eigenrobot Profile picture
Jul 5, 2023 11 tweets 3 min read Read on X
interesting

ancillary reactions

1. experience in tech has mostly been that everyone is insanely focused on actually selling stuff, probably because we see direct results from online channels

i guess i havent done much "brand" advertising work (vs conversion ad analysis) tho
2. selling consumer goods is noble actually

you earn a living and you give people stories about the stuff their buying that makes them not only get the stuff, but feel better as a person for having bought it

this is huge value add

people are way too down on capitalism
often the best thing you can do for someone is to show them how to tell a better story about themselves

but what am i saying. look at this soulless capitalist. ha ha

ads are an opportunity to remind people of what might matter to them.

my only complaint about ads is that so many are bad
@ryanpbradymedia practically every communication is in a sense manipulation. this is not _necessarily_ malign.

if i tell you that a hostile army is on the way, and my hope is to cause you to flee that army: ive manipulated you, but for a good and honest purpose
@ryanpbradymedia if i pay you a compliment, i am trying to change the way you view yourself for the better; this is usually a kind act, although of course it might be wicked if i am lying or if my objective is to do you harm for my own benefit
@ryanpbradymedia advertising is dicey because it's communication done explicitly for ones own financial benefit.

this demands a high level of integrity but if you can convince someone to buy something that they'd benefit from, and cause them to /feel good/ about doing so, it seems win-win to me
@ryanpbradymedia related :)

anyway, i hope ive . . . sold you on the upside of marketing. and if i havent, some consolation: i did not study ads, and what i did in my early "meaningful" work was unbelievably heinous. so you couldve done much worse.
addendum

i have no opinion about the object level discussion except that the company in question used marketing to make its customers feel BAD, and i expect probably made no one else feel good

i cant get behind that advertising model
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More from @eigenrobot

Oct 9
israel is NOT an ally of america. theyre aggressively trying to capture our strategic ashkenazi resources. is that how an ally behaves?
a true America First policy would be ANTIZIONIST

jews dont belong in israel. they belong in new york and its time to come home

the eigenrobot administration is prepared to agree to a population swap of 100 american muslims repatriated to arabia for each israeli returned to us
im also prepared to accept a "Two State' solution wherein palestinians from gaza and the west bank will be resettled in michigan territory redesignated "new palestine" and expelled from the union. in exchange the US will accept all current Israeli territory as a new 50th state
Read 5 tweets
Sep 22
cant believe ive been outed as a postrationalist

but yes im sorry the credibility revolution was a mistake and economics has long since abandoned careful empirical work for atheoretical regression slop that it massively overinterprets to mindlessly support political claims
my advice to you is if you ever want to ruin a party full of applied econometricians talking about the effect of immigration on native employment, bring up the mariel boatlift after everyone is several drinks in

you may find result enlightening and you'll certainly have some fun Image
fun inside story

when seattle implemented a $15/hr minimum wage they asked some ppl at UW to do a study of the employment effects

the big paper dropped in 2017 and found huge disemployment effects

so the city immediately disavowed it and ran to amherst for a rebuttal
Read 6 tweets
Sep 21
we can easily exploit this with secondary markets in H1B workers. all we need to do is buy up 63 H1Bs for a guaranteed successful IPO. vcs are leaving trillion dollar bills on the ground here
its a reasonable microeconomics paper with a plausible identification method and lots of regressions that are highly suggestive if you dont think about them too much

(are patents actually predictive of ipo success? are the h1bs producing these patents themselves? lol who knows) Image
Image
the literature review provides some complementary evidence, some of which is interesting context and some of which flatly contradicts the claim tabarrok would like to make Image
Read 15 tweets
Sep 18
Set normative considerations aside a moment.

Is there any way that Dems and the left, going forward, could credibly commit to not suppressing speech? I don't see it.

If not, is recent suppression of speech by the administration construable as strategic retaliation?
It's tricky.

This dynamic is _not_ obviously gainfully-modeled as IPD. Instead of acting simultaneously, one agent (here representing something like a D/R coalition) decides to act in each round.

Who acts next round is nondeterministic and may be affected by actions this round.
More things to consider in this model:

1. If party institutions are ahistorically weak, which I think they are now, discounting of future rounds ought to be treated as relatively intense, which makes commitment more difficult
Read 16 tweets
Sep 16
somewhere along the way i think maybe what happened was, eliezer started believing everything he thought

easy pitfall as you age, probably. IME when you spend enough time thinking, certain things crystalize and you get less patient about the process

happens to everyone prolly
the vital urge to say "ok, how is this wrong" starts to fade as you get older, because you've played that game so many times that it gets tiresome and you start to think you know what that room holds

usually you're right, but it's an easy way to get stuck
second issue is the cost of doing this sort of inquiry gets higher as you accumulate more committed beliefs or expectations

once more, you're usually more likely to be "correct" at any given moment, but updating gets very costly as your world model is built out and solidified
Read 5 tweets
Sep 13
its been a long week so tonight please relax as i relate to you the tale of a great episode in american autism Image
our third president, thomas jefferson, was immensely autistic

he spent much of his time inventing questionably useful devices, getting hung up on and beefing over irrelevant abstractions, pursuing unwise relationships w subordinates, and recording data for no particular reason Image
Image
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he combined several of these hobbies in an extended incident in the court of france where he was serving as america's ambassador ("minister plenipotentiary") in the mid 1780s, succeeding a real scientist and charmer, benjamin franklin

big shoes to fill! and he tried. awkwardly Image
Read 23 tweets

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