Constant2 comments on Do We Believe Everything We're Told? - Less Wrong

36 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 10 October 2007 11:52PM

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Comment author: Constant2 11 October 2007 07:57:58PM 1 point [-]

Contrary to what many seem to believe, I consider advertising to be one of the least harmful sources of unreliable information. For one thing, the cacophony of advertisements send us contradictory messages. "Buy my product." "No, buy my product." One might argue that even such contradictory messages have a common element: "buy something". However, I have not noticed that I spend less money now that I hardly ever put myself at the mercy of television advertising, so I have serious doubts about whether advertising genuinely increases a person's overall spending. I notice, also, that I do not smoke, even though I have seen plenty of advertisements for particular brands of cigarettes. The impact of all those cigarette advertisements on my overall spending on cigarettes has evidently been minimal.

For another, the message itself seems not all that harmful in most cases. For example, suppose that advertising is ultimately the reason that I buy Tide detergent rather than another brand of detergent. How much am I harmed by this? The detergents all do pretty much the same thing.

And in many specific cases, where people's behavior has been blamed on the nefarious influence of advertising, what I generally see is that the accuser has curiously neglected some alternative, very likely explanations. Smoking is attractive because it delivers a drug. Smoking was popular long before it was advertised. I suspect that no more than a very small fraction of smokers started smoking because of advertising.