!
In reality, technological invention has always gone hand-in-hand with progress in our understanding of how to organise a just and productive society. It's sometimes harder to point at specific examples because this change happened more gradually, but ignorance of this progress doesn't legitimise a wholesale dismissal.
Concepts such as the rule of law, democracy, capitalism etc. didn't appear out of nowhere, nor were they always-existing "goodery truthiness". And there's no technology that could be identified as central to their establishment.
In fact, I'm pretty sure I'd rather live in a society with the technology of the stone age and today's understanding of law&justice, than a society with the technology of today and the stone age's morality.
In as far as technology had an impact on such progress, Jared Diamond argues that it was mostly in increasing the productivity of farming, allowing more and more people to not work the fields, live in cities, and actually start thinking.
I get why you're being downvoted, but I fully agree with you. When I was still in college and read 'this is water' for the first time it felt like an epiphany. Now, a few years down the road, it just seems pretentious to me.
Also, I don't mean any disrespect here, but the fact that he killed himself kind of taints these sort of speeches for me also. How much better is his proposed lifestyle/world-view really, if it didn't even work for the master-mind himself? (Assuming that the goal is to be happy of course.)
EDIT: Just to clarify, I know he was probably battling depression, but should a person fighting such a severe mental illness really be the one, one listens to for live-advice then?
You can be wise and have mental health issues. In my experience often my friends with depression are wisest on this stuff because they have to deal with it all the time. Also, I don't think underlying health issues diminish it that much as you don't generally have much control over those issues
I wouldn't be so quick to say that Wallace' intentions are only commercial, i. e. "to sell empty wisdom[..]".
That's mostly because he's been dead for 10 years. Also, if you're trying to sell empty philosophy to "average, depressed liberal-arts majors who lack power and knowledge", it strikes me as a particularly bad idea to start with a 1,076-page tome? I mean–he could've at least made it a 12-part series, right?
You're also short-changing those liberal arts majors. After all, many of them go on to law school, with the result that Congress is about 2/3 liberal arts majors. And it's not like the liberal arts have nothing useful to teach. Most graduates would, for example, consider the idea that "in reality power [..] is essential if one aims to enable true change" a tautology in need of an editor.
>> You're also short-changing those liberal arts majors. After all, many of them go on to law school, with the result that Congress is about 2/3 liberal arts majors.
Congress the beacon of efficiency, progress and wisdom.
> In reality Power and Knowledge are essential if one aims to enable true change.
He's advocating for Knowledge so that you are not subjected to the whims or your "default settings" but instead are able to exercise _your_ personal Power on the basis of knowing yourself (and others) instead of just performing the script that is given to you by (this subset of our) culture.
Your criticism that "This is just meaningless babbling" which immediately transitions into advocating his point is... interesting.
"being seen as smart" refers to the external image of intellect, not to intellect itself. Wanting to be seen as smart, and valuing the cultivation of intellect, are not the same.
The most evident and problematic might be the worship of youth though. I'm curious if cultures in which the elderly are more respected and admired, are generally also happier.
They are not. Judging people by qualities outside of their control winds up giving respect and power to many who do not deserve it, with the pain that inevitably follows. This holds true regardless of whether the bias is towards youth or age.
Source: have lived for years in both types of culture
It's strange how many people in this thread are discussing concepts such as 'choice', 'do', 'freedom'.
Perhaps I've been too deep down the philosophical/metaphysical rabbit hole, but AFAIK there's only three options:
1) Deep down (past the turtles-all-the-way-deep) there's only chaos
2) <strike> Free will and alternative options exist</strike>
3) It's only predetermined order past the turtles.
And 2 is somehow impossibly situated on the razors' edge where 1 and 3 intersect, science is as yet undecided if 1 or 3, but our macro scale world appears to be 3.
'I' really 'want' to be convinced of 2, but it's something 'I' lost a long time ago, anyone care to convince me? These days 'I' find some comfort in 1. If it 'turns' out to be 3 'I'll' 'be' very sad indeed :(
Long story short: There's nothing to chose, either it's all been decided already, and your 'thoughts' are nothing but atoms and other things rattling around, generating the illusion of your conciousness, or there's only chaos and we're (also) never 'making' any choices, they are all just rolls of the dice.
On the contrary dude, I don't think you've gone deep enough. To dismiss the parent comment on some vague existential bemusement seems near insidious in intent.
At the risk of derailing this conversation into semi-unrelated philosophical conversations: Why is it you would prefer 2 to 3?
We'll that is why I asked people to talk me out of it ;)
Most people that I meet either assume 2 from the get go, reasonable because that's how everything appears to us at first glance.
3 Basically means we don't even exist, in the sense that you can't have agency/identity/whatever you want to pinpoint as 'you' if everything is predetermined. The closes analogy to 'real' (this is always a problem when discussing such things) people in our world is the experience a film character 'has' when it's played (none, it's not an agent).
Basically from 3 follows that, however counter-intuitive it seems to 3-type-people, you have no agency, no thoughts, no freedom, no choice I'd argue that you don't even exist or alternitively that you have always existed. Can you even say that causality exists if every location of every particle/wave/force/field/w\e has already been predetermined? AFAIK science does not really know if this is the case, and the only science I understand is the layman's tl/dr. But the general consensus, again AFIAK, seems to be: do more experiments, we're unsure as of yet.
I only know that we live in the macro world, and in the macro world the case for predeterminism is pretty darn strong.
I'd prefer 2 over 3, because 2 is the only place where a possibility exists for ethics and/or freedom. I can't be ethical if I can't 'do' anything. I can't 'do' anything if 'I' don't even exist (which I'd argue is the case in 3).
See other replies to your parent comment for other ways of phrasing that free will as it relates to ethics is generally deemed a moot consideration. That is, we can't predict the future from our perspective of reality (computationally prohibitive, non-deterministic, etc), so what the future will be can’t be taken into consideration for decisions of the present.
To me, your concern seems more related to the meaning of life rather than the presence of free will though?
Unfortunately, I fear that’s may be too broad a subject to fruitfully assess on a medium such as this forum..
At the least, I’d argue ‘you’ existing is the only thing you can really be sure of. “I think, therefore I am”. It’s harder to tell if others exist, and there are several branches of philosophy that outright conject that nobody else other than yourself does exist. EG: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solipsism
I recall studying free will in Intro Philosophy class, and Hobart [1] had a good argument that free will vs. determinism was a false dichotomy stemming from a misunderstanding of what it means to "choose" something.
His argument, paraphrased for the layman (he wrote in fairly impenetrable terms) was basically:
Say that we do have a deterministic world, where human action is the result of each human being continually processing stimuli, rationally (or emotionally) evaluating it, and then deciding on a course of action. The meaning of "choice" is this process, and the meaning of "self" is all the hidden machinery that lets us go from a stimulus to a course of action. People who believe free will and determinism are incompatible are implicitly positing that there's some entity outside of this process of weighing alternatives and choosing one, but there is no evidence for such an entity and no need to invent one. Rather, our common-sense notions of choice are completely compatible with someone having received a bunch of sensory inputs and then used the internal circuitry of their brain to decide on a course of action, and our common-sense notions of self are compatible with different people having different dispensations to make certain choices under various circumstances. And we can make moral judgments based on our evaluation of whether the choices another makes will be helpful or harmful to our interests.
Interestingly (and this is me adding to the theory after 15 years of life experience), this perspective seems to mirror psychological development. I've found that as I've gotten older, I tend to settle into my own skin. When I was young, it was like I'd frequently "pop out" of my self and my actions and be like "who is this person?" As I've gotten older, it's more like "Yeah, I'm me, and I make the best choices I can with the information available to me, and ultimately I'm responsible for the consequences even if they don't work out." It's like there's less of a divide between that automatic stimulus -> processing -> response cycle and my objective perception of my life.
I've always found the notion of compatibilism untenable as the problem is deeper than 'the hidden machinery that is in the process of weighing alternatives'.
The problem to me is that that machinery does not exist. It's not there, how can something (anything at all in them most extreme sense, a human, a 'system', an AI an animal the hidden machinery in the human brain, a bunch of particles or whatever) 'choose' when there's no alternatives? Real hard predeterminism implies that there's nothing to chose at all. Doesn't the theory of conservation of information tell us that information is never created or lost, so that on a grand scale, basically nothing is happening at all? All information that existed at the big bang is still there, and always will be. There's no place for hidden machinery to make more, or make choices. The 'result' of that choice must have existed/been known before, because otherwise information would have been created at that magical 'choosing' moment.
If we do not have free will, it would not be a tragedy. Ethics would still exist, and the importance of thinking about right and wrong would not be diminished.
Thinking about what is ethical often precedes acting ethically, because it puts your brain in a good mindset. Since we have good reasons to improve the world, we have good reasons to act ethically, and thus we've good reason to think about ethics. In this way, failing to consider ethics is a form of foolishness, because letting the world go to hell is a foolish thing to do.
This isn't a direct answer to your concern, but it might reduce how important free will is to you. If you're interested on the account I just summarized, see Derek Parfit's On What Matters, Vol 1 Section 38: "The Freedom that Morality Requires" (or just reply and I'll give my best attempt at answering).
Eh, in one sense you don't choose who you are or what you really value deep down, but it is fully up you how you end up expressing that identity in terms of the things you do during your lifetime.
Sure, you can then say that if all your thought processes are deterministic (modulo some inherent randomness), then even the outer stuff isn't really choice, is it? But the fact is, from your perspective the way your life will unfold is completely unknowable to you. And so, you get to experience the unfolding of your life and the "choices" inherent in that.
Freedom means the freedom to express who you are[1], right? Whether they are philosophically "real" choices or not is irrelevant. Have you ever felt the satisfaction of building something?
[1] Some people might call it the freedom to ~decide~ who you are, but one could say the difference is just a matter of perspective, depending on how much you see determinism playing into it.
The narrative that information distribution was more accurate in the past because of "traditional journalism" has always struck me as self-serving.
> Journalism — the historical counter to propaganda — has become the biggest casualty in this algorithmic war for our attention.
Is the best solution really to fight propaganda by leaving our information distribution to a selected elite that we have to trust to follow some standards? Journalists are humans just like everyone else, although we've been taught to think of them as super-moral heroes.
Is there a trustless way to implement journalistic standards such as sourcing?
> Is the best solution really to fight propaganda by leaving our information distribution to a selected elite that we have to trust to follow some standards?
Compared to leaving our information distribution to anybody who's out to make a quick buck?
I think the only obvious thing there is that leaving it to people whose actual motive is their profit, over your being well-informed, is obviously not the way to do it. It serves their ends to manipulate and monetize your attention in the ways The Fine Article describes.
That's not trustless, though. It's just ... call it "distributed" trust. The communities in question have, in whatever way, earned (or at least been granted) your trust.
Depends. Some members are known to be experts (as in: you can see right on Github what they actually do) in some areas so they are quite good primary sources. Sometimes people argue and provide links to support their point of view. But often you have neither and then the voting system plays the role of the distributed trust you mentioned.
I’m not sure if I have a great “all around” solution to propose, but I do like the idea of trying to remove the incentives to sensationlize anything/everything.
No. Everything comes down to trust and reputation. The NYT has over a century of reputation. When something like that is broken, it can't be quickly replaced.
No. You don't know enough to be expert at everything, and if you were to become expert at sourcing information etc, you'd become a journalist, the very elite you decry.
> Is there a trustless way to implement journalistic standards such as sourcing?
No, there isn't. But people really misunderstand how journalists deal with sources. Here's a recent compilation of behind-the-scenes stories from journalists, that also happens to better communicate the actual work they do than I've seen before: https://www.cjr.org/business_of_news/scoops-fahrenthold-greg...
In short, an "anonymous source" isn't just a reporter making something up. On the rare occasion that something like that happened, it became a major story in itself.
It's also rare for these sources to lie. These sources are real people, after all. And a lie would burn their relationship with the journalist and medium, and possibly beyond. For a politician, that could be a career-ending move.
Just to illustrate: we're reading new insider stories from the white house almost every day now. I can point to any number of anonymously-sourced stories that were later proven right by official announcements. There may be some that can't (yet) be judged, such as the persistence rumours that X or Y may resign. But the only story that was provably wrong was the Scaramucci-Malta story by CNN.
> But the only story that was provably wrong was the Scaramucci-Malta story by CNN.
There were at least a few others [1].
And those don't include the legitimizing of the Steele Dossier, which was a few levels separated from an "anonymously-sourced story," but hardly the paragon of journalistic standards.
And that doesn't take into account Comey's testimony, where he claimed that often the people talking about these things to reporters don't know what's going on [2].
I think people concerned with journalistic standards since the election aren't totally off-base.
> In short, an "anonymous source" isn't just a reporter making something up.
Is there really any difference who made it up if at the end the story came out false? If you look well enough, it's not hard to find people willing to say what you want to hear, and lying by proxy is not much better than lying outright.
> It's also rare for these sources to lie. These sources are real people, after all.
Implying real people do not lie? They do, all the time. Even more often, they are misinformed, mistaken, confuse their wishes for real fact, exaggerate their knowledge, etc.
