This is a common problem with "your job is bullshit" rhetoric. It says a lot more about the speaker than the people whose jobs they're criticizing.

The most famous example is David Graeber, an academic who wrote a whole book on what he called "bullshit jobs". He claimed over half of all jobs were bullshit. But of the jobs he identified as such, most of them were actually valuable (receptionist, lawyers, programmers doing maintenance work). He just didn't understand why other people valued them. And, he was an activist deploying flowery rhetoric to make an argument for far-left politics, which is why nearly all the jobs he identified were in the private sector. Ironically, the most obviously bullshit job revealed by his work was his own, but for some mysterious reason academic activists were not identified as people with bullshit jobs.

Lots of people noticed this. Some even did studies on it! They found that the number of people who said in surveys their jobs were useless was only 20%, and of those 20% a lot of them had jobs that were objectively not useless. Instead it was cleaners, janitors, garbage collectors and similar who tended to feel their jobs were useless. Clearly "work is useless" is simply a proxy for "I feel like a loser" and not an objective evaluation of whether the work actually provides value to others.

People are pretty rational. When you find a lot of people doing something that looks irrational and there isn't a clear link to ideology or coercion, then it probably makes sense given information you don't have.

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Ukv 7 days ago | parent [-]

> People are pretty rational. When you find a lot of people doing something that looks irrational and there isn't a clear link to ideology or coercion, then it probably makes sense given information you don't have.

It can be in people's/companies' rational self-interest to act in a way that is detrimental to society as a whole.

We can recognize harmful behaviour and legislate such that it's no longer profitable, but it can take a while to get to that point if there's a lack of awareness or powerful interests pushing against it.

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qcnguy 7 days ago | parent [-]

It's extremely rare to find people who aren't criminals yet engaged in behavior that's genuinely detrimental to everyone else. The world isn't new and the obviously unacceptable behaviors have all been forbidden for thousands of years.

That's why when people talk about stuff that's detrimental to "society", they are usually trying to claim that their personal preferences are more universal than they actually are. It's reminiscent of Thatcher's observation that there's no such thing as society in the sense the left use the word. There are families and coworkers and employers and so on, but there's not some monolithic unit called society that can be anthropomorphised and given preferences.

Clearly, advertising is nowhere near detrimental to society, it's the opposite: a society without ads would be a planned communist dystopia well beyond anything seen even in the USSR (which had advertising!). Many, many people benefit from advertising, which is why it's such a big industry.

People who don't believe this is true are typically in the "don't have information others do" bucket. But a few are just trying to dress up animalistic anti-capitalism in more respectable sounding clothes.

	▲	andrepd 7 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> It's extremely rare to find people who aren't criminals yet engaged in behavior that's genuinely detrimental to everyone else. This is such a wild thing to say. I thought it was evident that people can be bastards and do terrible things entirely inside the law, yet here we are.
	▲	Ukv 7 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> The world isn't new and the obviously unacceptable behaviors have all been forbidden for thousands of years. I don't think this checks out at all. Slavery was only outlawed in the US ~160 years ago, and marital rape only ~40 years ago. Some detrimental behaviors have significant money/power behind them, some detrimental behaviors are new - only enabled (or only enabled at scale) by modern advancements, and some otherwise-obviously-detrimental behaviors intentionally obfuscate their harms. > That's why when people talk about stuff that's detrimental to "society", they are usually trying to claim that their personal preferences are more universal than they actually are. I'd argue that pretty much regardless of what someone's belief is of which actions are detrimental, it includes at least some actions that are "rationally" in the acting person's/company's self-interest - i.e. "selfish" actions. Since we're not oracles, it's true that any statement we make on what we believe to be true about the world is ultimately prone to human error/bias (and disagreement over terms/frameworks/etc.) but I don't think that necessarily makes it just a statement of personal preference. Disliking the taste of steak is different from arguing steak production to be a net-negative. > Clearly, advertising is nowhere near detrimental to society, it's the opposite If Pepsi doubles their marketing budget to push flyers through every door and take some market share, then Coke does the same to reclaim that market share, it's unclear to me what has really been gained for all that resource wastage. Largely it seems to just be pouring resources into a zero-sum game. There are incidental secondary effects (maybe now more people drink sugary drinks, and people have spent more time reading about/trying out sugary drinks instead of something else) but it seems fairly questionable as to whether those are even beneficial in a lot of cases, and they're not in proportion to the resources spent either way. I believe at least that marketing spend would optimally be a tiny fraction of what it is now, with resources directed towards more productive forms of competition (improving the product) rather than just repeatedly persuading the potential customer base with increasingly manipulative/invasive techniques. > Many, many people benefit from advertising, which is why it's such a big industry. I feel this is again conflating being profitable or in the rational self-interest of a company with being beneficial. Sneaking a JS crypto miner in the background of your website can be profitable, for instance.