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Comment by RRWagner | Hacker News Reader

Here is an important difference. A century ago, the predator (seller) and the prey (buyer) were on equal evolutionary terms. Each generation of humans on either side of the transaction came into the world, learned to convince, learned to resist, then passed, and some balance was maintained. In this century, corporations and algorithms don't die, but the targets do. This means that the non-human seller is continuously, even immortally, learning, adapting and perfecting how to manipulate. The target, be it adult, adolescent, or child, is, and will be ever increasingly, at a severe disadvantage.

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What if I told you younger sales people were trained by more experienced sales people and its not a new thing.

Ah yes because trade secrets were never a thing at any of these companies. The companies always shut down when it's founding members died wiping out all the knowledge it had built up.

That is to say organizations have always had this edge on individuals.

Right, because we know that parents never pass down useful skills or life tips to their children, like skepticism of propaganda and advertising, and instead send their children into the world like sheep into a lion's den.

There might come a day when advertising is too flawless for a human mind to resist it, but we're not there yet.

Most of everybody thinks their behaviors and decisions are not meaningfully influenced by advertising. Companies spend literally trillions of dollars running ads. One side is right, one side is wrong.

And advertising largely relies on this ignorance of its effects, or otherwise most of everybody would go to much greater lengths to limit their exposures to such, and governments would be more inclined to regulate the ad industry as a goal in and of itself.

Advertising is just companies saying "This is what you can purchase from me - it's awesome - please consider purchasing it". I have managed hundreds of millions in ad spend for major brands. None of them rely on weird ad magic to persuade people secretly - just showing off different aspects of the product or service.

Um, off the top of my head:

"You'll be happier if you purchase this thing"

"You're not good enough as you are now, but you will be if you purchase this thing"

"Other people you admire or respect have purchased this thing, and if you do too you'll be more like them"

"Other people will like you more if you purchase this thing"

"You'll be more attractive if you purchase this thing"

"This thing will be worth more in the future so if you purchase this thing it will make you money"

"This is your only chance to purchase this thing, so if you don't it now you'll miss out on this price"

I don't think any of them has to do with how awesome "the thing" itself is. Obviously there's more to, say, an expensive watch, than its ability to tell time

The only products that sell this in advertising actually provide those brand features. Essentially people pay money to increase their perceived status.

Like, if you sell a luxury handbag. When people buy it, they know 70% of the value comes from the advertising saying "this is a high value product" as a status signal. I think that's really dumb, but that's what people want.

It also existed a long time before ads itself did.

So you've never seen like, a beer ad that promises status and attractiveness?

Beer/liquor is in the same category of status good. People pay a lot to show the brand.

Some liquor brands are like that. 95% or more of beer ads that imply status are just lying to you.

Similarly, something must have been missing from the AXE body spray instructions

> they know 70% of the value comes from the advertising

So, you are aware that advertising is in large part responsible for shaping what is perceived as high-value status signals in society. You're also aware that for certain products the only distinction between those and their alternatives is that specific high-value association.

How come you started out from the position that advertising is "just showing off different aspects of the product" then?

If anonymous billboards or banner ads can convince you you aren't good enough, your life is probably not great with or without ads.

If an ad convinces you to, say, get a gym membership or go on Ozempic, who's to say what happens next? Maybe you do start feeling better about yourself.

They don't consciously convince you directly anymore than a slot machine convinces you to give it one more spin - it's done on a subconscious level. For instance one of the most famous, and effective, ads in history is Apple's 1984 ad. [1] A 59 second ad where the only mention of what's being sold at all happens in about 1 second with a reference to a brand name and then a logo. See: ELM model and peripheral processing. [2] And this is all day one advertising stuff.

Advertising is a horrific industry. It probably always was, but at the modern scales, it's outright dystopic. I think there's simply a large amount of cognitive dissonance around this issue because advertising drives the paychecks of a whole lot of people, and it's rather difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtvjbmoDx-I

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elaboration_likelihood_model#P...

While I agree with your point about understanding, I think there's also an issue of self-image. "What? Me? Influenced by some ad? Get outta here! I make my own decisions!"

> Advertising is just companies saying "This is what you can purchase from me - it's awesome - please consider purchasing it".

