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Comment by sesteel | Hacker News Reader

I view advertising as a form of pollution. In many cases, it erodes the human experience. It is abusive to families with children creating strife where there was none. I spend a lot of time managing expectations and sharing philosophical ideas, like "less is more". I don't mind teaching my children, but I don't like feeling people are trying to take advantage of us all the time. I explain it to them as if it is a game we're all playing, "if you keep your money you don't have to work forever." Another fun game I'd like to suggest is looking at an index fund calculator and see how much money you'd have if somebody had invested 1K (or $50 a month) in your name on your birthday. I use this as a means of giving them a plan; nobody had ever done it with me growing up, hopefully my kids are clued in on how to earn financial freedom. Now, I just hope my advice withstands the test of time.

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It's good advice, but I find it ironic.

Keep your money. Stick it in an index fund. It'll get invested in Google, Facebook, Apple who make money from ... advertising their own or other people's products.

To really be minimalist I think it's better (if less lucrative on average) to start your own business that takes a small chunk of business away from the giants, that you have ethical control over.

It's getting harder to do that without needing help from Google, Facebook etc. though, and definitely hard to do without advertising. But there's simple advertising "Painter for hire" and then there is the manipulative advertising based on spying on people etc. I think they are two different things.

The content of targeted advertising is usually way less spammy than untarged advertising. More or less the only people who can make money on completely blind online ads are scammers (whiten your teeth! etc)

An index fund invests in lots of companies. The ones that are driven by ad revenue only make up a fairly small percent of the fund.

Almost all companies need a consumerist society to grow though.

Many companies can still be successful even if society becomes less consumerist. We don't have to look at it in a black and white fashion.

It is only ironic on a macro level. And, I think you extrapolated my thought out too far; I wasn't suggesting to never spend money. My concern is teaching two children how to manage their own consumption and to not spend money frivolously. We aren't at the point of asking 7 year olds to start businesses.

It is only ironic on a macro level.... that's true. At a micro level it's each to their own, look out for number 1.

But you did say "I view advertising as a form of pollution. In many cases, it erodes the human experience. It is abusive to families with children creating strife where there was none."

So I took that as caring about the macro level.

That's fair; I do care about advertising at a macro level and how it affects my family specifically.

Capitalism is fueled by consumerism. Even if some choose not to play the game (by consuming and producing only the strictly necessary) it's in their interest that others keep playing it.

On simple vs manipulative advertising being different things, I think mostly it's not the intent of the business advertising to be manipulative but rather just to save money. That is it's not the end that's bad, but the means.

Take our humble 'Painter for Hire' - an honest business looking to do real valuable work for people who genuinely want to pay for that service. That's the kind of advert we all want to see, when we need it.

To the painter, and perhaps even to the customer, it's just all round better if their straightforward advert can be targeted at people who are very likely to need the service, on demand. They can spend the same and reach some multiplier X more warm leads, or spend 1/X on the same amount of warm leads. Warm leads being people who genuinely need the service and are happy to pay for it. There's no real manipulation going on at that level - both advertiser and customer are basically better off for the targeting, with respect to that genuine painting service being facilitated more efficiently and therefore likely more cheaply.

The manipulation in this case is more at the level of the advertising platform itself - i.e. how is the targeting achieved (spying, etc), and what potential negative externalities might that have.

It's an open and interesting question if the ends justify the means in cases like this. I think I err towards saying they don't, but still at the end of the day the positives are undeniable. That is all basically a long winded way to say, I don't necessarily think it's a question of simple vs manipulative ads per se, I think the more important difference for the majority of ads is naive & expensive vs manipulative & cheap ad platforms, with a lot of tradeoffs in place between the two that are really hard to balance for both advertiser and customer.

But if someone needs a painter, they could just use an unbiased search engine, right? There is no need to bother anyone with ads.

You're right, but that's a very customer centric viewpoint - from the point of view of the advertiser this is not so great.

This specific painter pays the ad platform to be the one that comes to you, when you're busy with all the other things on your todo list, so that you choose them and not one of the other 10 painters in your area.

