My guess is that taking seriously the very concept of manipulation often makes [the type of person you’re talking about] uncomfortable, because it undercuts an ethically load-bearing abstraction of rational agency, and its fuzziness threatens to license paternalism with (what might feel like) no principled limit. (This is a genuinely hard problem.) This cashes out similarly to ‘people who are manipulated deserve it’, but I think isn’t quite the same thing.
I’m not convinced that manipulation should be handled by law (but I am concerned about it – I have several articles about creative adversaries who don’t initiate force particularly when they have big budgets behind the manipulation). But I don’t think that’s the right debate to start with anyway.
I think there is a ton of stuff which isn’t fuzzy, isn’t near a gray area, in which the company clearly violates both the letter and spirit of the law or contract. So we could start policing that and see how it goes. I suggesting focusing on the easier cases first. Also in general ambiguous contracts are (rightly) adjudicated in favor of the person who didn’t write them or have any lawyers or power, so we could also tackle those without getting into the trickier cases. (Unfortunately, even in these clearer cases there is still a lot of resistance to policing companies. But I still think they are easier cases to address than mere manipulation.)
I could give examples if people dispute that there’s a lot of blatant fraud, law breaking and contract breaking in the world.
My guess is that taking seriously the very concept of manipulation often makes [the type of person you’re talking about] uncomfortable, because it undercuts an ethically load-bearing abstraction of rational agency, and its fuzziness threatens to license paternalism with (what might feel like) no principled limit. (This is a genuinely hard problem.) This cashes out similarly to ‘people who are manipulated deserve it’, but I think isn’t quite the same thing.
I’m not convinced that manipulation should be handled by law (but I am concerned about it – I have several articles about creative adversaries who don’t initiate force particularly when they have big budgets behind the manipulation). But I don’t think that’s the right debate to start with anyway.
I think there is a ton of stuff which isn’t fuzzy, isn’t near a gray area, in which the company clearly violates both the letter and spirit of the law or contract. So we could start policing that and see how it goes. I suggesting focusing on the easier cases first. Also in general ambiguous contracts are (rightly) adjudicated in favor of the person who didn’t write them or have any lawyers or power, so we could also tackle those without getting into the trickier cases. (Unfortunately, even in these clearer cases there is still a lot of resistance to policing companies. But I still think they are easier cases to address than mere manipulation.)
I could give examples if people dispute that there’s a lot of blatant fraud, law breaking and contract breaking in the world.
This is also my answer to Eli Tyre who said that fine print can address legitimate edge cases in a sibling comment at https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/beDDK8MNxkkB7yfQY/i-changed-my-mind-about-error-correcting-debate-misogyny-and?commentId=MqKthhrMBHhXopwht