Advertising can help people become aware of products they never though could exist. One recent example is a baby toy that sticks onto the high chair tray with a suction cup. I bought this $10 toy from an advertisement and because my daughter loves to play with it so much, mealtimes go much faster. I have probably already recovered 20 hours of cleanup time because of this toy, and an advertisement was the only way I’d know about it.

I don't know if we have to ban advertising, but we should stop giving people a tax break on it for sure.

how do you categorize business activity as advertising or not?

Businesses already categorize this stuff. It's just another color of money. It's more a case of them labeling lots of things as advertising that a might cause a reasonable person to narrow their eyes.

Buying ads and ad services for one. Not sure how I feel about 'market research'.

>Advertising is brain manipulation, nothing more. It's unreservedly evil and harmful.

I'm no fan of advertising (canceled cable decades ago, happily use Ad Blocker, etc). But these sweeping statements do not sit well with me.

Any time I try to persuade someone to do something, I am engaged in brain manipulation. As someone who in the last few years decided to take up subjects like negotiation and communications, most effective communication is brain manipulation - and not in a way that is significantly different from advertising. As the GP said - once you learn these topics, you begin to see it everywhere - in all the ways people talk.

For most of my life, I tried to convince people with purely objective means, and for the most part, it was a failure. If you want to achieve good for most people, brain manipulation is not just a nice-to-have - it is a must.

So declaring it to be brain manipulation is not, in my mind, a negative. It is unfortunate, but not unreservedly evil. Certain applications of it are evil. But banning advertising wholesale is just a lazy way of not dealing with the problem.

The fact of manipulation is, itself, morally neutral. When you manipulate someone into something that's against their interests, but serves yours, and that manipulation is done by means of shading (if not worse) the truth somehow, it's pretty unambiguously a negative, in my book.

Unless you somehow think that having a "society" or "economy" is predicated on that kind of manipulation. I actively repudiate that notion, personally.

Some people who have been considered great leaders have manipulated people into something that is perhaps against their interests, but in the long-term interest of society at large. It's hard to say that the soldiers who died in the Civil War had their "interests" served, but it's a lot easier to make the claim that fighting that war was better than the alternative.

Thanks for your opinion. Do note that nowhere in my comment did I endorse manipulation by shading the truth. Nor did I suggest all manipulation is OK. My parent was making a statement without qualifiers, and I was highlighting the dangers of such statements.

>The fact of manipulation is, itself, morally neutral.

I don't disagree. The person I was responding to, however, seems to.