It still doesn't make them bad, or manipulative. You actually want this service and not having to do the search yourself is a bonus, all things being equal (price and service level is in line with the local market etc).

> It still doesn't make them bad, or manipulative.

I don't see why not. Ads have negative externalities, for example: now everybody sees the ad (not only people in need of a painter), and also now the painter with the largest advertising budget will get more customers (not the best one), and finally the advertising costs will eventually be paid by the client (the client pays for being manipulated).

But they don't work. So many products and services are not useful. Simply not useful. On Twitter, I've started blocking every useless advertiser that decides to show me an ad... and I'm left with EXAAIR, who I'm sure is glad to target a computer software researcher with their compressed air-powered tools. There is simply too much advertising and too little space. How many advertisements, reasonably, can be sent to a person for things they legitimately want? Does that at all track with what they would see on the unfiltered web?

Weirdly 'keeping your money' might be bad for the economy!

Your spending is someone else's income.

It's sounds a little nutty to say you're depriving someone else but it's kind of true.

If you see products and or services you like and they have some value to you - and you can reasonably afford - it's good to spend in many ways.

I should add, the related concept here besides 'consumer economy' which is kind of a fundamental of the US economic machine is 'velocity of money'. It's an intriguing economic concept for those unfamiliar. [1]

I'm party from a small town, my grandfather was notoriously thrifty (and a little wealthy) and he would never eat out. A dinner at the local diner would be a 'big thing' for him. Coffee shops and little such things are impossible to take hold in this small town because people are like this. They are not poor. Just thrifty. Which is fine ... but it means no secondary economy. The only thing that survives is the gas station / resto out by the highway for passers through.

The town is definitely large enough to accomodate 1 or 2 small places, but due to the culture, it's not going to happen.

It wasn't until later on in life (studying econ) did I realize the 'other side' of savings, and real value of money: When you buy something, you generally value it more than the money, ergo, you make a profit, we call this 'consumer surplus'. It increases the quality of your life by some nudge. Buying things that can improve your life, even if it's a coffee ... has many positive effects. Without consumption most of us would be out of jobs.

[1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/v/velocity.asp

> I think it's better (if less lucrative on average) to start your own business that takes a small chunk of business away from the giants, that you have ethical control over.

Ok, what's your business? I'll gladly check it out! I'm open-minded, love new ideas, and admire integrity and good founding principles!

I spend no time managing expectations because my child isn’t exposed to advertising. There is no TV or social media in our household, and no ads thanks to multiple overlapping ad blocking solutions. There’s advertising outside, but it’s easy to ignore, and usually contains messages relating to things my daughter has no baseline for. For example, she doesn’t care about some billboard advertising a TV show because... you guessed it: there is no TV!

Popular culture in 2019 is worth opting out of. It brings no value, erodes humanity, and pollutes our minds. “And nothing of value was lost.”

I tried to think of a counterargument to this and drew an almost total blank. There have been some great works of art over say the last 20 years or so—"Breaking Bad," "The Sopranos," and the like—but it's almost completely trash. I can't name more than a half-dozen things I'd have missed if I had thrown out my television and deleted Facebook etc.

I've spent most of my self aware life so far online. I don't want to be one of those "phones are bad" people who are scared by technology they don't understand. But I'm starting to change my mind.

Recently while waiting to board a plane, I saw a kid browsing instagram. The speed at which they were consuming content actually shocked me. They were rapidfire scrolling through pages and pages of the same kind of junk that's been in tabloids for decades. ~5 pictures a second. For half an hour, almost non-stop. I'm not sure why, but it really stuck out as deeply unsettling to me. I can't imagine that being healthy.

Instead of letting the mind wander, it is trapped in a tight loop of looking at one picture after another. Like a book you can't put down, only you never finish it, and it's not at all compelling - just addictive.

This brings up an interesting topic for discussion. I think there are several modes of parenting: hands off, protective, preparatory, etc. I think most parents try to balance these. I've taken the view that for most situations I want to prepare my children for the world they will face given what I know today, be hands off to see how they react, and only protect them as a last resort. While, some kids simply aren't ready to handle the problems they face on a daily basis, mine seem to understand more than you'd think they would. I could see how removing these stimuli from the beginning might be a good idea when you know it is going to be a problem or you want to create a peaceful environment, but I'd really prefer them to make that choice, not I.

