Advertising’s Folly
This is a bottle of Tide detergent. It costs about $7 at your local market. It has less than $1 of ingredients in it. The rest is packaging, marketing, “shelf space fees” and profit. Tide’s manufacturer, Procter and Gamble spends $255 million per month in U.S. advertising for all its products.
In the first six months of the year, General Motors spent around $200 million per month in advertising to sell 250,000 cars and trucks. That’s close to $1000 per vehicle for marketing.
I believe it’s time to ask the question of whether advertising has become the tail that wags the dog of capitalism. We will spend in the U.S. around $300 billion on advertising this year, and that is just the actual outlay for space and doesn’t include all the money spent making the ads. When I am paying $7 for a product where 80% of my dollars are used to persuade me that Tide gets my shirts whiter than all the other duplicate detergents, then something is seriously screwed up with the economics.
Capitalism has sought to maximize utility–create the greatest satisfaction from the consumption of goods. But just how does advertising increase utility? If the average consumer knew they were paying $7 for $1 of goods would they be satisfied? When Henry Ford first started selling cars, advertising was a very small part of his budget. Even into the 1920’s, the outlets for mass advertising were relatively limited. Radio was just getting started as a commercial business and the era of mass market magazines was in a relatively nascent stage. It was not until the Great Depression that the advertising business presented itself to business as the solution to the crisis of overproduction. Paul Mazur, a Lehman Bros. banker wrote in 1932 (New Roads to Prosperity) that the first task was to give workers more leisure time so they could shop. Within a few years the five day work week became the standard. He went further.
Within the society we must develop systems of education and persuasion which help convert the potential desires of the people into the positive force of their demands for goods with which to satisfy the living standards that they have established for themselves.
The movement of a whole society from a “needs” to a “wants” consumer culture was the role of advertising. And as its importance grew lonely voices like that of John Kenneth Galbraith
It can no longer be assumed that welfare is greater at an all-around higher level of production than at a lower one. The higher level of production has, merely, a higher level of want creation necessitating a higher level of want satisfaction
No one doubts that the ad business has perfected the art of “want creation”, but at what cost? The Psychologist Barry Schwartz has written a wonderful book called The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less
Yesterday the Wall Street Journal quoted Bob Rodriguez, a money manager who had correctly called the mortgage meltdown in 2005.
He also expects consumers to save rather than spend, spawning “severe difficulty for a large segment of the economy directly or indirectly related to consumers.”
By the time the March quarter ends, he expects the U.S. savings rate will approach 4%. By the first quarter 2010 it could be in the 7% to 10% range. In recent years, that rate has hovered near 1% or lower, indicative of a country binging rather than saving.
In other words, Mr. Rodriguez doesn’t think Americans will shop their way out of a recession.
He believes the U.S. consumer has transformed into a saver, though policymakers don’t fully understand that. President-elect Barack Obama “will try to stimulate spending with one foot on the gas, while consumers are pushing on the brake” by saving. “We’re in for a very discontinuous environment.” Thus, he says, the economy will sputter in fits and starts. The recession will deepen over the next six to 18 months.
The fact that we are greeting the return of thrift to our culture with such fear demonstrates just how distorted our ad driven 24/7 media culture has gotten. If the consumer is finally developing some natural resistance to the siren song of advertising and if our plethora of choice has actually lowered our standard of living (because we are paying so much to be advertised to)–then maybe we can take this period of creative destuction in the retail economy to rethink the role of marketing in our culture. One simple experiment would be to decrease the deductibility of advertising expenditures by business against their tax bill. For instance, businesses can only deduct a portion of entertainment expenses (the fabled 3 Martini lunch) against their taxes. Why not allow only 50% of ad expenditures to be deducted from taxes? The other alternative is a straight sales tax on advertsing. Of course the broadcasters and newspapers would scream bloody murder, but the issue of how they survive in the digital age is a subject for another post in the near future.
Whether it has become the tail that wags the dog?
It is the dog.
Dan
January 2, 2009 at 11:34 am
There are some great insights in your post, but I think you’re blaming advertising for way too much here.
In a capitalistic society, you simply cannot regulate advertising to the degree you’re suggesting. Even if you did, it would only help the big dogs, and hurt the smaller companies. Regardless of how much you tax or penalize, the big dogs always push through (look at the Yankees and luxury taxes in baseball).
Brett
January 2, 2009 at 12:15 pm
Brett- Even if they push through, at least the state is earning money on their pushiness and doesn’t have to tax something else.
Jon Taplin
January 2, 2009 at 1:25 pm
you might like my blog jon…the biggest lie ever told is that advertising is effective. it can’t be measured. agencies will come up with all sorts of “exposures” and “recall” and “brand recognition” studies to sway advertisers, but for the most part, tis wasted money.
http://cyber-clutter.blogspot.com/
jim
January 2, 2009 at 2:10 pm
Well, in all honesty, consumer behavior is slowly (albeit glacially) changing advertising. As you mentioned, the internet is hitting hard at print and broadcast, direct mail has fallen sharply and catalog printing less and less. The numbers don’t support the ad rates – the fact that the air time for the Superbowl hasn’t sold out yet leaves lots of media types in a slight cold sweat.
