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Comment by gt_ | Hacker News Reader

>Isn't this true of almost any industry which lets you put out information? E.g. news publishing? Book publishing? Blogs?

Advertising is not information. If it were merely data being exchanged, we wouldn't call it advertising. Advertising is the part that changes one's mind. See: https://www.etymonline.com/word/advert

>I mean, what exactly would you do, ban all communications?

Start by acknowledging the problem. Dodging it hasn't worked. Then we can learn more about it, how it works, the complications of it's side effects (like directly incentivizing privacy abuse) and come up with hopefully a sufficient and efficient solution. In short, we would do Problem Solving, very different from the other option of Not Trying.

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Because I'm familiar with HN's penchant for being black-and-white about things, I'll preface this with: I think advertising is very much a net loss for the world and would be pretty happy if it all disappeared tomorrow, magically ceterus paribus. I just don't think that it makes any sense to redefine a word instead of actually addressing a point you disagree with.

Yea, and "villains" are just farmers (https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=villain)

Come on man, there's no way that you don't know how dumb it is to pretend that the etymology of a word is more relevant than its modern definition. '

> Advertising is the part that changes one's mind.

You can't just assert something insane like this without any attempt at backing it up. Advertising is 100% information being exchanged; it may be subjective, but the dirty secret that everyone ignores about epistemology is that all "knowledge" is socially-constructed. Thank God we've (generally) agreed on a few high-quality sources like the scientific establishment, but it's hopelessly naive to pretend that you can find the line where something ceases to be "real" information. And clear lines are incredibly important in legislation, particularly when there's a trillion dollars of incentive to find loopholes.

I never redefined anything. I’m just trying to help you with the nuance in the language that you must be just willfully avoiding. Otherwise, you have found a rhetorical loophole. Doesn’t mean you are right.

“Information” is a poor term for this discussion. “Data” draws the more useful distinction. I should have said “Advertising is not only information”. It would just be stubborn to insist that advertising is merely data sharing. I’ve been working in advertising most of my life and we do more data distortion than data sharing. We make a living on dishonesty and manipulation.

It's funny how your line of argument can seem so obviously accurate to one person (like myself) but so obviously wrong to another (like whoever has downvoted you here). FWIW, I think your distinction between advertising and dissemination of information is a good one.

Those who disagree might nevertheless be surprised to learn that recognized protection of commercial speech (i.e. advertising) by the 1st amendment is only a fairly recent legal development. I would suggest to anyone interested in the topic to revisit the arguments in Virginia State Pharmacy Board v. Virginia Citizens Consumer Council. This case, from the 1976, was a key stepping stone that paved the way for the rampant drug advertising that we have in the U.S. today. In fact, the lone dissenter, the late Justice Rehnquist, foresees precisely this outcome in his opinion, predicting almost the exact "talk to your doctor" phrasing that we have become so accustomed to decades later. By contrast, the majority justices sound like nothing other than hapless and naive dupes of an astroturfing campaign, speaking guilelessly about issuing their decision on behalf of "consumers of prescription drugs" and their right to receive "information". I doubt that they anticipated anything remotely approaching the ravages that, for example, the opioid epidemic would bring.

It's easily on my own personal "top ten" list of bad Supreme Court decisions.

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