Most adults are not prepared to make that choice ;-)

There is a balance to strike. Bringing up kids too far outside the norms that society sets can have all kinds of ramifications. Rather than shelter them, I'd prefer them to have things in common with their friends and teach them to make good choices for themselves given their own dispositions and circumstance.

Compared to when, the '90s to '00s?

At least rap's woke now. Back then, it encouraged criminal behavior and discrimination[0]. D:

That said, I think I turned out okay.

0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIeSGUK-Lyo&feature=youtu.be...

I'd like to add that advertising is also economic pollution that goes against free competition.

The theory behind free markets requires that voters are more or less rational and well informed. That they will never spend more on an inferior product. Advertisement distorts that.

I suspect that banning advertisement altogether would make the economy gain a lot in terms of market efficiency. Can you imagine a world where pricing and quality would be highly correlated? A world where information on a product would be, if not correct, at least made in good faith?

I'd love to see that happen.

Where would you draw the line? How would producers expect for consumers to find their product?

Would consumers be allowed to recommend products to each other?

What about design and product packaging? Isn't that essentially a form of advertising?

>Where would you draw the line?

At paying platforms to advertise your product.

>How would producers expect for consumers to find their product?

How about typing "insert product here" into a search engine?

>Would consumers be allowed to recommend products to each other?

Yes, as long as there is nothing of value changing hands.

>What about design and product packaging?

Fine, as long it ends at the store shelf/online product-listing.

Take my suggestions with a grain of salt, because they come from a person who ranks advertising as one of the top three problems facing humanity.

>How about typing "insert product here" into a search engine?

But new products don't show up in search engines.

> Mises in Human Action (p. 19) writes "Human action is necessarily always rational. The term 'rational action' is therefore pleonastic and must be rejected as such. When applied to the ultimate ends of action, the terms rational and irrational are inappropriate and meaningless. The ultimate end of action is always the satisfaction of some desires of the acting man."

https://mises.org/library/what-do-austrians-mean-rational

> The rational being practicing rational-expectations theory only makes behavioral economists laugh. And the neoclassical construct of equilibrium prices requires assumptions that only tenured professors who don't get out much could believe, like perfect competition, perfect information, and perfect rationality.

https://mises.org/library/rationality-and-market-economy

I'd love to see an efficient market too, but banning advertising won't accomplish that, it'll just shift the burden of discovery elsewhere, like review aggregators, and information there is already questionably reliable.

In practice, I think the problem that creates advertising is that humans have limited bandwidth for ingesting information in general, so we have tons of tools to compile more information into less information, such as news, books, statistics, reviews, etc. (For example, how many people really entirely understand their health insurance plans? It's not for lack of trying.) Advertising is sort of an arbitrage of that communication bandwidth based on the fact that some actors (companies) really want you to see their information more badly than others.

That problem doesn't go away just because you ban advertising, it just moves the arbitrage opportunity elsewhere.

I don't know if you can ever fix that. Here's a complaint about someone being cheated on a sale, 4000 years ago (1). Probably long before the ad men appeared, but people have always been looking for their angle.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complaint_tablet_to_Ea-nasir

> I view advertising as a form of pollution

Quite. If (which is now for obvious reasons somewhat unlikely) our global civilisation manque struggles on for another century, it will look back on the overconsumption propaganda industry very much like we now see slavery. Ogilvy, Saatchi et al are the Goebbels' of our age.

I would drink with you

That's a nice thing to say, thank you. I'm off to an Extinction Rebellion meet up this afternoon, where this kind of perspective is less alien than in the tech sector. They've had to book a bigger venue than originally planned because of a deluge of local interest. I have no great hopes, but there are stirrings.

I was wondering when collapse-awareness would reach the tech community. Glad to hear about extinction rebellion. Email me: shaunewilliams@gmail.com

> Ogilvy, Saatchi et al are the Goebbels' of our age.

