[luk32]

Why the distaste? I treat it as a study of phenomena. It's like a social study on rather grand scale. It doesn't different species much from the crowd dynamics, useful in better design of evacuation routes.

The application is not life-saving, but the conclusions are the same. It's like dynamite and atom splitting. You can use it for the good and for the bad.

> it's important to understand what's going on in these companies.

This is simple. They study people's behavior to drive it for their benefit. The basics of it should be taught in high school, so people better understand themselves.

[phyzome]

The distaste is from people wanting to "drive demand", doing it, or recommending it. Driving demand is, quite literally, making possibly-happy people unhappy and then offering a paid solution. Reducing people's happiness for profit is basically evil.

And yeah, I'm reading about it because it's important to understand, anthropologically.

[Godel_unicode]

Why the automatic assumption that the people were happy before, and that they won't be happier after? Have you never been happier/better off after buying something that you didn't know you wanted?

Driving demand is how some people discover lifelong hobbies.

[phyzome]

No, generally when I buy something I didn't know I wanted, I soon feel vaguely "bleagh" about it and realize I had merely lusted after it, but that it didn't actually add anything to my life.

Buddhists have this down pat: Desire is suffering.

I think people are pretty capable of finding hobbies on their own. We're connected to this global information network. It's not like people aren't being exposed to new ideas all the time. But telling them "you will be happier if you buy this" is disingenuous, and makes people question their existing happiness. That's... bad.

I'll tell you one place where it's appropriate, though -- if someone is already seeking recreation, and doesn't know which option they want, marketing a specific answer is fine. One of the reasons people love libraries is that they can go wander around and discover something they'd never heard of. But that's someone who is already looking for a book to spend time with! Compare to a banner ad saying "this book will fix your life", when someone was just trying to look up information on how to fix their mower. They don't need that. They need to fix their mower.

[Molaxx]

But it's not just studying a phenomena. "driving desire" is an intervention and usually a neutral way of describing massive exploitation of human cognitive failings for purposes of monetary gains. Money is supposed to be a proxy measure for value, but these "desire driving" strategies are optimizing for the proxy. It's the ultimate manifestation of Goodhart's Law. You can very easily stop providing real value and still make money. Mind you, I'm not a communist and I see the advantages of a free market. But its failings stem from this problem. The only way to overcome these failings is by being critical. Like articulating distate for "desire driving" loudly and clearly. Hopefully this would lead to self regulating economical players which would allow us more freedom from actual formal violently enforced state laws. I do agree that teaching these strategies, critically, to high school students is a very good idea.