This is such a naive view of advertising that if you're really this unaware of how manipulative ads are, you can't possibly have defenses against them. You should seriously spend some time looking into the secret magic of dark psychology they use to manipulate people because while knowing about their tactics won't make you immune to them, it really can help to be aware of how they work and to train yourself to recognize when they're being used against you.

I don't know, I just went to find an ad in my feed and the first one was for a house plant that was easy to take care of. I'm not saying I'm the smartest cookie in the shed, but I didn't detect any manipulation. Seems like it was a person who just wanted me to know about their product.

Let me know what I'm missing.

I haven't seen the plant ad, but it sounds like once you start learning about how the ad industry works your mind will be blown. Insane amounts of money have been poured into research by the industry (including some highly questionable research being done on children and infants) and some of the results are fascinating.

The manipulation goes beyond even the content of the ads themselves. For example, one of the reasons companies are spending so much money collecting/buying/storing/securing every scrap of data they can get about you and your life is so that they can target ads at you at specific times when they know you'll be more vulnerable such as times when they know you'd normally be tired, or when they think your medication may be wearing off, or during periods where you're under high stress, or when you might be entering a manic phase, or when you're intoxicated, etc.

Like I said, understanding the many many ways that you are vulnerable to their tricks can help but it won't stop them from working on you. It's kind of like how you can't not see certain optical illusions even though you know you're interpreting them incorrectly. The conclusion I've come to is that it's best to do everything you can to avoid exposure to advertising where possible and to keep an eye out for when those tricks are being used against you elsewhere.

So a company should not be able to recommend therapy ads if I seem stressed? Ozempic if I seem like I want to lose weight? Laxatives if I seem constipated, or energy drinks if I'm sleep deprived?

Trying to moralize ad targeting is exhausting. It's not inherently a bad thing to target an ad to someone who's in a bad spot, or really in general.

People who buy the product are presumably competent enough to manage their own finances. Acting like they're being exploited constantly because ads hinted that they weren't masculine enough, or too fat, or being their peers, etc. is ridiculous. Ads aren't like cigarettes.

It's more like companies recommending an alcoholic who has been sober for 13 months his favorite drink because they know he is going through a divorce and is currently 15 feet from a bar, or a company targeting a person with Alzheimer's right at the time they know they'll start sundowning, or even just cranking up nostalgia in their advertising because they know your last surviving parent died and for the first time you won't be going home for the coming holidays.

Ad targeting these days can be intensely personal and manipulative. There are lots of ways ads could be used that aren't harmful, but also lots of ways that they can. Imagine an ad using a deepfake of your own child who died in a car crash telling you in his voice how he might still be alive if your car only had <insert new safety feature here>. There are clearly lines that can and should be drawn. There are extremely unethical practices happening today because companies are amoral monsters that only care about money and there are almost no laws or regulations to stop them from doing whatever they want.

Ads aren't like cigarettes. You make the choice to smoke or not, but ads are just forced on you. Only rarely are you given any opportunity to opt out of them, and the industry spends a lot of money trying to circumvent any efforts you take to cut them out of your life. You can quit cigarettes, but they wont let you quit advertising.

> Ads aren't like cigarettes

And it's worth noting that there are laws that restrict advertisement of cigarettes, alcohol, etc.

Meanwhile let's also not forget the post itself on which we are commenting: accusations that social media companies have, in fact, engineered their products to be addictive.

To what end? To sell more ads!

Either you intentionally misunderstood his point and deflected or you honestly seem to think this way. In either case, you misapprehended what he meant.

I can't remember ever seeing an ad that was just showing off different aspects of the product or service, outside of things like Craigslist.

>Advertising is just companies saying "This is what you can purchase from me - it's awesome - please consider purchasing it". I have managed hundreds of millions in ad spend for major brands

Oh, okay. Well if you say so.

No, this take is crazy. If ads were able to brainwash people Coca-Cola would still be the most popular drink in America.

The problem with "meaningfully influenced" is that a 1% bump in sales is massive for a company, but normally only represents a very minor shift in customer behavior.

US spending on advertising is, in total, about $1200/person-year. If you believe that advertisers are rapacious capitalists who will take as much as they possibly can, then they only believe that they can capture about that much extra per person by advertising to them.