> I can point to any number of anonymously-sourced stories that were later proven right by official announcements.
I can also point to any number that were proven false. E.g. CNN reporting Comey expected to refute Trumps words about not investigating him, and Comey confirming Trumps words. Or the same Comey calling NYT reporting "almost completely wrong" (I guess they got Trump's name correctly?) Not to mention that hilarious Fusion GPS "dossier". There's a ton of this stuff around, all the time. It's a free market - if there's demand, there's supply, and man, is there the demand.
> There may be some that can't (yet) be judged, such as the persistence rumours that X or Y may resign
That's a nice one because eventually everybody resigns (or gets fired, but that is usually also framed as "resigned", see Spicer), or dies. Since the former case is much more frequent, one can always bet on the rumor that X or Y may resign - eventually it will become true. It's just not true yet...
> to fight propaganda by leaving our information distribution to a selected elite that we have to trust to follow some standards
The members of the said elite would certainly like that. Even after they basically spent all their inherited trust capital on silly politicking.
> Is there a trustless way to implement journalistic standards such as sourcing?
That'd not be easy - you'd have to trust somebody. You're not going to go to every place where something of note is happening and verify it, and people that would go there might lie or be mistaken about what is happening, or their reports might be distorted, edited and selectively suppressed to make it fit an agenda. But we could raise the standards of who we trust and how easily we trust. That'd require some work and giving up on so much tasty outrage and righteous indignation, that I'm not sure it would be very attractive proposition.
The article isn't arguing for underreaction. It argues that overreaction is worse now than it was before because the new platforms for publishing have dispensed with a number of editorial checks that would have tempered the sensationalism. Its main aim is that overreaction is more expensive than many realize.
the issue of what one should report on, and what it might mean to be unbiased is broader than the one at hand. all discourse, whether well founded or not, is being shaped my a machine whose entire function is to optimize ad revenue.
which is kind of sad, but the part that seems to be really egregious is that by co-opting communication, its not just feeding on us, its shaping us.
Great article! And oh, the irony of having a very engaging title...
It seems it all boils down to incentives: if the only available way of making money is ads, news agencies will optimize for that. I wonder if new techs like blockchain/ethereum may provide alternative ways of making money with different kinds of incentives (i.e. not optimized for more clicks, but for something else).
I would be happy with just opinion free and divisive speech free headlines. If the big outlets could simply start with that, it might be attainable. Words matter.
It is alphabetical. Also it is wikipedia edits from the previous day, some days do not have that section, but I would say that is rare. The blurbs do seem to be more statement of fact than op ed especially compared to media outlets.
I would also suggest that the LA Times does seem to apply a lot of effort into separating OP/ED and news. They do publish a lot of op/ed, but it is decently separated.
There's no such thing as "opinion free". The events you choose to cover, the facts you choose to highlight, the people you interview, even the timing, are all based on opinion. Opinions and ideology are what guide us.
A better policy, in my opinion, is to explicitly acknowledge one's opinions and ideologies, and to have some humility, recognizing at all times that one may be wrong.
Hence the humility. But I don't know if the shrill voices aren't less dangerous than the supposedly "impartial" ones. At least you can usually tell what horse are they betting on.
Wow, this is exactly what I want, a TL;DR for news. Too bad this is so limited in scope.
I get the point of long form, and all that, but sometimes you just want the gist of it instead of digging in a 5k word article which starts from the childhood.
Looks like it's sourced from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events
I used to check that regularly for a while. Now I don't check the news at all. I realized it doesn't seem to affect my life much more than other forms of entertainment.
I noticed his violent crime graph stopped around 2013. Convenient. Yes violent crime is down by the standards of the previous 50 years but I'm pretty sure it has been inching back up over the previous two, at least in cities. Nothing to panic about yet but also nothing to be dismissive about.
Also, though I too long for the old days of journalistic standards, let us a remember one of the side effects what creating the assumption that there is one correct mainstream view of reality and that anything that deviates too much from it is extremism (or today "fake news").
There is almost no such thing as a bias free reporting of facts and events in the news. Many of the things which were in the past dismissed as the views of cranks are now accepted as normal. Surely some of the views expressed in the darker corners of the internet today will someday be considered mainstream and many of the views expressed by the mainstream real news will some day be considered nuts.
That's a bogus objection that ignores the yawning gap that opened up between perception and reality around the turn of the century, which is the author's point.
As for the argument about there being so such thing as bias-free reporting, you're extrapolating from that to a position of epistemological abdication where you use that narrow fact as a justification for believing whatever you want to believe. While bias is inevitable, it is also to a large extent measurable, and the quality of news reportage can be measured in terms of its predictive power by comparing contemporaneous reports with knowledge gained in hindsight and ranking news sources by their reliability over time.
Your first sentence is just a long way of saying "you are wrong and I need offer no counter evidence because I am right"
WRT your second sentence you are clearly so deep in your own cognitive bias you can't see anymore. I'd enjoy seeing such a study. I've seen plenty of reports about stuff that happened in the past century that were obviously now misreported by the mainstream press at the time.
It is totally something to be dismissive about because violent crime is firmly in a downtrend, that a year here or there has a slight uptick does not change the trend and is entirely irrelevant. To say violent crime is up at all is to be dishonest and nothing more than an attempt to incite fear.
What, even if violent crime is up you know the downward trend will continue so pointing it out is fear mongering? Given the down votes we can consider the point made; people enjoy being outraged by things they disagree with
Yes, misrepresenting minor bumps in a downtrend as "crime is going up and out of control" is fear mongering. We saw this lie continually used in the presidential campaign to mislead the right into thinking crime is out of control when exactly the opposite is true. The current liar in chief did this continually.
Regarding the graph of perception, it shows "% saying there is more
crime in the US than a year ago." That's more like an estimate of
slope than an estimate of number of crimes.
Also, if you drill down to the Pew image, and count years/tick marks,
the year perception turned from downward to upward was 2001,
which I believe is not a mere coincidence.
Increasing awareness of more distant crimes through social
networks and the aging of the baby boomer generation may
also contribute to the increased perception of growth.
This is what we've sold for millennia. Right from Roman-era gladiatorial fights (for pure entertainment) to CNN, Fox, or Breitbart disguising entertainment as news, telling you the world is coming to an end.
While we can and should certainly aspire to a different way, plainly presented news and information has few(er) takers in comparison to shock and awe. Humans love drama.
>Journalism — the historical counter to propaganda
"The good old days", except that never existed. Journalism has always been the tool for the powerful to paint a positive picture of themselves to the general public via "unbiased agents" called journalists who are "free to write anything" as long as it serves their masters.
Now that almost anyone can publish their opinion and share it with everyone, the ones who have been doing their thing for hundreds of years are being exposed.
This ignores the fact that many journalistic endeavors have been borne out by historical factors, although perhaps in your model of the world all journalists and social change occur only at the will of powerful forces which manipulate things from behind the scene. But not you, of course.
If you're trying to say that journalistic endeavors occurred because of multiple historical factors and not just a shadowy cabal, which is what I think you were trying to say, you may mean borne out of, not borne out by. 'Borne out by' essentially means 'proven by,' whereas 'borne out of' means 'came about because of.'
I mean by. I typed factors when I meant events because I was half-listening to someone talking at the time :-/
To be clear, my point is that journalism can be evaluated by how well it predicts outcomes, or how reliably it documents things that are subsequently judged to matter.
Just because we’ve removed a perverse incentive from the past (the oversight of the wealthy) doesn’t mean we haven’t replaced it with an even worse incentive (engagement-first monetization).
> >Journalism — the historical counter to propaganda
Wow. Then they need a lesson in the history of journalism. They might want to read up on hearst and pulitzer and the founding of modern american journalism.
> "The good old days", except that never existed. Journalism has always been the tool for the powerful to paint a positive picture of themselves to the general public via "unbiased agents" called journalists who are "free to write anything" as long as it serves their masters.
Agreed. It's a credit to the media how well they do their job to brainwash that they fool us into thinking they are objective and truthful. At the end of the day, foxnews and the nytimes are just propagandists like any other. But somehow, we have been told over and over that our guys tell the "truth" and the enemy spreads propaganda.
> foxnews and the nytimes are just propagandists like any other
This is a textbook example of the lazy, uneducated thinking that causes fear and outrage. Lazy lazy lazy false equivalence. To say that "they're all the same" is absolutely not the case and nor will it ever be. The sooner people become more discerning of the information that they consume, the better off we all will be.
There is an extremely large gulf in the baseline quality of reporting between those two outlets. If you cannot discern that, then you are too far gone.
Just because you find one source more politically palatable than the other does not make your preferred news outlet less susceptible to being propaganda. It was the NYT after all which convinced the public that Saddam Hussein was armed to the teeth with WMD's, and the only solution was to give him (and his oil fields) a little taste of Freedom.
Those two things are not mutually exclusive. All other things being equal, I'd rather cite the NYT than Fox News. That doesn't mean the scale of bias isn't the same between NYT and Fox News.
With regard to quality of reporting I think the gulfs really lie in the outlet/format. TV/cable news is worse than traditional/print news. Daily news is worse than weekly/monthly, etc. When you're reporting 24 hours a day you've gotta sensationalize a lot of shit to keep people watching. If you only print once a day, not so much. Once a week, even less so.
I've gotten to the point now that I usually try to avoid the TV and daily print news altogether. If it's not important enough to make it in a weekly newspaper, it's probably not worth knowing about.
I'll get myself in trouble, but the main difference between Fox News and the NYT is that the NYT is far more effective at disguising its bias. Let's face it, Fox News doesn't even try.
My advice to you is to follow foreign news services and compare the news you get. The biggest challenge, unfortunately, is that you have to dig a bit because lately English language news is dominated by stories from Reuters and AP. You best bet, by far, is to get news in languages other than English for a fair comparison. However, if you can't do that, you should search google for news articles and compare them to the equivalent Reuters and AP articles to ensure that they didn't originate there.
If you do that for a while, I suspect your opinion of the NYT (and many other respected English language news services) will change pretty dramatically.
Which is not to say that there aren't good journalists, good editors, good news stories, etc, etc. These exist all over the world. However, the news is big business and also an institution that is critical for political success in any country. Educating yourself on the level of interference that occurs will only benefit you.
Which sources would you recommend? The BBC and The Guardian are foreign and have their own news gathering networks but for the most part seem similar to the NYT. If it helps I can read French as well as English.
When I was a kid I listened to Radio Moscow and to go honest found it not that much different from the BBC..
Al jazeera is worth watching. Both the BBC and the Guardian, while being foreign regurgitate a lot of stuff out of Reuters (especially BBC when it comes to foreign news). Take a look at NHK -- seemingly highly influenced by the Japanese government, but worth watching for the contrast.
The key here is not to try to find the truth. Rather try to find different reports of the same events (or different editing wrt to what makes the final cut). It's quite hard if you are stuck in English because a huge amount of English language news reports come from the same pool of reporters. These reports are then packaged up differently, but the bias often exists prior to it getting to the final news service. It is interesting (and instructive), to try to find the source of news stories and then write down the names of the reporters whose stories make it into your news. What I've found (YMMV) is that only 3-4 reporters write most of the English language news for reports in certain regions. Those reports are then recycled through all of the news services.
I first started doing this for Japanese news stories when I found serious factual errors in English language news stories related to Fukushima and nuclear power in Japan. In one instance, all of the news outlets reported that the power station near me was restarting within 2 weeks. So I went down to the power station and asked them. They denied the story and in fact, more than 6 years later, they are still not operating (though they do plan to restart soon). When I traced back all of the stories that I could find provenance for in the western press, I found that it all came back to 3 Japanese reporters for Reuters. Since then I've off and on checked western news reports and still find that those 3 reporters dominate all of the western news reports about Japan.
Now, it's crap of me to say all this and not provide any proof. In my defence, I really don't want to get involved in the "fake news" thing going on in the US. It's not my intent to make any accusations, but rather to encourage people to look for themselves. I have not put forth the kind of effort necessary to make accusations that might affect somebody's career. What I'm saying is that it didn't take much effort at all for me to notice that something was not right, so if you look I think you'll also have no trouble seeing it either.
Or I might be mistaken. It wouldn't be the first time it happened.
The BBC, Guardian, NYTimes, etc are just the mouthpiece of the same group of elites.
To get a "diverse" set of information, you need to expand your "sources". RT, Al Jazeera, Xinhua, etc.
You need to get information from the propaganda representing other elites.
But you have to keep in mind that all propaganda outfits are in the business of SPINNING the truth for their own agenda. You will never get the "truth" from the NYTimes, BBC, RT, Xinhua, Al Jazeera, etc.
It's up to you as a rational intelligent human being to filter the propaganda from the articles to get at the truth.
> This is a textbook example of the lazy, uneducated thinking that causes fear and outrage.
I'm highly educated despite what you may think.
>Lazy lazy lazy false equivalence.
I have a degree in philosophy and I think you need a refresher course on logic.
> To say that "they're all the same" is absolutely not the case and nor will it ever be.
