A fine explanation of the dangers of all loyalty statements, which have now come to mathematics.
Mathematicians coming from ex-communist countries have the advantage of knowing how to navigate these things at workplace… but probably also a strong aversion against doing so.
It has been explained but I will never stop being confused by the dislike of personalized advertisements, which are universally far superior to the alternative. [...] What we actually deserve, and might benefit from requiring, is user control over ad customization.
I suppose most people’s objection is that you can’t do targeted advertising without spying on users, and they object against the spying part. So if you gave them a list of topics to choose from (with a warning: “if you don’t choose any, you will still get the same amount of ads, only randomly selected”, or maybe just with an “everything” option selected by default, which you can only unselect after selecting something else), this objection would go away. I am not sure it would make the advertisers happy though, for several reasons:
many people would not bother setting this up;
if they had to, many people would just click some random shit to make the dialog go away;
even those who set it up correctly would not bother updating it regularly;
how granular would the choices be? more detailed are more useful, but also more work to set up (“movie previews” but what genre? “game advertisements” what kind of games? “restaurants” in which area?);
plus there are people like me, who want to precommit to never buy anything that was advertised, so I would select irrelevant ads on purpose (preferably in a foreign language I do not speak) so they would not distract me.
All these objections go away if you simply spy on users.
this is trivial, the sequence has limited memory so it will repeat in a loop
Is the memory really limited? As I understand it, you move a cursor starting at the start of the sequence, and append one or two digits to the end. The distance between “where the cursor is now” and “where I am appending now” keeps growing (if the 2-digit numbers keep happening once in a while). So the sequence is not necessarily periodic… unless I missed something.
Personally, I’m opposed to targeted ads partially because of the spying and partially because they increase the value of ads. Since ads are bad, I want their value to be as low as possible to the advertiser so they have an incentive to use better monetization strategies.
If the strategies to increase sales are either to increase the quality of the product, or to improve the marketing, as a customer I would prefer to live in a world where increasing the quality is the winning move for the producers.
Okay, maybe we should distinguish between situations where the market is saturated and the producers are playing a zero-sum game against each other… and situations where some people are still unaware that a certain type of product exists, in which case the advertising provides them useful information. But if you show me the same ad for the hundredth time, the “just providing information” argument is no longer plausible.
Mathematicians coming from ex-communist countries have the advantage of knowing how to navigate these things at workplace… but probably also a strong aversion against doing so.
I suppose most people’s objection is that you can’t do targeted advertising without spying on users, and they object against the spying part. So if you gave them a list of topics to choose from (with a warning: “if you don’t choose any, you will still get the same amount of ads, only randomly selected”, or maybe just with an “everything” option selected by default, which you can only unselect after selecting something else), this objection would go away. I am not sure it would make the advertisers happy though, for several reasons:
many people would not bother setting this up;
if they had to, many people would just click some random shit to make the dialog go away;
even those who set it up correctly would not bother updating it regularly;
how granular would the choices be? more detailed are more useful, but also more work to set up (“movie previews” but what genre? “game advertisements” what kind of games? “restaurants” in which area?);
plus there are people like me, who want to precommit to never buy anything that was advertised, so I would select irrelevant ads on purpose (preferably in a foreign language I do not speak) so they would not distract me.
All these objections go away if you simply spy on users.
Is the memory really limited? As I understand it, you move a cursor starting at the start of the sequence, and append one or two digits to the end. The distance between “where the cursor is now” and “where I am appending now” keeps growing (if the 2-digit numbers keep happening once in a while). So the sequence is not necessarily periodic… unless I missed something.
Personally, I’m opposed to targeted ads partially because of the spying and partially because they increase the value of ads. Since ads are bad, I want their value to be as low as possible to the advertiser so they have an incentive to use better monetization strategies.
If the strategies to increase sales are either to increase the quality of the product, or to improve the marketing, as a customer I would prefer to live in a world where increasing the quality is the winning move for the producers.
Okay, maybe we should distinguish between situations where the market is saturated and the producers are playing a zero-sum game against each other… and situations where some people are still unaware that a certain type of product exists, in which case the advertising provides them useful information. But if you show me the same ad for the hundredth time, the “just providing information” argument is no longer plausible.