Sorry, but that is waaay over the top. It makes you sound a bit nutty. A "Truther" of sorts, that dangerously believes too profoundly in his own ideology.

I understand that, and agree from a conventional point of view the comment does look nutty.

However the notion that the current so-called 'growth' oriented global order threatens the very fabric of our living planet, while not yet quite mainstream in corporate media, is gaining currency fast. It's well inside the fringe in academia and on the streets.

And the notion that marketing's most fundamental aim is to create desires for more consumption (hence more fake 'growth' aka ecosystem destruction) isn't a conspiracy theory (contra your 'Truther' jibe). It's quite open: philosophically-inclined marketers have understood this for a long time. They even used the term 'consumer engineering' in the early 20th C.

Have you considered that maybe GP has a better intuition about the systems effects of advertising, that you haven't fully considered?

- Advertising is a major driver of material consumption, much of which is unnecessary.

- Material consumption drives economic growth. There's also intellectual property, and there's the service industry, but even those contribute indirectly to material consumption.

- Economic growth and socioeconomic growth are unquestioned foundations of virtually every "civilized" society, but they make no sense. Growth works great... until at some point it doesn't.

Obligatory Albert Bartlett video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZA9Hnp3aV4

Obligatory Eric Weinstein video segment, focusing more on what he calls "EGO"s... embedded [unacknowledged] growth obligations. (Ignore the other three people in the video... even Jordan Peterson is completely out of his league in this "discussion".)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PagNM_oxssE#t=27m47s

The only criticism I'd make against GP's claim is that the advertising industry is just one spoke in the global wheel of impossible growth and consumption. GP's claim is not nutty, it's too narrow and limited. Ogilvy and Saatchi are only footsoldiers.

The only way this game of musical chairs ends without tears is if we luck into some awesome technology that leads to post-scarcity economics. That doesn't seem very likely from my perspective, except if we create AGI and AGI figures it out, but then AGI is an existential risk while economic collapse is just at worst a 100-200 year setback.

> The only criticism I'd make against GP's claim is that the advertising industry is just one spoke in the global wheel of impossible growth and consumption. GP's claim is not nutty, it's too narrow and limited. Ogilvy and Saatchi are only footsoldiers.

Sure - guilty as charged. I was making a pretty limited somewhat rhetorical gesture.

> The only way this game of musical chairs ends without tears is if we luck into some awesome technology that leads to post-scarcity economics.

I don't believe this to be possible, because the global ecological crisis (of which economic crashes are minor phenotypical efflorescences) doesn't have the kind of simple single causes that short-term big-bang technological innovation can fix. It's the progressive erosion of hundreds of complex evolved systems whose components are being broken at multiple levels. The kind of technology required to 'fix' this would have to have similar types of complexities at multiple scales as are found in those complex evolved systems. That may be achievable, but given the crudeness of our current technology, surely over a timescale of centuries, not the decades we have available.

The one possibility would be to slow so-called 'growth' down dramatically enough to allow evolved systems to recover, and in the meantime develop complex technologies on a slow, centuries-scale, burn. But obviously that's politically infeasible, so global ecological collapse it will be.

A game indeed. Our investments only grow as a direct exploit of the very “pollution” we try to avoid. As debt increases exponentially, so must consumption to cover it. So we shield ourselves and invest—because the game has winners, and it has losers.

People would still spend money and companies still grow even if you banned advertising. I still quite like having housing, good food, travel and so on even if I haven't seen adverts for those recently.

Marketers have always been clear that their task is to manufacture desire. Beyond the basics of food, sex, basic security, etc, wants are cultural constructions. Of course you want what you want. You did not make yourself. Your culture has that job.

If we had had a century of relentless propaganda installing onto young brains stereotypes of the glories of a clear night sky, or clean healthy rivers (instead of trivial comforts & consumer gewgaws), do you think people would still 'want' the things that destroy our natural rights to experience those things quite as much as they do?

Yes, because most of the things we want we want because of biological desire. Clean rivers and clear skies are nice for a brief moment, but they can't compete with the dopamine release of sugar and sex.

