[davidhollander]

>part of the argument is that the modern culture is designed by marketers to keep you unhealthy and consuming.

Welcome to the field of Applied Psychology and Cognitive Science. Once you have reverse engineered the mind, the only practical application is manipulating it.

>just as likely that modern marketers are just doing what people want

For a TRILLION dollars we are not talking about "marketers" in the Mad Men, I-made-a-website-and-wrote-a-book, or "social media expert" sense. We are at minimum talking about behavioral psychologist PhDs and global corporate parasites like Coca Cola, Philip Moris Tobacco, etc.

In reality, those are still on the billion dollar level and not on the top of the food chain. The only trillion dollar companies I'm aware of though are financial institutions, so that would be my criticism of the article. If you really want to make a trillion dollars, you'll need to be much closer to the monetary spigot. In other words, a bank.

[blasdel]

Neither Coca-Cola nor Phillip Morris invented their products or market segments — cola/caffeine and tobacco/nicotine have been used for thousands of years by huge portions of every population to gain access to them.

The products have always sold themselves, if anything it's the marketers and behavioral psychologists that are the parasites (on the commodity-selling industries).

[radu_floricica]

> the only practical application is manipulating it

Or improve it?

[gritzko]

Manipulation is simpler and pays better.

[radu_floricica]

The proper answer is a bit longer. When you have more then one entity with this knowledge, sooner or later you're going to have an arms race. Which has, as a byproduct, all sides getting better and better.

So it's not really a question of one or the other. Having manipulation will, long term, lead to corresponding vaccination.