[akramachamarei]

> Are you truly curious as to how it might not be A Good Thing that those engaging in high-finance capitalistic money making programs would have access to forcefully engaging a human being's brain into activity, with or without their consent, to such an extent as to drive motivations and bias neuronal activation that leads to what they think is a choice?

I guess I just don't think this is the topic at hand. What you're proposing is mind control. That's not what's at issue. What's at issue is scientifically optimized superstimuli that can predictably activate certain brain regions. So when I read "rowhammer" I'm thinking about it in this context, the ability of a video to consistently activate a targeted section of your brain.

As you should know, and IIRC, cognition does not cleanly or consistently map geographically in the brain. To go from the ability to activate a subset of brain regions to influencing behavior is not a neglible step. The only real potential I imagine is in emotional activation, which is fairly well-localized.

So really what we're talking about is being able to evoke ideas and feelings with more consistency and precision than before. This doesn't seem new. And it can't be that intense either—I have the sense that your hypothetical mind control video would be extremely annoying or unpleasant before becoming influential. And for now we have the freedom to choose what we watch and turn the video off.

And it might be reasonable to say that you were referring to future possibilities, and that I'm focusing too much on what's currently available. But I am not just reacting to the first quoted clause of parent, but to their [vomits] policy recommendations. "This sort of thing", if not heavily controlled, etc. Maybe you see no value in this research, maybe there isn't any. Nonetheless the paranoid and the scifi-as-nonfiction readers will throw up the Bat signal for the idiots and moral panic orchestrators in power to wrap us all in comforting red tape for our own good.

I exaggerate. And I am talking about many more things than you were, as if the volume of text strengthens any rebuttal. All I'm saying is, this tech has little power over human behavior, in my opinion, and we should be cautious before bringing the hammer down before we know if we've got a bumblebee or a wasp.

[SubiculumCode]

Its like we don't already show faces in fMRI experiments because we know that it will often activate the fusiform face area. Its just light years away from anything dangerous, that I am compelled, as a neuroscientist, to try to shake some sense into people. This is HN, but it feels like twitter on some topics.

[542354234235]

This just strikes me as the false dichotomy that there are two option; complete freedom of choice, and complete mind control that you are physically incapable of resisting. That as long as you are not physically incapable of, say turning off a video, that there is no problem. Just because you can stop using crack doesn't mean it isn't dangerously addictive. Just because you can say no to someone holding a gun to your head does not mean it isn't incredibly coercive.

Also this seems to ignore that people can be influenced or manipulated without being consciously aware of it. Like the people that say that marketing doesn’t work on them, failing to see that every interaction with the products and services they buy and use are curated in some way to influence and manipulate them.

[akramachamarei]

I'm not certain I took that dichotomy as a premise, but regardless I agree there is a middle ground of many patches occupied by real events characterized by mixtures of intentionality and submission. That's the easy part. What I think is the harder question posed by my original parent is when is it worth wielding the state at the issue.

For example, I'm in theory opposed to the prohibition on crack cocaine, despite its strong consistent effect on personal agency, because of two things: basic moral principles (my body my choice), and the massive (hopefully unintended) side effects of prohibition. Namely, mass incarceration, black markets, decreased drug quality, gang violence, exhaustion of policing resources, the public perception of systemic racism, and tax losses. My guess is the downsides of a hypothetical ban on algorithmically optimized advertisements would be of a very different kind but similar quantity. And again, the other issue is basic moral principles. I'm not comfortable with bracketing free expression with numerous exceptions, rate-limits, inspectors, or whatever apparatchiks would be employed to enforce such a restriction.