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[faust]

I think that is proven wrong by actual effects. The fashion industry frequently does this thing where they have famous people wear their clothes to make people want them, and it seems that works very well overall.

The trend for women to shave their body hair was started by a razor company trying to expand their client base.

On a more substantial level, car companies lobby against public transport to increase demand for their products.

The idea that companies just cater to whatever needs exist and do nothing to manufacture demand is ridiculously naive to me.

"Clothes that let me pretend to be a higher status individual than I actually am" is a thing that people inherently want, the fashion industry only takes advantage of this desire. It's a similar situation with shaving for women; many women read women's magazines because making themselves appear feminine is something they inherently want to do and the magazines promise to address that by giving them advice on how to do it, and the shaving products advertised there promise to address that by making their users appear more feminine (how well the products actually deliver on these promises is not super relevant — products are allowed to be bad if they look like they're good).

Car companies don't lobby against public transport to increase demand for their products, but to decrease competition for addressing the need to move from places to other places, which people inherently have.

There are all kinds of marketing techniques that companies can do to make their products sell better besides designing the product itself to be maximally appealing, but it is ultimately only the customers who can decide whether or not your product is worth buying for them, and if you don't have a product that at least appears to help your customers in some way, it's not going to be successful.

I mean you're just claiming that any number of things are desires that people inherently have, without giving any evidence or at least reasoning for why that would be. Usually I can at least see some kind of argumentative throughline with you, even if I disagree with it, but it just seeems like there is no substance here whatsoever.

[Awaclus]

I mean you're just claiming that any number of things are desires that people inherently have, without giving any evidence or at least reasoning for why that would be. Usually I can at least see some kind of argumentative throughline with you, even if I disagree with it, but it just seeems like there is no substance here whatsoever.

Evidence suggests that the desire for status is a "fundamental human motive": https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25774679/. It is also pretty easy to observe this effect in practice when you look at what people are like and how they act, e.g. by posting pictures on social media that show a much more flattering view of how things are going for them than what the reality is, buying expensive cars that might be slightly better than affordable cars but crystal clearly nowhere near enough to justify the price difference unless the price difference, and hence getting to show off one's high status to other people by driving such a car around, is itself worth tens of thousands of dollars to them, etc. There's countless of examples of people going to lengths to show off the status that they have, and to pretend to have status they don't really have.

I couldn't quickly find any research on whether or not it is inherently important for people to express their gender through their appearance, but I feel like the fact that trans people usually seem to either do this despite the risk of discrimination or even violence that trans people might face, or feel a lot of distress from not getting to do it, should be pretty convincing, even if you feel like almost all the cis people in the world express their gender through their appearance for some reason other than liking it.

And, uh. Do I really need to present evidence for the claim that people want to move from places to other places?

[Awaclus]

Tbh it's pretty surprising that out of all the arguments I've posted on f.ds, this is the one without any substance at all. Admittedly I just assumed that it would be obvious that status, gender and being able to travel are things that people value without me having to demonstrate that, but surely I've posted like a hundred less well thought out arguments here. I comment on a lot of things with a lot less expertise than I have in marketing, like, I'm probably not going to get hired as any kind of a marketing specialist in a company with my creds but it is at least a part of my professional skillset, both from learning the theory in school and from practicing it in practice as a freelancer and a politician and with my band. (and the band is a hobby, not a business, which is why it's allowed to make a product that is not inherently appealing to a very wide audience, which it does, and that's why it costs us money to run the band instead of being commercially viable)

[faust]

Okay, on one hand, I think I understand better where you are coming from, and on the other, I'm more confused about why you think your argument works.

What I thought when you made the claim

"Clothes that let me pretend to be a higher status individual than I actually am" is a thing that people inherently want

is that the very specific thing was somehow inherent (which is problematic seeing how humans didn't even always wear clothes. But now it seems that this is just a specification of

the desire for status is a "fundamental human motive": https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25774679/.

And that latter one is something I can accept as a premise.

Similarly with the body hair thing, it seemed to me that you were claiming that body hair removal was inherently feminine (when it was not considered as such until the 60s or so in the West). But you just wanted to state I think that gender expression is an inherent goal. But what constitutes that is not.

So I hope I got you right on those counts. But if that is the case, I feel like your argument supports my claim rather than yours. The debated claim was

You can't just make a random product that nobody wants, start selling it, and expect people to suddenly want it. Even if you pour ShiTtons of money into advertising, that's just not going to ever work.

But it seems that, with the argument you are making, all you need to do is associate whatever product you make with status or gender expression or some other innate desire, and then you can sell it, and it doesn't really matter what the product is.

Hence my confusion. Why do you think the above supports your position?

[silverspawn]

Similarly with the body hair thing, it seemed to me that you were claiming that body hair removal was inherently feminine (when it was not considered as such until the 60s or so in the West). But you just wanted to state I think that gender expression is an inherent goal. But what constitutes that is not.

I, however, don't buy at all that hair removal is an entirely arbitrary thing, and given other cultural forces, that we could just as easily be in a society were men do it and women don't.

Not that I expect this to be convincing or even now how evidence here could look like.