Right now, packaging and placement seem to be the main old-line advertising war horses that still perform at close to the level marketers are comfortable with. The big question in the year ahead is, will impulse buy rates fall further than expected?
While the internet will slowly supplant traditional media as the source for advertising placement and revenues, agencies are still trying too hard to come up with gee-whiz ideas as opposed to dealing with what the internet does best – deliver information.
This is similar to the dull-eyed look that the music industry gave digital files back at their inception – instead of reconfiguring the business/marketing model to leverage the technology and delivery system to their advantage, they ignored it.
While viral marketing, meta tags, search engine placement, banner ads, ad sharing and all that other annoying stuff are now part of any media campaign, agencies are still focusing on the sizzle rather than the steak. Review sites, portals, forums and other areas were individuals can research before purchasing have steadily increased in traffic year after year and yet, agencies do a lousy job of pushing out straight ahead informational websites.
Will expenditures on advertising go down as a result of the shift in market alignment? I doubt it. Placement rates will continue to rise based on hit count – seriously trafficked entertainment sites will become the new “network shows” and as streaming media improves, networks will become just another URL in the mix.
Additionally, the majority of folks in the Advertising business are as out of touch with reality as congresspersons or captains of industry – witness Chrysler and GM spending a half a million dollars in “thank you, America” ads last week.
Tom Wilmot
January 2, 2009 at 2:14 pm
But Jon – if it wasn’t for advertising, I would have never known how much I needed a Jet Ski.
For that matter, the fact that my escargot forks are fully digital is something I owe entirely to the Advertainment Industry.
Your really on the wrong side of history on this one Jon!
Besides – I’d need to retool! (he-he-he)
Noel
January 2, 2009 at 2:18 pm
The gullibility and ignorance of the consumer is to blame more than the predators. Given that it won’t change too quickly, government regulation should assist and channel the change as you suggest. But ultimately the aim should be to empower the consumer and gradually remove the excess regulation. The consumer may catch up quicker than expected, given the current media revolution.
Akira Bergman
January 2, 2009 at 2:21 pm
Speaking of supermarkets, there were three extraordinary BBC documentaries on The Learning Channel last night- The Half Ton Mom, The Half Ton Dad, and The Half Ton Man about the super morbidly obese. Here are some data I picked up from them.
64% of adults of adults in Texas are overweight or obese. 15 MM Americans are morbidly obese. There are 2 MM people in this country that weigh over 569 pounds and are classified as Super Morbidly Obese. Texas is home to six of the nation’s most obese cities. This nation is in the middle of a fast food epidemic. As our culture spreads to other nations, the obesity epidemic spreads there as well. We are the heaviest nation in the world.
Food is everywhere. Fast food restaurants are everywhere. Food advertising is everywhere. Supermarkets are disturbing.
T Bone Burnett
January 2, 2009 at 2:29 pm
The obesity epidemic is here as well, maybe not as bad as there. I wonder if it has something to do with the ‘desire to fall’ of drug addiction. I have known so many people who were unable to stop the fall while knowing it. As if they were looking forward to the bottom which was not there for many. It seems to work for societies as well. Perhaps this is naturally encoded so that they get the hell out of the scene through self destruction.
Akira Bergman
January 2, 2009 at 2:51 pm
Two million over 569 pounds? One out of every 150 people weighs at least 569 pounds? If that’s true, then it’s a lot worse than I realized.
Advertising lately is crammed with ads for fast food, because it’s one of the few things that is still selling.
Go USA.
Dan
January 2, 2009 at 3:01 pm
And I gather that one of the ratings powerhouses (although I never go near the horrid dreck on network TV that passes for entertainment) is a show about fat people trying to lose weight.
Dan
January 2, 2009 at 3:06 pm
Perhaps we need to focus less on buying and selling and more on giving.
T Bone Burnett
January 2, 2009 at 3:23 pm
What would happen if a law was passed limiting profit?
JT
January 2, 2009 at 3:46 pm
And just how much money has anybody ever earned by “giving?”
JTMcPhee
January 2, 2009 at 3:56 pm
JTM With all due respect, that is not for us to know. It is also the wrong question.
(The word earned probably deserves quotation marks in the way you are using them.)
T Bone Burnett
January 2, 2009 at 4:19 pm
Interesting points. A couple I would add: Why on earth would you pay Tide to transport liquid around the country when you can buy powdered detergent and use the water that’s already plumbed into your house?
Second: American capitalism is predicated on growth. But for most US consumers, they have all that they need, and have for some time. But the only way to sustain growth is to stimulate demand where none exists.
Thus, solutions to imagined medical problems (“if you think you suffer from this bizarre series of medical symptoms, ask your doctor about Quackinex,” etc.), or terribly frustrating household conditions like not having Timmy’s socks white and spring-fresh enough.
Or they’re appealing to some exalted version of your symbolic self (“lose weight fast/whiten your teeth/bolster your manhood,” etc.), which has nothing at all do to with need. (Except, of course, for my need for whiter teeth.)
My .02 is that there’s so much advertising, it becomes white noise. Thus, why not tax it? NPR ran a story in September about how the state of Florida gives precedence to billboards — over trees.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=94023551
You can imagine how much I loved hearing that …
JohnO
January 2, 2009 at 4:26 pm
How much of that 80% is marketing? I suspect the lion’s share goes to profit. That’s the real crime, with wages stagnant for decades.
