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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

The problem is that bullshit is a negative externality. It's cognitive pollution. Those who clutter the world with bullshit reap the rewards of nabbing the suckers who respond to it, but don't pay the costs of imposing those cognitive loads on everyone else. That leads to more bullshit than would be economically efficient.

Take a simple example like billboards. If billboard advertisers had to pay every person whose life experience is degraded by seeing a billboard for a product they'd never buy, the equilibrium amount of billboard advertising would go way down.

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If billboard advertisers had to pay every person whose life experience is degraded by seeing a billboard for a product they'd never buy

I've never found my life "degraded" by a billboard, even if it was for a product I'd never buy. In fact, some of them are still useful, especially when driving long distances on the Interstate. They're something to break the monotony and give you something to think about, if only for a minute or two. Some are downright funny/amusing, and others at least provoke a "I wonder what that's supposed to mean" reaction.

"cognitive pollution"? That smells suspiciously like bullshit to me.

You may welcome the billboards, but "cognitive pollution" sounds like a perfectly good description to me. Something that disrupts your focus and is forced on you as part of the environment rather than asked for.

Why would you say a billboard is any more disruptive than whatever else I'd be looking at if the billboard weren't there? Maybe it's a tree, or a fence, or a cow, or a farm tractor, or just sand and dirt... but when you're driving on the Interstate, at some point you're going to get bored and your eyes are going to wander looking for something to fix on for at least a few seconds, other than the road in front of you. Well, mine do anyway. Maybe I'm abnormal.

Anyway, I acknowledge that a lot of people get really worked up over billboards. I just have a hard-time getting excited over that. Maybe there are better examples of this "cognitive pollution". shrug

There certainly are better examples[1], but I think you are being willfully obtuse.

Of course there would be something where the billboard would have been, but advertising is designed, at great expense and with a huge amount of effort, to arrest the attention of the audience. (A significant amount of which is accomplished by being intentionally obnoxious.)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5766534

* veidr 1 hour ago

There certainly are better examples[1], but I think you are being willfully obtuse.*

Please... that kind of thing just lowers the level of discourse for everybody involved.

Of course there would be something where the billboard would have been, but advertising is designed, at great expense and with a huge amount of effort, to arrest the attention of the audience.

Perhaps it is, and what I'm saying then is that that doesn't bother me. But it's probably a reflection of some ideological / philosophical bias on my part. I've never been up-in-arms about advertising the way some people are. I don't even surf the web with an adblocker installed. Ads are something I see as occasionally beneficial, occasionally Really-Fucking-Annoying, and mostly just ignorable background noise. The only time I find myself drifting into anti-ad rage is when the ads are particularly obnoxious, or repetitive, etc. For example, video/audio ads on a page that start playing with no prompting from the user. That gets on my tits a bit, and that's where I jump on the "end the bullshit" bandwagon somewhat.

> Something that disrupts your focus and is forced on you as part of the environment rather than asked for.

By that definition, anything outside of one's immediate focus and interests is "cognitive pollution." If that's the standard, then it's so vague and subjective as to be nearly useless. As forms of advertising go, I can't think of many which are less disruptive, or easier to simply ignore, than billboards.

I've been thinking it over. Dang left an agreement, so the premise is worth reconsidering. It seems like the problem was that billboards were a remarkably bad example.

A better example might be alternative medicine. It's bullshit because it's mistaken. It's a negative externality because it costs nothing to imply that it works. And it's harmful because it can kill you.

Most cases of bullshit aren't as extreme, and I'm trying to think of some better examples of bullshit that won't kill you but will degrade your life. TV comes to mind.

Even tv is a problematic example. It's nothing more or less than a medium, and that medium can vary widely in the quality of what it presents. You could replace it with any other medium (film, radio, books, the internet) and have the same effect. One person's bullshit is another person's popular culture and creative outlet.

> By that definition, anything outside of one's immediate focus and interests is "cognitive pollution."

If also has to bring you no value as it acts to distract you.

> As forms of advertising go, I can't think of many which are less disruptive, or easier to simply ignore, than billboards.

Each billboard is less disruptive, but a hundred can cry for your attention at once.

There are billboards and billboards. It depends on the country, city, culture, etc. how many of them you get. If there are no limits, this is your view on a normal road: http://bi.gazeta.pl/im/ae/8b/d5/z13994926Q,ponad_300tablic_r...

They're not funny / amusing / thought provoking anymore. They're not even readable or recognisable because there's too many of them. The photo title from the link is "300 billboards on a 20km road". And it's a fairly standard thing in Poland for example.

Right, but the counterpoint is that, for me, all forms of advertising are negative. I dislike them and would prefer to never see another one again. I'm sure there are plenty of people like me and the problem is that we aren't compensated for the economic harm they cause us.