I didn't say they were the "same". Saying an apple and a banana are fruits doesn't mean that I'm saying an apple is a banana. Just because I say foxnews and the nytimes are propagandists doesn't mean I'm saying foxnews = nytimes.
> The sooner people become more discerning of the information that they consume, the better off we all will be.
Agreed. Hopefully, you'll join us one day in being a more discerning about information.
> There is an extremely large gulf in the baseline quality of reporting between those two outlets.
Agreed. NYTimes is far better quality propaganda. They have a lot more influence and credibility. But the NYTimes is still propaganda.
> If you cannot discern that, then you are too far gone.
I've been feeling that most "news" outlets these days (for a while?) seem like propaganda. But I think I realize now that this propaganda feeling is just a side-effect from trying to sell shit.
I'm very glad I found Hacker news. Sometimes I read the news just cause I'm bored. Now I can just read hacker news which helps me be a better coder instead of draining me of emotional energy
HN is hardly devoid of fear and anger and biases and prejudice and self interest. In fact it's pretty much filled with it -- but not quite overflowing with it like many other popular textual outlets.
And with all due respect, this thread isn't helping you become a better coder. If anything it's stoking our emotional needs, just in a different manner than say CNN.
A nicely laid out and illustrated article that's well written.
That's about the best I can say. The worst is why? Who is the audience for this? I firmly believe that if you found this article by clicking on a link on the HN homepage, then you already know all this. It's exactly the kind of article we've been reading about in one form or another for 20 years.
If you didn't find this article on the homepage of HN, then the odds are that you will never read it. Why? Because of all of the noise that the very article itself points out!
This is a type of preaching to the choir, imo. Reinforcing to the wrong audience. The points made are fair, but obvious.
I shared the article in my Facebook feed. It will reach at least a couple of friends that are habitual troll victims. I guess to your point, that probably won't stop them from being victims/easy bait. At least they'll read it, hopefully.
I highly doubt it will matter. I was at the dentist's office about 6 months ago, and as I'd had a few dental procedures done over a spread-out timeline, I'd made friends with the dental assistants.
We were talking about the news (which was on in the background) and I cautioned the lady at the desk to not put too much stock in it, and to wait around for updates before drawing any conclusions. She asked why, and I explained that the 24 hour news cycle often drops facts -- a couple of segues later, and I made the point that everybody thinks America is more dangerous than ever, largely because of the constant fear-mongering in the news, but crime statistics actually show falling crime rates over the past few decades.
She didn't believe me, so I asked her to Google it on the computer in front of her, which resulted in a search result something like this[1], but before she started giving too much credence to it, she Googled a few more times until she found an article about Baltimore crime rates going up, even though we weren't in Baltimore, and neither of us lived in Baltimore, and she'd previously admitted to not having been in Baltimore in more than a decade -- none of that mattered, because her confirmation bias was slaked.
We need to promote critical thinking skills somehow (obviously a difficult task though). I don't see how it's a good strategy to simply accept a population lacks critical thinking skills and the only way forward is the impossible goal of stopping all misleading news from reaching people.
The people that believe obviously misleading news are just as much at fault as the ones producing the news.
I put it on Facebook, I used the headline "what the human race did next will make you cry". Maybe this will turn a few heads that I've not been able to?
Judging by the comments it's not entirely preaching to the choir. It's also hard not to notice that HN is one of the highest concentrations you can find online of the very people who build this system.
"Regardless of the dramatic drop in crime over the last 30 years, more than half the population believes crime is worse than it was in years past."
"The children now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise."
- Socrates
This argument keeps popping up. To confirm it we would need a control group. It is likely that even before social media people believed the state of affairs worse than it actually was. Maybe people are more prone to believe that our condition is deteriorating rather than improving.
Isn't the control group the part of the graph from 1993-2000ish, where perception and reality are fairly closely correlated?
I guess that raises more questions than it answers. What about the rise of cable news? That tracks the change in the graph more closely than the rise of social networks. What about 9/11 and the war on terrorism? A significant portion of the US population lost their shit and never got it back. I'm not sure we should pin all or even most of the change on social media.
I think you have a point that the "good old days fallacy" has been around since forever. But it also seems like something dramatically changed 15 years ago or so.
As far as I can tell, "things are worse now" (or put the other way, "everything was better in the past") is a generally accepted thing throughout time and space. Including absurdities like "people were happier" or "there was less pollution".
I and I am sure a good percentage of the internet population always struggle with articles like this. I don't have an ad blocker, don't have any 'ad-free' subscriptions to anything, yet I never click an ad while at the same time am not particularly bothered by them. They're just noise, and since they register as basically whitespace in my head, noise easily ignored.
I don't feel 'at war' when I go online, and even if my attention is 'captured', it certainly doesn't translate to any purchased products or revenue for the 'aggressors'.
That being said, I don't dismiss that it does occur: as Max Barry the author said, 'the industry is making multiple billions a year - that money comes from someone' (paraphrased). Just not from me.
Nor does it mean advertisers can't track your behavior after the fact.
A conversion event post ad impression without a click is called a "view-through conversion" and is a cornerstone metric of most display advertising because the bulk of performance from display is likely to be view-through vs. click-based.
Advertisers without "hard" conversion metrics can still measure uplift just as easily.
I would like to think that no, my spending tends to be largely on things that do not tend to be advertised (craft beer and bills, mainly). But no doubt you are right. Still, if its so passive that I can barely detect it happening, all power to them.
You have to wonder how much of it's perceived authenticity is, well, authentic and how much is manufactured.
So while your particular brand of craft beer might not spend one dollar on advertising, it's benefiting from the general upsurge.
Apparently there is a book about it. Except:
In The Craft Beer Revolution, Steve Hindy, co-founder of Brooklyn Brewery, tells the inside story of how a band of homebrewers and microbrewers came together in one of America's great entrepreneurial triumphs. Citing hundreds of creative businesses like Samuel Adams, Deschutes Brewery, New Belgium, Dogfish Head, and Harpoon, he shows how their combined efforts have grabbed 10 percent of the US beer market...
Which craft beers? Most of them are manufactured by huge corporate breweries.
Do you own a car? What kind? Is it an older honda civic or something similar? In North America your choice of cars is almost certainly the result of advertising, both on you and on the people who's opinion about you you care about.
NZer here. Our craft beer is still mostly owned by small companies, with some notable recent exceptions. But for whatever reason I don't see ads for beer, either NZ or otherwise, online.
I own a BMW, but have no interest in cars and so don't see car ads online (nor would they be effective - the BMW was chosen by my wife).
I take your point, and I am not arguing I am the exception, however your specific examples probably don't apply.
Maybe the choice of utility companies? Internet, power etc. We have more choices here than the US tends to have, due to the smaller market and more government regulated competition. It's hardly a dire violation of my personal liberty if I am manipulated into picking one or another provider of fibre though.
I have a weakness for BMW myself. But when you look at what you get for what it costs it is the very definition of a status purchase, which is an advertising based choice by definition.
I think that makes my point well actually, you may actually be an exception but because of your social/personal circle you were effected.
Now that you mention it, a big part of it for me is the issue of liberty. I would massively prefer to make a choice based on having a gun to my head rather than being manipulated into it without my knowledge. In one case I'm aware of the manipulation and have a chance to do something to fix the situation, in the other I simply lose some liberty without noticing a little at a time.
It was a common saying when I worked adjacent to online advertising that "The guys who think it doesn't work on them are the biggest marks of them all". The reasoning was that they have no defenses and think because they don't click on ads (who does?) that they are immune to social pressure, cognitive biases around awareness, status concerns.
After I heard this and started paying attention I'm completely sold, people who say this are never living lives that look remotely like they aren't affected by advertising.
That's not even counting the fact that it doesn't have to work on everyone, just enough people so that those who don't conform are punished by becoming outsiders with all the social, financial and professional consequences that entails.
If we accept the article's premise (which I think I do), whether we click on the ads or even see the ads is irrelevant, though, isn't it? The need to get those ads in front of us changes the way publications write, edit, frame, and promote their stories.
As a kid, I grew up in a country with almost no advertising. Repeat after me: No ads in the streets, in the TV, in the radio, nowhere.
One day we found a magazine (from another country), which contained ads. Two people smoking cigarettes in a strangely alien world, some kind of jungle - or a safari, maybe.
This image was so strange in many ways: Why is it there in a magazine, that was about something completely different? Who does it speak to? What is this strange world depicted there? Why does it feel a so - unreal? And why do the people smile in the picture, even though it is unreal?
Image a day in your life without coming across an ad. Or a week. Or a year.
Take a breath and imagine what the world would feel like.
The need for advertising is deeply rooted in a society, that overproduces things and where a large part of your survival depends on your skill to sell. My deepest hope is that this world will be regarded just as strange as my kids eyes stopped before the strange picture of the two smokers.
Advertising is a fact of life, though. Without it, there's no way to inform potential customers of a new brand or product.
I mean, imagine if it all disappeared tomorrow. Wouldn't people just stick to the megacorps and established brands they already know? Wouldn't this make it even that much tougher for a Netflix to compete with a Comcast, or an Uber/Lyft to compete with an entrenched taxi industry? How would Dollar Shave Club possibly compete with Gillette?
I don't like ads, either, but the alternative is worse. It just seems unrealistic. I know it could be done--I just don't think it'd bring about some post-materialist society. It'd just allow us to pat ourselves on the back while making it that much tougher to start a business and compete against existing businesses.
It seems to me that the solution is not to ban advertisement but only certain kinds of them such as ones containing strong emotional (Ads guilting people into buying insurance) or aspirational content (won't you look so cool if you lived 'The Marlboro Life')
It's a matter of push versus pull though. If I know I want a product, I can search for reviews and recommendations, (half of which I assume are astroturfed, but I'm counting those as "ads" which would disappear in this hypothetical.)
How will I promote my new movie? Or book? How would I know to search for a Netflix or Uber or Dollar Shave Club or Game of Thrones?
I wouldn't, until someone else told me about it. And they wouldn't tell me about it unless they found out somehow. And how could you possibly differentiate between grassroots interest and astroturfing, particularly online?
Besides, how many months go by with you happily using your razor before you sit down to research whether there are better options? The vast majority of people choose to spend their time on more important things, thus further entrenching the status quo.
It'd only make all the things people hate about megacorps worse. We've already got this dearth of creativity and risk-taking in Hollywood. Imagine how much worse it'd be if they couldn't advertise something new!
It seems to me like reviews and word-of-mouth can and already do a good job of all this. When I find out about new things, it's generally through social networks. And when I'm looking to buy something new I usually look for reviews.
> How will I promote my new movie? Or book?
The same way that people do today. Talk shows, trailers (which you let people organically share, rather than paying to put it in front of people), movie/book reviewers.
> Besides, how many months go by with you happily using your razor before you sit down to research whether there are better options?
I feel like you're countering your own point here. Buying a new razor when you're already happy with the one you're using is exactly the kind of consumerism that advertising encourages.
> We've already got this dearth of creativity and risk-taking in Hollywood. Imagine how much worse it'd be if they couldn't advertise something new!
I disagree. Imagine if advertising didn't exist, and the only way to get the word out about new movies was through movie reviews, and so studios were actually encouraged to make good movies. I think we would have a lot less riding on established IP.
> It seems to me like reviews and word-of-mouth can and already do a good job of all this.
They do now, as part of a society that includes advertising. That word of mouth comes as a result of people being aware of things. Reviewers focus on reviewing things people are interested in reading about. All of these benefit from advertising.
> Talk shows, trailers (which you let people organically share, rather than paying to put it in front of people), movie/book reviewers.
We're going to get in pretty deep if people appearing on talk shows to promote something doesn't count as an advertisement.
Even trailers have to be promoted somehow. They run the trailers in ads because they're effective! They're effective because a significant chunk of people wouldn't have seen the movie, who otherwise would have if they had known about it. They would have known about it if the general word of mouth and close friends on social networks were enough. But it isn't. Clearly reviews and word of mouth are not sufficient.
> I feel like you're countering your own point here. Buying a new razor when you're already happy with the one you're using is exactly the kind of consumerism that advertising encourages.
Me continuing to drive to a Target to pay $7 for a four-blade razor with special proprietary blade cartridges because I assume better options don't exist due to not spending time researching the purchase is not reduced materialism or consumerism. It's just protecting the status quo.
> I disagree. Imagine if advertising didn't exist, and the only way to get the word out about new movies was through movie reviews, and so studios were actually encouraged to make good movies. I think we would have a lot less riding on established IP.
Putting aside that movie reviews are not as inherently separate from advertising as you're suggesting, I totally disagree. Only a small subset of moviegoers actually read reviews ahead of time and use that to influence a decision. We'd only see more people showing up to see brands they already know well (e.g. Star Wars, Transformers) and less likely to attend movies they've heard / seen nothing about. The people who don't value reviews won't suddenly start valuing them, and the gap between "things movie critics like" and "thing general moviegoers like" won't close.
