| Please accept this physicalist's take: - Advertising as a first-principle works, because our biology is amenable to familiarity. sheer repetition ⇒ familiarity ⇒ positive bias ("things I know / like / trust / ...", common pattern) There might be more to it, but that's enough, and proved enough times in many a scientific study afaik. - Applying the technique to a real-world problem has varying levels of efficiency; whether it's the wrong solution or badly executed. Heed this naive comparison: not all bridges are good, and some are scams. But there's no question whether building bridges is useful in the first place. The question is and forever will be, what should be the rules for making good enough bridges, safe enough? Advertising as a domain and market is not a special snowflake in most regards. It's actually boringly common, dare I say predictable. ____ Where it gets tricky. Where first-principles aren't enough because complexity is at a whole other level: advertising is the primary revenue for a bunch of industries, most notably the press (the media) which is otherwise considered "the fourth pillar of democracy", i.e. that quality of information in a democracy is as necessary as government, congress, and justice, the 3 branches of the republic ideal form. How do you reconcile that the biggest "influencers" of public opinion, the press, is itself mostly influenced financially by the most interest, biased, self-tauting side of the entire economy? Wherein not rational engineers, not sane financiers, not level-headed CEOs or even just Jane and John your co-workers next door have a voice, not even sales who know that lying and deceiving is not the way to build a sustainable business... but marketing, in other words those whose job is to create a Hollywood-fiction of fabled greatness... it's not lying, it never was, it's been elevated as fiction —see: artistic awards for the best ads, superbowl hype, and the actual real cinematographic value of some of that, hands down. Nevermind that the products are asking for real money, however. And then we wonder why the media has become such a theatrical ongoing masterpiece of sensationalist storytelling. Well, lines were crossed. Why infotainment has become such a norm that it is now capable of higher quality than "editorialized" (read: advertiser-leashed) newsrooms. “No, Jane, we can't say that. We'd lose ad money, you don't want us to fire people, do you?” The sheer complexity of that makes me want to duck in quantum machine learning and call it a day on politics. I don't have a perfect solution, I can only see red lines in law and a certain sense of ethics, like we value life, we should value information. In short, bug is in human code, thus fix as well. |