>there is no lack of ways to find out about new products that I enjoy. //

Man, when I'm trying to find products I can never find what I want because the websites - Amazon, urgh - don't expose the characteristics I want to search on.

Companies (with few exceptions) don't care if you want it, they care if you buy it. Often it seems things are made opaque on purpose.

Example, I was buying a house phone (aside: I imagine it's the last time I'll ever do that) and know I need answerphone, but with self-recorded message and with call monitoring.

Even BT, a phone maker and phone service provider only expose search at the level of "answerphone". Useless.

I had to download the manuals and read the usage instructions. And of course the sellers don't provide the manuals (in general, I mean BT didn't have the manuals for the lower priced BT phones, crazy).

Ebay are pretty good, not perfect.

Other example, buying graphics cards, you can't search for "8gb graphics card" on a bunch of sites, you gave to choose AMD or Nvidia cards first.

Then you get the search results and the most expensive cards are above your top-price and they're ordered by "recommended", argh.

Sure. I don't do much product discovery via Amazon either. For that I turn to places not trying to sell me things like Consumer Reports, Wirecutter, and Kevin Kelly's Cool Tools. Also forums where other users talk about our shared problems and what has worked for them.

It's a good analogy to think about, but surely you wouldn't say something like "we should never take people at their word, we have to decide what we think they feel and then assume that's how they're feeling, regardless of how they say they feel".

Sure, in some cases people get trapped in patterns where if you ask them, they say they want to stay in them, but it's pretty well established that actually they'd be happier if they broke out of it, and the desire is probably not really genuine and more a result of fear/shame/etc.

The existence of cases like this doesn't mean we can just blindly apply this argument to everything. It can easily go wrong: "you say you want to be an artist but you're just being manipulated by your lazy friends. Trust us, you'll be much happier becoming an accountant like your dad"

> In this age of instant connection and infinite on-demand information, there is no lack of ways to find out about new products that I enjoy.

Yeah this is more or less what I mean by the arms race argument.

You are correct that I wouldn't agree with that straw man that nobody would agree with.

My point is mainly that we should default to not manipulating people, especially when the manipulator has a conflict of interest, which includes the vast bulk of paid advertising. And that secondarily, it's ethically dangerous to cloud that over with a philosophical fog.

I was responding to your straw man ("if you think that sometimes people can be influenced into having different genuine desires, then you must think this is true any time someone is manipulated, even in the case of spousal abuse") with another to demonstrate that there's a spectrum and more subtlety here than your initial response was acknowledging.

> especially when the manipulator has a conflict of interest

I think the conflict of interest argument is a good one for why advertising is generally dangerous.

> it's ethically dangerous to cloud that over with a philosophical fog.

Eh, fuck that noise. "Advertising is definitely bad so we shouldn't ever try to be clear about why exactly it's bad, since that might involve discussing some ways in which advertising is not bad, and we know it is bad."

I don't believe that's a fair statement of my point regarding abuse. And it's an entirely unfair restatement of my concern about your post. So I'm done here.