I have a feeling this post could get to the top of HN and become famous, but it's too long to get off of new without a catchier title than I've been able to come up with.
I think a handful of the things I've written are semi famous, not particularly me. 😆
Thanks. I haven't read enough of less wrong and haven't posted anything there so don't know what the posting norms are. But I do think it's the kind of thing they'd be interested in.
To the extent that ads cause you to make purchases that you're retrospectively happy about, I agree. The limit case of a really good advertising system is a recommendation engine for arbitrary products, which is super useful. There are a few reasons why I think they don't converge to that though.
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Different products have different margins that are uncorrelated with how useful they are to use, and this distorts the recommendations.
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Advertising systems are competing to cause you to buy via them, and that causes them to expose you to more ads than your desire to purchase things would warrant.
Ok, I resubmitted with a submission statement.
Ok sorry, I participated a lot on Reddit but just made the switch over here.
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Ok nevermind, it made it. I probably should have asked an LLM to optimize the title for me.
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