"Well, in a fundamental sense, advertisements aim to overcome obstacles posed by different reporting incentives to achieving common knowledge about product qualities!  That is, if I was good enough friends with somebody, such that I thought they knew me very well and had my interests at heart, they could just tell me they were very sure I ought to buy something, and I'd buy it!  In principle, the problem of advertising is posed when somebody who knows me less well still has justified belief that I, or a bunch of people in a class similar to me, ought to make a trade we haven't already made.  The basic difficulty of this problem class is that you can also imagine people who don't have such valid knowledge, but are incentivized to deceive themselves about how good their product is, because they capture a portion of the gains from trade.  And the basic danger of advertising is that if you have a group of people like that, they may be incentivized to burn all of their gains from trade on advertising - getting people to trade with them rather than somebody else.  Like, you and I are both producing flavored drinks, which are actually exactly as good as each other, and we each capture 10 dollars... that is not how large our monetary unit of account is, English, but fine, 10 dollars.  We each profit 10 dollars each time we sell a drink.  If I'm self-deceptive about my drink being superior, and I pay $5 to produce an advertisement promising that and thereby convince one consumer to switch from your drinks to mine, I gain net $5 but you lose $10 and the consumer is no better off and also pays switching costs or costs of cognition, so social surplus has been destroyed.  There's a mild tax on marketing, more symbolic than anything else at current levels, but it does remind people of how easily it can go negative-sum given the incentives and less than perfect information.  So the basic challenge in advertising is to convince the customer that you actually do know about a product that's better for them to buy - overcoming my skepticism about my conflict of interest with whoever wants me to trade with them."

"So, in practice, an ad might look like a picture of the product, a brief description of what the product does better that tries to sound very factual and quantitative so it doesn't set off suspicions.  Plus a much more glowing quote from a Very Serious Person who's high enough up to have a famous reputation for impartiality, where the Very Serious Person either got paid a small amount for their time to try that product, or donated some time that a nonprofit auctioned for much larger amounts; and the Very Serious Person ended up actually impressed with the product, and willing to stake some of their reputation on recommending it in the name of the social surplus they expect to be thereby produced.  Plus a Network trail to a much longer report from an old, even higher-reputation institution testing whatever the product's merits were.  To me, at least, this doesn't sound like a weird private quirk of our Civilization, it sounds coherent with some of the most fundamental and important theorems about systems of multiple agents, which states that in principle they end up on the multiagent-optimal frontier, and in practice they end up very close to the multiagent-optimal frontier."

"Well, in a fundamental sense, advertisements aim to overcome obstacles posed by different reporting incentives to achieving common knowledge about product qualities!  That is, if I was good enough friends with somebody, such that I thought they knew me very well and had my interests at heart, they could just tell me they were very sure I ought to buy something, and I'd buy it!  In principle, the problem of advertising is posed when somebody who knows me less well still has justified belief that I, or a bunch of people in a class similar to me, ought to make a trade we haven't already made.  The basic difficulty of this problem class is that you can also imagine people who don't have such valid knowledge, but are incentivized to deceive themselves about how good their product is, because they capture a portion of the gains from trade.  And the basic danger of advertising is that if you have a group of people like that, they may be incentivized to burn all of their gains from trade on advertising - getting people to trade with them rather than somebody else.  Like, you and I are both producing flavored drinks, which are actually exactly as good as each other, and we each capture 10 dollars... that is not how large our monetary unit of account is, English, but fine, 10 dollars.  We each profit 10 dollars each time we sell a drink.  If I'm self-deceptive about my drink being superior, and I pay $5 to produce an advertisement promising that and thereby convince one consumer to switch from your drinks to mine, I gain net $5 but you lose $10 and the consumer is no better off and also pays switching costs or costs of cognition, so social surplus has been destroyed.  There's a mild tax on marketing, more symbolic than anything else at current levels, but it does remind people of how easily it can go negative-sum given the incentives and less than perfect information.  So the basic challenge in advertising is to convince the customer that you actually do know about a product that's better for them to buy - overcoming my skepticism about my conflict of interest with whoever wants me to trade with them."

"So, in practice, an ad might look like a picture of the product, a brief description of what the product does better that tries to sound very factual and quantitative so it doesn't set off suspicions.  Plus a much more glowing quote from a Very Serious Person who's high enough up to have a famous reputation for impartiality, where the Very Serious Person either got paid a small amount for their time to try that product, or donated some time that a nonprofit auctioned for much larger amounts; and the Very Serious Person ended up actually impressed with the product, and willing to stake some of their reputation on recommending it in the name of the social surplus they expect to be thereby produced.  Plus a Network trail to a much longer report from an old, even higher-reputation institution testing whatever the product's merits were.  And the upshot is that people can find out about things they didn't know they wanted to buy, but could validly use, without all of Civilization's gains from trade being dissipated in a negative-sum fight about who trades with who, driven by an arms race in deceptive advertisements.  To me, at least, this doesn't sound like a weird private quirk of our Civilization, it sounds coherent with some of the most fundamental and important theorems about systems of multiple agents, which states that in principle they end up on the multiagent-optimal frontier, and in practice they end up very close to the multiagent-optimal frontier."

