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Death to Bullshit

deathtobullshit.com

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Re: Death to Bullshit

#151

Post by mindcrime »

a3n wrote: post #123
mindcrime wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except the call to arms is two pronged: call out bullshit, but also don't create bullshit. Never gonna happen. Human beings are born to bullshit. The fact that we compete for mates and the way the different genders have differing optimal mating strategies pretty much ensures that. We are always going to bullshit each other to a certain degree, as we try to achieve the ends we are innately wired to pursue. That doesn'…

> The fact that we compete for mates and the way the different genders have differing optimal mating strategies pretty much ensures that. I think we've accumulated some nuance over the millenia. Killing the mating competition, or even lower level violence, is very relatively rare these days. And I'm pretty sure that significant numbers of people approach meeting and mating with more sincerity than bullshit.

And I'm pretty sure that significant numbers of people approach meeting and mating with more sincerity than bullshit.

You may be right. But that doesn't contradict what I said. I'm not saying we approach that, or anything else, with complete bullshit. I'm saying we all (or close to all) approach it with some bullshit. Perhaps not even consciously, but we're all trying to sell ourselves, make ourselves look more desirable, etc. in various ways.

Killing the mating competition, or even lower level violence, is very relatively rare these days.]

"Relatively" in this context is ill-defined, but I'd be curious to see the numbers on how many murders/assaults/etc. ultimately involve jealousy over romantic/sexual partners, infidelity, cuckolding, etc.

Re: Death to Bullshit

#152

Post by avivo »

Animats wrote: post #60

Advertising in the US doesn't create demand. It just moves it around. America is spent out. The US personal savings rate is under 5%. Everything else gets spent, and the saved money gets spent later. There's no "pent-up demand" waiting to be unlocked by advertising. Advertising is thus a net lose for Americans. All that effort adds to cost. For some products, including movies, long distance phone service, and many pr…

Advertising can also be helpful -- it is possible to develop a new product which is useful while not being intrinsically viral. Advertising makes it possible to have such a product actually exist and benefit people.

But impression or persuasion based advertising is generally unhelpful or actively harmful.

I recently ran across a fascinating (and scarily dystopian) take on the future of that sort of advertising: http://escapepod.org/2013/05/16/ep396-dead-merchandise/

Re: Death to Bullshit

#153

Post by mindcrime »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #121
mindcrime wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

Re: Death to Bullshit

#154

Post by hugh4 »

Animats wrote: post #60

Advertising in the US doesn't create demand. It just moves it around. America is spent out. The US personal savings rate is under 5%. Everything else gets spent, and the saved money gets spent later. There's no "pent-up demand" waiting to be unlocked by advertising. Advertising is thus a net lose for Americans. All that effort adds to cost. For some products, including movies, long distance phone service, and many pr…

>America is spent out. The US personal savings rate is under 5%. Everything else gets spent, and the saved money gets spent later. There's no "pent-up demand" waiting to be unlocked by advertising.

Though potentially you could persuade people to work harder.

Take me, for instance. I could theoretically retire, if I were happy to live, Mr Money Mustache style, on a very modest income. But every time I pass one of those Jaguar billboards I am reminded to keep working so I can retire later with shinier objects.

Re: Death to Bullshit

#155

Post by noarchy »

deciplex wrote: post #144
mikerichards wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And let me guess, since "The Capitalist project" has failed we're going to go back to those successes of the 20th century that caused so much human misery.

I mean, I agree with you that Stockholm isn't the greatest city in the world to live in, nor Oslo, but they're not exactly filled to the brim with human misery, either.

They're also not socialist, in the sense that the parent comment was (I think) hinting at. There's plenty of capitalism at work in both Sweden and Norway.

Re: Death to Bullshit

#156

Post by superuser2 »

The vast majority of working adults in the US are employed in the making and selling of things people don't need. A world without bullshit is total, utter economic collapse. It's the end of capitalism. It's hundreds of millions of people with nothing to do all day and no way to sustain themselves, an inevitable civil war with the landlord class, and a revolution that manages to install a government's that quite possibly worse.

Every piece of bullshit you see is how a great many people pay their mortgages and feed their children. Casting them out to the street is unlikely to make things better.

Re: Death to Bullshit

#157

Post by krapp »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #129
krapp wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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'…

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.

Re: Death to Bullshit

#159

Post by veidr »

mindcrime wrote: post #153
Dylan16807 wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

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

Re: Death to Bullshit

#160

Post by Killswitch »

munin wrote: post #131
Killswitch wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So I got my start in ad based websites. If it wasn't for ads, I would have never really gotten into what we do. I'd have done something away from the internet because I never grew up with a computer and wasn't fascinated by them as a young child. So because of that, I had always been in favor of ads. Not as in I'd plaster my site with ads, but if a site displayed ads, I would endure them because if I wanted the conte…

> So I got my start in ad based websites. If it wasn't for ads, I would have never really gotten into what we do. I got my start in computer crime (chasing the crimes that others committed) and if it wasn't for others committing computer crime, I would never have gotten into what we do. Should I be in favor of other people committing computer crime?

Except one is illegal and one isn't. I'll let you figure out what's wrong with your argument.
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