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Should There Be Limits on Persuasive Technologies?

schneier.com

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Re: Should There Be Limits on Persuasive Technologies?

#91

Post by raxxorrax »

Barrin92 wrote: post #2

>The New York Times once experimented by predicting the moods of readers based on article content to better target ads, enabling marketers to find audiences when they were sad or fearful Can we maybe go one step back in the discussion and not only discuss what we should do about it, but simply ask does it even work? There's Zuboff's book about surveillance capitalism that echoes much of what the blog post talks about…

Indeed.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25415052

Is an example of a self-fullfilling prophecy. Bad words aren't used because they are bad. They are not used to game the system and hence become bad words....

...Sorry, English is not my native tongue.

The industry described here is heavily degraded and removed from reality, it is a sorry mix of gambling, lying and posing. It was predictable they would swallow AI systems for their "work" like their lives depend on it. This is blind faith, you could use a prophet to do the same.

There would be no net negative effect if it vanished overnight aside from slower price building. Regulation could do so much here compared to rules for advertisement or AI itself.

This is actually a topic about bias, since people use tech for self-validation to a large degree.

Re: Should There Be Limits on Persuasive Technologies?

#92

Post by marcinzm »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #81
agent008t wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it even possible to eliminate it altogether, down to the very last 'influencer'? As long as people care what is popular and fashionable rather than what is good there will be ways of exploiting it.

Enforcement doesn't have to be perfect to benefit society. Once it was illegal to advertise drugs to the public. After it was legalized suddenly drug company budgets were overtaken by marketing, instead of R&D. In my opinion that was a net loss for society.

From what I can tell 70% of drug marketing budget is about persuading doctors and not consumers so I don't see how your example applies. In fact it just shows that companies will find a way to spend marketing money to influence people given enough ROI even if they can't target consumers directly.

Re: Should There Be Limits on Persuasive Technologies?

#93

Post by swiley »

lordnacho wrote: post #26

I wrote this for a related article yesterday: --- If we know that humans have all sorts of cognitive biases, how come it's ok to use that fact while at the same time we insist there's some kind of free market? Say you discover that putting good-looking women next to cars causes the sale of cars to increase. Why does nobody question whether it is legitimate to do so? It's as if there's a line between actively lying ("…

I saw a talk a while ago that argued the sexist marketing of home computers toward boys is likely responsible for the drop in women becoming computer programmers during the 90s.

Re: Should There Be Limits on Persuasive Technologies?

#94

Post by prionassembly »

pjc50 wrote: post #83
prionassembly wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The wider culture is supposed to counterbalance for this. Taking things to the extreme: maybe people are by default violent and will kill a few people in their lifetime to get their way. But the culture counterbalances this. Likewise everyone old enough to have a sex drive has seen enough publicity with barely-clad attractive women to know the ruse. Of course, people are still vulnerable to these things (cf. onlyfans…

In the UK, the advertising regulator is supposed to handle this; see https://www.asa.org.uk/type/broadcast/code_section/10.html Mild amusement can be had from the example cases in the sex section: https://www.asa.org.uk/advice-online/offence-sexism.html (I note that vaunted free speech zone America is actually more restrictive in what sexual material can be shown on TV or even marketed; there isn't a US "Babestation"…

In Brazil there was a lot of social pressure (from NGOs or similar "civil society" groups reflecting elite class views, but anyway) to curb what was becoming an arms race in beer advertising. Now beer advertising is very modest about female skin, and instead focuses on time with the guys and so on.

TV coverage of the yearly five-days Mardi Gras has also dialed back very very significantly over the past decade. Internationally we can see the case of F1 "Grid Girls". The culture sometimes puts backpressure on this.

(Societies have odd contradictions on sex generically. In relatively relaxed, women-breastfeed-in-public, close-physical-contact among strangers Brazil, topless sunbathing is not only frowned upon, it's illegal. People will snitch on tourists and the police will go and arrest them.)

Re: Should There Be Limits on Persuasive Technologies?

#95

Post by prionassembly »

andrepd wrote: post #82
prionassembly wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The wider culture is supposed to counterbalance for this. Taking things to the extreme: maybe people are by default violent and will kill a few people in their lifetime to get their way. But the culture counterbalances this. Likewise everyone old enough to have a sex drive has seen enough publicity with barely-clad attractive women to know the ruse. Of course, people are still vulnerable to these things (cf. onlyfans…

>Likewise everyone old enough to have a sex drive has seen enough publicity with barely-clad attractive women to know the ruse. Clearly not, for the simple fact that they do it anyway. It works, else you wouldn't see it in ads.

This is what Slavoj Zizek terms the "cynical function of ideology". People can know the ruse and enjoy it anyway. No one goes to e.g. striptease joints expecting complete sexual gratification.

(The following video analyzes a fragment of the movie "West Side Story" and it's fully SFW)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzztNjZqbOQ

Re: Should There Be Limits on Persuasive Technologies?