Also much more uncertain about this than the music thing; no direct connection to valence here. Just that in general, the "100% culturally created" hypothesis doesn't seem super plausible tome.

[silverspawn]

Speaking of the music thing, I got to ask a QRI member abut this in a QnA! He said I was applying the model correctly (i.e., their theory does predict inherent pleasantness of harmonic chords), that this fits what the data says, and that they're working on an article/paper where they talk about it. So I'm not going to look into it more myself... got so many other things to do, even just in terms of reading papers.

[silverspawn]

was too much of a wuss to also ask about the metric, sadly.

[Awaclus]

Pretty much. I mean, there's different levels of inherent; there are basic physiological and psychological needs, and then there's needs like my need of some kind of a solution that would let me get all of my monitors further away so that it's easier on my eyes to sit in front of them all day, whether that's a bigger desk or some kind of a stand or something, which I would also count as an inherent need in this context even though I didn't have it until I got a third monitor which made it less trivial to fit them all on my desk. It's still a problem that I have and would like to have solved, and getting rid of the third monitor is not a solution I would be happy with because having three monitors rocks. Possibly a company could start developing a new product that's designed for people who want to have their monitors further away, and later also have a huge advertising campaign targeting the people who haven't yet taken into consideration that it's pretty important to have your monitors far away from your eyes, but it would only have any hopes of working out because it legitimately is important, so some of the people seeing those ads could potentially be convinced.

Now, if the same company also sold third monitors to people who previously were able to have both of their monitors far away enough just fine in an effort to cause them to run short of desk space and thereby have this problem that their product conveniently solves, that would be pretty clever of them, and it could result in a sequence of events that starts with a person who does not want a Monitorfurtherer™ and ends with the same person happily buying one. However, at every point within this sequence, the person is only buying a product they need because of their current circumstances, and what the company is manipulating is the circumstances, not the needs directly. This is similar to the women's shaving example, although pushing a cultural shift to make women's armpit hair seem undesirable was a much more impressive feat than selling someone a third monitor.

(And based on the Wikipedia article, I'm getting the picture that it was basically an amazing once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that Gillette and other companies were there to seize at the right time, since it was a time period where the previously established ideas about femininity were getting outdated, which I assume must have created somewhat of a gender expression vacuum where many women would have been actively looking for new ways to express their femininity, and a few other trends were simultaneously going in a direction that made the armpit hair removal thing seem like it made sense. As far as I can tell, it is not typical for companies to have done something like this on a comparable scale.

And also I shave my armpits too, I do it because it makes my body feel more like my body, a more harmonious existence in a way, but I didn't start doing it until I was reasonably sure that it was established enough for men that I could do it without feeling like it contradicts my gender expression. I'm fine with, and perhaps even happy about being an early adopter when it comes to new trends for masculinity, but being at the frontlines trying to set the trends myself is a bit too much for me. So I wouldn't be terribly surprised if some women in the early 1900s were likewise excited about this cultural trend, but I doubt there's any way to find out if that was a common experience or if it was more common to shave just to fit in while not particularly enjoying it.)

The fashion thing doesn't seem as forceful to me, it probably happens on its own that the trendy thing to do is to copy whatever the highest-status individuals are doing as early as possible, and the later to the party you are, the less cool it is, and at some point it gets so lame that the original high-status individual who set the trend abandons it and starts doing something new. There is therefore a need for "newly designed clothes", and that's the product that fashion companies offer, the exact designs aren't that important (although it probably helps if they're legitimately good designs) but the novelty is.

[Awaclus]

I started writing that before silverspawn posted and now the "Pretty much" seems weird.

[Awaclus]

To put it in other, shorter words: "all you need to do is associate whatever product you make with status or gender expression or some other innate desire, and then you can sell it, and it doesn't really matter what the product is" is not entirely false, but it is probably impossible to associate random products with status or gender expression, or it is at most doable to a very limited extent in typical cases. For example, some guitar players buy Gibson guitars over much cheaper and otherwise pretty much equivalent or even superior alternatives because they associate Gibson guitars with high status, but 1) Gibson is never going to be able to sell a substantial number of guitars to people who are not and don't wish to become guitarists, no matter how high status their guitars seem and 2) even among guitarists, there appears to be an increasing consensus that buying a Gibson is a pretty stupid idea.

[faust]

To put it in other, shorter words: "all you need to do is associate whatever product you make with status or gender expression or some other innate desire, and then you can sell it, and it doesn't really matter what the product is" is not entirely false, but it is probably impossible to associate random products with status or gender expression, or it is at most doable to a very limited extent in typical cases. For example, some guitar players buy Gibson guitars over much cheaper and otherwise pretty much equivalent or even superior alternatives because they associate Gibson guitars with high status, but 1) Gibson is never going to be able to sell a substantial number of guitars to people who are not and don't wish to become guitarists, no matter how high status their guitars seem and 2) even among guitarists, there appears to be an increasing consensus that buying a Gibson is a pretty stupid idea.

