Comment by Scene_Cast2
17 hours ago
As someone who's worked with population data, I found that there is an enormous rift between reported opinion (and HN and reddit opinion) vs revealed (through experimentation) population preferences.
17 hours ago
As someone who's worked with population data, I found that there is an enormous rift between reported opinion (and HN and reddit opinion) vs revealed (through experimentation) population preferences.
I always thought that the idea that "revealed preferences" are preferences, discounts that people often make decisions they would rather not. It's like the whole idea that if you're on a diet, it's easier to not have junk food in the house to begin with than to have junk food and not eat more than your target amount. Are you saying these people want to put on weight? Or is it just they've been put in a situation that defeats their impulse control?
I feel a lot of the "revealed preference" stuff in advertising is similar in advertisers finding that if they get past the easier barriers that users put in place, then really it's easier to sell them stuff that at a higher level the users do not want.
Perfectly put. Revealed preference simply assumes impulses are all correct, which is not the case, an exploits that.
Drugs make you feel great, in moderation perfectly acceptable, constantly not so much.
Absolutely. Nicotine addiction can meet the criteria for a revealed preference, certainly an observed choice
One example I like to use is schadenfreude. The emotion makes us feel good and bad at the same time: it's pleasurable but in an icky way. So should social media algorithms serve schadenfreude? Should algorithms maximize for pleasure (show it) or for some kind of "higher self" (don't show it). If they maximize for "higher self" then which designer gets to choose what that means?
Well that's what akrasia is. It's not necessarily a contradiction that needs to be reconciled. It's fine to accept that people might want to behave differently than how they are behaving.
A lot of our industry is still based on the assumption that we should deliver to people what they demonstrate they want, rather than what they say they want.
Exactly, that sounds to me like a TikTok vs NPR/books thing, people tell everyone what they read, then go spend 11h watching TikToks until 2am.
This is why I work in direct performance advertising. Our work reveals the truth!
Your work exploits people's addictive propensity and behaviours, and gives corporations incentives and tools to build on that.
Insane spin you're putting on it. At best, you're a cog in one of the worst recent evolutions of capitalism.
Exploitative ads are a small minority. I also think gambling advertising should be banned.
Advertising is not a recent evolution of capitalism, it's a foundational piece of it. Whatever you do as a job would not exist if there was no one marketing it. This hostility seems insane.
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Sounds both true and interesting. Any particularly wild and/or illuminating examples of which you can share more detail?
The "my boyfriend is AI" subreddit.
A lot of people are lonely and talking to these things like a significant other. They value roleplay instruction following that creates "immersion." They tell it to be dark and mysterious and call itself a pet name. GPT-4o was apparently their favorite because it was very "steerable." Then it broke the news that people were doing this, some of them falling off the deep end with it, so they had to tone back the steerability a bit with 5, and these users seem to say 5 breaks immersion with more safeguards.
If you ask the users of that sub why their boyfriend is AI they will tell you their partner or men in general aren't providing them with enough emotional support/stimulation.
I do wonder if they would accept the mirror explanation for men enjoying porn.
My favorite somewhat off topic example of this is some qualitative research I was building the software for a long time ago.
The difference between the responses and the pictures was illuminating, especially in one study in particular - you'd ask people "how do you store your lunch meat" and they say "in the fridge, in the crisper drawer, in a ziploc bag", and when you asked them to take a picture of it, it was just ripped open and tossed in anywhere.
This apparently horrified the lunch meat people ("But it'll get all crusty and dried out!", to paraphrase), which that study and ones like it are the reason lunch meat comes with disposable containers now, or is resealable, instead of just in a tear-to-open packet. Every time I go grocery shopping it's an interesting experience knowing that specific thing is in a small way a result of some of the work I did a long time ago.
Classic example: people say they'd rather pay $12 upfront and then no extra fees but they actually prefer $10 base price + $2 fees. If it didn't work then this pricing model wouldn't be so widespread.
wow, framing. "people say they prefer quitting smoking, but actually they prefer to relapse when emotionally manipulated."
The most commonly taken action does not imply people wanted to do it more, or felt happiest doing it. Unless you optimize profit only.