#96

Post by akalsz »

raxxorrax wrote: post #56
lordnacho wrote: post #26

I wrote this for a related article yesterday: --- If we know that humans have all sorts of cognitive biases, how come it's ok to use that fact while at the same time we insist there's some kind of free market? Say you discover that putting good-looking women next to cars causes the sale of cars to increase. Why does nobody question whether it is legitimate to do so? It's as if there's a line between actively lying ("…

I think there is much uncorroborated assertions about bias. Associating emotions to a product or getting attention is an old trick that existed before modern marketing. The smoking example can be generalized for fashion and there are mechanisms like peer pressure involved that certainly incentivize consumption. But they are not overriding your will. Addictions can, but even then I would say there is still a free will…

Isn't what you're calling a free will just the influence of your previous experiences? Which would mean that there should theoretically be a way for powerful advertisers to avoid people from obtaining such experiences in the first place.

Re: Should There Be Limits on Persuasive Technologies?

#97

Post by laurent92 »

swiley wrote: post #93
lordnacho wrote: post #26

I wrote this for a related article yesterday: --- If we know that humans have all sorts of cognitive biases, how come it's ok to use that fact while at the same time we insist there's some kind of free market? Say you discover that putting good-looking women next to cars causes the sale of cars to increase. Why does nobody question whether it is legitimate to do so? It's as if there's a line between actively lying ("…

I saw a talk a while ago that argued the sexist marketing of home computers toward boys is likely responsible for the drop in women becoming computer programmers during the 90s.

My family is a living proof of this. I have 2 sisters, I was a boy, and yet, I am the only programmer. GW-BASIC’s evil plan with its marketing oriented towards me, its black-and-white text, and their 10 20 30 LIST instructions, or the white reference book of the Amstrad 8086 in English which, as a French boy of 7, was incredibly opaque (which I still read and memorized by heart), those were all directed towards me.

Or perhaps it is time to admit that talks which are drawing inferences are just talks, and while my sisters were asking dads to draw horses, I was asking dad to offer me a drawing of a powerpoint, because things that plug to each other fascinated me.

If sex creates differences in the body, it is only stunning ideology that draws us to affirm it creates no difference in average in the brain, and that everything is socially constr... No, I’m not James Damore.

Re: Should There Be Limits on Persuasive Technologies?

#98

Post by sneak »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #68
sneak wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't offer any indication that social media is the root cause of the current state of political polarization in the US, or any indication that polarization is bad or harmful. I think people place far too much stock in US partisan screaming. It simply doesn't matter that much. I'm not arguing that the US isn't polarized, that much is clear. I just don't see any precipice.

Social media is not the cause of any of this. The techniques used, are probably hundreds of years old (maybe thousands). Social media is just a new medium; but an effective one that allows scale. I'm old enough to remember when television occupied the same slot.

Why does social media not pose the same polarization threat to large free countries other than the US? We're not seeing any large-scale global shift toward political polarization, and, Facebook is pretty much everywhere in the west.

Re: Should There Be Limits on Persuasive Technologies?

#99

Post by UncleMeat »

laurent92 wrote: post #97
swiley wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I saw a talk a while ago that argued the sexist marketing of home computers toward boys is likely responsible for the drop in women becoming computer programmers during the 90s.

My family is a living proof of this. I have 2 sisters, I was a boy, and yet, I am the only programmer. GW-BASIC’s evil plan with its marketing oriented towards me, its black-and-white text, and their 10 20 30 LIST instructions, or the white reference book of the Amstrad 8086 in English which, as a French boy of 7, was incredibly opaque (which I still read and memorized by heart), those were all directed towards me. O…

I was on a flight a few years ago while wearing a software company branded hoodie. The person next to me was very excited, since he was trying to get his son to like computers. He bought his son all these toys, read him books, and did activities to encourage an interest in software. His son was six.

I asked if he had other children. He had a daughter who was eight. He was not doing the same things for her.

Enrollment among women in computer science was growing steadily until the 80s, when it turned around and declined. Our biology has not changed during that time frame. And the core job of a software engineer hasn't really changed at that time. Other engineering disciplines did not experience the same change in trajectory. Innate biological preferences have a hard time explaining the unique trajectory experienced in software.

You don't just need to demonstrate that there exist differences in the brain between men and women, but that the specific differences lead to the observed population-wide outcomes.

Re: Should There Be Limits on Persuasive Technologies?

#100

Post by imtringued »

UweSchmidt wrote: post #22
IfOnlyYouKnew wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're a US citizen with a Facebook account, your value for Facebook is about $ 200 per year. That's the average, including children, seniors, etc. If you're a tech worker in your 30s, it's probably 3x as much. If you want to use Facebook without targeted advertising, you need to either convince them that they don't need all that money, or pay it yourself. And that's just Facebook. In other words: the internet eco…

Worth noting that the $200 ultimately come from our pockets. We are paying those $200 anyway through markups on products ads made us buy.

Product awareness is not the same thing as buying something.
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