Still, point taken about the advertising.
EGrise
January 2, 2009 at 4:53 pm
There’s this oxymoronic phrase, “educated consumer.” What a world there is in just two words. A consumer is not a “citizen, as I would understand the term. He or she is a user-up of stuff, by definition. The consumer is the person with the 8-horsepower chain saw, the 40-hp “John Deere, just like a yeoman farmer” riding mower, the gasoline powered hedge trimmer and edger and weed whacker and maybe roto-tiller and, of course, the ubiquitous “yard blower.” Which is about as much of an anti-citizenship device as you can imagine.
You mow your half-acre, trim the privet, whack the errant blades of St. Augustine or bluegrass or zoysia, edge perfect straight or ogive lines between grass, “plantings” and sidewalk or pool deck. Then you fire up your 300-mph Category 6 handheld “Hurricane” blower, and poosh and whoosh all the greenery trimmings from the yardly monoculture, and leaves, and dog crap and cigarette butts and candy wrappers, over onto your neighbor’s lawn or into the public streets and storm sewers.
I’ve lived in a neighborhood where clandestine blow-fights went on, one “neighbor” waiting until the other drives away and then rushing out to blow the stuff back on the other yard. And what doesn’t get blown, gets “hosed,” even in drought areas. Ever watch some “consumer” chase a pebble with a stream of potable water from the top to the bottom of the driveway and out into the street? And of course where the “neighbors” can afford it, they have there illegal-immigrant mercenaries do the dirty yardwork for them.
And these were your FAT people, who would never stoop or bend to pick up a rake or broom or shovel.
And is it ADVERTISING that brings about this consumer culture? “Human nature” is involved, of course, but humans are heterogeneous adaptives, trainable for just about anything. Ask Joseph Goebbels and Newt “C’mon, At Least I Didn’t Get Any Stains On A Blue Dress” Gingrich. Those bidnesspeople don’t spend all that money just on promises of profit — they must have some fairly objective notion that placements and branding and differentiation of those 157 different salad dressings help extract money from “consumer” wallets.
As a <a href=”http://www.tokenconservative.com/how-willing-are-you-to-inflict-pain-on-others” shows, humans will, when told to by someone “in authority,” administer what they believe are potentially fatal electric shocks to “train” another human to perform tasks more efficiently.
Speaking of education, we have penetration and permeation in our schools — corporate curriculum “contributions” on how to be a “wise consumer” (Sic, VERY sic) and how to use (but not control) a credit card, and make change but not the social kind, and read the labels (which because they are “government approved,” give the manufacturer a great defense against lawsuits, because warnings are given and state liability laws are “federally pre-empted,” the warnings having been cleverly designed by “advertising specialists” to attract rather than educate). So our little offspring are not taught the habits of thought that might lead to a more meta-stable culture, spared exposure to pesky “civics” and “classics” in favor of how to read “Consumer Reports” and research products and shop on our lovely Internet.
And it would be such a shame if degrees in marketing and sales and “communication” (apologies to the blog owner) became “the new English Lit” degree. All those people in the pipeline, hoping to be the next whiz kid to develop a NEWER “New Coke.”
Maybe Akira can give some insight into what the end point of all this activity is — I hope it’s not the reported view of James Watt and other Reagan Revolutionaries from the Christian Right, that we all are bound into a mutual-assured-destruction pact to “use it all up before Jesus returns, or He will be really pissed off.”
And of course as has been pointed out, if “we” stop consuming, how is “the economy” ever going to “get going” again?
Just asking.
JTMcPhee
January 2, 2009 at 5:02 pm
Perhaps we need a new economy.
T Bone Burnett
January 2, 2009 at 5:07 pm
T Bone – Perhaps we do indeed.
JT
January 2, 2009 at 5:17 pm
TBB;
“Perhaps we need a new economy.”
Perhaps the humanity is too broken into too small pieces. Our natural size is tribal since in the tribal form we evolved into the modern shape. This may explain why we make incredibly stupid choices in large numbers in the broken “family” based system.
Since the last ice age ended more than 10000 years ago, our expansion has been exponential. We have gone through many painful stages and we successfully adapted to all of them, however costly. Now we find ourselves in “interregnum”, after finding that both communism and capitalism are no good in themselves.
Maybe the time ripe for a synthesis. Why can’t we start living in small semi-independent communes? We have already found out, after many experiments, things like retirement villages, kindergartens, campus style universities, corporations work quite well. Why can’t we expand this concept? Our science and technology are capable enough to design modern self sufficient village style systems that can operate semi independently in many ways; legal, economic, reproductive, technical, scientific…
There is a growing hunger for not living alone. Too many families are dysfunctional and bring up broken children into a broken society for the predators to prey on. Addictions are epidemic. Legal systems are stretched to the limit. Prisons are expanding. Clearly the top down system does not work. Time to break the pyramid and quantise the population field based on it’s natural minimum size; tribe.
This would take huge load off the governments. There are communal style legal systems operating already here in Melbourne and many other places. It would also pave the way to a global political system unified in a large field of incredible diversity.