Well, shaping the demand is something you can only do if you have significant market power. In your example, Gibson is probably too specialized and small to pull this off. But if, say, Alphabet decided to buy Gibson it could then launch massive campaigns in support of the idea that A) being a guitarist is a high-status activity, and B) that the most high-status guitars are the ones they sell. I think that's not entirely impossible, but of course there are probably more efficient ways for Alphabet to make more money.

[silverspawn]

Of course, getting a dirty keyboard to be clean is not possible inside this universe as far as we know, but ...

[Awaclus]

To put it in other, shorter words: "all you need to do is associate whatever product you make with status or gender expression or some other innate desire, and then you can sell it, and it doesn't really matter what the product is" is not entirely false, but it is probably impossible to associate random products with status or gender expression, or it is at most doable to a very limited extent in typical cases. For example, some guitar players buy Gibson guitars over much cheaper and otherwise pretty much equivalent or even superior alternatives because they associate Gibson guitars with high status, but 1) Gibson is never going to be able to sell a substantial number of guitars to people who are not and don't wish to become guitarists, no matter how high status their guitars seem and 2) even among guitarists, there appears to be an increasing consensus that buying a Gibson is a pretty stupid idea.

Well, shaping the demand is something you can only do if you have significant market power. In your example, Gibson is probably too specialized and small to pull this off. But if, say, Alphabet decided to buy Gibson it could then launch massive campaigns in support of the idea that A) being a guitarist is a high-status activity, and B) that the most high-status guitars are the ones they sell. I think that's not entirely impossible, but of course there are probably more efficient ways for Alphabet to make more money.

Yeah, possibly Alphabet would have the resources to accomplish that, but even though they could, it wouldn't be commercially viable, because it would take a ton of resources and I'm not sure if the payoff could ever be expected to even cover the expenses at all, and even if it eventually would, it would definitely take so long that Alphabet is better off investing their resources into something else with a faster, more predictable payoff. I guess I could have been more clear originally that I was talking about what it takes for a product to be successful, not just about whether it's technically possible to convince people to buy something they don't want — I mean, if you don't care about commercial success, that is trivially doable by selling the product at a negative price.

[Awaclus]

L00nark had pretty much this experience with Prismata. As a product it is not inherently unviable; people complain about RNG, grinding and p2w, and Prismata addresses that by not having any of that, but they tried to advertise it to an audience that didn't want this product and it wasted them a lot of money and now the game is not quite dead but not very lively either.

[silverspawn]

It's really flippin cool how Moody tortures Draco because he hates his father. Already a fun scene, but so much better in retrospect.

[silverspawn]

Also like, he humiliated a student, then he LITERALLY USED the torturing curse on a spider. He's not just Mad-Eye who spontaneously turn out to be a Death-Eeater, he's actually a psychopath.

[silverspawn]

I like how english is getting increasingly(?) flexible. You can just switch around the order of words, and if it sounds right, it's fair game.

[silverspawn]

one need not obey boring rules, most fortunately so

[silverspawn]

While I now have to admit that there's a lot that rationalists are wrong about, I think they nailed technical writing styles.

I use Grammarly (premuim version!) to proofread my writing. While it lets me set preferences, there is no setting that does what I want. That's because I can either tell Grammarly the writing is supposed to be academic, or not do that, and neither work:

- If I do select academic, it will criticize me for using "I" and for making my writing "entertaining" in various ways. A primitive example is just using "it's" over "it is"

- If I don't select acedemic, it will keep criticizing me for repetitive word and language choices. Why not use a synonym for "model" here? And here's a very monotonous passage!

But what LessWrong does, and what makes perfect sense to me, is to be both highly technical and precise while also being entertaining and at times funny. I tend to pay extremely close attention to the consistent use of terminology, but I also use I; I have monotonous passages when I think it helps put things as simply as possible, or sometimes when the similarity is the point ("in context A, we have XXXY, in context B, we have XXXZ"), but I'll also use out there phrasings at other places.

[silverspawn]

In fact, I would say this is an important part of the rationalist aesthetic that Eliezer cultivated. Which most of them don't really understand because they lack the concept of aesthetics.

[silverspawn]

I do have a personal vendetta against people who think you should rephrase every sentence with "I" in it to use the passive voice. Thankfully, that one is at least not prevalent in the computer science literature.

[silverspawn]

Beyond the intuitive perception of tone, there's pretty complex signaling going on. At a minimum, the style signals (a) disapproval of formal academia or science (and perhaps superiority?) and (b) disapproval of... how to put this... cultish or status-centered communities. And there's probably more.

Like for (b), the other thing that joking does is that it makes you sound non-arrogant and I guess non-serious in some way, which gives off a more welcoming vibe. Probably because most communities who think they're above normal science have adopted some kind of arrogant sounding style, so it's important to signal that we're different. And I know from examples that arrogant-sounding posts on LW are very much not tolerated.

[silverspawn]

Also, LWs don't think they're above science, they just think they're doing science better. They think science has the right ideas, it's just too inefficient. So you are also supposed to respect it.

[silverspawn]

All of this is important to understand because I need to hit the rationalist aesthetic as hard as possible to soften the blow of suggesting they could be wrong about some things.

[silverspawn]

"hit" as in "adopt"