See also my reply to sibling, which I think speaks to this as well. Exploiting the naive with snake-oil is bad, but the question is do we really want to try and regulate every kind of sale of anything for authenticity, and if we did then would it even work? I'm generally fine with snake-oil salesmen at the local farmer market, and even a small cottage industry for homeopathic nonsense or whatever kinds of disinformation.
The problem always comes when the manipulation involved crosses a certain threshold of being organized, industrialized, weaponized. Is a union, guild, or weird new accreditation/certification for snake oil practitioners crossing such a threshold? Probably not, unless they are throwing millions at advertising, lobbying, making sly deals with doctors.
To understand the line in the sand for "being evil", one can usually ask something like "what happens if the business model succeeds beyond the owners wildest dreams". For a cottage-industry of grift/manipulation/exploitation, you get to pay for the cottage and maybe buy a boat? If the corporate AI girlfriends scale up well then I guess not only are the cam girls out of a job, but human relations in general are devalued, hell, maybe the species corporations evolved to exploit even dwindles and disappears?
> Exploiting the naive with snake-oil is bad, but the question is do we really want to try and regulate every kind of sale of anything for authenticity, and if we did then would it even work?
I mean, I don't think you could get it all, but I think there's a lot of flagrantly bullshit things that we could easily set a very low standard of like... you can't just lie to people to get their money.
Homeopathy for example, is just straight bullshit. Just through and through, there's no argument to be had here, the science is in and it is complete horse dung, absolutely debunked 100%. Yet homeopathic remedies are still sold every day, amounting to an almost 1 billion dollar per year industry. Why? This is a huge amount of business being done, money being made, productive time being wasted creating incredibly slightly dirty water, shipping it around, contributing to climate change, and it's just, I'm sorry, no disrespect meant to any individual believer in this stuff, but it's just a waste, it's 100% waste. It's products that do not do anything that are sold to people who are being tricked.
Like, if it was an inert just kind of cultural nonsense that wasn't really hurting anything, I'd be more blase about it? But it's measurably impacting our world. I'm sure it isn't the sole reason for climate change of course, but it's a non-zero contributor to it and from the sounds of things, it's pretty non-zero at that. I don't know what the total, for example, emissions are of the global homeopathic industry but again, all it is is little bottles of water being packed, shipped worldwide, with nozzles and etc. to accomplish nothing. I think that bears consideration as we look for ways to reduce our global impact, you know? Do less... ridiculous nonsense. Anything above zero emissions for that industry is that amount too much.
> The problem always comes when the manipulation involved crosses a certain threshold of being organized, industrialized, weaponized. Is a union, guild, or weird new accreditation/certification for snake oil practitioners crossing such a threshold? Probably not, unless they are throwing millions at advertising, lobbying, making sly deals with doctors.
Well, this problem only exists if you presuppose that snake-oil salesmen of minor scale are to be allowed. And I would ask, why? I wouldn't suggest we have patrols of anti-bullshit regulatory agencies patrol every farmers market per se, but the days of the roaming doctor going from town to town selling snake oil are long past. Most of these are large operations with significant presences on the Internet in general and social media in particular. The "small operations" to the extent they still exist at all are still advertising using whatever terms best describe their alleged products. We can find them easily, because they are trying to be found, like any business is.
> To understand the line in the sand for "being evil",
To be clear, I would not call this evil, I just call it theft, scamming, grift. Flim-flammery, one might say, and to that end we have ample historical precedent for shutting it down.
> one can usually ask something like "what happens if the business model succeeds beyond the owners wildest dreams". For a cottage-industry of grift/manipulation/exploitation, you get to pay for the cottage and maybe buy a boat?
I mean, D. Gary Young's net worth at the time of his death was noted to be in the millions... and again, the industry of homeopathy is valued at just shy of a billion. And that's just one industry of flim flam, Chiropractors as a profession are worth something closer to 14 billion dollars, I don't think there's hard numbers on the crystal healing crowd but I'm guessing it's far from nothing. And for that matter, Replika's supposedly worth 20 million so far? Not because the product is helping people, but because they're monetizing the secrets people tell it.
> If the corporate AI girlfriends scale up well then I guess not only are the cam girls out of a job, but human relations in general are devalued, hell, maybe the species corporations evolved to exploit even dwindles and disappears?
I mean, being one of the idiots who was born a human, I'd kinda prefer it didn't? Haha
The problem always comes when the manipulation involved crosses a certain threshold of being organized, industrialized, weaponized. Is a union, guild, or weird new accreditation/certification for snake oil practitioners crossing such a threshold? Probably not, unless they are throwing millions at advertising, lobbying, making sly deals with doctors.
To understand the line in the sand for "being evil", one can usually ask something like "what happens if the business model succeeds beyond the owners wildest dreams". For a cottage-industry of grift/manipulation/exploitation, you get to pay for the cottage and maybe buy a boat? If the corporate AI girlfriends scale up well then I guess not only are the cam girls out of a job, but human relations in general are devalued, hell, maybe the species corporations evolved to exploit even dwindles and disappears?