Akira Bergman
January 2, 2009 at 8:48 pm
Akira- What you are expressing is in fact the basis for this idea of the New Federalism. Local autonomy connected by technology to the greater society.
Jon Taplin
January 2, 2009 at 9:12 pm
Jon- thanks, I should have read more about it in the first place, but it feels good to have rediscovered it semi-independently by myself. This gives me more confidence in scientists like yourself.
Akira Bergman
January 2, 2009 at 9:20 pm
Though I strongly dislike advertising, I think it’s important to remember that most of the money that goes into it (nearly all of the money for placement that J.T. is talking about here) goes into supporting or subsidizing some sort of media. Your getting a new episode of “the Simpsons” with your $7 bottle of tide.
That said their is a lot of inefficiency in the system. Some placement costs don’t subsidized media (such as billboards and guy’s wearing sandwich boards) and of course the production costs are all burnt money on top of all of the organizational overhead. But it’s important to remember that Coke’s battle with Pepsi is what’s paying for your copy of the New York Times.
Harry Pottash
January 2, 2009 at 9:41 pm
TB sez: “Perhaps we need a new economy.”
Or we reshape it by choosing what we buy more carefully by buying less.
The Americans as consumers are cutting their spending by household. That has a very democratic way of picking winners and losers. That is the free market at it’s most free: the free by few choices brigade. No money. No thrills.
The problems are we don’t control tax spending and we don’t control those who do. We get product we don’t like for money we’d rather not spend. So when I see “new economy”, I realize it’s a spiel for reallocating taxes to other vendors first, and not changing the lot of those who are taxed except by indirection and who choose best by not spending.
When they do that, the market listens. When they don’t, the market takes them for granted.
You know how the Rick Warren’s talk about a “purpose driven life”, maybe we are becoming a nation of purposeful misers and our purpose it to take the wind out of the sails of sales.
len
January 2, 2009 at 10:26 pm
Here is an individual- The Unabomber.
http://cyber.eserver.org/unabom.txt
A rugged individual even.
By the way, Kleenex tissue is softier.
Please don’t forget that. I can’t.
T Bone Burnett
January 2, 2009 at 10:49 pm
TBB; very elegant.
Akira Bergman
January 3, 2009 at 1:16 am
JTM – I like your take on the issue. Our education system is almost as much to blame as the people pushing stuff on us. We don’t learn critical thinking at any step. Children can’t decipher between advertising and programing and yet ads are targeted directly at them at a very young age. Then of course, we allow our children to watch a lot of junk with a lot of advertising from a very young age. I think the consumer has been bred into the system just as much and the advertising industry…
Josh C
January 4, 2009 at 7:17 am
I haven’t read that before. Now I have yet another Harvard graduate’s manifesto for change and a thesis on how my generation failed to achieve it: self-doubt, feelings of inferiority, and oversocialization. Wow. I thought it was all the sex wasting our time.
So Ted Kazcinski is the original Millenial?
Artists hold up mirrors to themselves and occasionally others. Sociopaths don’t cast reflections but they can hold up a mirror. In fact, that is the trait that makes them successful. However, what a sociopath’s mirror reflects is not the reality but the beliefs of the subject about themselves. Those are well worth examining even if the person holding the mirror is reprehensible.
len
January 4, 2009 at 10:51 am
I have learned via IBM during a break in the Dolphins Ravens game that we have just broken the petaflop barrier.
http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/11/supercomputers.html
T Bone Burnett
January 4, 2009 at 11:00 am
And I was sitting here with my old mate, Asmodeus, discussing if he was really ready to make a comeback with new material or if he should just keep playing the old hits that worked so well in the 50s.
Simulation is modeling. As a branch of science, it provides a means to find hypotheses about real subjects but not to test them. It is limited to testing hypotheses about the models. That is not “fundamentally new science” because such models have been made in science from the beginning. What it changes is the detail possible in the model over time: what is observable given the limits of the observer. So once again, it serves as a mind amplifier in the sense that Englebart wrote about. Once the model gives a result, a set of tests are then created that attempt to correlate what is learned in the model with an observable in the real world.
What is most interesting is what happens when a computer with a model of a world/system is enabled to interact with the real world/system. Now the model becomes a second or third order control over that real world and given assumptions, may cause that world to evolve toward a goal state. Our automated mixing boards with self-seeking levels, equalization, etc., are examples of that.
As a tool of social experimentation, the ability to provide extremely detailed virtual worlds is of enormous interest because of the acceptance by the human brain of onset cues when learning. Economists are thrilled by what they can test in the virtual world economies.
By the way, it will be illuminating to give the Unabomber Manifesto to people to read without the source to see what they accept before and after knowing who the author is.
len
January 4, 2009 at 11:55 am
Len — wasn’t it argued here not too long ago that economists aren’t much better than the guys who “read the entrails” of sacrificial animals back in the day? And wow, it is possible to do some really interesting simulations, for sure, but is it chaos science or something that gives us this reality check, that for all the peta-belly-takrumaflops in the World Interlinked Brain, the conceit that we can “model” something, like, say, “the weather,” which has maybe a similar order of magnitude of points and energy states and all that as a 6.7-billion-human “Econogotalotomy,” “we” can look forward maybe a whole 2-5 days at various degrees of resolution? And giving “the Matrix” any kind of controlling interest in our little human lives scares the bejeezus out of this little person.
