[opportune]

It’s funny because the whole “Amazon ambassador” thing is just Amazon doing the same thing in reverse.

What I hate most about the 21st century is how almost nothing feels genuine anymore. The news, any sort of campaign, even “science” in a lot of cases are just people using money to tell us what to think. Maybe it’s been like this for decades and we’re just now waking up to it, but regardless it just makes it all feel hollow

[LeifCarrotson]

I fear that previously, trying to use money to tell people what to think was ineffective or inefficient, but now the cents-to-sentiments exchange rate is tipping too far.

When communication was one-to-one, you could hire someone to visit a target in person and advocate your position, which made sense only if your revenue from the advocacy was greater than the cost of the employee. Most of the time you wouldn't even start to do this because it would be dumb.

But now communication is now one-to-thousands and it's even cheaper to publish an idea than it used to be. If you can spend $100 to influence 10,000 people to give you $0.10 on average, that will be stupidly profitable, and greedy/amoral corporations will spend that money until the ROI is down to break-even.

[high_5]

That's what postmodern era is. End of belief. IMO that's the fruit of scepticism as a way of life which has become well entrenched in the modern, well educated societies. As if we're in another stage of consequences of eating the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge (as a society).

[mikelyons]

The big problem is that it's not true skepticism, it's false skepticism: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kzZdps9PG4

[high_5]

I agree. The problem is that "true scepticism" demands a disciplined mind in a relatively stable emotional state. That's not what usually what happens in our daily lives.

[dredmorbius]

Actualised really needs to distill its message to 10-20 minutes max.

I see 1h 16m and close tab.

I've tried watching in the past: tediously repetitious.

[mikelyons]

This attitude that dumbed-down, 10 second sound-bytes can suffice to examine and grok the nuance and existential dimensionality of the deep topics that he covers is what has lead to such pervading pollution of the information ecology. I would posit to you that you don't have time for shorter videos on these topics, and if you believe that, you will waste your life at a very low-level of communication and awareness around these topics in your attempts at a shortcut to wisdom. Does that sound wise? If it seems repetitious I would see if you can find the subtle differences between what occurs to you as mere repetition.

Or am I just witnessing the damage to attention-span of modern living?

There's lots wrong with this attitude IMHO, even though I am guilty of it in many ways I think that you should be able to see the quality of the messages and place them higher than a lot of other information sources that are blasting at you.

[dredmorbius]

I watch and listen to plenty of good long-form audio/video.

This ain't it.

10 minutes is 60x 10 seconds.

And if you can't get the meat of your argument out in a few minutes, there's something wrong with it.

(And that's windbag-me saying this.)

You're also going a bit overboard with the Actualized videos of late. Might want to give it a break.

[andreilys]

I do wonder what an end game looks like for a society that has no strong unified set of beliefs or meaning. Citizens left to themselves to decide meaning (with these “decisions” often co-opted by influence professionals whose job is to inject values and extract cash from consumers)

[mikelyons]

It's not a decision so much as lots of difficult emotional labor that almost nobody in our society is prepared or willing to do. Absolute Truth is accessible to your direct experience. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvaPmKQVIuQ

[moosey]

Soon "tell us what to think" will be so subversive that most people might not have any way to combat it. Experiments have shown that leading questions can create memories where none previously existed, and how fragile and inaccurate our memories are. I don't know if that makes times interesting or terrifying.

It's come to the point where I seriously toy with handing off most of my decision making process to statistics. Mathematics has derived an algorithm for a lot of real world decision making that is superior to what the vast majority of humans can do, and I'm not sure which group I'm in: the ones that make really poor emotional decisions (although "luck" and emotions are tied together, according to more research I've read; luck might just be a way of thinking), or if I'm able to make well informed decisions based on data.

[opportune]

Unless you are directly plumbing the depths of data and doing computations, I worry using “statistics” to make decisions will just bias your thinking in subtler ways: towards what you’re already aware of, estimates that could be faulty, information availability bias. Except in some ways it’s more dangerous because it carries the veneer of mathematical correctness

[inimino]

Statistics based on what? Almost all statistics you can collect will be based on what other people do, so there's no escaping that bias. You're better off thinking for yourself, and being cautious about making any decision that affects your future.

[ewzimm]

In my opinion, this is a good kind of hate, and any genuine activity of the type you're talking about has grown from it, not just in the last few decades but for millenia. Groups pressure us to feel comfortable with their version of reality and use that comfort as a means of control. The natural inclination might be to find other people offering different ideas that feel more genuine, and genuine connections certainly do have value, but if those people try to make you comfortable with their own version of things in the same way, they're probably not much different than the people that left you dissatisfied in the first place.

[Zenst]

Yes, in the 80's we would call such things cheesy, today they are the standard. Just we kinda accept it for what it is, equally accept that some people will fall for the cheese and enjoy the cheese. So it carries on as the norm. Then, when you get a good, fair - non-brain insulting advert or product, your like just wow - thank you. Though they can alienate most of the cheese lovers out there.

But I'm sure there is some science behind it, might be the case that marketing whent - lets target the average IQ and go for the masses and with that. We get lots of cheese.

As an aside - some aspects of today's marketing remind me in part of an old TV show https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Headroom_(TV_series)

[opportune]

I don’t think marketing only applies to people with low IQs. There are many “prestigious” magazines and newspapers, mostly marketed towards educated professionals, that get a huge portion of their articles ghost written by PR firms.

The majority of content is sponsored in some shape or form, and all content is biased towards the interests of the publishers and authors.

Sure you may not buy a certain car because of the music in the commercial, or positively view some corporate ambassador saying “80% of our cocoa does not come from child labor!” but there is much more to corporate propaganda than that.

[fucking_tragedy]

Astroturfing has been happening for as long as I've been online.

[malandrew]

But now we have the technology to automate and scale it.

[AtlasBarfed]

It is scary how much more mechanized and automated its become and the reach via the smartphone interface terminals,

but at the meta level, I think most people growing up with the internet know to a fundamental level that they are being manipulated and tracked.

Alas they may be resigned to it as a reality, but people in the older generations are so gullible to frighteningly basic propaganda.

[ryandrake]

Yea it’s not new. Money converts freely and losslessly into speech, so it’s difficult to distinguish truth from a paid message. When you see a tweet or watch a YouTube video or read a comment on HN or hear a product endorsement from an acquaintance or hear a journalist tell you that something is “science“, how do you know it’s not paid for?