Same with buying a soda from a company other than Coke/Pepsi. Same with buying an unknown shampoo brand, or an unknown car brand, etc. Except it's really even worse in other industries because people aren't looking for or expecting a new shampoo. And so we just stick to whatever we've been buying, even if it's some huge megacorp milking their brand because competitors have no platform to make the case that they're better.
I agree with you. Obviously I'm against manipulative, deceptive and obnoxious advertising but it's beneficial to consumers and companies for consumers to find out about new products through ads that will save them time, save them money, be enjoyable etc.
It doesn't seem realistic at all to me that someone would invest piles of money into a product that solved a problem people didn't know they have or significantly improves on an existing product where you're only route to communicate this with customers would be to ask for reviews, hope that your target market actively looks for reviews and hope word of mouth spreads.
Don't we hear all the time on hackernews about how building a great product isn't enough if you don't have a marketing strategy?
I find it hard how you can disagree with ads for entertainment especially. Why would you be against knowing a sequel to a movie or game you like but don't actively follow just came out?
There must be some happy middle ground between obnoxious privacy invading ads and no ads at all.
I guess to me that comes off as a meaningless platitude. Ads on TV (and other mediums) absolutely do show new things, including each of the things I noted in the very comment you responded to.
Megacorps benefit from pushing brand, but they'd benefit even more from nobody being able to push brand, because they already have one established.
no platitudes around here. you can't deny (well you can but you shouldn't) that the vast majority of ads are all brand.
Not talking about absolutes or semantics but:
Without the Big Advertising people would drift off-brand. maybe boredom, maybe trying what their friend uses, maybe (surely not) be affected by price and quality.
> Ads on tv do not show new things. They push brand. brand is mother, brand is father.
This is a platitude.
> you can't deny (well you can but you shouldn't) that the vast majority of ads are all brand.
Maybe it is--it's just meaningless to my point. Even if 99% of ads are all entrenched megacorps reminding people they exist, that other 1% could be Netflix disrupting Comcast, or Uber/Lyft disrupting taxis, or whatever else. Those disruptors who were previously unknown benefit much more from their advertising than Coke reminding people to not stop buying Coke.
> Without the Big Advertising people would drift off-brand. maybe boredom, maybe trying what their friend uses, maybe (surely not) be affected by price and quality.
Imagine how much more effective that off-brand would be if it could tell consumers about its lower price or higher quality, rather than having to just hope they found out somehow... versus a known competitor and brand.
>Imagine how much more effective that off-brand would be if it could tell consumers about its lower price or higher quality, rather than having to just hope they found out somehow... versus a known competitor and brand.
imagine you have an army of 100 and you are against an army of 1000.
now imagine how much more effective you would be if everyone had machine guns instead of swords.
I'm not so sure that's the analogy you're after. You'd have a much, much better chance of winning with the guns, unless you're fighting on a perfectly flat field (in which case you're toast either way). I don't think I've ever seen a realistic example of somebody managing to take out two people at once in a sword fight, let alone 10.
I remember ads 25 years ago would show new things constantly---usually for local companies as well, because TV and Newspaper advertisement was basically the only way to let people know that you opened a new store, or were doing a sale for XYZ products.
Those kind of advertisements are actionable, and the supplier wants to see metrics on how much impact a single advertisement had. In today's era, metrics are much easily found from online advertisement, and so businesses have gravitated to those, and most notably Google search ads.
Word of mouth is not enough for a 300-million market. Yet less observing other people, especially as many things aren't very observable. And to search for a product online, you need to know it exists and you want it. Nobody searched for iPhones before Apple started advertising them.
I had similar thinking about how alien that would be in a previous discussion around service culture in the US vs. Germany.
In the US, it is expected that employees in service businesses (think coffee shops, grocery stores, etc.) put on a smiling face and pretend to love their jobs. In Germany, I was told that is unheard of because it is thought of as inhumane to force someone to pretend they love their job like that. So as a result you get some less-than-enthusiastic responses from those employees.
I encountered this a bit in a coffee shop in Vienna and it was stark to say the least.
Agreed. A friend mocked British service standards the other day and I said that this showed people hadn't completely given up. It's a form of resistance.
If I had to work a shit job like grocery store clerk, I'd much prefer an ineffectual dolt of a boss telling me to smile than I would a German realist boss telling me a smile isn't a requirement of my employment.
Or you'll have an American realist Walmart boss telling you to "cheer" up. I see it as unvalued emotional labor, and degrading to those who do it as they are non-negotiably expected to do it.
Some people are into this, and some aren't -- but if you are poor and working retail, then you must smile and sometimes sing.
I have hard time to see how being nice to people is "degrading". Is it somehow assumed that only assholes are real decent people and anyone who is nice to the clients is automatically degrading themselves?
Yes, I get it - working as a clerk in a store like Walmart is not the most luxurious job in the world. But I, as a client, is not at fault that the clerk is not a billionaire hedge fund manager (neither am I btw). On the contrary, the money that I bring in are partially paying his - admittedly, far from luxurious, but still nonzero - salary. He is not forced to work this job, he could leave at any moment (he'd have to give up the salary of course). So is it really too much to expect some nice disposition towards customers which pay your living? I really don't understand how it's unreasonable and "degrading" to expect that. Singing maybe going too far (OTOH, the video looks like a dreaded "teambuilding exercise", that's the whole other story), but a nice smile?
Also, you can be nice to people without pretending to feel happy all the time, such as by smiling or singing. Being nice could mean efficiently executing their duties.
I'm not sure why talking about emotional labor, smiling and singing, suddenly brought on doubts about decency, niceness, and assholeness in the following reply. I see that as very stressful expectations to have for somebody.
Smiling is a communication of internal feelings. It puts pressure on me as the customer as well when I know my mere presence is an on-button for an emotional act for people. How draining for both parties.
>"He is not forced to work this job, he could leave at any moment (he'd have to give up the salary of course)."
A couple points worth mentioning:
1. For most retail clerks, the choice to leave is often "stay in a shitty job I hate" vs. "become homeless and starve (and potentially my family as well) because there is a lack of other jobs, high competition for them, and I live paycheck-to-paycheck because the jobs I can get pay minimum wage with no benefits."
2. It might be different overseas, but in the US at least the vast majority of retail clerks are paid hourly at the minimum wage. In fact, many retail employers do their best to have managers play games with people's scheduled hours to keep them under the amount that triggers benefits and overtime.
So in many (dare I say most?) cases, yes, it is too much to expect some nice disposition by default. That said, I would hope most people, when treated nicely by customers with realistic expectations, would respond in-kind.
> Or you'll have an American realist Walmart boss telling you to "cheer" up.
I don't think that video exemplifies the American stereotype you think it does:
1. One of the people recording this was singing sarcastically-- purposefully off key, and in a tone that clearly signals to other Americans that he is mocking the thing he is being made to do. He also posted it on Youtube to criticize Walmart.
2. Most of the people aren't really participating. Look at that person who is literally an aisle away from the action! There's also a group just watching the person who isn't in uniform make yet another recording.
3. Do you really think the guy forced to play the lead Walmart cheerleader to that un-licensed Queen ripoff is a realist? Do you think he feels anything but shame and embarrassment that his most famous moment is a pathetic (and ineffectual) attempt to wring a tiny bit more productivity out of his no-benefits part-time staff?
4. Have you ever been to a Walmart? The cashiers at Walmart don't smile, and rarely look up at you.
Compare to:
"Guten Morgen. Your corporate overlords have seen fit to allow you to be the only unionized Walmart in the world for another day. So give thanks, and continue not smiling as that would otherwise betray a transcendental lie. That's the German Walmart Guarantee!"
I don't think this is necessarily American, but more indicative of the relationship between employer and employee at a low SES level. My point was to show that militaristic German vs. relaxed "dolt" American wasn't the right framing.
Most of that CP did, at least where I grew up, was not advertisement but slogans. Like "in God we trust" in US. Nobody really takes it as an ad for God.
Could you quote a couple of them saying so? Because it doesn't match what I know about evangelicals, they don't exactly consider God something you can buy.
The territory government here asked for public submissions regarding the possibility of relaxing restrictions on outdoor display advertising. It received more submissions than any other it appears: http://www.parliament.act.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0004...
While I haven't read every one, most submissions seem to be against relaxing restrictions and in favor of tightening them up.
The problem is that companies can tangibly prove the benefit, even if it's minuscule (imagine if 1:10000 car ads will generate a sell at best, that's still better than no advertising), but the citizenry have a hard time proving the opposite - that having a sanctuary from advertising is actually a good thing. And because of that, I fully suspect ads to continue infiltrating our American (and British, and Australian) lives.
Even privacy is easier to advocate for than the intangible peace of mind an ad-free space offers. Even if studies end up proving that advertising rots the brain and keeps us too engaged, even if it is elucidated as one of the causes of obesity and poor sleep hygiene and attention deficit syndromes... companies will simply argue it's too big of a hit to their bottom line to quit, and that will be the end of the discussion.
...and people wonder why AdBlocking continues to grow online.
I suppose I might object that "making a sale" is a tangible benefit but that is a different conversation about the value of commerce in general. Let's not go there today!
I heartily agree with your thesis though - making the case that 'nothing' is a good thing is incredibly difficult. It took decades to prove cigarettes dangerous then get rid of cigarette advertising and that was linked to an observable medical problem.
I don't hold hope that we'll manage with advertising.
I have no TV. When I see an advert if I'm round someone's house or something like this, when you have not seen adverts for a while, they just look ridiculous. Some person telling you with utmost urgency about something so trivial.
I don't know why this is, but when you step back and are not used to adverts, when you do see them they just seem so transparently pathetic.
Used to do that too, when I was watching TV. It's strange how the perspective changes with no sound. You can block your sight by looking elsewhere, but you can't stop from hearing an open TV or radio. If you cut the sound, you cut their teeth.
> Image a day in your life without coming across an ad
I have had such days. I read a lot of stuff online, and I have adblockers. My entertainment is supplied by books and TV, where I watch either channels like Netflix or recorded shows, where I can skip through commercials. It's not exactly not encountering ads - and I surely encounter billboards when I drive around (though I don't think I can recall any of them, the mind filters them out by now), but it's pretty close and I'm sure I've had days where I didn't see ads. The thing is, they didn't feel much different from the days where I saw some.
> society, that overproduces things and where a large part of your survival depends on your skill to sell
That is preferable to the society which underproduces things and where large part of your survival depends on you skill in finding how to satisfy basic needs - food, shelter, etc. I'd rather watch ads than be hungry. My deepest hope is to always live in the former kind of society - where productivity is so high that it's ok to spend resources on convincing people to consume stuff. I've lived in another kind of society - where people spend resources on finding way to get decent food, clothes, books, etc. and where ads convincing people to consume some luxurious goods could not be taken but as a cruel joke. I'd much rather take the overproducing one.
>(though I don't think I can recall any of them, the mind filters them out by now),
Oh no no no. That is not how that works. Coca cola doesn't put up signs, ads, billboards, coaters and napkin holders with their logo on it to get you to stop and think about coca cola.
No. What they do it place their logo next to something that seems happy. Next to someone smiling or put it up in situations where people are happy. Relaxing on a beach? Coca cola flag. Sitting in a cafe with friends? Coca cola coasters sitting on the table.
Slowly but surely, your mind will associate Coca cola with happiness and relaxing.
And when that moment comes when you feel down. Your mind will think. I don't want to feel down. I want to feel happy.
I want happy. I want cola.
There is no such thing as 'filtering' out ads. They are not hoping you can recall them. They are designed to infiltrate your subconscious.
> Slowly but surely, your mind will associate Coca cola with happiness and relaxing.
Not really. My mind associates Coca cola with high blood sugar, diabetes and horrible tasting sugar water that would take decades off my life expectancy. Looks like I'm doing something wrong.
> There is no such thing as 'filtering' out ads.
I'm pretty sure there is, based on my own experience.
> They are designed to infiltrate your subconscious.
It's a vacuous claim - by definition, it is impossible to know what is in my "subconscious", so there's no way to disprove whether something "infiltrated" it.
Tell it to me when I start drinking that colored sugar water. Since I stopped doing it 15 years ago, the thought of it still disgusts me. Maybe I need to give it more time to work...
> Santa Claus is a Coke Ad
For you, maybe. Most people have no idea about that, admittedly fascinating, bit of trivia. The article is called "Things You Never Knew" - and for a reason. It's hard for an ad to work if nobody has any idea what it is advertising. Ah, but of course - it's "subconscious", so all normal laws of the universe are suspended and magic is real.
That version of Santa Claus may have started that way, but it isn't any longer. Kids will grow up today never knowing that it is a Coke advert and will never associate the two until they learn the truth at a later stage of life.
And that version of Santa Claus was still based on fictional folk characters from history.
My point is two-fold: 1. There exists a sophisticated art and science of "subconscious" and it's used extensively in the advertising industry. 2. Even if you isolate yourself from ads personally, there is a huge and largely inescapable effect from rampant commercial advertising.
If the fact that a soda company can suborn an ancient figure like Saint Nick so completely that no one remembers it happened doesn't drive the point home then consider this: Diamond engagement rings are a deliberately ad-created "tradition".