Old Isaac Asimov wrote this whole “Foundation” sci-fi series based on the idea that some really deep guy named Hari Seldon at some point figured out an actual science called “econometrics” “psychohistory” or something, that supposedly put everything in its place and “predicted” (Free will? What’s that again?) all of history in a large-scale way. I would offer that we are a very long way from even “prediction,” especially the kind that actually implies that Hari Seldon and his ilk would in effect “control” what the future of humanity might or will look like.
JTMcPhee
January 4, 2009 at 3:56 pm
Len,
I was thinking the exact same thing. It gets a bit iffy a few paragraphs in, but judging only by the opening statements, I think it’s a fairly good assessment of how a large and ascendent segment of the population feels.
But what’s also clear is that, when it comes to consciousness, exploding bombs don’t do the trick. For real change to take effect, you’ll need to wait for an implosion. That just seems to be the way it goes with the humans.
With regard to advertising, the implosion seems to be well underway. In their ‘Predictions for 2009′ the Economist notes that corporate power will be shifting towards CFOs, who will become the new MVPs, while ‘head-count’ becomes a popular word once again.
In their view, the biggest looser is HR, now that the ‘War for Talent’ is being eclipsed by the notion that few people have real talent, and that’s just fine, since few jobs require it anyway, and there are more than enough people around to fill them. In cultural terms, this provides a fairly brutal bit of counter-programming to the mainstays of Madison Ave. messaging that ‘it’s all about you’, and that ‘you deserve the best’.
The other big looser in the Economist’s assessments were Marketing Directors. Specifically, they say
In short, the future looks grim for expensive, but empty feel-good / feel-better messaging pumped out to masses of individuals with carefully cultivated senses of entitlement and plenty of credit. Jon’s observation that advertising culture as we know it was spawned by the Great Depression. It looks like ‘the greatest crisis since the Great Depression’ might provide the other bookend to this era.
Not to say that organized cultivation of desire through image is going away, but a major driver just may be.
Actually ‘go away’ may be too strong a word. ‘Radically transformed’ may be a better expression. And as noted by Harry Pottash, an enormous amount of seemingly unrelated cultural output that banks on ad dollars and traditional advertising is going to have to change as well.
I suppose this is where the ‘art imitating life, and vice versa’ part of the Interregnum comes into play.
Alex Bowles
January 4, 2009 at 4:34 pm
Len- Modeling gone mad.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/04/magazine/04risk-t.html
Jon Taplin
January 4, 2009 at 4:48 pm
You put your finger on it, Mc: resolution.
A simulation is as good as the rules and the recursion depth or resolution of the math where it is math that is the basis of the rule. Otherwise, it is a decision tree (yes/no/mu/next).
1. Chaos may come into play. Are any of the functions self-referential/self-measuring and is the math floating point such that one has to decide how many places to the right of the decimal point one calculates before truncating, and is that result then a value fed into the next calculation?
2. How many calculations are required and how many rules are fired? IOW, what is the size of the problem space. It is trivial to simulate a car driving a route. It is a little more difficult to simulate a car driving a route with a changing schedule if the goal is to obtain the most efficient route for some multiple set of efficiencies (complexity).
Where chaotic systems are deadly is when they are used to predict a one-off or critical value, aka, betting the farm. Early fly-by-wire systems on aircraft had problems with non-terminating functions, or if the behavior it induced contradicted the pilot’s “feel” and therefore, reflexes (the source of the F-111A failures in VietNam – it caused a pitchdown and the pilots would immediately pull it out of terrain following mode and do the wrong thing).
Big numbers such as Seldon’s are pretty reliable. It is when you get into the ’small’ that precision matters, and again, if errors can cascade through the system and amplify by repetition, then we are in ‘for want of a nail’ territory.
What the speed of the IBM machine gets us is more calculations faster. So a simple problem can be computed very very fast and a complex problem faster. The dirty art of simulation is getting the numbers that you can believe in, making them constants or constraints, then working in the unknowns.
The virtual world simulators are a bit different. Most of the power required there is not for solving tough problems but rapid update, that is, given say 100,000 objects that can change between two frames (3D is still just a very dynamic movie where you can see behind things and decide if two objects in motion have collided, etc.), can you update the display fast enough to avoid inconsistencies given the lag time for each user at a different terminal. IOW, if I drop a glass, each display has to show that but if one is slower and I catch the glass, will it see that or will the glass hit the floor first thus introducing an inconsistency.
The other difference is the critical problem solving in virtual worlds is done by the wetware, the computer between your ears. The advantage to economists is they can set up the world rules precisely as you set up a game, then watch as thousands of people play at the same time. So the simulation doesn’t have to be complex.
The Cosmic Muffin/Hairy Thunder manages by being omnipresent/omnipotent/omniscient. That takes care of update/functional power/state truthfulness. IOW, keep the truth tables accurate isn’t a problem
The triple-omni is a hard problem but speed of the computer helps a lot. However, the Golem problem remains unsolved. I wrote a paper for MIT about that about a decade ago. The story of the Golem is instructive in that even then the rabbis had worked out the issue of the seal or aleph that is put on the Golem providing him not just power but authority. The sort of bad news for the philosophers here is that this problem is a problem of ‘authority’ and hierarchies of authorities vs flat networks of authorities.
