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Comment by debt | Hacker News Reader

I don't mean to make to big a stretch here, but shouldn't the advertising companies also be held morally culpable for exacerbating CTE?

I mean the NFL had an incentive to increase the hits and blows to make it more entertaining, to draw more people, to sell ads.

I do see a future, where, unless the sport changes, companies will start pulling their ads from football games.

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Sure, but there's degrees of moral responsibility. Shouldn't the spectators, should the player's parents etc.

"Who killed Davey Moore, Why an' what's the reason for?"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Killed_Davey_Moore

As you said, more hits and blows draw more viewers. Ad sales increase. Until violence becomes less popular, I'm not convinced that companies will start pulling their ads.

Ultimately, the audience is responsible. The NFL is merely delivering what people want to see. And the audience are the people who are paying for this, either directly by buying tickets or broadcasts or indirectly by buying products that are advertised. Everyone else is just following the money, and they have no incentive to stop.

>And so the children of the revolution were faced with the age-old problem: it wasn't that you had the wrong kind of government, which was obvious, but that you had the wrong kind of people. As soon as you saw people as things to be measured, they didn't measure up.

- Terry Pratchett, Night Watch

It's a shared responsibility. The NFL has devoted a lot of effort to hiding the reality of what the audience is watching. Now that we know fully how dangerous it is, it's our responsibility to stop watching it.

If the dominant motivation wasn't to make the big games more interesting, I don't know what it would be! Although "evil laundering" is definitely something that we have to watch out for, it isn't always practical to hold people responsible for their entire supply chains when we could otherwise go straight to the actual problem-causers.

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