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Comment by joshuamorton | Hacker News Reader

How do you draw the difference between an ad and not an ad?

Is a doctor telling you to brush 2x a day an ad for toothpaste? What about their suggestion that you floss more? Those are aligned with your well being, but will increase your consumption.

> change their behavior in a way that's going to be detrimental to them.

This seems obviously wrong. The implication here is that anything advertised must be bad for the target. From an econ perspective this means that you reject the idea of comparative advantage.

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> How do you draw the difference between an ad and not an ad?

If it's paid promotion, it's an ad. If the doctor's doing this only because they think it's in my best interest, it's not. The FTC already has some pretty clear guidelines on this because ads are required to be clearly marked as such in many cases.

I guess I should clarify in the context of this discussion, we're defining ads as

>psychological warfare against a populace using their very nature against them. All in an effort to get them to change their behavior in a way that's going to be detrimental to them. Either they stop looking for alternatives, or they make purchases they don't need to

In this context, a doctor making a recommendation to use a particular brand (paid or unpaid) is an ad. Even a doctor generally recommending you change your behavior to consume more toothpaste is an ad.

So in this framing, how do you determine the difference between an ad and not?

Even with the narrow definition, you missed:

> in a way that's going to be detrimental to them.

A dentist recommending that I use more toothpaste may change my behavior, but not in a detrimental way. If the dentist is paid to make the same recommendation, it's more difficult to say whether they made the recommendation purely out of my best interest, so the definition begins to apply again.

This gets back to what I said about comparative advantage. The monetary transfer is only bad if you assume the company can only gain if you lose and the situation is zero sum. If you using toothpaste is good for you, and good for the company, what's the issue?

To use a more current example: would Pfizer marketing in a way that intentionally appeals to anti-vax people be mind control to their detriment?

Taking a step back, there are at least (but really I think only) two reasons for an advertisement: to raise awareness or to convince. The first clearly isn't unethical. Saying "we exist" isn't really mind control, and results in a more informed consumer. I admit that most ads that appear to do that don't just do that, but an advertisement that simply points out that Colgate is a Toothpaste brand that you can buy Is ethical. Its exactly the same as putting your logo on your box (which is a form of advertisement!) and having your box at eye level on the shelf (which is also a form of advertisement!!).

The second type convinces people that one act may be better than another (our brand > their brand, or brushing > not). These can be ethical or not, but GP stated that, essentially, advertising is always going to be detrimental to the consumer, which implies that everyone is already acting in a globally optimal way. That seems immediately suspicious, does it not?

Thanks for expanding. I agree with your delineation between raising awareness or convincing, I think. I don't think it's the most helpful way to understand ads and their potential for harm. There's another way to categorize ads - maybe orthogonal - based on whether they are presented as part of an advertising network or not. There's a fundamental difference between showing a box on a shelf and buying ads on a billboard. Or perhaps the line should be drawn at targeted ads. It's of course possible to show benign "we exist" ads via Facebook ads, or political disinformation ads in a newspaper, but it seems to me that certain methods of advertising are obviously more conducive to harmful, manipulative ads.

Also (and this is more radical), I do think it's a legitimate to want to unsubscribe, even from "we exist" ads. Attention is valuable, it shouldn't be considered an inalienable right to sneak anything you want into my consciousness for the purposes of selling. Even if you accept that it's not a zero-sum game. I recognize that this is not the status quo at all currently, but it's the feeling behind comments like the above.

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