We can predict history. We just usually aren’t around to see the results if we make predictions of very large changes, but we can also predict changes in the artifacts, the tools we make, and then model given the powers/functions of those tools some changes that will come as a result of their application.
But predicting and wishing are two different things. Some people predicted the web and the changes it would cause. Some wished for jet packs with beer coolers. But in the sense that we use tools to shape our lives, we use them to shape our selves and in that sense, Hari and The Matrix have been in charge since we were australopithecines. Every time you drive and stop and start at the lights, you are interacting with a simulation control. Every time you fly an Airbus, a real-time simulator is holding your life in its qubits.
This is an interesting topic. We could go for quite awhile. But if it interests you, this sort of thing scares the bejesus out of me probably more than you because I realized years ago what candides the geeks are. They seldom look at a technology they invent as something they should also be responsible for. They tend to be on the “that’s a social/religious/ethical” problem train and avoid it especially if it will make them rich.
That’s why I laugh a lot when the “Obama will use technology to make it all better” meme comes up. Obama is a lawyer. I doubt he really gets it and the people he has advising him are salesmen for high tech companies. In a sense, there is little difference in what he is saying about technology and what Cheney says about energy.
len
January 4, 2009 at 5:03 pm
Len;
“That’s why I laugh a lot when the “Obama will use technology to make it all better” meme comes up.”
Don’t forget the successful predictions of the climate change decades ago. Anti-science stance is as dangerous as anti-spirituality. We all know who opposed the scientists and did everything they can to shut them up; energy miners and marketers. The fact that modeling is used wrongly in the greedy advert industry does not disqualify it from other fields.
Akira Bergman
January 4, 2009 at 5:25 pm
Modeling is the domain of the questions. Value sets are just data or type. Relationships are functions.
An administration asks questions.
A guitarist questions/plays with the order of the pedals.
A 3D modeler plays with the morphology of shapes.
A real-time 3D modeler plays with the shapes and locations and proximity in time and routed relationships among events shared among those shapes.
Choose a class of objects and routes by event types.
It’s in the way that you use it – Eric Clapton
len
January 4, 2009 at 5:37 pm
len is wrong: “The Cosmic Muffin/Hairy Thunder manages by being omnipresent/omnipotent/omniscient. That takes care of update/functional power/state truthfulness. IOW, keep the truth tables accurate isn’t a problem”
If light is the ultimate information type, and the speed of light is limited, then the system cannot keep truth tables accurate for all observers at all times. Relationships vary by proximity as light potential to all points in the space. Dark matter is the non-potential event. Possible but it won’t happen. Locale cancels it.
Or consciousness is separate from physicality and the dark matter is the consciousness of the universe.
len
January 4, 2009 at 5:53 pm
In my problem domain space, or what-ever, there are only a few rules:
1. Nothing is ever what or the way it seems, or what you think or hope or believe it is.
2. Never mess with a working system (corollary to that guy Murphy’s postulate).
3. If you don’t understand it, totally and completely, and everything that it does, affects or might possibly do, and are willing to be neutered, drawn and quartered if your “invention” or “innovation” has bad or even unintended effeccts, keep yer goddam warty mitts off’n it.
4. Every action has unintended consequences, and unless you live the Golden Rule, and do everything you can to mitigate or avoid the bad ones (measurable in pain and destruction and disorder) , maybe you should go somewhere else.
5. There is no such thing as “good engineering.” Only “less bad.”
6. The Devil may be in the details, but God is, too.
You mention the F-111 and its software-driven penchant for diving into the terrain at 500 knots, “ruining the pilots’ whole day.” You don’t mention all the other technological monstrosities and failures, many the result of “modeling,” which are legion.
There are geeks who wanted to create a “computer” to control the nation’s “nukular deterrent,” not much different from WOPR, the semi-sentient gadget in WarGames who, wiser than its creators, learned that “the only winning move is not to play.”
The generals and their pet engineers, whose “wetware” is still driven by a very different set of Black-Hole-centered functions than most of ours, no doubt have rewritten the code to avoid that particular computational endpoint.
I believe (see the “mad robot” post earlier above) the SDI geeks and their toys are still on-line as part of the Matrix that may well determine what happens in a “large and long-scale” way to humanity. The Star Warriors of the Reagan era wanted to just write a lot of code, put up some satellites with lasers and kinetic killers and all, connect it all to the ICBM launch systems, and sit back with a smug expression and pat themselves on the back for a job well done “protecting the nation.”
I asked one SDI partisan once if he would like to deal with a problem right here on earth with the same tools. Too many people run red lights at intersections. The code for operating CO2 lasers to cut in half any vehicle that sped through the intersection against the light, and the earhbound sensors to provide the control inputs, are a lot simpler than the 6 million lines of code that would all have had to work perfectly to have a hope that SDI could be trusted not to launch all the missiles when a satellite got pinged by a cosmic ray or hypervelocity micrometeorite or e’en the rosy Sun rising proud over the horizon of our island home. He hemmed and hawed, and allowed that he might not want to entrust even that local police function to SDI-level technology.
