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How Fear and Outrage Are Sold for Profit

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Re: How Fear and Outrage Are Sold for Profit

#131
post #35

I would be happy with just opinion free and divisive speech free headlines. If the big outlets could simply start with that, it might be attainable. Words matter. In the meantime. https://legiblenews.com/

The Economist, while not devoid of biases, is as close as we have to this.

I would also suggest that the LA Times does seem to apply a lot of effort into separating OP/ED and news. They do publish a lot of op/ed, but it is decently separated.

Re: How Fear and Outrage Are Sold for Profit

#132
post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where do trying to be "Jesus-like", relentlessness, or replacing one fixation with another come into it? That's the bias I'm talking about; you're making a leap from one extreme to another that's unsupported by anything in the discussion, or the referenced text.

> The really important kind of freedom involves .. being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day. Are we not reading the same thing? Is this sentence not the crux of the entire message? It seems to me - by the word choice used - that DFW finds sacrifice to be "petty and unsexy" - yet does it to a repetitive extent for the sake of real freedo…

I don't think the author denies that this is a form of worship. Immediately before the above excerpt, Wallace says:

"Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship -- be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles -- is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive."

Re: How Fear and Outrage Are Sold for Profit

#133

Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful, it's that they're unconscious. They are default settings. They're the kin…

It's strange how many people in this thread are discussing concepts such as 'choice', 'do', 'freedom'.

Perhaps I've been too deep down the philosophical/metaphysical rabbit hole, but AFAIK there's only three options:

    1) Deep down (past the turtles-all-the-way-deep) there's only chaos
    2)  Free will and alternative options exist
    3) It's only predetermined order past the turtles.
And 2 is somehow impossibly situated on the razors' edge where 1 and 3 intersect, science is as yet undecided if 1 or 3, but our macro scale world appears to be 3.

'I' really 'want' to be convinced of 2, but it's something 'I' lost a long time ago, anyone care to convince me? These days 'I' find some comfort in 1. If it 'turns' out to be 3 'I'll' 'be' very sad indeed :(

Long story short: There's nothing to chose, either it's all been decided already, and your 'thoughts' are nothing but atoms and other things rattling around, generating the illusion of your conciousness, or there's only chaos and we're (also) never 'making' any choices, they are all just rolls of the dice.

Re: How Fear and Outrage Are Sold for Profit

#134
post #86

Just an FYI - you will probably cringe when you look back at how you used to type and form sentences.

Can you please clarify the point you're making here? Because this is a complete non sequitur to me.

I have no idea why you are italicizing types of logical fallacies. I can't think of a good reason to do that.

And just pointing out that you believe they are committing a logical fallacy without any explanation is a very lazy discussion technique.

Re: How Fear and Outrage Are Sold for Profit

#135
post #73

A nicely laid out and illustrated article that's well written. That's about the best I can say. The worst is why? Who is the audience for this? I firmly believe that if you found this article by clicking on a link on the HN homepage, then you already know all this. It's exactly the kind of article we've been reading about in one form or another for 20 years. If you didn't find this article on the homepage of HN, then…

I dunno about you, but I clicked because of the sensational headline.

A memetic countervirus.

Re: How Fear and Outrage Are Sold for Profit

#136
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you please clarify the point you're making here? Because this is a complete non sequitur to me.

I have no idea why you are italicizing types of logical fallacies. I can't think of a good reason to do that. And just pointing out that you believe they are committing a logical fallacy without any explanation is a very lazy discussion technique.

> I have no idea why you are italicizing types of logical fallacies.

If I were to guess, it is because it it is a term from a foreign language, in this case Latin, not because it is the name of a logical fallacy.

There exists an orthographic, or perhaps typographic practice in English to italicize words and phrases borrowed from other languages, like à la carte, du jour, sine qua non, ...

Re: How Fear and Outrage Are Sold for Profit

#137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nor does it mean advertisers can't track your behavior after the fact. A conversion event post ad impression without a click is called a "view-through conversion" and is a cornerstone metric of most display advertising because the bulk of performance from display is likely to be view-through vs. click-based. Advertisers without "hard" conversion metrics can still measure uplift just as easily.

I would like to think that no, my spending tends to be largely on things that do not tend to be advertised (craft beer and bills, mainly). But no doubt you are right. Still, if its so passive that I can barely detect it happening, all power to them.

> if its so passive that I can barely detect it happening, all power to them.

So you don't care if people are manipulating you, so long as you are unaware?

Re: How Fear and Outrage Are Sold for Profit

#138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nor does it mean advertisers can't track your behavior after the fact. A conversion event post ad impression without a click is called a "view-through conversion" and is a cornerstone metric of most display advertising because the bulk of performance from display is likely to be view-through vs. click-based. Advertisers without "hard" conversion metrics can still measure uplift just as easily.

I would like to think that no, my spending tends to be largely on things that do not tend to be advertised (craft beer and bills, mainly). But no doubt you are right. Still, if its so passive that I can barely detect it happening, all power to them.

Craft beer has had huge uptake in recent years.

You have to wonder how much of it's perceived authenticity is, well, authentic and how much is manufactured.

So while your particular brand of craft beer might not spend one dollar on advertising, it's benefiting from the general upsurge.

Apparently there is a book about it. Except:

In The Craft Beer Revolution, Steve Hindy, co-founder of Brooklyn Brewery, tells the inside story of how a band of homebrewers and microbrewers came together in one of America's great entrepreneurial triumphs. Citing hundreds of creative businesses like Samuel Adams, Deschutes Brewery, New Belgium, Dogfish Head, and Harpoon, he shows how their combined efforts have grabbed 10 percent of the US beer market...

Re: How Fear and Outrage Are Sold for Profit

#139
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you please clarify the point you're making here? Because this is a complete non sequitur to me.

I have no idea why you are italicizing types of logical fallacies. I can't think of a good reason to do that. And just pointing out that you believe they are committing a logical fallacy without any explanation is a very lazy discussion technique.

[deleted]

Re: How Fear and Outrage Are Sold for Profit

#140
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you please clarify the point you're making here? Because this is a complete non sequitur to me.

I have no idea why you are italicizing types of logical fallacies. I can't think of a good reason to do that. And just pointing out that you believe they are committing a logical fallacy without any explanation is a very lazy discussion technique.

It's customary in some contexts to italicize "loan words". The terms for the fallacies come from the Latin. Ergo...

As for your second point, I think it's pretty clear from both my comments and their context why I'm pointing out those fallacies. That said, in the case of "non sequitur", I was actually referring more to the literary sense of the term — "Where the hell did that come from?" — than the fallacious "does not follow" sense.

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