I'm just supporting what the other poster said about advertising not always having the intended effect.
There are some brands I actively avoid simply because I didn't like their advertisements, or how often they advertise and others where no amount of advertising will convince me to use their product (like Coke for example, because I think it tastes vile and I know it's basically just unhealthy sugar water).
Ah, cheers. I think I was a little worked up yesterday. ;-)
And I agree with you about advertising and unintended effects. To me modern life seems more and more like a giant open-ended experiment, one with no control group...
> That is preferable to the society which underproduces things and where large part of your survival depends on you skill in finding how to satisfy basic needs - food, shelter, etc. I'd rather watch ads than be hungry.
And that is perfectly correct. One thing I might add is that capitalism looks much like communism in the long run as companies merge, fuse and become bigger and bigger, because centralisation and control are the key for efficiency. Wasn't it in the news recently? One of the biggest companies on this planet on a mission to get a share of every transaction on this planet.
> is that capitalism looks much like communism in the long run
Not sure what you mean here. In the long run, any communist country has ended up either being completely ruined (USSR, Venezuela, Cuba, North Korea) or turning back to capitalism (China, Viet Nam, East Europe). Surely capitalism's track record is not that sordid.
> as companies merge, fuse and become bigger and bigger
Companies also break up and whither away.
> because centralisation and control are the key for efficiency
Only for very narrow understanding of efficiency, taken as saving money on very mundane tasks. The same harsh reality of information flows that leads to socialist central planning end up in disaster in the long run applies to the capitalist conglomerates. Unless they are centralized only by name (as it is the case in holding companies, not exercising centralized operational control), they grow rigid, their technologies and business processes grow stale, and eventually they are beaten by young and hungry newcomers to the market.
The only way that they know to resist this process is to enshrine their way of doing business and their position in the market by coopting government regulation and raising entry barriers. That's why they spend so much money on lobbying - it is one of the most profitable investments known to mankind.
> One of the biggest companies on this planet on a mission to get a share of every transaction on this planet.
Not sure what that is about. Which company is that?
Food and Shelter don't need advertisements. Hamburger Helper and Mariott need advertisements. Advertisements don't help finding a realtor or choosing a store to shop food for at. Advertisements don't help in acquiring clothes. Capitalism did all these things with very little help from modern advertisement since the "invention" of capital.
>I've lived in another kind of society - where people spend resources on finding way to get decent food, clothes, books, etc.
How would overt modern advertising have fixed that? Do you think we don't spend resources on having the advertising find us instead of us finding the products? Does advertising even help with finding decent food, are lies forbidden when you advertise?
There's a wide gulf between advertising you have the cheapest apples in town on a sign in front of your store and advertising Red Lobster's Lobsterfest. Capitalism works fine under either example though.
> Capitalism did all these things with very little help from modern advertisement since the "invention" of capital.
Media advertising exists at least since 18th century (in our common modern understanding, commercial and political writings that can be reasonably considered ads were found on the walls of Pompeii, and probably exist since writing was invented). So there pretty much was never a period where modern capitalism existed and advertising didn't.
> How would overt modern advertising have fixed that?
It is not fixing that, it is a direct and inevitable result of abundance of resources. If you have surplus of resources available for consumption, you will need to choose which ones to consume. Thus, advertising - i.e. speech that is intended to make you to choose one particular resource - becomes profitable.
> Does advertising even help with finding decent food
> I have no idea why you are italicizing types of logical fallacies.
If I were to guess, it is because it it is a term from a foreign language, in this case Latin, not because it is the name of a logical fallacy.
There exists an orthographic, or perhaps typographic practice in English to italicize words and phrases borrowed from other languages, like à la carte, du jour, sine qua non, ...
It's customary in some contexts to italicize "loan words". The terms for the fallacies come from the Latin. Ergo...
As for your second point, I think it's pretty clear from both my comments and their context why I'm pointing out those fallacies. That said, in the case of "non sequitur", I was actually referring more to the literary sense of the term — "Where the hell did that come from?" — than the fallacious "does not follow" sense.
Those terms are used all the time on hn but not usually italicized, but that's fair, I get your point.
When you respond twice in a row in a comment chain saying that they are using a logical fallacy, and nothing else, you've done nothing to add to the conversation, but are playing the role of Logic Studies 101 Professor. That's probably what they meant by the looking back on on your writing comment.
I think the biggest problem is that the media got dissolved within social networks
clickbait titles were existing before - just remember tabloids.
the thing is that when you see offline media you see:
1. the brand
2. you know how reliable is this media
3. you usually know the audience and think if you're part of it and trust the media
so in offline, they don't afraid that their reader will buy something else (well they afraid, but it's not a matter of click)
in facebook it's all just titles when reposted and people don't check where exactly it was published before clicking
so it's just like "national examiner" will have a version published in the design of nytimes or anything else - so they will not only have their audience but will try to get a slice of other media's audience
it could have been a quite complex thing to do for offline media as you need to actually print the edition, and pay money for it, but it's free for online, and you get money per view/per click
so i think it's definitely a war between media for this new spread audience on social, there should be a new way to re-establish reliability
As the article mentions, this sensationalism was also a problem in the past. I think the big change is the subscription model vs the one-off model. A one-off model whether sold on the street or on the Internet favors a sensational attention grabbing. A subscription model favors long term value which is insight and honesty.
I am happy that some of these traditional newspapers are going back to a traditional model. I would guess that if you compared headlines from newspapers that are subscription vs ad based, the ad based ones have significantly more sensational headlines.
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[ 6.2 ms ] story [ 290 ms ] threadhttps://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/culture-shrink/201508/a...
They also cause the release of cortisol, that depresses your immune system, unlike healthy behaviors like spending time with your friends or taking a good walk in a park.
Is it maybe that most people have checked out too and only a small but loud minority is addicted to all the nonsense? On Facebook it seems it's only a few people that constantly post web links or engage in flame wars. Most people I know are very quiet.
I know someone who only ever posts about gardening, and yet I know for a fact she reads almost everything people post. Her husband on the other hand is constantly posting and commenting on far-right posts. They are still influenced the same way, they just express it differently.
That's by design and intentional. Anything you say online can be used to convict you in some obscure court of public opinion where your viewpoint didn't align with the mainstream viewpoint.
(This, I think, is the real lesson of computing in the modern era, that subjects will not object to being surveilled if they don't notice it. The abstract argument against it is predicated on possible future action, and the inability to stop it.)
2) Negativity is more contagious.
Will it ever happen? If not will the economic repercussions leave us with a decent world or some kind of dystopia?
Such things started forming on YouTube (with some problematic elements) but were defunded with an eye towards attracting more old media ad money.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MfHXXV45EjE
Phillip DeFranco isn't perfect, but he's graduated from YouTube punk to what passes as a "moderate" there. (I think he's a good way to keep track of the middle of opinion in new media there.) He's also decided to start his own online news network.
That's what I do anyway, I'm much happier for it.
There is a problem in curation / moderation though. Who do you trust with correcting headlines? The public, with voting? Easily manipulated still.
Another problem this doesn't correct is the selection of what events to report on. To use an example from the article, terrorism would still dominate your news feed.
Or for clickbait science headlines immediately report the statistical significance of the cited paper/credibility of journal based on the number of citations that journal recieves from other scientists.
Some types of articles would be tougher than others for sure but that doesn't mean we couldn't grab at the low hanging fruit.
Money still sells most of all. Fear is just catching up now that the "news" is instant.
I know right? It's outrageous how people are so addicted to outrage, anger and fear. :)
> Now I can't even stand watching CNN or watching a campaign ad.
I stopped watching cable news a long time ago. I also canceled my subscription to useless things like NYTimes, NPR, etc.
It's amazing how much media influences the way you think and contorts your viewpoint to their extremism.
Knowing that these people are around makes my blood boil!!!!
The great Tom Lehrer: National Brotherhood Week
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPNsr0mhcrY
And of course they'll rather challenge you to a duel with kitchen knives before admitting the real reason.
So yeah, emotional creatures. Most of the "humans" are more like "animals in human body form".
https://youtu.be/rE3j_RHkqJc
(This is to increase the discussion spectrum, not to shut down the one started here)
For my part, I've begun to recognize that any news that provokes me to outrage was designed specifically for that end. This at least converts anger and despair at the state of the world to annoyance at the media outlet that would stoop to courting outrage. It leaves me with precious little news to read.
https://itscoffeeti.me/secrets-of-monetizing-a-medium-blog-d...
But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful, it's that they're unconscious. They are default settings. They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing.
And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom.
The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving and [unintelligible-- sounds like "displayal"]. The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.
That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.
DFW, 2005.
What is the argument for why this is better than the alternatives? Self-sacrifice can also be a worship.
He is not arguing that you be a doormat. He is arguing that you be attentive and aware of your own mind's biases.
The supposition being that when you are free from these controls, you will be able to see others as more than just means to ends.
It seems to have a religious "give until it hurts" type of mentality. Because giving doesn't really "count" unless it hurts. Otherwise you're just a rich dude donating money and that's not as edgy as a poet giving his last hot-pocket. Seems very Christian in nature..
But personally, if I were ever poor and starving - please, to whoever has resources (looking at you Bill Gates) - I will be equally grateful for all donations.
I don't think being happy, or contributing to society requires a fixation on giving - or for it to be uncomfortable. Bill Gates seems to be a pretty generous dude, but I don't think he makes being Jesus-like his identity. So in a certain sense, I think working smarter not harder is a healthier and more sustainable mentality.
Are we not reading the same thing? Is this sentence not the crux of the entire message? It seems to me - by the word choice used - that DFW finds sacrifice to be "petty and unsexy" - yet does it to a repetitive extent for the sake of real freedom. I'm making the observation that that also sounds like a type of worship. Maybe it's totally off base, but I don't see why the point is confusing. It's pretty simple actually.
"Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship -- be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles -- is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive."
“truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them” is just meaningless babbling that you would expect from a writer who needs to sell empty wisdom to demotivated readers. In reality Power and Knowledge are essential if one aims to enable true change.
[1] http://www.vulture.com/2015/06/rewriting-of-david-foster-wal...
In reality, technological invention has always gone hand-in-hand with progress in our understanding of how to organise a just and productive society. It's sometimes harder to point at specific examples because this change happened more gradually, but ignorance of this progress doesn't legitimise a wholesale dismissal.
Concepts such as the rule of law, democracy, capitalism etc. didn't appear out of nowhere, nor were they always-existing "goodery truthiness". And there's no technology that could be identified as central to their establishment.
In fact, I'm pretty sure I'd rather live in a society with the technology of the stone age and today's understanding of law&justice, than a society with the technology of today and the stone age's morality.
In as far as technology had an impact on such progress, Jared Diamond argues that it was mostly in increasing the productivity of farming, allowing more and more people to not work the fields, live in cities, and actually start thinking.
> I'm pretty sure I'd rather live in a society with the technology of the stone age and today's understanding of law&justice
I'm sure we could conduct an easy experiment.. but maybe that's too empirical for you
Also, I don't mean any disrespect here, but the fact that he killed himself kind of taints these sort of speeches for me also. How much better is his proposed lifestyle/world-view really, if it didn't even work for the master-mind himself? (Assuming that the goal is to be happy of course.)
EDIT: Just to clarify, I know he was probably battling depression, but should a person fighting such a severe mental illness really be the one, one listens to for live-advice then?
That's mostly because he's been dead for 10 years. Also, if you're trying to sell empty philosophy to "average, depressed liberal-arts majors who lack power and knowledge", it strikes me as a particularly bad idea to start with a 1,076-page tome? I mean–he could've at least made it a 12-part series, right?
You're also short-changing those liberal arts majors. After all, many of them go on to law school, with the result that Congress is about 2/3 liberal arts majors. And it's not like the liberal arts have nothing useful to teach. Most graduates would, for example, consider the idea that "in reality power [..] is essential if one aims to enable true change" a tautology in need of an editor.
Congress the beacon of efficiency, progress and wisdom.
Some of the best technologists I've ever worked with were film majors, history majors, philosophy majors, sociology majors, &c.
By far, the most important skill for this kind of work is critical thinking.
He's advocating for Knowledge so that you are not subjected to the whims or your "default settings" but instead are able to exercise _your_ personal Power on the basis of knowing yourself (and others) instead of just performing the script that is given to you by (this subset of our) culture.
Your criticism that "This is just meaningless babbling" which immediately transitions into advocating his point is... interesting.
This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8CrOL-ydFMI
Source: have lived for years in both types of culture
Perhaps I've been too deep down the philosophical/metaphysical rabbit hole, but AFAIK there's only three options:
And 2 is somehow impossibly situated on the razors' edge where 1 and 3 intersect, science is as yet undecided if 1 or 3, but our macro scale world appears to be 3.'I' really 'want' to be convinced of 2, but it's something 'I' lost a long time ago, anyone care to convince me? These days 'I' find some comfort in 1. If it 'turns' out to be 3 'I'll' 'be' very sad indeed :(
Long story short: There's nothing to chose, either it's all been decided already, and your 'thoughts' are nothing but atoms and other things rattling around, generating the illusion of your conciousness, or there's only chaos and we're (also) never 'making' any choices, they are all just rolls of the dice.