That's not nothing, but it's not very much either. Ads are extremely overblown as a threat to society; you only need to look as far as eye-tracking studies of web browsers and the prevalence of ad blockers to see pretty good proof that people do just ignore them most of the time.

I'm firmly in the camp of "I'm not influenced by ads (or so I think)" / "not convinced that ads are actually a net positive". But even so, I don't fully agree with your take.

I think that it's very possible to think we aren't influenced, yet still be. My reasoning is that basically no one admits to being influenced. Yet you can definitely see the effects of ads on people: whenever there's a strong campaign for something, little after you'll see everyone buying it. Maybe they just try to "follow trends" or whatever, but that's just a form of advertising, isn't it? I only very rarely watch TV and have ad blockers everywhere, yet I can still detect when all of a sudden everybody has the same bag or same jacket or whatever. My bags last years and years. I doubt it's simply a coincidence and they all needed new bags right at the same time.

> Ads are extremely overblown as a threat to society; you only need to look as far as eye-tracking studies of web browsers and the prevalence of ad blockers to see pretty good proof that people do just ignore them most of the time.

I think that many people don't know about ad-blockers and try to ignore the ads while reading a website or scrolling some app. But that doesn't imply they aren't influenced. In my case, I'm fairly convinced that I'm not influenced by my instagram's feed's ads, since they try to sell me pregnant women's garments, of which I have 0 use as a single, childless male. But there can be other factors of which I don't have conscience, like seeing people use the same brand camera or whatever. Call it advertising-by-proxy.

However, take a look at people's screens when taking the metro or whatever. Many do watch the ads instead of just scrolling past. This is what I actually have a hard time understanding: people would spend a comparable amount of time on what looks like ads and what looks like their friends' stuff, as if it was the same thing. Which, granted, isn't a very long time. In my case, I only follow photographers and would spend a fair amount of time on people's pictures but scroll right through anything that looks like an ad (text or video of any kind).

USA here: our schools brainwash children to remove that skepticism. It makes them easier to control and order is very important to the kind of person who becomes a teacher.

Seattle area, they're brainwashing my children to celebrate the "seahawks" team. They came home yesterday being excited that team won the superbowl. I ask "why do you care? You don't like to watch football, none of your friends like to play it". Hard to influence when the kid is there 6.5 hours every day.

My dad was a lot like you. He would shit on things I was excited about that he didn’t like.

We haven’t talked in years.

Ah, don't worry. He'd forgotten ten minutes later and I later took him rock climbing, which he actually loves and I support him doing despite me being terrified of heights.

I bullshitted my dad a lot too because I wanted to try and make him happy.

My child's San Francisco Bay Area school has taught media literacy / skepticism every year since 3rd grade. Curricula are determined by the teacher, but N=1 is sufficient for a counterexample for a broad country-wide generalization.

Celebrating a local sports win is about as apolitical and low-harm as possible when it comes to promoting a shared cultural bond for a community.

Are the children allowed to sit and study all day on the topic they're currently interested in? No. https://cantrip.org/gatto.html They're required to submit to authority at all times. How could it be otherwise in our system -- one teacher, 20 random kids of varying personalities and education level.

It's not a "local sports win" -- it's a profitable, billionaire-owned corporation stealing public tax money by brainwashing everyone into thinking it's "local". The majority of the players aren't from the area either and will leave after.

Are we really recreating elementary education from first principles here? American public education has always followed an instructor -> pupil format, beginning in New England for bible reading, accounting, and manufacturing.

There are probably some Montessori schools that opt for other formats, but I doubt that children are set up for success by neglecting math or other topics they are uninterested in. I would wager that even Montessori schools require study of the core tested curriculum.

If you have ever been a guest teacher then you would observe that a substantial minority of students must be guided to pay attention to the material. Autodidacts are not representative of the majority of people.

Re: sports: all things have negative aspects to them. Being a grump to such an extent as to discount all positive culturally cohesive aspects of a largely benign activity is a suboptimal way to live life. Choosing to build on commonalities in a community leads to better outcomes. Believing sports to be a net bad activity is a single-digit percentage minority opinion.

Former USA teacher here: I assure you that the 17.5 hours parents have with kids are much more influential. It's likely that a lot of the students were really excited that their home team won and the teachers leaned into that excitement.

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