> a form of pollution

I'm reading Edward Bernays' 1928 book Propaganda [0]. Bernays was an advertising and public-relations guy who wanted to rehabilitate the term "propaganda" and rid it of its negative connotations.

Ultimately, advertising, public relations and propaganda are about agitating and motivating people to do things that they wouldn't ordinarily do, and Bernays believes it's all for the benefit of the public.

Crucially, Bernays argues that it's not so much about the ad you see, it's about the social cues that have been engineered into your family, education, employment and political system that predispose how you consume.

Turning off the TV and Instagram are good starts, but I wonder what media you and your children consume that is immune to the methods of Bernays and those who followed him.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_(book)

If everyone just "keeps their money" the amount of cash changing hands would be much reduced which has a big negative impact on the US market (for better or worse). It's why everyone's monitoring "consumer confidence index".

I moved to the US from a society where for almost any service or product, if there was a realistic option for the consumer to do their own thing and avoid spending money they would most definitely do so (even if that meant doing a worse job, wasting a lot of time on it). In the US I was surprised by the opposite attitude, if one affords to pay some money to avoid putting in the work they'll do it (and many times even when they don't have the cash for it and have to get credit). There are advantages and disadvantages for both approaches I don't think it's a clear win.

> I moved to the US from a society where for almost any service or product, if there was a realistic option for the consumer to do their own thing and avoid spending money they would most definitely do so

I'm in the US, and this is the predominant attitude amongst my friends and family -- so it's not unheard of here.

and it doesn't have to be but i do agree. jingles were a form of advertising and were kind of fun and had the phycological effect of getting stuck in your head. there were/are also quite entertaining commercials but still give visibility to their products tv and streaming. perhaps its the medium. of course we still have the equivalents to a infomercial on the internet though.

The biggest driver of people wanting more is peer actions or non ad entertainment (people with fancy things in movies).

How did you think those fancy things got into the movies? Why were those peers seen performing those actions?

To tell a story. The specific brands paid to be there, but the idea of the glamorous item is always there. This is consistent with extensive literature showing marketing can switch brand preference but is very bad at getting people to change their mind about product categories as a whole (like smoking or drinking) they've already heard of.

Then don't talk about advertising but talk about the big brother, public relations - the inventor of which played an important role in positioning smoking as a pleasant and desirable activity.

Actually, the "inventor" of public relations, Edward Bernays, illustrates my point really well. He claimed credit for getting women to smoke with his PR stunts. The data shows that the trend of women smoking started years before he did anything, and the trendline was completely unaffected when he did his stuff. He, at best, got people already smoking to switch to the brand of cigarettes he promoted.

I feel like the data might not be a slam dunk for your case at all. Bernays started his "Torches of Freedom" PR campaign in 1929. The rate of women smoking actually dropped dramatically soon after thanks to the Great Depression.

Once the Depression was over, the trend line does not appear to be unaffected, though the reasons it trended as it did aren't simple to attribute. Cigarette companies were already advertising to women before Bernays' PR campaign, but they increased their advertising afterwards as a response to it.

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm4843a2.htm#fig1

Our disagreement shows the issue with correlation studies. People will interpret them to say whatever conclusion they wanted, reducing the scientific value to nil.

If the OP study found the opposite, it wouldn't have made it to the top of HN, and if it did, every comment would mock it for using correlation and would be pointing out other explanations.

So, here's a paper that explicitly discusses "Keeping up with the Joneses" and Veblen's conspicuous consumption and all, and that claims to show that more advertisement leads to less satisfaction.

You can't really just walk in and say "Well, no, guys, listen, let me tell you how it really is" and just dismiss the whole basic notion of the paper without giving sources.

I'm on mobile, but https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https:/... is a great place to start. It summarizes hundreds of academic sources and includes them in the footnote. Certainly better research than the main study we're discussing, for reasons I've commented on elsewhere in this thread.

Thanks. I haven't read that book, but I think it is fair to say that the advertisement business has changed a lot between 1986 (when that book was published), and now.

EDIT to add: The blurb says that the author "finds much lacking in the business's importance and effectiveness and much that is problematic in advertising's social impact." (my emphasis).

It is indeed a wonderfully nuanced, in depth book.

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