At the risk of derailing this conversation into semi-unrelated philosophical conversations: Why is it you would prefer 2 to 3?
We'll that is why I asked people to talk me out of it ;)
Most people that I meet either assume 2 from the get go, reasonable because that's how everything appears to us at first glance.
3 Basically means we don't even exist, in the sense that you can't have agency/identity/whatever you want to pinpoint as 'you' if everything is predetermined. The closes analogy to 'real' (this is always a problem when discussing such things) people in our world is the experience a film character 'has' when it's played (none, it's not an agent).
Basically from 3 follows that, however counter-intuitive it seems to 3-type-people, you have no agency, no thoughts, no freedom, no choice I'd argue that you don't even exist or alternitively that you have always existed. Can you even say that causality exists if every location of every particle/wave/force/field/w\e has already been predetermined? AFAIK science does not really know if this is the case, and the only science I understand is the layman's tl/dr. But the general consensus, again AFIAK, seems to be: do more experiments, we're unsure as of yet.
I only know that we live in the macro world, and in the macro world the case for predeterminism is pretty darn strong.
I'd prefer 2 over 3, because 2 is the only place where a possibility exists for ethics and/or freedom. I can't be ethical if I can't 'do' anything. I can't 'do' anything if 'I' don't even exist (which I'd argue is the case in 3).
To me, your concern seems more related to the meaning of life rather than the presence of free will though?
Unfortunately, I fear that’s may be too broad a subject to fruitfully assess on a medium such as this forum..
At the least, I’d argue ‘you’ existing is the only thing you can really be sure of. “I think, therefore I am”. It’s harder to tell if others exist, and there are several branches of philosophy that outright conject that nobody else other than yourself does exist. EG: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solipsism
His argument, paraphrased for the layman (he wrote in fairly impenetrable terms) was basically:
Say that we do have a deterministic world, where human action is the result of each human being continually processing stimuli, rationally (or emotionally) evaluating it, and then deciding on a course of action. The meaning of "choice" is this process, and the meaning of "self" is all the hidden machinery that lets us go from a stimulus to a course of action. People who believe free will and determinism are incompatible are implicitly positing that there's some entity outside of this process of weighing alternatives and choosing one, but there is no evidence for such an entity and no need to invent one. Rather, our common-sense notions of choice are completely compatible with someone having received a bunch of sensory inputs and then used the internal circuitry of their brain to decide on a course of action, and our common-sense notions of self are compatible with different people having different dispensations to make certain choices under various circumstances. And we can make moral judgments based on our evaluation of whether the choices another makes will be helpful or harmful to our interests.
Interestingly (and this is me adding to the theory after 15 years of life experience), this perspective seems to mirror psychological development. I've found that as I've gotten older, I tend to settle into my own skin. When I was young, it was like I'd frequently "pop out" of my self and my actions and be like "who is this person?" As I've gotten older, it's more like "Yeah, I'm me, and I make the best choices I can with the information available to me, and ultimately I'm responsible for the consequences even if they don't work out." It's like there's less of a divide between that automatic stimulus -> processing -> response cycle and my objective perception of my life.
[1] https://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~mnat/~ball0888/oxfordopen/hoba...
The problem to me is that that machinery does not exist. It's not there, how can something (anything at all in them most extreme sense, a human, a 'system', an AI an animal the hidden machinery in the human brain, a bunch of particles or whatever) 'choose' when there's no alternatives? Real hard predeterminism implies that there's nothing to chose at all. Doesn't the theory of conservation of information tell us that information is never created or lost, so that on a grand scale, basically nothing is happening at all? All information that existed at the big bang is still there, and always will be. There's no place for hidden machinery to make more, or make choices. The 'result' of that choice must have existed/been known before, because otherwise information would have been created at that magical 'choosing' moment.
Thinking about what is ethical often precedes acting ethically, because it puts your brain in a good mindset. Since we have good reasons to improve the world, we have good reasons to act ethically, and thus we've good reason to think about ethics. In this way, failing to consider ethics is a form of foolishness, because letting the world go to hell is a foolish thing to do.
This isn't a direct answer to your concern, but it might reduce how important free will is to you. If you're interested on the account I just summarized, see Derek Parfit's On What Matters, Vol 1 Section 38: "The Freedom that Morality Requires" (or just reply and I'll give my best attempt at answering).
Sure, you can then say that if all your thought processes are deterministic (modulo some inherent randomness), then even the outer stuff isn't really choice, is it? But the fact is, from your perspective the way your life will unfold is completely unknowable to you. And so, you get to experience the unfolding of your life and the "choices" inherent in that.
Freedom means the freedom to express who you are[1], right? Whether they are philosophically "real" choices or not is irrelevant. Have you ever felt the satisfaction of building something?
[1] Some people might call it the freedom to ~decide~ who you are, but one could say the difference is just a matter of perspective, depending on how much you see determinism playing into it.
> Journalism — the historical counter to propaganda — has become the biggest casualty in this algorithmic war for our attention.
Is the best solution really to fight propaganda by leaving our information distribution to a selected elite that we have to trust to follow some standards? Journalists are humans just like everyone else, although we've been taught to think of them as super-moral heroes.
Is there a trustless way to implement journalistic standards such as sourcing?
Compared to leaving our information distribution to anybody who's out to make a quick buck?
Encouraging others to think critically, to seek their own confirmation of information, both surprising and expected. Leading by example is powerful.
That's kind of what HN and a few selected subreddits are for me.
HN is probably ok for highly specific technical discussions. Everything else is just going to reflect the people who make up the community.
(it's ok to have experts, honest!)
No, there isn't. But people really misunderstand how journalists deal with sources. Here's a recent compilation of behind-the-scenes stories from journalists, that also happens to better communicate the actual work they do than I've seen before: https://www.cjr.org/business_of_news/scoops-fahrenthold-greg...
In short, an "anonymous source" isn't just a reporter making something up. On the rare occasion that something like that happened, it became a major story in itself.
It's also rare for these sources to lie. These sources are real people, after all. And a lie would burn their relationship with the journalist and medium, and possibly beyond. For a politician, that could be a career-ending move.
Just to illustrate: we're reading new insider stories from the white house almost every day now. I can point to any number of anonymously-sourced stories that were later proven right by official announcements. There may be some that can't (yet) be judged, such as the persistence rumours that X or Y may resign. But the only story that was provably wrong was the Scaramucci-Malta story by CNN.
There were at least a few others [1].
And those don't include the legitimizing of the Steele Dossier, which was a few levels separated from an "anonymously-sourced story," but hardly the paragon of journalistic standards.
And that doesn't take into account Comey's testimony, where he claimed that often the people talking about these things to reporters don't know what's going on [2].
I think people concerned with journalistic standards since the election aren't totally off-base.
[1] https://www.circa.com/story/2017/05/12/what-a-breathless-med... [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/NeutralPolitics/comments/6g53av/jam...
Is there really any difference who made it up if at the end the story came out false? If you look well enough, it's not hard to find people willing to say what you want to hear, and lying by proxy is not much better than lying outright.
> It's also rare for these sources to lie. These sources are real people, after all.
Implying real people do not lie? They do, all the time. Even more often, they are misinformed, mistaken, confuse their wishes for real fact, exaggerate their knowledge, etc.
> I can point to any number of anonymously-sourced stories that were later proven right by official announcements.
I can also point to any number that were proven false. E.g. CNN reporting Comey expected to refute Trumps words about not investigating him, and Comey confirming Trumps words. Or the same Comey calling NYT reporting "almost completely wrong" (I guess they got Trump's name correctly?) Not to mention that hilarious Fusion GPS "dossier". There's a ton of this stuff around, all the time. It's a free market - if there's demand, there's supply, and man, is there the demand.
> There may be some that can't (yet) be judged, such as the persistence rumours that X or Y may resign
That's a nice one because eventually everybody resigns (or gets fired, but that is usually also framed as "resigned", see Spicer), or dies. Since the former case is much more frequent, one can always bet on the rumor that X or Y may resign - eventually it will become true. It's just not true yet...
The members of the said elite would certainly like that. Even after they basically spent all their inherited trust capital on silly politicking.
> Is there a trustless way to implement journalistic standards such as sourcing?
That'd not be easy - you'd have to trust somebody. You're not going to go to every place where something of note is happening and verify it, and people that would go there might lie or be mistaken about what is happening, or their reports might be distorted, edited and selectively suppressed to make it fit an agenda. But we could raise the standards of who we trust and how easily we trust. That'd require some work and giving up on so much tasty outrage and righteous indignation, that I'm not sure it would be very attractive proposition.
A person having Ebola seems to me like a significant fact even though it doesn't represent any danger
These articles want to play a holier-than-though nihilist/"we know better" image but just come across as idiotic.
Overreacting is stupid, but underreacting is naive.
which is kind of sad, but the part that seems to be really egregious is that by co-opting communication, its not just feeding on us, its shaping us.
In the meantime. https://legiblenews.com/
Also humans are messy.
A better policy, in my opinion, is to explicitly acknowledge one's opinions and ideologies, and to have some humility, recognizing at all times that one may be wrong.
I get the point of long form, and all that, but sometimes you just want the gist of it instead of digging in a 5k word article which starts from the childhood.
Also, though I too long for the old days of journalistic standards, let us a remember one of the side effects what creating the assumption that there is one correct mainstream view of reality and that anything that deviates too much from it is extremism (or today "fake news").
There is almost no such thing as a bias free reporting of facts and events in the news. Many of the things which were in the past dismissed as the views of cranks are now accepted as normal. Surely some of the views expressed in the darker corners of the internet today will someday be considered mainstream and many of the views expressed by the mainstream real news will some day be considered nuts.
As for the argument about there being so such thing as bias-free reporting, you're extrapolating from that to a position of epistemological abdication where you use that narrow fact as a justification for believing whatever you want to believe. While bias is inevitable, it is also to a large extent measurable, and the quality of news reportage can be measured in terms of its predictive power by comparing contemporaneous reports with knowledge gained in hindsight and ranking news sources by their reliability over time.
WRT your second sentence you are clearly so deep in your own cognitive bias you can't see anymore. I'd enjoy seeing such a study. I've seen plenty of reports about stuff that happened in the past century that were obviously now misreported by the mainstream press at the time.
Also, if you drill down to the Pew image, and count years/tick marks, the year perception turned from downward to upward was 2001, which I believe is not a mere coincidence.
Increasing awareness of more distant crimes through social networks and the aging of the baby boomer generation may also contribute to the increased perception of growth.
While we can and should certainly aspire to a different way, plainly presented news and information has few(er) takers in comparison to shock and awe. Humans love drama.
"The good old days", except that never existed. Journalism has always been the tool for the powerful to paint a positive picture of themselves to the general public via "unbiased agents" called journalists who are "free to write anything" as long as it serves their masters.
Now that almost anyone can publish their opinion and share it with everyone, the ones who have been doing their thing for hundreds of years are being exposed.
To be clear, my point is that journalism can be evaluated by how well it predicts outcomes, or how reliably it documents things that are subsequently judged to matter.
Wow. Then they need a lesson in the history of journalism. They might want to read up on hearst and pulitzer and the founding of modern american journalism.
> "The good old days", except that never existed. Journalism has always been the tool for the powerful to paint a positive picture of themselves to the general public via "unbiased agents" called journalists who are "free to write anything" as long as it serves their masters.
Agreed. It's a credit to the media how well they do their job to brainwash that they fool us into thinking they are objective and truthful. At the end of the day, foxnews and the nytimes are just propagandists like any other. But somehow, we have been told over and over that our guys tell the "truth" and the enemy spreads propaganda.
This is a textbook example of the lazy, uneducated thinking that causes fear and outrage. Lazy lazy lazy false equivalence. To say that "they're all the same" is absolutely not the case and nor will it ever be. The sooner people become more discerning of the information that they consume, the better off we all will be.
There is an extremely large gulf in the baseline quality of reporting between those two outlets. If you cannot discern that, then you are too far gone.
With regard to quality of reporting I think the gulfs really lie in the outlet/format. TV/cable news is worse than traditional/print news. Daily news is worse than weekly/monthly, etc. When you're reporting 24 hours a day you've gotta sensationalize a lot of shit to keep people watching. If you only print once a day, not so much. Once a week, even less so.
I've gotten to the point now that I usually try to avoid the TV and daily print news altogether. If it's not important enough to make it in a weekly newspaper, it's probably not worth knowing about.
My advice to you is to follow foreign news services and compare the news you get. The biggest challenge, unfortunately, is that you have to dig a bit because lately English language news is dominated by stories from Reuters and AP. You best bet, by far, is to get news in languages other than English for a fair comparison. However, if you can't do that, you should search google for news articles and compare them to the equivalent Reuters and AP articles to ensure that they didn't originate there.
If you do that for a while, I suspect your opinion of the NYT (and many other respected English language news services) will change pretty dramatically.