Let’s not forget the Current Programs to develop “autonomous battle robots” and nifty applications for nanotechnology that have nothing to do with promises of medical miracles and those recombinant and molecular-engineering tools that may let a housewife or a pimple-faced misfit teen who is bored with war games and hacking and suffering terminal anomie build up a perfect little virus that is 100% fatal to humans, transmittable by a variety of vectors and air and water dispersal, and so quickly fatal that there will be no time to develop a vaccine. Or the dude who figures how to jigger the GPS system and all that depends on it — now THERE’s an effort worthy of a UnaBomber!
You use the word “value.” I wonder, in the wonderful world of domains and sets and all that other “poerful” math, which of the various definitions of that word will apply. Do you have children? Grandchildren? I do and I love them and I hope, their brains being not much bigger than mine or even Einstein’s or any other great thinker’s, that they will get the chance to watch their share of sunrises and sunsets, and pass on “values” like decency and fairness and affection and such to future generations. Or are we on our way to the alternate universes depicted in “Heavy Metal,” incomprehensible, hi-tech, violent, apparently totally meaningless? At least to this late-20th-early 21st-century bit of protoplasm?
Just asking.
JTMcPhee
January 4, 2009 at 6:28 pm
The following video (thanks to Seth Godin) seems relevent here.
“Scarcity plus Christmas plus social pressure plus greed plus kids = critical mass.”
http://www.pwnordie.com/videos/5337c6b1ab/50-kids-happy-to-get-a-nintendo-wii-for-christmas-from-nicksmith
Genuine happiness at christmas, or a sign of the emminent apocolypse?
Espenia Hallowe
January 4, 2009 at 6:29 pm
There’s an interesting counterpoint in today’s Times, in the pair of articles from Michael Lewis (Liar’s Poker)about the end of the financial world as we know it.
In the first, Mr. Lewis notes that:
In the second Mr. Lewis goes on to reccomend, among several reforms, that we
I mention this here because it’s demonstrates that, no matter what anyone says, the meltdown was not one of these “1 in 100 Black Swan” events that, like some “unpredictable” natural disaster, came out of “nowhere” (as Rick Rubin likes to suggest) and swamped the system.
The problem was the system. And it was obviously the system. This is what I find so stunning about the whole thing. In fact, you’d have to look for some Black Swan in the event that the ratings agencies didn’t end up getting completely and totally corrupted.
I’m reminded of the scene in 28 Days Later, where our heros – who are trying to escape zombie-infested London – find themselves considering a long dark tunnel under the River Themes as the way to go.
One of them turns to the others and says “This is a shite idea. And do you know why it’s a shite idea? Because it’s so obviously a shite idea.” They go down the tunnel anyway, and swiftly discover how bad the decision really was.
It’s easy to blame the complexity of models. Or, if you’re a developer of models, the competence of the people using the models. But of you’re in the business of governance, none of this should matter. You should only need to look as far as the ratings agencies and recognize the spectacular conflict of interest they represent to step in with some serious corrective action.
This assumes, of course, that you’re an effective government to begin with. If anything, this fiasco should demonstrate that the government itself has become victim of deep regulatory capture, and is no longer capable of carrying out its most important functions.
Here again, massive conflict of interest is clearly in play. With Congress beholden to special interests for the astonishing sums needed to run for office ($1.3m for a seat in the House in 2006, and $9.6 for one in the Senate) the mechanism for regulatory capture is clear.
As we look around the ruins we’re currently in, and figure out where our first and best efforts need to be made, it seems like restoring independence and accountability to our representatives is job one.
Only when the independence of Congressmen from everyone but actual, human constituents has been restored can we expect that legislation and oversight will end the tyranny of the short-term to which Wall Street, if left to its own devices, naturally gravitates – taking with it everything it touches, and every industry it finances.
Instead, we get guys like Charles Schumer, who was famously owned by Wall Street, and who dedicated himself, among other things, to limiting
Which all goes to show that you can have perfect SAT scores, two degrees from Harvard, and still be a complete idiot – or entirely corrupt.
The Times piece linked to above suggest the latter.
Anyway, one more name for the Truth & Reconciliation Commission.
Alex Bowles
January 4, 2009 at 7:12 pm
Oops – missed a line “dedicated himself to limiting meaningful oversight”.
Alex Bowles
January 4, 2009 at 7:17 pm
“You use the word “value.” I wonder, in the wonderful world of domains and sets and all that other “poerful” math, which of the various definitions of that word will apply. Do you have children? Grandchildren? I do and I love them”
++1. My children are my revenge.
I said the F111 pitched. The pilot reacted instinctively but mistakenly. An F111 pilot explained it. He said the problem was the designer not understanding how the “feel” of the correction would affect the pilot’s “feel” for the plane. This is important. Situational intelligence in modeling is a premium data type.
IOW, technology, models, any engineering for use by people that doesn’t account for people won’t. Mistakes get made. I used the study of that in a lecture at Lockheed about coming problems and challenges of using distributed hypermedia for enterprise engineering. As the article Jon cites shows, models are there to be “felt” as much as relied upon. Note the Goldman Sachs examples. Models drift. Humans can feel that.
