Targeted Advertising: Good or evil?

I have had some professional experience in marketing. It’s a job, you know? Targeted advertising is a very common data science application. Specifically, I’ve built models that use credit data to decide who to send snail-mail. Was this a positive contribution to society? Eh, probably not.

In the title I ask, “good or evil?”, but obviously most people think the answer is “evil”. I’m not here to convince you that targeted advertising is good actually. But I have a bunch of questions, ultimately trying to figure out: why do we put up with targeted ads?

For the sake of scope, I’m thinking mainly about targeted ads as they appear on social media platforms. And I’m just thinking of ads that try to sell you a commercial product, as opposed to political ads or public service announcements. These ads may be accused of the following problems:

  1. Using personal data that we’d rather keep private.
  2. Psychic pollution–wasting our time and attention, or making us unsatisfied with what we have.
  3. Misleading people into purchasing low quality or overpriced goods.

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I read books: Philosophical Investigations

Philosophical Investigations, by Ludwig Wittgenstein, translated by G. E. M. Anscombe

To steal a description from Existential Comics, Wittgenstein solved philosophy in 1921 with the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, and then unsolved it again in 1953 with Philosophical Investigations. Philosophical Investigations is primarily concerned with what we mean with our language. Many 20th century philosophers (including early Wittgenstein) have tried to translate our language into something more precise, as if to uncover what we really mean. Philosophical Investigations argues that meaning is much more complicated, deriving from practical use.

I have a book queue that consists mostly of queer mystery and romance novels, but Philosophical Investigations was an oddball among them. I’ve been interested in Wittgenstein largely as a result of my husband. He has a degree in philosophy, and his seminar on Wittgenstein was particularly impactful. If you want to know what our banter sounds like, it’s not altogether unlike the text of Philosophical Investigations. I had never actually read it though, so I thought to correct that.

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Link Roundup: October 2024

How I Fell Out Of Love With Facebook | Tantacrul (video, 3:10 hours) – A comprehensive review of all the scandals that Facebook got involved in.  I had known about a few of these but hadn’t heard of the more international scandals, like Free Basics.  I mostly remember how Facebook sought to reduce bias on their platform, and through the funhouse mirror of corporate priorities it turned into refusing to take down politically conservative posts less they generate an appearance of bias.  Facebook really is a nightmare of corporate immorality.

Fast Crimes at Lambda School | Sandofsky – A long article about the scandals surrounding Lambda School, a coding boot camp.

My husband went to a bootcamp (under an income share agreement), and I went to something like a bootcamp (under a hiring fee model).  Both of us owe are career success to them.  There’s nothing about the idea that makes it inherently bad or unworkable.  But… the one my husband went to was exaggerating its job placement rates by excluding people they kicked out of the program, and excluding people who remained at their current job (!?).  The program I went through was more honest–but it all but collapsed during the pandemic.  Both of our programs were extremely selective.  From what I can tell, bootcamps operate on very thin margins, and are not easy to scale up.  It sounds like Lambda School immediately tried to scale up, and simply could not get its unit economics working, no matter how much they fleeced students.

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Tips for respecting microlabels

Readers may be familiar with the idea of stacking queer labels, especially words related to asexual and nonbinary people. For example, somebody might call themselves a nebulagender panromantic aegosexual fraysexual, and what does any of that mean? Perhaps you’ve seen these label stacks applied to a hypothetical person, a caricature meant to be mocked. Perhaps you’ve seen label stacks provided as a rhetorical example of someone worthy of respect, as if to say, “yes, we even tolerate those people”. Or perhaps you’ve seen the real thing in the wild: a person who unironically chains four or more identities together.

I’m assuming that the reader is interested in respecting others, and is not just coming here to mock labels they don’t understand. I offer some basic tips.

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Link Roundup: September 2024

Did you know that some of my links, I get from other link roundups?  I don’t always give credit to aggregators, since it’s not like they wrote the original article.  But in case you like more links, the ones I follow are Critical Distance (games criticism), Perfect Number (ace ex-evangelical blogger), and Ozy (rationalist blogger).  I also run a separate link roundup for The Asexual Agenda.

Oh, and in case anyone is interested, I wrote a couple queer fiction book reviews this month: Aces Wild, and The Bell in the Fog.  On to the links:

Can You Trust An AI Press Release? | Asterisk Magazine – When I wrote about LLM error rates, I pointed out even when AI companies boast of their models’ performance, the error rates are there in plain sight.  But I also said you shouldn’t actually trust those numbers.  This article goes into more depth, explaining how AI companies can select information that shows their products in the best light, while understating the performance of rivals.

The Games Behind Your Government’s Next War | People Make Games (video, 1:12 hours) – A look at the world of wargaming, i.e. games made for the serious purpose of helping decision-makers prepare for war and other crises.  The video forthrightly confronts the ethical question: is this killing people?

I think my stance is fairly favorable to wargaming.  Assuming that wargaming is effective (although this is legitimately in question), I would really rather that decision-makers are good at strategy, rather than bad at it.  I wouldn’t celebrate an incompetent soldier for saving the lives of rival soldiers.  I think it’s a mistake to blame only the military for bad wars, when a lot of the blame belongs to the cultural and political systems that decide to make war in the first place.  The part I blame on the military is when they produce propaganda that tilts cultural sentiment to their own benefit.

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