Nothing Fails Like Success

Id say comparing advertising with child labor proves how biases distort perception.

Who decided that? In the USA we decided that domestic child labor is unacceptable, so we outsourced it to Africa and Asia.

We decided child labor was unacceptable _outside certain limits_. I was helping customers in the family deli at 11-12 years old, and that's perfectly legal as long as time/task regulations are followed.

I think "advertising" is a deliberately ambiguous term nowadays (like justice or freedom)

50 years ago, advertising was a broadcast medium. A sign, a jingle, a page in a magazine with a photo and a pitch.

But nowadays advertising is two-directional, probably more accurately defined as surveillance and profiling of individuals.

For example, if you run the Target app on your phone and look at the "advertisements" for a product, it is very likely the price will go up if you walk into the store and look again.

> is that a thing you want to fix though, or to prevent?

wanting to fix is pretty obvious. capable of fixing is a different story. biologically there is no fix (genetic engineering maybe? but that is super sci-fi). so we can try to correct with technology or social conventions but those fixes never change the underlying biological defects so how effective can they really be?

Look at the social engineering aspects of organized Christianity. How well did those work? Look at the social engineering aspects of the U.S. experiment like universal education and literacy. How well did those work?

It is a little bleak but in reality universal literacy has been a complete failure (in the U.S. at least). Probably 80% of the population is at the level of what used to be called "knowing your letters" but they are functionally illiterate (they have never done any significant amount of reading in their life, and aren't really capable of it). That is not a popular opinion, at least not for public consumption, so we can't even begin to address the issue because we refuse to acknowledge that it exists.

How can you tell the difference between your own personal hangups and absolute moral truths? That's what we're really debating here. Good luck solving that one in an afternoon...

Option one, check with your community. That's the approach the pro-censorship side is taking, they only propose censoring content that every acceptable silicon valley individual thinks is objectively harmful. They also support drowning witches. Wait, no, wrong culture, they got it wrong, we got it right this time we promise.

Option two, check with the conscience of the accused. Human beings regret most of their decisions, and people are their dumbest in the heat of the moment, and further people tend to dig in when pushed from the outside, so maybe the path to virtue can only be people improving themselves. However if you're convinced that your enemies are all a bunch of complete evil psychopaths then that won't work because clearly psychopaths don't do that.

Option three, optimize for something completely unrelated, and pretend to be motivated by whatever suits your goals - if morals are "in," then pretend to be moral. That's probably what's going to happen if we can't pick between 1 and 2.

As a side note, what always amuses me when I see phrases like "what people want" is that it sounds like there are all the people, and the speaker is not them.

I suppose the situation is usually more complex; in the simplest case it's just "us vs them", but likely it's a more detailed separation of groups, based on culture, values, etc. Thinking a bit more explicitly about that, and especially about who are "we", the ingroup, could be beneficial.

> I get it, is that a thing you want to fix though, or to prevent?

Do you think technology should be used to help us become better? Or help us become worse?

What is this that you refer to exactly? The deep non uniformity of our current society and politics, globally, indicates that there is, at the very least least, a lot of room to maneuver and improve. Liberalism, for example, likes to push the narrative of the least bad option, but often it does so to reject ideas that have a clear precedent of working better than the ongoing decline of equality and flight of alienated workers towards reactionary politics we have now.

History is rather misanthropic.

To add, maybe pacification has led more speech to be deemed "wild" whereas before the same speech may have registered as a 2-out-of-10 on "will this get me beheaded?" scale.

It may not be the pain of violence that was more effective a deterrent than the pain of social ostracism, which bubbles and anonymity prevent.

> Many projects of love are free with no revenue model at all

Yes. I myself have several different ongoing projects. Some of them are in no way intended to be businesses and intentionally have no revenue model at all. Those are free for everyone and will always be (at least until/unless I tire of them and pass them along to someone else).

Others are intended to generate some sort of revenue -- with a couple, I only want them to cover their own costs, with others, I want to see them make a profit. Those are not free.

There is room for both types of project.

> many cannot in non geological time

Are the things that can't be bootstrapped actually worth doing?

There are things that can't be bootstrapped. They tend to involve the upfront purchase of millions of dollars of scientific equipment or a decade of R&D. Things like drug candidates and commercial airplanes. That's where venture capital originally developed.

I am unaware of and have not been able to think of a software business that requires comparable investment for technical reasons. When you see a software company that must be backed by venture capital, it's to fund anticompetitive practices.

No. Not everything but hundreds a day at least. work hard. Save up. Identify a problem. Solve it. Nice and neat. Sell the solution. Profit. Spend some on marketing and sales.

Repeat.