I don’t despair that. As Von Braun said, “We are not in the business of making shoes.” I despair that we spend our money on technology of destruction we don’t intend to use, or buying short and betting against success breeding an urge to see the other guy lose.
len
January 4, 2009 at 8:26 pm
@Len
“Situational intelligence in modeling is a premium data type.”
That’s a concept I like a lot.
Alex Bowles
January 5, 2009 at 12:46 am
Von Braun was in the business of making rockets — no normative or “humane” content in what he did at all. ICBMs, anti-missile-missile-missiles, “to the moon, Alice,” all the same delighted dedication. He was probably happier with his Nazi masters than with the “democratic” system that captured him and that he in turn suborned and used. The Nazis, at least until the present more complete stage of “regulatory capture” like we see in the military-industrial death wish of today, gave him the power to collect whatever resources (gold from the teeth of Auschwitz-Birkenau and Treblinka, etc., slave labor and other “values”) to build the V-weapons. “Democracy” at least pre-regulatory capture, provided the potentially infinitesimal possibility of “situational intelligence input” into an otherwise unbounded appetite for “resources.” Not any more.
[“At the turn of the century, German sociologist, Max Weber, called attention to the dominant process underlying western culture – rationalization. In Weber’s view, the economic revolution and the Industrial Revolution combined to produce the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. The driving force underlying both was rationalism – a quest for and the implementation of the most rational means for goal achievement. In order for capitalism and industrialization to reach their goals, a system of production and organization would emerge based on the principles of efficiency, predictability, calculability and control. The emergent result of this driving force is the bureaucracy.
“While Weber certainly recognized the importance and the positive potentialities of rationalization, he also recognized its dangerous potential to erode individual liberties and to dehumanize. Weber feared the long range consequences of a process which focused exclusively on means-end rationality to the exclusion of any concern with the human element of social organization. He expressed these fears in his concept of the “Iron Cage of Rationality,” i.e., a process so rational that (a) it is irrational and (b) creates an inevitable cage from which there is no escape.”
http://frank.mtsu.edu/~baustin/holocamp.html
Which as you know means the persistence and “growth” of “established program(me)s” like the V-22 “Crashing Turkey” and so many others. The V-22 partisans assume that now the delicate things have been “deployed” to South Asia, of course keeping them from harm’s way and with essentially infinite support, all questions of the validity and “value” of those hundreds of billions have been silenced, and their pampered pet is now “just another program.”
Those “turkey” programs continue to receive Spendable Present Dollars, that get their “value” only from the Real Wealth (not “bubble money”)yet to be created and taxed. Those SPDs are taken “democratically” from the mouths, health and minds of today’s children and other “weaklings” who might learn a less deadly way of living. MIGHT learn, if only they had a voice in the place where the “modeling” and choices of “values” and the distribution of all that present and future wealth goes on. Speaking, of course, of the Imperial court that squats like some enormous, ungovernable, insatiable toad, with its belly squarely centered on the Mall and its gaping mouth turned out toward the rest of us. Seen “Little Shop of Horrors?” What is it that Audrey II said? “FEED ME!!! NOW, SUCKAH!!! I WANT BLOOD!!!!!”
Anyone going to the Inaugural BAAL?
And of course, seeing the world this way and writing about it in an interesting but impotent blog is an invitation to madness, borne of a sense of total futility, a futility conceived in the persistence in seductive idiocies of wealth, profit, technology, hegemony and violent power.
Will “situational intelligence” be one of the functions/values of the positronic brains that, never encumbered by the Three Laws of Robotics since they were developed to drive “autonomous battle robots,” may end up giving us the plot of “The Terminator” without the time travel for the Last Human Hero From the Future and Sarah Connor and the possibility of a cancel-cancel, “I call do-over!”?
And why do I now recall Dr. Brackish Okun, played by Brent Spiner (who played “Data,” the ultimate emotiorational entity on Star Trek) giving a perfect rendition of the pure scientist in his lair, showing off the long-hidden captured alien spacecraft to the President and other barely-escaped folks from the ruins of D.C., and excitedly bragging up the progress they have made and continue to work on as the species is about to get annihilated, as “This is REALLY NEAT STUFF!”?
JTMcPhee
January 5, 2009 at 5:23 am
“He was probably happier with his Nazi masters than with the “democratic” system that captured him … ”
Not to argue with the rest of your reply, Mc, but only the part quoted. That wasn’t true. Von Braun was very happy with being a citizen here. What he discovered too late was the fickleness of the Americans with regards to achievements they claim but are too embarassed to admit are not wholly their own, and the speed with which they kick expertise to the sidewalk because they believe a change of underwear satisfies the need for a change of heart.
Von Braun’s chief disappointment was that we didn’t move on to Mars when we had the technology and organization in place to do it.
len
January 6, 2009 at 8:41 am
I recently went to Target and decided to buy detergent. I refused to buy it because on the20 foot long row, there were nothing but Tide Detergents. I refused to buy it because I was not going to let them control my thinking about which detergent was the right one for me. I wrote Target and explained that I would go next door to the Super Walmart on Moreno Beach where there was a large selection and I could buy what I wanted. There are many people who have their own favorites.
Della Smith
January 6, 2009 at 5:13 pm