Comment by anigbrowl | Hacker News Reader

Comment by anigbrowl | Hacker News Reader

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I was thinking about this the other day looking at a billboard, talking about how Alive/Bob/Carol wasa winner! at the local casino, with a tiny 'play responsibly' box huddled in the corner. I don't have a strong opinion about gambling but I do care about externalities, and I was amused by the idea that some percentage of billboards (reflective of the incidence of problematic gambling) should feature Alive, Bob and Carol losing everything to their great despair, but with the same logo and typesetting choices as the positive advertising.

More seriously, I think first amendment protections for commercial speech are too generous. Game theory tells us that perverse incentives will often win out, and while it's tempting to fall back on caveat emptor it's also a cop out. The reality is that the huge and increasing information asymmetry between organizations and individuals leads inevitably to inequitable outcomes; further, it's entirely predictable that by swamping the recipient of a contract with reading material they'll just go ahead and agree to it because it's not obvious that it will be worth the effort of analysis. I can't remember the last time I read a EULA, and I like reading contracts and legal documents.

Free business idea: a fiduciary AI that parses contracts, simplifies contractual terms for maximum clarity, and rates contracts on their adherence to/deviation from industry norms.

>The reality is that the huge and increasing information asymmetry between organizations and individuals leads inevitably to inequitable outcomes

Consider the following three statements.

Consent cannot exist when the information asymmetry becomes too great.

The information asymmetry between a massive corporation (as compared to some mom and pop shop) and an individual consumer is great enough to invalidate consent.

We allow and legally enforced consent between these entities (with very limited exceptions; even things like arbitration clauses tend to be binding).

One of the above statements cannot be true for us to be moral in our actions, yet all three seem true. I honestly have a moral issue with how this all works, even though I'm not sure how to fix it and recognize a fix may completely change how we do business.

Note that for example in germany (and I'd guess in other parts of the EU also), there is a law that limits what "standard contracts" can do to a consumer [1]. I.e. whenever a business has one contract that it uses for more than one natural person, then that contract is considered an AGB thereby greatly limiting what kind of clauses would be considered valid in that contract.

As far as I understand, many clauses will then be automatically invalid if they are too one-sided for the company. Also maximum durations of contracts are greatly restricted while certain standards for contract cancellation rights are enforced.

[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/AGB-Gesetz

In the United States we have a judicial concept called a "contract of adhesion". For a contract to be treated as a contract of adhesion, it must be presented on a standard form on a "take it or leave it" basis, and give one party no ability to negotiate because of their unequal bargaining position. The court will treat any terms outside of the reasonable expectations of the person who did not write the contract as invalid, and any ambiguous terms will be interpreted in their favor also.

Interesting, didn't know this. This seems to be similar to AGB-Law, albeit pretty weak. While the US "contract of adhesion" [1] concept protects against terms "outside of the reasonable expectations", the AGB-Law [2] also protects against terms that are "unreasonably to the disadvantage" of the consumer. Arbitration clauses are not valid, for example.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_form_contract#Contrac...

[2] https://www.buzer.de/s1.htm?g=BGB&a=305-310

Arbitration clauses here in the United States don't even required a valid contract, you can bind yourself to arbitration by simple agreement due to the https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Arbitration_Act

For casinos make the odds of winning play a part in the adverts.

99.9% of the casino adds have to show people sad about losing - before we get 1 winning ad

Nah, just require them to disclose the odds for any games of chance.

"Visit Golden Palace photo of a roulette wheel for a 46% chance of breaking even!"

Wouldn't help. Lottery tickets have the odds of winning printed right on them, and people still buy them.

In small print, though. That is the main issue, people see the possible winnings before any odds are considered.

Compounding/causing this issue is people in general don't take expectation values into account - we always subconsciously overestimate the probability of a rare, positive event (winning the lottery) and underestimate the probability of a rare, negative event (dying in a car crash tomorrow).

Spending ten bucks on a lottery ticket doesn't hurt most people while winning the lottery can have a live-changing impact. Every action is rational for a properly chosen value function.

Yep. I'll spend 8-16 bucks a month on lottery tickets. It's what I use spare cash left in my wallet for. It's not going to break the bank and I'm likely not going to win, but it's a nice pipe dream and where I live a decent amount of the money goes to the environment.

Playing the lottery is more paying for the fantasy of winning than actually expecting to. It makes for some fun office chats, and worth a couple of extra bucks.

Wouldn't that be cool if it created a competitive market where casinos advertised their house advantage?

One of them does around here. The one that always amuses me is '05% payout on slots'. I like to imagine some nice people handing a crumpled up $100 to a cashier and getting nice crispy bills in return totalling $95.

That was actually my first idea, but everyone knows that the odds are with the house, and as people pointed out the odds are printed right on lottery tickets and people still buy them despite the terrible deal on offer.

I figured that adjusting say 8% of the ads to reflect an (imaginary) 8% incidence of problem gambling would actually be more effective, by balancing the legitimate commercial desires of the casino, the legitimate worry of gambling addiction, and making the billboards just unpredictable enough to keep people playing...er, guessing.

False or misleading commercial speech is not protected by the First Amendment.

Then super PACs are what again?

Political, not commercial. All politicians lie or are "economical with the truth". If you want to get the courts involved in judging political statements, especially in a country that has already politicised the courts to a greater extent than many other Western countries, then you're on a hiding to nothing.

But the money that funds PACs can come from commercial activities. If all a company has to do is create a PAC, and PACs don't need to be truthful, it seems to me commercial speech is protected.

Commercial speech is not defined by its funding or by whether it's said by a PAC, but by whether it "proposes a commercial transaction."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_speech

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