I hesitate to post any thoughts on HN that don't toe the party line, since
these days the modal commenter seems to be little more than a pattern-matching and buzzword machine,
particularly for topics for which the community has a collectively strong opinion. Commenters like
you with some level of reading comprehension and cognitive skills are the reason I still hang
around, so thanks for the response!
Your point is well-taken, and I'm definitely aware that ads' effects are a lot more insidious than
seeing an ad and consciously deciding to go buy the product. Like many new grad Googlers, I started
my career paying my dues for a couple years as an ads engineer and have had plenty of time to think
about and hear a hundred different perspectives on advertising's utility and dangers. So rest
assured, this isn't based on low-effort theorizing like "I don't _feel_ like ads affect my
purchases". My purchases take one of two forms: small-ticket items (eg bath soap) where I buy the
cheapest one that meets my constraints, and big-ticket items where it's worth spending at least a
couple/few hours researching the options. I just don't see how first-order effects of advertising
would creep into this process[1], beyond hand-wavy, unfalsifiable effects on the ultimate purchase
decision (subjectively, I don't notice this either: I end up with the low-brand-recognition
contrarian choice as often as I do the front-running brand).
Given the strong belief most people have in advertising's irresistibility, I started out with the
hypothesis that ads may negligibly affect my purchases as very low-confidence, given the strong
priors from others' beliefs. Over the last decade or so, I've 1) periodically (non-rigorously)
thought about random purchases I've made and whether ads may have had any effect, and 2) brought
this up to people who seem confident that ads are irresistible (both online and in-person), in the
hopes that I'd get a good counterargument. The quality of response has been about the same as the
dumpster fire the rest of this thread is: not only do people fail to offer any defense of the
contrary view, they're emotionally incontinent about someone having the audacity to wonder whether
ads don't wield ultimate power over every person. I still don't consider any hypothesis
high-confidence until I've heard a high-quality defense of the counterargument, but the fact that
I've tried a couple dozen times over the years and gotten only hysterical emotional responses
obviously increases my confidence in my hypothesis over time.
Anyway, thanks for reading all that, assuming you got this far. In your opinion, what could I be
missing? People with the consistent purchase process explained above seem like the violation of
their "cognitive sovereignty" would, at worst, be negligible enough that the phrase would apply to
any of a million uncontroversially benign things about society.
EDIT: I forgot to address this in my already too-long comment: "being an expert" on the products in question seems like a non sequitur, since in a world with zero advertising, the information gap would still exist. The salient question is whether ads _fill_ that gap at all, and it seems to me that they don't in this case. Also, inre "Can you name five replacements (products) and describe their tradeoffs?": yes, generally, excluding small-ticket items where pricing drives my purchase decision.
[1] The second-order effect of advertising coloring what's stocked at Walgreens and the
discoverability and reviews of a product is unavoidable, but that's an information discoverability
problem, not a "cognitive sovereignty" one, and as such is a substantially different topic from the
one the GP comment brought up.