Comment by dsfyu404ed | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dsfyu404ed | Hacker News Reader

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>Most other public infrastructure doesn't try to make you unhappy or manipulate your desires in every aspect of your life.

Taxes make me unhappy and yes, all sorts of things the government does, many of them related to infrastructure are designed to manipulate people at scale. Often it's manipulation for "the greater good". Sometimes it's not.

Having my infrastructure subsidized slightly more by ads and less by taxes makes me less unhappy.

Advertising on public space is highly unobtrusive, like a banner ad compared to some JS advert that covers the whole canvas and tries to trick you into clicking it.

The overwhelming majority of of advertisement is irrelevant to any given person. I'm not in the market for ED pills, high end vodka or student loan refinancing. When it's irrelevant like that it's just white noise. If I do see something relevant them maybe I'll look into it and maybe exchange my money for whatever is being sold and it's a win for both parties.

Paying for infrastructure is a necessary evil. That money has to come from somewhere. Ads are a fundamentally less evil way of satisfying that necessity than taxes.

Also, the ads on the subway have never tried to run malicious code on me and don't report my metadata to Google/FB/the NSA/etc.

>Ads are a fundamentally less evil way of satisfying that necessity than taxes.

Strongly disagree. Advertising is obtrusive, distracting, ugly. It defaces our public infrastructure and crowds our minds. It lets companies into our brains nearly everywhere, companies who generally are working hard to make the world a worse place by overharvesting the earths' natural resources in order to make junk to sell to us, or to enrich a select few by selling an experience to the rest of us.

I don't watch television partly to avoid sitting through ads. Raise my taxes to pay for ad-free streets, subways, and everything else that isn't so optional for me.

>...the ads on the subway have never tried to run malicious code on me...

Ads that are trying to psychologically manipulate you are doing worse than running malicious code on your machines, they are trying to run malicious code on your brain.

Research has shown time and again that there are exploits to trick human minds, and you cant really just update your brain to shut those down. You can try to be mindful of them and avoid them, but if they are plastered literally everywhere when you go out into public, that becomes a much harder task

I knew someone would make this comparison.

The ability for an static ad to screw with your mind is orders of magnitude less than the ability of code running in your browser to engage in nefarious behavior with the aim of stealing your PII for the purpose of financial crime or just intrusive tracking.

Subway ads are like boring old banner ads on websites that are only targeted based on the content of the websites they are on.

>Research has shown time and again that there are exploits to trick human minds, and you cant really just update your brain to shut those down.

It's very hard to run those exploits when your level of access is "2x2 square of glossed folder paper on the wall"

Static print advertisement like found on subways is orders of magnitude less bad than TV, online and arguably radio ads. I don't see why there is some perceived moral argument against using them to help pay for the upkeep of society.

I don't find that they are less of a threat. We can find and fix issues in machines because a human mind is outside of the system evaluating and fixing things. When the mind itself is being manipulated there is nothing above that making fixes.

As for the "perceived moral argument". I don't see why everyone in society should be subjected to psychological attacks constantly to keep taxes lower.

These are value judgements so people are going to have different opinions that aren't based on immutable laws of nature. If you're going to assume that the other side is ridiculous because you don't hold the same opinion, why even engage in a debate in the first place?

>Research has shown time and again that there are exploits to trick human minds, and you cant really just update your brain to shut those down. You can try to be mindful of them and avoid them, but if they are plastered literally everywhere when you go out into public, that becomes a much harder task

There's a BBC documentary series called "The Century of the Self" about the invention of modern PR/propaganda by an Austrian gentleman named Edward Bernays.[1] He basically perfected the art of propagating fake news. (If you've read "The Fish That Ate The Whale" you'll recognize the name - he's the one who helped the CIA overthrow the Guatemalan government.)

The series is three or four parts and the first episode is a bit heavy on how Freud's pop-psychology was the catalyst that started it all (Bernays is related to him, though I don't recall exactly how) but oh man was my mind blown when I got to the part about "manufacturing consent." It's incredible the master manipulation machine this guy was running in the 1950's. It's even more incredible when you realize that our brains still work the exact same way. We still fall for these tricks time and again but now, thanks to the internet, they're harder to resist and we can fall for them faster and more efficiently.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays

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