It is standard wisdom in politics that if you control the agenda, it doesn't matter how people vote.
I think I understand the confusion. When I say "vote", I am not necessarily talking about electorates or plebiscites. In fact, Pettit's paper is remarkable precisely for also considering situations that have nothing to do with politics or government.
Consider the case of a trust fund that must make decisions for the trust based on how the original creator specified it. For example, they may be charged to make investment decisions that best support a specific community or need. The executors of this trust try their hardest to meet the spirit as well as the letter
Why is the collective decision of the three judges wrong? Two of the judges believe there was no breach of contract, although for different reasons. Therefore the defendant is acquitted.
The paradox demonstrates that there are differences in outcome based on the way you aggregate majorities. It doesn't claim that one aggregation rule is superior to the other.
That's another way to say that collective decision isn't "wrong" - the point of the paradox is to show that it depends on how you choose to measure that decision.
It seems to me clearly wrong to prefer a separate vote on A and B, round the results off to true/false, and then use those fictitious values
Organizations that enforce rationality at the collective level can get very different voting outcomes than organizations that enforce rationality at the individual level, per known results in social choice theory. This has implications for real-world expert panels.
Here, "rationality" is logical consistency - it is possible for the majority of members to vote to reject a conclusion while also believing the necessary conditions to accept it hold, and vice-versa, even if they all independently evaluated the precepts and arrived at the conclusion logically. This arises because of how majority votes work.
This post summarizes Philip Pettit's 2002 paper outlining the issue and its implication for any deliberative democracy. It additionally summarizes Pettit and List's
However, my own experience in the industry suggests that most spend that goes beyond generating more than zero awareness is poorly spent. Much to the dismay of marketing departments, you can't usually spend your way through ads to growth. Other forms of marketing look better (content marketing can work really great and can be a win-win when done right).
This experience has been corroborated by countless reviews (summarized in my other comment), so I agree with you.
The question is, why should we believe advertising works at all?
This is a fair objection. I decided to look for a review paper summarizing the existing literature on the subject of advertising effectiveness.
Via Google Scholar, I was able to find a particularly useful review paper, summarizing both empirical effects and prior literature reviews for advertisements as well as political and health campaigns across multiple channels (print, TV, etc.). Overall, the literature paints a disjointed, inconclusive view of the value of advertising - there is insufficient data to conclude that advertising in general has no impact.
I invite you or anyone interested to read it in depth, but will, for the purpose of... (read 789 more words →)
I read this article and its referenced papers when it was published on Hacker News 12 days ago, and I have reservations against accepting its conclusions regarding the broken nature of digital advertising.
The article's conclusion is predicated on two specific kinds of evidence:
1. That brand-keyword ads overwhelmingly demonstrate selection effects.
2. That advertising for companies with large advertising impact across different channels demonstrates more selection effects than advertising effects.
The evidence is compelling, but it doesn't warrant the conclusion that digital advertising is ineffective because:
1. Brand-keyword ads (when someone searching for "Macy's" gets an ad linking to Macy's website) are not the only kind or even the most common kind of keyword... (read more)
I do not understand the validity of this statement:
There is no possible plan you can devise, no clever strategy, no cunning device, by which you can legitimately expect your confidence in a fixed proposition to be higher (on average) than before.
Given a temporal proposition A among a set of other mututally exclusive temporal propositions {A, B, C...}, demonstrating B, C, and other candidates do not meet the evidence so far while A meets the evidence so far does raise our confidence in the proposition *continuing to hold*. This is standard Bayesian inference applied to temporal statements.
For example, we have higher confidence in the statement "the sun will come up tomorrow" than the... (read more)
I have a huge problem with the "Some problems are boring" section, and it basically boils down into the following set of rebuttals:
Every single one of the examples cited in that section falls into this category:
... (read more)