Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated) @joepie91@pixie.town

@buherator @esther@strangeobject.space This is not a "harmful generalization". This is literally *how the advertising industry works*. It *is* the "actual problem". Why do you think that practically every single advertising platform has some kind of bidding mechanism nowadays?

It doesn't matter whether you can think of scenarios where it "isn't that bad", regardless of how "realistic" they are. You measure the impact of a system on society by measuring its *worst-case* scenarios, not its *best-case* scenarios. And that is what I am trying to illustrate here.

The model we have for advertising is optimized *for* that worst-case scenario, in that it always converges to it at scale. This is a choice as a society. We can choose not to accept that, and instead pick models that behave respectfully towards society *even under worst-case conditions*.

But to do that, we first need to acknowledge that this model is bad, and that it's not actually optimized for discovery; it's optimized for the *suppression of* discovery, and the "discovery" component is just used as a moral fig leaf.

Once this is understood and acknowledged, we can select models that *actually are* optimized for discovery, without this worst-case failure mode.

@buherator @esther@strangeobject.space This doesn't really engage with my point at all, though - this is basically arguing "but if you kind of squint, with the right conditions, then the current model *can* work like an index of stuff".

And sure, that's true, but the part that matters here is how the system behaves when those conditions are *not* met, and we're *not* living in the optimal case. And in that case, it behaves exactly like I described, and that is considered desirable in the industry because it's what keeps the money coming in.

Also feels like this maps neatly onto "precision" in other disciplines (3D modelling, manufacturing, etc.) where working at higher precision gets you a more exact result but usually at increased cost elsewhere

Note that this is a philosophical classification much more than a technical one; many technical choices feed into how a language behaves, and the *intention* and underlying belief system of the designers are going to be the main determining factor here

Pondering whether it would make sense to classify programming languages on a "precision" axis, meaning where it sits on the axis of tradeoffs between "exactly (needing to) specify all the details of what you want it to do, resulting in guaranteed and predictable behaviours" and "doing hopefully-the-right-thing with little specification work, at the cost of less predictable behaviour and it sometimes guessing wrong"

@buherator @esther@strangeobject.space This is a really common argument I hear, but it falls flat when actually scrutinized: because advertising, in the sense that it is meant here, is fundamentally based on *asymmetry*.

The whole point of advertising, and advertising spend, is to elevate your presence above that of the competition. Which is to say, every dollar you spend on advertising is a dollar you spend on *reducing* the discoverability of your competition, ie. of other options.

Since there are more competitors (who lose discoverability) than there are "you"s (who gains discoverability), this means that every dollar towards advertising is a net-loss for total discoverability; most things become *less* visible, only one thing more so.

If we designed our society around discovery of options, it wouldn't look like advertising. It would look more like an ad-free phone book, or perhaps a consumer-reports-style comparison table or facet-based search engine. Crucially, there would fundamentally be no relation between ad spend and discoverability.

TL;DR: Advertising does not actually serve improved discovery of options and in fact does the opposite, that's just the moral fig leaf the industry uses to justify its "social license to operate".

I've noticed that the (autistic?) practice of "repeat in different words what was said to explicitly acknowledge it and incrementally add onto it at the same time" often gets interpreted as "mansplaining" on here and I'm not sure what to do about that