Ads work by cultural imprinting, not emotional inception • Hacker News Board

Re: Ads work by cultural imprinting, not emotional inception

#101

Post by gress » Tue, Sep 23, 2014, 12:49 AM UTC

philh wrote: post #100

gress wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes you think the signal is stronger than the noise?

It doesn't need to be. My argument never assumed that. I don't know where you get the impression that it did. Take nine 0s and a single 1, then generate ten random numbers, identically distributed however you choose, and add one of them to each of your starting numbers. Ask someone to pick out where the original 1 was. However you generated the random numbers, their best strategy is to choose the largest resulting nu…

Advertising isn't random or independent of the signal - it's systematic bias.

Re: Ads work by cultural imprinting, not emotional inception

#102

Post by jessriedel » Tue, Sep 23, 2014, 11:04 AM UTC

tedks wrote: post #81

jessriedel wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds nice, but in practice it's extremely difficult because academics have very little incentive to make their rigorous research discoverable, much less accessible, to laymen. I agree that arm-chair theorizing is almost always a waste of time, but a layman probably contributes more by trying to bring his own particular expertise (software engineering or whatever) to bear on the problem -- on the off chance tha…

Influence is maybe a hundred pages, very accessible, and written by one of the foremost persuasion researchers out there. You're just justifying laziness. Software engineering does not, in fact, qualify you to comment on human minds, which are very different from software. Presumably you wouldn't accept design advice from a doctor because of some claimed way to bring medical practices to bear on software engineering.

I don't do software, I'm an academic. At least in my subfield, I have a pretty good idea how many unnecessary barriers stand between laymen and the expert wisdom, and how how often experts use their expertise as a way to dismiss outside views without consideration. That's true even though, at the same time, most outside views are a waste of time (as I mentioned).

He's writing a blog post, and you don't need to be qualified to do that.

"Influence" is a fine book and I encourage everyone to read it including the OP. But that does't mean OP did something wrong, or was lazy, by using his finite amount of time to write up his thought.

Re: Ads work by cultural imprinting, not emotional inception

#103

Post by alexvoda » Mon, Sep 29, 2014, 8:21 PM UTC

jessriedel wrote: post #36

GuiA wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It looks like the author of this is just some random engineer without a lot of backround in marketing or persuasion psychology. That's a shame because he's clearly interested in it. Little parenthesis: if you're interested in a subject, make the effort to read about it from well established sources (very often, books). The author of the posted article relies on sources like LifeHacker and pop psychology journalism…

That sounds nice, but in practice it's extremely difficult because academics have very little incentive to make their rigorous research discoverable, much less accessible, to laymen. I agree that arm-chair theorizing is almost always a waste of time, but a layman probably contributes more by trying to bring his own particular expertise (software engineering or whatever) to bear on the problem -- on the off chance tha…

>academics have very little incentive to make their rigorous research discoverable, much less accessible, to laymen

This is sad but true. I wonder, in the end, what is the purpose of the scientific journals where academic papers get published? Long ago I hoped that the purpose was to bring the knowledge created to all those who are interested. Why else would anybody publish anything if not to make it available to others. Then I discovered these journals are all paywalled. And in December the Elsevier vs Academia.edu incident happened. I find the situation disappointing.

Knowledge created in academia should be available to everyone to the benefit of mankind. I think that is part of the academic spirit.