[somenameforme]

I think this is a rabbit hole that makes you want to pull out of it real fast. For instance consider how many tech jobs right now basically devolve into trying to make people see ads that they don't want to watch. Not only are you not adding value to the world, you're actively making it worse.

Of course people can convince themselves with all sorts of rationalizations, like claiming you're introducing people to things that can make their lives better that they might not have otherwise known about. But that's just a fallacy. Good things, with or without advertising, gradually become known. Online ads are overwhelmingly about shoveling chaff down people's throats.

And poker players have the same sort of rationalizations. You might view oneself as an athlete, or an entertainer, a competitor, or maybe even just an analyst. Many of those descriptors, in my opinion, fall closer to reality than ad delivery rationalizations, but again it's all just rationalizations anyway you look at it.

The number of people working truly valuable jobs that genuinely improve society are few and far between, and they tend to pay terribly. Farmers being a textbook example. There are some good counter-examples like doctors, but even there there's an undesirable trend. Working at a poor public emergency institution is going to drive relatively low income and high stress. Go work as a plastic surgeon in Beverly Hills and you're driving an extremely high income and low stress work. All in all we have a pretty terrible system, but nonetheless it's almost certainly better than all the others.

[munksbeer]

> I think this is a rabbit hole that makes you want to pull out of it real fast. For instance consider how many tech jobs right now basically devolve into trying to make people see ads that they don't want to watch. Not only are you not adding value to the world, you're actively making it worse.

I don't see this as the same thing at all. Advertisers exist because of demand for them by companies who want to sell their stuff to consumers. Those companies employ people and actually produce things that consumers want. This is not a zero sum game.

Ultimately all we really need is food, water and to keep from freezing to death in some shelter. So sure, we can get rid of almost everything else, but that isn't really the point.

[somenameforme]

By the same logic casinos, gamblers, and professional players all exist because there's demand from other players to play. If there were no 'fish' then there'd be no 'pros.' It's just all rationalizations. Look at the impact on society. Professional gamblers (or casinos for that matter) aren't truly making society better for anybody except themselves. It's the same thing for companies spending inordinate amount of efforts trying to force people to watch ads they don't want to see. That's not a benefit for society in any way, shape, or fashion.

[hnbad]

During the genocide of Jewish people in Poland, one of the officers of the German reserve police who were tasked with the executions negotiated with his comrades that he would kill the children, but that he would only do so after their mothers had already been killed by someone else. This way, he told himself, he was doing the children a favor by ending their suffering because surely they had nothing left to live for if they had seen their mothers die in front of their own eyes.

I'm not saying poker (or advertising) is like the Holocaust. I am however saying people are exceptionally good at rationalizing their participation in acts they would otherwise find morally appalling if they end up in a place where they are part of a system and their ability to maintain their social status quo hinges on continuing to be part of it.

> All in all we have a pretty terrible system, but nonetheless it's almost certainly better than all the others.

Completely unrelated fun fact: Eastern Block apparatchiks used to refer to anarchists and other communists as "utopians" and coined the term "real socialism" (or "actually existing socialism") to describe the Soviet system of authoritarian governance and justify why it never met the aspirational goals Lenin and the Bolsheviks initially claimed they had. It's terrible, da, but it's better than capitalism and only a counter-revolutionary would claim that something more radical would be possible.

If you go back to the days of feudalism I'm sure you can find a thinker arguing in not as many words that while the divine hierarchy may feel cruel at times it is clearly preferable to the chaos of mob rule.

[wenyuanyu]

Ads are not zero-sum at all... Also most ads are not for the not known things... Coca Cola and Apple are among the top spenders on ads...

[hnbad]

Spend any time working in advertising and you'll fall down the "content marketing" rabbit hole. There's a lot of money in selling Pepsi its own logo or making sure people can't forget about a brand but there's even more money in content marketing and that's entirely a grift.

Content marketing is like a void onion. It's layers upon layers of nothing and it all generates "passive income". Most of it exists to sell to other people who are doing content marketing as a get-rich-quick-scheme. Why bother doing a grift yourself if you can grift by selling your grift to other people and let them worry about how to make it actually work. The actual product and topic doesn't even matter. Is it investment advice? Mental health? Self-improvement? Weight loss? "Passive income"? Offer vacuous goodies like "free ebooks" to get people hooked and then continue selling and upselling them on the promise that if they just pay for one more Mastermind session, webinar, virtual retreat or coaching package, they'll figure it out eventually.