capitalism as a neglectful parent who keeps serving you ads in a desperate attempt to offer you something you want but who never took the time to get to know you well enough to know what you want
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i can’t imagine how different the world would feel if even 20% of the ads i saw offered me anything i wanted. right now i’m at less than 1% pretty sure even when the ads are targeted. massively disappointing. motherfuckers should be good enough at ML to do better by now
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obviously it is time for a poll
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poll: roughly what % of online ads show you something you might plausibly want? (don’t stress out too much about the exact number, answer by feel)
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I see ads I like all the time! But I value privacy very little and give out my personal info to pretty much any business that asks.
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there's a counting argument here
there are far more worthless ads for things that people don't want than ads for things people do
and they gotta show them to *someone* because how else are they gonna launder the money
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You need both good ML, and products that can make more money by advertising to those who are very likely to buy.
In reality, product A makes $1/sale, and you're 20% likely to buy, but product B makes $100/sale, and you're 0.5% likely to buy - so ads will be for B.
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i can’t imagine how different the world would feel if even 20% of the ads i saw offered me anything i wanted. right now i’m at less than 1% pretty sure even when the ads are targeted. massively disappointing. motherfuckers should be good enough at ML to do better by now
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It’s never been about what we need — it’s about making you believe you need the things they are trying to sell you. Capitalism is in the business of inventing needs.
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You still get internet ads?
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do any of these block promoted tweets?
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You think that the people who are solving protein folding haven’t been able to do the math on whether or not high price ads with high conversion are more profitable than low cost ads with bad conversion?
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hmmmmmm fair point
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Yeah, I don't understand why this happens at all. Are there not *huge* incentives to get this right? This is the kind of thing I would expect civilization to be good at.
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I imagine a substantial population of people essentially never click on ads (and Google must know this), so one would think they're very low-cost targets for weird experiments like this. What have the advertisers got to lose? twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/st…
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