Which is not to say that there aren't good journalists, good editors, good news stories, etc, etc. These exist all over the world. However, the news is big business and also an institution that is critical for political success in any country. Educating yourself on the level of interference that occurs will only benefit you.
When I was a kid I listened to Radio Moscow and to go honest found it not that much different from the BBC..
The key here is not to try to find the truth. Rather try to find different reports of the same events (or different editing wrt to what makes the final cut). It's quite hard if you are stuck in English because a huge amount of English language news reports come from the same pool of reporters. These reports are then packaged up differently, but the bias often exists prior to it getting to the final news service. It is interesting (and instructive), to try to find the source of news stories and then write down the names of the reporters whose stories make it into your news. What I've found (YMMV) is that only 3-4 reporters write most of the English language news for reports in certain regions. Those reports are then recycled through all of the news services.
I first started doing this for Japanese news stories when I found serious factual errors in English language news stories related to Fukushima and nuclear power in Japan. In one instance, all of the news outlets reported that the power station near me was restarting within 2 weeks. So I went down to the power station and asked them. They denied the story and in fact, more than 6 years later, they are still not operating (though they do plan to restart soon). When I traced back all of the stories that I could find provenance for in the western press, I found that it all came back to 3 Japanese reporters for Reuters. Since then I've off and on checked western news reports and still find that those 3 reporters dominate all of the western news reports about Japan.
Now, it's crap of me to say all this and not provide any proof. In my defence, I really don't want to get involved in the "fake news" thing going on in the US. It's not my intent to make any accusations, but rather to encourage people to look for themselves. I have not put forth the kind of effort necessary to make accusations that might affect somebody's career. What I'm saying is that it didn't take much effort at all for me to notice that something was not right, so if you look I think you'll also have no trouble seeing it either.
Or I might be mistaken. It wouldn't be the first time it happened.
To get a "diverse" set of information, you need to expand your "sources". RT, Al Jazeera, Xinhua, etc.
You need to get information from the propaganda representing other elites.
But you have to keep in mind that all propaganda outfits are in the business of SPINNING the truth for their own agenda. You will never get the "truth" from the NYTimes, BBC, RT, Xinhua, Al Jazeera, etc.
It's up to you as a rational intelligent human being to filter the propaganda from the articles to get at the truth.
I'm highly educated despite what you may think.
>Lazy lazy lazy false equivalence.
I have a degree in philosophy and I think you need a refresher course on logic.
> To say that "they're all the same" is absolutely not the case and nor will it ever be.
I didn't say they were the "same". Saying an apple and a banana are fruits doesn't mean that I'm saying an apple is a banana. Just because I say foxnews and the nytimes are propagandists doesn't mean I'm saying foxnews = nytimes.
> The sooner people become more discerning of the information that they consume, the better off we all will be.
Agreed. Hopefully, you'll join us one day in being a more discerning about information.
> There is an extremely large gulf in the baseline quality of reporting between those two outlets.
Agreed. NYTimes is far better quality propaganda. They have a lot more influence and credibility. But the NYTimes is still propaganda.
> If you cannot discern that, then you are too far gone.
One of us seem to gone for sure.
And with all due respect, this thread isn't helping you become a better coder. If anything it's stoking our emotional needs, just in a different manner than say CNN.
Also I appreciate the discussions. Instead of one agenda rammed down mu throats, I get to see the honest opinions of a lot of people.
Also:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc
That's about the best I can say. The worst is why? Who is the audience for this? I firmly believe that if you found this article by clicking on a link on the HN homepage, then you already know all this. It's exactly the kind of article we've been reading about in one form or another for 20 years.
If you didn't find this article on the homepage of HN, then the odds are that you will never read it. Why? Because of all of the noise that the very article itself points out!
This is a type of preaching to the choir, imo. Reinforcing to the wrong audience. The points made are fair, but obvious.
But it is pretty! :)
We were talking about the news (which was on in the background) and I cautioned the lady at the desk to not put too much stock in it, and to wait around for updates before drawing any conclusions. She asked why, and I explained that the 24 hour news cycle often drops facts -- a couple of segues later, and I made the point that everybody thinks America is more dangerous than ever, largely because of the constant fear-mongering in the news, but crime statistics actually show falling crime rates over the past few decades.
She didn't believe me, so I asked her to Google it on the computer in front of her, which resulted in a search result something like this[1], but before she started giving too much credence to it, she Googled a few more times until she found an article about Baltimore crime rates going up, even though we weren't in Baltimore, and neither of us lived in Baltimore, and she'd previously admitted to not having been in Baltimore in more than a decade -- none of that mattered, because her confirmation bias was slaked.
[1] - http://www.slate.com/content/dam/slate/articles/news_and_pol...
The people that believe obviously misleading news are just as much at fault as the ones producing the news.
"The children now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise." - Socrates
This argument keeps popping up. To confirm it we would need a control group. It is likely that even before social media people believed the state of affairs worse than it actually was. Maybe people are more prone to believe that our condition is deteriorating rather than improving.
I guess that raises more questions than it answers. What about the rise of cable news? That tracks the change in the graph more closely than the rise of social networks. What about 9/11 and the war on terrorism? A significant portion of the US population lost their shit and never got it back. I'm not sure we should pin all or even most of the change on social media.
I think you have a point that the "good old days fallacy" has been around since forever. But it also seems like something dramatically changed 15 years ago or so.
I don't feel 'at war' when I go online, and even if my attention is 'captured', it certainly doesn't translate to any purchased products or revenue for the 'aggressors'.
That being said, I don't dismiss that it does occur: as Max Barry the author said, 'the industry is making multiple billions a year - that money comes from someone' (paraphrased). Just not from me.
Subconscious influence/manipulation is more powerful and prevalent than most people realize.
The most skillful forms of influence are invisible to the target.
A conversion event post ad impression without a click is called a "view-through conversion" and is a cornerstone metric of most display advertising because the bulk of performance from display is likely to be view-through vs. click-based.
Advertisers without "hard" conversion metrics can still measure uplift just as easily.
So you don't care if people are manipulating you, so long as you are unaware?
You have to wonder how much of it's perceived authenticity is, well, authentic and how much is manufactured.
So while your particular brand of craft beer might not spend one dollar on advertising, it's benefiting from the general upsurge.
Apparently there is a book about it. Except:
In The Craft Beer Revolution, Steve Hindy, co-founder of Brooklyn Brewery, tells the inside story of how a band of homebrewers and microbrewers came together in one of America's great entrepreneurial triumphs. Citing hundreds of creative businesses like Samuel Adams, Deschutes Brewery, New Belgium, Dogfish Head, and Harpoon, he shows how their combined efforts have grabbed 10 percent of the US beer market...
Do you own a car? What kind? Is it an older honda civic or something similar? In North America your choice of cars is almost certainly the result of advertising, both on you and on the people who's opinion about you you care about.
I own a BMW, but have no interest in cars and so don't see car ads online (nor would they be effective - the BMW was chosen by my wife).
I take your point, and I am not arguing I am the exception, however your specific examples probably don't apply.
Maybe the choice of utility companies? Internet, power etc. We have more choices here than the US tends to have, due to the smaller market and more government regulated competition. It's hardly a dire violation of my personal liberty if I am manipulated into picking one or another provider of fibre though.
I think that makes my point well actually, you may actually be an exception but because of your social/personal circle you were effected.
Now that you mention it, a big part of it for me is the issue of liberty. I would massively prefer to make a choice based on having a gun to my head rather than being manipulated into it without my knowledge. In one case I'm aware of the manipulation and have a chance to do something to fix the situation, in the other I simply lose some liberty without noticing a little at a time.
After I heard this and started paying attention I'm completely sold, people who say this are never living lives that look remotely like they aren't affected by advertising.
That's not even counting the fact that it doesn't have to work on everyone, just enough people so that those who don't conform are punished by becoming outsiders with all the social, financial and professional consequences that entails.
One day we found a magazine (from another country), which contained ads. Two people smoking cigarettes in a strangely alien world, some kind of jungle - or a safari, maybe.
This image was so strange in many ways: Why is it there in a magazine, that was about something completely different? Who does it speak to? What is this strange world depicted there? Why does it feel a so - unreal? And why do the people smile in the picture, even though it is unreal?
Image a day in your life without coming across an ad. Or a week. Or a year.
Take a breath and imagine what the world would feel like.
The need for advertising is deeply rooted in a society, that overproduces things and where a large part of your survival depends on your skill to sell. My deepest hope is that this world will be regarded just as strange as my kids eyes stopped before the strange picture of the two smokers.
I mean, imagine if it all disappeared tomorrow. Wouldn't people just stick to the megacorps and established brands they already know? Wouldn't this make it even that much tougher for a Netflix to compete with a Comcast, or an Uber/Lyft to compete with an entrenched taxi industry? How would Dollar Shave Club possibly compete with Gillette?
I don't like ads, either, but the alternative is worse. It just seems unrealistic. I know it could be done--I just don't think it'd bring about some post-materialist society. It'd just allow us to pat ourselves on the back while making it that much tougher to start a business and compete against existing businesses.
I wouldn't, until someone else told me about it. And they wouldn't tell me about it unless they found out somehow. And how could you possibly differentiate between grassroots interest and astroturfing, particularly online?
Besides, how many months go by with you happily using your razor before you sit down to research whether there are better options? The vast majority of people choose to spend their time on more important things, thus further entrenching the status quo.
It'd only make all the things people hate about megacorps worse. We've already got this dearth of creativity and risk-taking in Hollywood. Imagine how much worse it'd be if they couldn't advertise something new!
> How will I promote my new movie? Or book?
The same way that people do today. Talk shows, trailers (which you let people organically share, rather than paying to put it in front of people), movie/book reviewers.
> Besides, how many months go by with you happily using your razor before you sit down to research whether there are better options?
I feel like you're countering your own point here. Buying a new razor when you're already happy with the one you're using is exactly the kind of consumerism that advertising encourages.
> We've already got this dearth of creativity and risk-taking in Hollywood. Imagine how much worse it'd be if they couldn't advertise something new!
I disagree. Imagine if advertising didn't exist, and the only way to get the word out about new movies was through movie reviews, and so studios were actually encouraged to make good movies. I think we would have a lot less riding on established IP.
They do now, as part of a society that includes advertising. That word of mouth comes as a result of people being aware of things. Reviewers focus on reviewing things people are interested in reading about. All of these benefit from advertising.
> Talk shows, trailers (which you let people organically share, rather than paying to put it in front of people), movie/book reviewers.
We're going to get in pretty deep if people appearing on talk shows to promote something doesn't count as an advertisement.
Even trailers have to be promoted somehow. They run the trailers in ads because they're effective! They're effective because a significant chunk of people wouldn't have seen the movie, who otherwise would have if they had known about it. They would have known about it if the general word of mouth and close friends on social networks were enough. But it isn't. Clearly reviews and word of mouth are not sufficient.
> I feel like you're countering your own point here. Buying a new razor when you're already happy with the one you're using is exactly the kind of consumerism that advertising encourages.
Me continuing to drive to a Target to pay $7 for a four-blade razor with special proprietary blade cartridges because I assume better options don't exist due to not spending time researching the purchase is not reduced materialism or consumerism. It's just protecting the status quo.
> I disagree. Imagine if advertising didn't exist, and the only way to get the word out about new movies was through movie reviews, and so studios were actually encouraged to make good movies. I think we would have a lot less riding on established IP.
Putting aside that movie reviews are not as inherently separate from advertising as you're suggesting, I totally disagree. Only a small subset of moviegoers actually read reviews ahead of time and use that to influence a decision. We'd only see more people showing up to see brands they already know well (e.g. Star Wars, Transformers) and less likely to attend movies they've heard / seen nothing about. The people who don't value reviews won't suddenly start valuing them, and the gap between "things movie critics like" and "thing general moviegoers like" won't close.
Same with buying a soda from a company other than Coke/Pepsi. Same with buying an unknown shampoo brand, or an unknown car brand, etc. Except it's really even worse in other industries because people aren't looking for or expecting a new shampoo. And so we just stick to whatever we've been buying, even if it's some huge megacorp milking their brand because competitors have no platform to make the case that they're better.
It doesn't seem realistic at all to me that someone would invest piles of money into a product that solved a problem people didn't know they have or significantly improves on an existing product where you're only route to communicate this with customers would be to ask for reviews, hope that your target market actively looks for reviews and hope word of mouth spreads.
Don't we hear all the time on hackernews about how building a great product isn't enough if you don't have a marketing strategy?
I find it hard how you can disagree with ads for entertainment especially. Why would you be against knowing a sequel to a movie or game you like but don't actively follow just came out?
There must be some happy middle ground between obnoxious privacy invading ads and no ads at all.
Word of mouth has worked fine long before mass media advertising became a thing.
Is our society and economy dependant on advertising? Absolutely. Has it always been this way, and must it always be this way? Not so much.
Ads on tv do not show new things. They push brand. brand is mother, brand is father.
Megacorps benefit from pushing brand, but they'd benefit even more from nobody being able to push brand, because they already have one established.
