Workshop Booze Up VII - New Year, Same Plague, Same Booze Up, Deja Vu

[Jubal]

Hmm. I think a lot of the reason the availability heuristic aspect of advertising works is time pressure plus the fact that the advert is not the thing they're there for: so if you happen to see the advert while on social media or YouTube, you get the "I'm now thinking about this" but it seems time-wasteful to look it up further in a world where everyone is constantly being told they need to be more productive, so people don't take extra steps to as it were, dispel the heuristic and reassess information availability. This is now also worsened by search functions being so much worse than they were ten years ago. So I'm not sure "NPC" is the correct way to look at it here: it's being caught between decisions, information, and time pressure, which is very much a problem of player characters!

Adverts generally fail on me as well unless they're very well targeted to something I actually need. The weird one is clothing adverts where Meta's advertising has worked out my general vibe pretty well but has not worked out my gender, or possibly nobody makes hobbit clothes for men.

[pinky]

google constantly redacting that really on-point search
result from a week ago that would be completely
à propos to the convo you are in right now
(i actually had to start bookmarking things)
makes it feel like there is top-down pressure
to be an npc. to stop asking the real questions

(today i learned apropos is a word, apparently)
((looks more greek than french that way))

ads probably fail on me because i always
seem to be shopping for unfindable things
while ads are always hawking findable things

i saw a video today about people nodding affirmation
when not required, and fearing silence in conversation
and it makes me think insecurity is the achilles' heel
for npc consumer disorder, we need more confident populace

[Jubal]

Huh, yeah, now adding apropos to the list of words you can mispronounce like a Greek hero along with bicycles/barnacles/cubicles etc.

In fairness, even in an ideal world something that isn't findable is hard to advertise

Re insecurity: I think you're right that people often have insecurity problems, but I don't think herd mentality requires insecurity, that's just one of a number of ways of producing herd instinct in humans. Like, the LLM bro community in Silicon Valley: financially and socially some of the most secure and privileged people in the world, with huge egos, and yet very obviously acting in certain herd mentality focused ways.

Also some forms of herd mentality aren't always bad: there are lots of things on which relying on consensus is necessary to exist in a complex world, and so we kinda have to offload some items to specialists and who is a specialist is a societal consensus decision. A human brain has a finite capacity for information, after all, and we've seen some really bad examples of "I am confident, I do my own research and ask the Real Questions" in recent years which worked out badly because the people absolutely did not have the skills to assess the evidence properly (obvious one being the people literally dying in parts of the USA now because a subset of people abandoned the collective mentality of protecting themselves against basic diseases using established science).

So I think it's important to make the distinction in this between "information that we need to share collectively to function as an advanced society" and "information that is being pressured onto or hacked into people to get them to consume/act in a certain way for someone else's benefit" which I think is more what you're talking about.