I seem to have no way to signal my demand for such things other than avoiding products and brands that advertise, but my signal is probably misinterpreted by companies thinking they're not advertising enough.

Maybe a better term is just negative externality. The masses suffer the negatives while the advertiser and the business paying for the ads receive nearly all the benefits.

That's an interesting concept, it makes the cumulative attention span of the people exposed something akin to tragedy of the commons.

It's worse. In a typical tragedy of the commons scenario, common resource eventually get depleted and the responsible parties leave. Here, you can't really deplete the commons, you can only compete for the share in it. Which means there is no limit within the system for the negative feedback loop that occurs.

Advertisers play a zero-sum game, committing more and more resources to one-up each other. They're wasting ever increasing amount of fuel, minerals and man hours on epsilon marginal benefit. Those are real, tangible costs for society.

Thanks for putting into words what I've felt inchoately for years.

Out of curiosity, how do you balance the negative feeling you have towards that stuff against the companies you consider investing in? Do you simply choose not to invest in companies that promote these practices?

Billboards are pretty helpful. They often tell me I can get food by taking the next exit. Someone might be pulling out their phone while driving instead, because the only alternative is to pull over first. Affecting the equilibrium might have obvious consequences.

Are you sure the prevalence of bullshit isn't healthy? If there weren't so much bullshit, you'd be less immune to it when it matters. Seeing the wrong kind of doctor after being diagnosed with cancer, for example.

-> Billboards are pretty helpful. They often tell me I can get food by taking the next exit.

Usually I find the state-made info signs on the sides of freeways more informative than the advertisement billboards because it displays everything I need in one quick glance. The tiles of each "food" or gas or whatever option partitioned left or right, denoting which way I need to turn after the exit. That's just me, though. And I'm a weirdo who sometimes drives with his phone in airplane mode and chases NPR on the dial.

-> If there weren't so much bullshit, you'd be less immune to it when it matters.

I don't think this is necessarily true. It's not like it's 2 alternatives of content we're talking about, one legitimate and one not. I think it's more that there's legitimate content that's constantly getting interference from this extraneous and meaningless noise.

It's not like it's 2 alternatives of content we're talking about, one legitimate and one not. I think it's more that there's legitimate content that's constantly getting interference from this extraneous and meaningless noise.

It's important to remember that such abstractions enable you to reject the content you don't personally see as meritorious as unwholesome. And that's a sure way to fool oneself. Rewind the clock a hundred years and you might be arguing for prohibition. It's also classic no true Scottsman, for what it's worth.

One's noise is another's music. Why is it there if no one finds it helpful?

A better distinction is mistaken or not mistaken.

-> One's noise is another's music. Why is it there if no one finds it helpful?

Sure, but I'm not talking about subjective opinions about content. I'm talking about the other things interfering with my ability to consume the content I'm trying to consume. And I don't think that this is a classic "no true Scottsman" in that sense. I'm not making any statement about what is or isn't true internet content (because obviously that would be silly). Perhaps my word choice of "legitimate" was unwise in that way.

> Why is it there if no one finds it helpful?

OP had a good answer: Negative externality.

As healthy as prevalence of air pollution, I guess.

"negative externality".. "It's cognitive pollution".. "imposing those cognitive loads on everyone else", "life experience is degraded by seeing a billboard"

I'm seeing some BS here..a lot of hyperbolic, pseudo-psychology BS.

I like the term "cognitive pollution" only as a metaphor but the rest is just economics.

A negative externality is when one does something which imposes a cost or an 'economic bad' on someone else who is not being compensated for it.

The noise from the neighbor who mows his lawn at 7:00 on a Sunday morning is a negative externality. The neighbors lives are slightly worse off because their sleep, which was interrupted, has value to them.

When determining what should be done about this there are only a few ways this could go, the lawn-mower compensates his neighbors for the noise, the neighbors compensate the lawn-mower to mow his lawn at some other time, or the homeowner's association compels the lawn-mower to stop.

But there's at least one solution with a problem. If the neighbors pay the lawn-mower to not mow his lawn then we've created a situation where someone can be paid for doing something annoying to others and then demanding compensation to stop.

Hopefully you've seen how this metaphor translates to advertising, and specifically for the practice of paying to remove advertising.

Based on the numbers of users of various ad blockers there are a huge amount of people who find ads in general as a negative externality. Although you might argue that they're being compensated on websites by receiving some desirable content in return this doesn't translate to billboards where the annoyed viewer is gaining no other value.

I guess, but I'd love to see some research into the effects of advertising. I know that some advertising on the web would create barriers to accessibility: http://webaim.org/articles/evaluatingcognitive/#focus

It's time for a tax on advertisements.

You mean like the "Google tax"?

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