Not talking about absolutes or semantics but:
Without the Big Advertising people would drift off-brand. maybe boredom, maybe trying what their friend uses, maybe (surely not) be affected by price and quality.
This is a platitude.
> you can't deny (well you can but you shouldn't) that the vast majority of ads are all brand.
Maybe it is--it's just meaningless to my point. Even if 99% of ads are all entrenched megacorps reminding people they exist, that other 1% could be Netflix disrupting Comcast, or Uber/Lyft disrupting taxis, or whatever else. Those disruptors who were previously unknown benefit much more from their advertising than Coke reminding people to not stop buying Coke.
> Without the Big Advertising people would drift off-brand. maybe boredom, maybe trying what their friend uses, maybe (surely not) be affected by price and quality.
Imagine how much more effective that off-brand would be if it could tell consumers about its lower price or higher quality, rather than having to just hope they found out somehow... versus a known competitor and brand.
imagine you have an army of 100 and you are against an army of 1000.
now imagine how much more effective you would be if everyone had machine guns instead of swords.
Those kind of advertisements are actionable, and the supplier wants to see metrics on how much impact a single advertisement had. In today's era, metrics are much easily found from online advertisement, and so businesses have gravitated to those, and most notably Google search ads.
What about word of mouth, observing other people, searching for a product online?
In the US, it is expected that employees in service businesses (think coffee shops, grocery stores, etc.) put on a smiling face and pretend to love their jobs. In Germany, I was told that is unheard of because it is thought of as inhumane to force someone to pretend they love their job like that. So as a result you get some less-than-enthusiastic responses from those employees.
I encountered this a bit in a coffee shop in Vienna and it was stark to say the least.
Disclaimer: I live in Huddersfield and it is sometimes grim up north.
Some people are into this, and some aren't -- but if you are poor and working retail, then you must smile and sometimes sing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOkQJm_UGM4
https://youtu.be/Z8zNsUTWsOc
Yes, I get it - working as a clerk in a store like Walmart is not the most luxurious job in the world. But I, as a client, is not at fault that the clerk is not a billionaire hedge fund manager (neither am I btw). On the contrary, the money that I bring in are partially paying his - admittedly, far from luxurious, but still nonzero - salary. He is not forced to work this job, he could leave at any moment (he'd have to give up the salary of course). So is it really too much to expect some nice disposition towards customers which pay your living? I really don't understand how it's unreasonable and "degrading" to expect that. Singing maybe going too far (OTOH, the video looks like a dreaded "teambuilding exercise", that's the whole other story), but a nice smile?
I'm not sure why talking about emotional labor, smiling and singing, suddenly brought on doubts about decency, niceness, and assholeness in the following reply. I see that as very stressful expectations to have for somebody.
Smiling is a communication of internal feelings. It puts pressure on me as the customer as well when I know my mere presence is an on-button for an emotional act for people. How draining for both parties.
A couple points worth mentioning:
1. For most retail clerks, the choice to leave is often "stay in a shitty job I hate" vs. "become homeless and starve (and potentially my family as well) because there is a lack of other jobs, high competition for them, and I live paycheck-to-paycheck because the jobs I can get pay minimum wage with no benefits."
2. It might be different overseas, but in the US at least the vast majority of retail clerks are paid hourly at the minimum wage. In fact, many retail employers do their best to have managers play games with people's scheduled hours to keep them under the amount that triggers benefits and overtime.
So in many (dare I say most?) cases, yes, it is too much to expect some nice disposition by default. That said, I would hope most people, when treated nicely by customers with realistic expectations, would respond in-kind.
I don't think that video exemplifies the American stereotype you think it does:
1. One of the people recording this was singing sarcastically-- purposefully off key, and in a tone that clearly signals to other Americans that he is mocking the thing he is being made to do. He also posted it on Youtube to criticize Walmart.
2. Most of the people aren't really participating. Look at that person who is literally an aisle away from the action! There's also a group just watching the person who isn't in uniform make yet another recording.
3. Do you really think the guy forced to play the lead Walmart cheerleader to that un-licensed Queen ripoff is a realist? Do you think he feels anything but shame and embarrassment that his most famous moment is a pathetic (and ineffectual) attempt to wring a tiny bit more productivity out of his no-benefits part-time staff?
4. Have you ever been to a Walmart? The cashiers at Walmart don't smile, and rarely look up at you.
Compare to:
"Guten Morgen. Your corporate overlords have seen fit to allow you to be the only unionized Walmart in the world for another day. So give thanks, and continue not smiling as that would otherwise betray a transcendental lie. That's the German Walmart Guarantee!"
edit: forgot that German nouns are capitalized
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKd2unIg5Rk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Njp7ZPeUy2w
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mk7qF2eXkgQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=53AAezi_R8U
The first video isn't in English, and is indicative of reach.
[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/03/how-do-...
Are you sure?
Seems like the right-wing evangelicals of the US definitely do.
While I haven't read every one, most submissions seem to be against relaxing restrictions and in favor of tightening them up.
Even privacy is easier to advocate for than the intangible peace of mind an ad-free space offers. Even if studies end up proving that advertising rots the brain and keeps us too engaged, even if it is elucidated as one of the causes of obesity and poor sleep hygiene and attention deficit syndromes... companies will simply argue it's too big of a hit to their bottom line to quit, and that will be the end of the discussion.
...and people wonder why AdBlocking continues to grow online.
I heartily agree with your thesis though - making the case that 'nothing' is a good thing is incredibly difficult. It took decades to prove cigarettes dangerous then get rid of cigarette advertising and that was linked to an observable medical problem.
I don't hold hope that we'll manage with advertising.
I don't know why this is, but when you step back and are not used to adverts, when you do see them they just seem so transparently pathetic.
I have had such days. I read a lot of stuff online, and I have adblockers. My entertainment is supplied by books and TV, where I watch either channels like Netflix or recorded shows, where I can skip through commercials. It's not exactly not encountering ads - and I surely encounter billboards when I drive around (though I don't think I can recall any of them, the mind filters them out by now), but it's pretty close and I'm sure I've had days where I didn't see ads. The thing is, they didn't feel much different from the days where I saw some.
> society, that overproduces things and where a large part of your survival depends on your skill to sell
That is preferable to the society which underproduces things and where large part of your survival depends on you skill in finding how to satisfy basic needs - food, shelter, etc. I'd rather watch ads than be hungry. My deepest hope is to always live in the former kind of society - where productivity is so high that it's ok to spend resources on convincing people to consume stuff. I've lived in another kind of society - where people spend resources on finding way to get decent food, clothes, books, etc. and where ads convincing people to consume some luxurious goods could not be taken but as a cruel joke. I'd much rather take the overproducing one.
Oh no no no. That is not how that works. Coca cola doesn't put up signs, ads, billboards, coaters and napkin holders with their logo on it to get you to stop and think about coca cola.
No. What they do it place their logo next to something that seems happy. Next to someone smiling or put it up in situations where people are happy. Relaxing on a beach? Coca cola flag. Sitting in a cafe with friends? Coca cola coasters sitting on the table.
Slowly but surely, your mind will associate Coca cola with happiness and relaxing.
And when that moment comes when you feel down. Your mind will think. I don't want to feel down. I want to feel happy.
I want happy. I want cola.
There is no such thing as 'filtering' out ads. They are not hoping you can recall them. They are designed to infiltrate your subconscious.
Not really. My mind associates Coca cola with high blood sugar, diabetes and horrible tasting sugar water that would take decades off my life expectancy. Looks like I'm doing something wrong.
> There is no such thing as 'filtering' out ads.
I'm pretty sure there is, based on my own experience.
> They are designed to infiltrate your subconscious.
It's a vacuous claim - by definition, it is impossible to know what is in my "subconscious", so there's no way to disprove whether something "infiltrated" it.
I don't have time to write a big long thing about how wrong you are right now, but I'll provide this though:
Santa Claus is a Coke Ad. http://www.coca-colacompany.com/stories/coke-lore-santa-clau...
Tell it to me when I start drinking that colored sugar water. Since I stopped doing it 15 years ago, the thought of it still disgusts me. Maybe I need to give it more time to work...
> Santa Claus is a Coke Ad
For you, maybe. Most people have no idea about that, admittedly fascinating, bit of trivia. The article is called "Things You Never Knew" - and for a reason. It's hard for an ad to work if nobody has any idea what it is advertising. Ah, but of course - it's "subconscious", so all normal laws of the universe are suspended and magic is real.
And that version of Santa Claus was still based on fictional folk characters from history.
If the fact that a soda company can suborn an ancient figure like Saint Nick so completely that no one remembers it happened doesn't drive the point home then consider this: Diamond engagement rings are a deliberately ad-created "tradition".
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/02/ho...
I'm just supporting what the other poster said about advertising not always having the intended effect.
There are some brands I actively avoid simply because I didn't like their advertisements, or how often they advertise and others where no amount of advertising will convince me to use their product (like Coke for example, because I think it tastes vile and I know it's basically just unhealthy sugar water).
And I agree with you about advertising and unintended effects. To me modern life seems more and more like a giant open-ended experiment, one with no control group...
And that is perfectly correct. One thing I might add is that capitalism looks much like communism in the long run as companies merge, fuse and become bigger and bigger, because centralisation and control are the key for efficiency. Wasn't it in the news recently? One of the biggest companies on this planet on a mission to get a share of every transaction on this planet.
Not sure what you mean here. In the long run, any communist country has ended up either being completely ruined (USSR, Venezuela, Cuba, North Korea) or turning back to capitalism (China, Viet Nam, East Europe). Surely capitalism's track record is not that sordid.
> as companies merge, fuse and become bigger and bigger
Companies also break up and whither away.
> because centralisation and control are the key for efficiency
Only for very narrow understanding of efficiency, taken as saving money on very mundane tasks. The same harsh reality of information flows that leads to socialist central planning end up in disaster in the long run applies to the capitalist conglomerates. Unless they are centralized only by name (as it is the case in holding companies, not exercising centralized operational control), they grow rigid, their technologies and business processes grow stale, and eventually they are beaten by young and hungry newcomers to the market.
The only way that they know to resist this process is to enshrine their way of doing business and their position in the market by coopting government regulation and raising entry barriers. That's why they spend so much money on lobbying - it is one of the most profitable investments known to mankind.
> One of the biggest companies on this planet on a mission to get a share of every transaction on this planet.
Not sure what that is about. Which company is that?
That kind of reckless corporatism was a core tenet of early fascist ideology.
>I've lived in another kind of society - where people spend resources on finding way to get decent food, clothes, books, etc.
How would overt modern advertising have fixed that? Do you think we don't spend resources on having the advertising find us instead of us finding the products? Does advertising even help with finding decent food, are lies forbidden when you advertise?
There's a wide gulf between advertising you have the cheapest apples in town on a sign in front of your store and advertising Red Lobster's Lobsterfest. Capitalism works fine under either example though.
Media advertising exists at least since 18th century (in our common modern understanding, commercial and political writings that can be reasonably considered ads were found on the walls of Pompeii, and probably exist since writing was invented). So there pretty much was never a period where modern capitalism existed and advertising didn't.
> How would overt modern advertising have fixed that?
It is not fixing that, it is a direct and inevitable result of abundance of resources. If you have surplus of resources available for consumption, you will need to choose which ones to consume. Thus, advertising - i.e. speech that is intended to make you to choose one particular resource - becomes profitable.
> Does advertising even help with finding decent food
Depends on advertising. Some does, some doesn't.
Because this is a complete non sequitur to me.
And just pointing out that you believe they are committing a logical fallacy without any explanation is a very lazy discussion technique.
If I were to guess, it is because it it is a term from a foreign language, in this case Latin, not because it is the name of a logical fallacy.
There exists an orthographic, or perhaps typographic practice in English to italicize words and phrases borrowed from other languages, like à la carte, du jour, sine qua non, ...
As for your second point, I think it's pretty clear from both my comments and their context why I'm pointing out those fallacies. That said, in the case of "non sequitur", I was actually referring more to the literary sense of the term — "Where the hell did that come from?" — than the fallacious "does not follow" sense.
When you respond twice in a row in a comment chain saying that they are using a logical fallacy, and nothing else, you've done nothing to add to the conversation, but are playing the role of Logic Studies 101 Professor. That's probably what they meant by the looking back on on your writing comment.
the thing is that when you see offline media you see: 1. the brand 2. you know how reliable is this media 3. you usually know the audience and think if you're part of it and trust the media
so in offline, they don't afraid that their reader will buy something else (well they afraid, but it's not a matter of click)
in facebook it's all just titles when reposted and people don't check where exactly it was published before clicking
so it's just like "national examiner" will have a version published in the design of nytimes or anything else - so they will not only have their audience but will try to get a slice of other media's audience
it could have been a quite complex thing to do for offline media as you need to actually print the edition, and pay money for it, but it's free for online, and you get money per view/per click
so i think it's definitely a war between media for this new spread audience on social, there should be a new way to re-establish reliability
I am happy that some of these traditional newspapers are going back to a traditional model. I would guess that if you compared headlines from newspapers that are subscription vs ad based, the ad based ones have significantly more sensational headlines.