The Scientific method exists because of fraud, confusion, and other issues.
Like any set of tools, it has to be actually applied. There is a long and storied history of scientific advances and discoveries being fraudulent, because there are many incentives for fraud - or just plain delusion. Delulu is the solulu has always been tempting.
There is nothing missing from the toolbox here. It just has to be applied.
The people providing science funding ought to be interested in their money being spent on science. If the methods of a study are not described in sufficient detail as to enable replication, the study is simply not science. Of course, doing science requires more diligence than doing pseudoscience. That's kind of the point.
That would mean the death of at a minimum Meta (market cap $1.5 trln), most of Google (market cap $2.1 trln, lets say half would die). So what, a couple trillion haircut on the US stock market, and more of a GDP hit than if the entire US military suddenly stopped getting funded.
Not to mention the secondary effects - a LOT of businesses are built based on online ads. A LOT.
> So what, a couple trillion haircut on the US stock market, and more of a GDP hit than if the entire US military suddenly stopped getting funded.
Not even.
Market Cap is more like net worth than like GDP, GDP is more like annual revenue (both are still somewhat different, hence "more like") — Meta's global revenue is $164.5 billion, Alphabet's is $350.02 billion, so even if that's entirely in the USA (it isn't), and the money spent was purely positive-sum (it isn't), even combined that's less than the US military budget of $849.8 billion.
If we're talking about removing one advertising platform, there is plenty of other stuff to spend money on. Even if the totals go down, I don't expect the average bystander to take a notable hit.
I beleive the argument being made here is a map-territory distinction — certainly I myself see it this way.
I mean, their other comment was:
> If we'd lose so much GDP, without losing anything of value, perhaps GDP is not a useful measure of the economy.
Meta etc., can pay taxes on the profits made from connecting advertisers to eyeballs, but what actual value do they really provide? What real value gets created due to this, that would otherwise not be created? If Meta is just moving money around, without helping more stuff get made, then whatever measure says "Meta is good" is a poor measure. Even Meta's taxable income would just become someone else's higher profit or cheaper goods.
(But: I presume my belief that ads are zero-sum, or close to thst, is correct; perhaps this is untrue).
Advertisement is positive sum: it connects people who need goods or services with people who can provide those goods and services. The modern advertising industry is negative-sum: the sheer cost to everyone far outweighs this theoretical benefit. (Most people I know will deliberately refuse to buy anything that's advertised at them, unless they have no other option.)
The "attention economy" is stealing people's time, then trying to sell it. Other people's cognitive resources are not yours to sell. (Are there really people who do not realise how cartoonishly evil this is?) Time was, people used to pay for big books full of advertisements. Would anyone pay to receive modern online advertising?
The advertising companies are a big part of why I don't have the money to spare to pay for "ad-supported" websites: I'm too busy trying to keep my personal life away from their mass surveillance systems, missing or declining opportunities in the process. I, and those around me, would be richer if not for this pointlessly-wasted effort, me establishing increasingly-impractical countermeasures to maintain my privacy, and them building increasingly-elaborate workarounds to spy on me anyway, all so they can try to sell me a washing machine.
> People are taking the piss out of you every day. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.
Agree - I think another way to put it, is the advertising industry is positive ROI directly, but has severe negative externalities. Especially when ramped up to the extent it currently is, and likely will continue to be even more.
It’s a similar analogy to global warming/fossil fuels IMO. As long as we don’t care about the somewhat invisible co2 part of it slowly cooking us to death, it’s awesome.
CDOs, the financial instrument behind the 2008 financial collapse, had a tremendous amount of market value too. A "LOT"(sic) of businesses were built on selling tobacco products, lead based gasoline, and high sugar ultra-processed foods too. Perhaps you should rethink your argument?
Creating economic activity doesn't justify harming people and it has become thunderingly obvious that titillating and outraging viewers constantly to maximize ad impressions is harming the public.
I've lived through 3-4 major downturns too and, yeah, it's hard. Like discontinuing leaded gasoline, we either pay the price now or pay much worse later.
Google and Meta collectively employ how many software people in the United States? The jobs hit would be unimaginable. High octane nightmare fuel, that idea.
You're right. What was I thinking? Instead, they should be unemployed and starving, and all the services they bought from other Americans with their $200k/year salaries, those Americans should also be unemployed and starving too. All because you don't want to see an ad on whatever ridiculous social media it is that people are visiting now days. That will make the world right.
"...total advertising has averaged about 1.3% to 2% of U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) over the past 20 years. ... In 2015, digital advertising corresponded to about 50% of total advertising spending and more recent estimates point to a share closer to 65% of total advertising spending. That represents about 0.6% to 1.1% of GDP. ..." from https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2024/oct/rise-digi...
So, nah. It's significant but not "nightmare fuel" even if online advertising entirely went away. (Which nobody is proposing, by the way.)
reply