Perfectly put. Revealed preference simply assumes impulses are all correct, which is not the case, an exploits that.

Drugs make you feel great, in moderation perfectly acceptable, constantly not so much.

My favorite somewhat off topic example of this is some qualitative research I was building the software for a long time ago.

The difference between the responses and the pictures was illuminating, especially in one study in particular - you'd ask people "how do you store your lunch meat" and they say "in the fridge, in the crisper drawer, in a ziploc bag", and when you asked them to take a picture of it, it was just ripped open and tossed in anywhere.

This apparently horrified the lunch meat people ("But it'll get all crusty and dried out!", to paraphrase), which that study and ones like it are the reason lunch meat comes with disposable containers now, or is resealable, instead of just in a tear-to-open packet. Every time I go grocery shopping it's an interesting experience knowing that specific thing is in a small way a result of some of the work I did a long time ago.

The "my boyfriend is AI" subreddit.

A lot of people are lonely and talking to these things like a significant other. They value roleplay instruction following that creates "immersion." They tell it to be dark and mysterious and call itself a pet name. GPT-4o was apparently their favorite because it was very "steerable." Then it broke the news that people were doing this, some of them falling off the deep end with it, so they had to tone back the steerability a bit with 5, and these users seem to say 5 breaks immersion with more safeguards.

Your work exploits people's addictive propensity and behaviours, and gives corporations incentives and tools to build on that.

Insane spin you're putting on it. At best, you're a cog in one of the worst recent evolutions of capitalism.