The Toxoplasma of Rage (2014)

Re:The Toxoplasma of Rage (2014) by afarrell on Tuesday July 28, 2020 @08:08AM (#23974857)

Do you ever worry that we are building Superhuman Artificial Intelligences with the goal of maximizing the amount of attention paid to advertisements? I'm concerned that they might accidentally either turn the world into paperclips or turn journalists into maximally conflict-driven-story finders.

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Re:The Toxoplasma of Rage (2014) by NateEag on Tuesday July 28, 2020 @08:15AM (#23974903)

The AI can't do that to journalists, because journalists have already done that to themselves.

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Re:The Toxoplasma of Rage (2014) by ethbro on Tuesday July 28, 2020 @08:34AM (#23975023)

There have been good and bad journalists since the beginning of journalism.

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Re:The Toxoplasma of Rage (2014) by marcus_holmes on Tuesday July 28, 2020 @09:11AM (#23975330)

This is not about good/bad journalism. A great journalist will turn in a fantastic story, get it approved and even on the front page, only to have it get few clicks because it can't compete for attention with the sensationalist crap.

This is about how humans first discovered that, given an infinite amount of reading material, we choose to read things that give us an emotional reaction. Any emotional reaction.

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Re:The Toxoplasma of Rage (2014) by paulie_a on Tuesday July 28, 2020 @08:21AM (#23974944)

While I don't know of I would call it journalism, computer generated articles are becoming increasingly prevelant

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Re:The Toxoplasma of Rage (2014) by afarrell on Tuesday July 28, 2020 @03:46PM (#23979873)

Who pays journalists? Companies that depend on ad revenue.

Individuals have agency. A set of persons responds to incentives.

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Re:The Toxoplasma of Rage (2014) by BenoitEssiambre on Tuesday July 28, 2020 @11:05AM (#23976552)

Scott Alexander has a (Halloween) short story sort of about that:

https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/

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Re:The Toxoplasma of Rage (2014) by paulie_a on Tuesday July 28, 2020 @08:19AM (#23974931)

On the flip side we are training humanity to be less susceptible to advertising. Hence the increase in noise as humans naturally and unknowingly filter it out.

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Re:The Toxoplasma of Rage (2014) by thinkingemote on Tuesday July 28, 2020 @08:26AM (#23974977)

We really are not training humanity to resist advertising at all.

If anything its quite the opposite and at the very least no change from before. We should try individually and we might get some success. We might try at a societal level but I have not see this occuring (apart from things like bans for things like cigarettes or products aimed at children). There's no fundamental human change occuring.

Additionally the vast majority of HN users are dependent on advertising. Advertisments are core to the western life. It's deep in our psychology, and requires more than just an ad blocker.

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Re:The Toxoplasma of Rage (2014) by neutronicus on Tuesday July 28, 2020 @10:28AM (#23976145)

Yeah, if anything, we're training people to aspire to be living advertisements, since the reward for success on Instagram is luxury brands subsidizing your lifestyle in-kind and perhaps even in money.

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Re:The Toxoplasma of Rage (2014) by paulie_a on Tuesday July 28, 2020 @12:42PM (#23977665)

Is advertising in the 50s more or less successful than now? I do not know the answer but I am curious. Does the more in your face advertising actually make a difference or is the bar simply raised?

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