"Well, in a fundamental sense, advertisements aim to overcome obstacles posed by different reporting incentives to achieving common knowledge about product qualities!  That is, if I was good enough friends with somebody, such that I thought they knew me very well and had my interests at heart, they could just tell me they were very sure I ought to buy something, and I'd buy it!  In principle, the problem of advertising is posed when somebody who knows me less well still has justified belief that I, or a bunch of people in a class similar to me, ought to make a trade we haven't already made.  The basic difficulty of this problem class is that you can also imagine people who don't have such valid knowledge, but are incentivized to deceive themselves about how good their product is, because they capture a portion of the gains from trade.  And the basic danger of advertising is that if you have a group of people like that, they may be incentivized to burn all of their gains from trade on advertising - getting people to trade with them rather than somebody else.  Like, you and I are both producing flavored drinks, which are actually exactly as good as each other, and we each capture 10 dollars... that is not how large our monetary unit of account is, English, but fine, 10 dollars.  We each profit 10 dollars each time we sell a drink.  If I'm self-deceptive about my drink being superior, and I pay $5 to produce an advertisement promising that and thereby convince one consumer to switch from your drinks to mine, I gain net $5 but you lose $10 and the consumer is no better off and also pays switching costs or costs of cognition, so social surplus has been destroyed.  There's a mild tax on marketing, more symbolic than anything else at current levels, but it does remind people of how easily it can go negative-sum given the incentives and less than perfect information.  So the basic challenge in advertising is to convince the customer that you actually do know about a product that's better for them to buy - overcoming my skepticism about my conflict of interest with whoever wants me to trade with them."

"So, in practice, an ad might look like a picture of the product, a brief description of what the product does better that tries to sound very factual and quantitative so it doesn't set off suspicions.  Plus a much more glowing quote from a Very Serious Person who's high enough up to have a famous reputation for impartiality, where the Very Serious Person either got paid a small amount for their time to try that product, or donated some time that a nonprofit auctioned for much larger amounts; and the Very Serious Person ended up actually impressed with the product, and willing to stake some of their reputation on recommending it in the name of the social surplus they expect to be thereby produced.  Plus a Network trail to a much longer report from an old, even higher-reputation institution testing whatever the product's merits were.  And the upshot is that people can find out about things they didn't know they wanted to buy, but could validly use; without all of Civilization's gains from trade being dissipated in a negative-sum fight about who trades with who, driven by an arms race in deceptive advertisements.  To me, at least, this doesn't sound like a weird private quirk of our Civilization.  I sounds coherent with some of the most fundamental and important theorems about systems of multiple agents, which states that in principle they end up on the multiagent-optimal frontier, and in practice they end up very close to the multiagent-optimal frontier."

"Well, in a fundamental sense, advertisements aim to overcome obstacles posed by different reporting incentives to achieving common knowledge about product qualities!  That is, if I was good enough friends with somebody, such that I thought they knew me very well and had my interests at heart, they could just tell me they were very sure I ought to buy something, and I'd buy it!  In principle, the problem of advertising is posed when somebody who knows me less well still has justified belief that I, or a bunch of people in a class similar to me, ought to make a trade we haven't already made.  The basic difficulty of this problem class is that you can also imagine people who don't have such valid knowledge, but are incentivized to deceive themselves about how good their product is, because they capture a portion of the gains from trade.  And the basic danger of advertising is that if you have a group of people like that, they may be incentivized to burn all of their gains from trade on advertising - getting people to trade with them rather than somebody else.  Like, you and I are both producing flavored drinks, which are actually exactly as good as each other, and we each capture 10 dollars... that is not how large our monetary unit of account is, English, but fine, 10 dollars.  We each profit 10 dollars each time we sell a drink.  If I'm self-deceptive about my drink being superior, and I pay $5 to produce an advertisement promising that and thereby convince one consumer to switch from your drinks to mine, I gain net $5 but you lose $10 and the consumer is no better off and also pays switching costs or costs of cognition, so social surplus has been destroyed.  There's a mild tax on marketing, more symbolic than anything else at current levels, but it does remind people of how easily it can go negative-sum given the incentives and less than perfect information.  So the basic challenge in advertising is to convince the customer that you actually do know about a product that's better for them to buy - overcoming my skepticism about my conflict of interest with whoever wants me to trade with them."

"So, in practice, an ad might look like a picture of the product, a brief description of what the product does better that tries to sound very factual and quantitative so it doesn't set off suspicions.  Plus a much more glowing quote from a Very Serious Person who's high enough up to have a famous reputation for impartiality, where the Very Serious Person either got paid a small amount for their time to try that product, or donated some time that a nonprofit auctioned for much larger amounts; and the Very Serious Person ended up actually impressed with the product, and willing to stake some of their reputation on recommending it in the name of the social surplus they expect to be thereby produced.  Plus a Network trail to a much longer report from an old, even higher-reputation institution testing whatever the product's merits were.  And the upshot is that people can find out about things they didn't know they wanted to buy, but could validly use; without all of Civilization's gains from trade being dissipated in a negative-sum fight about who trades with who, driven by an arms race in deceptive advertisements.  To me, at least, this doesn't sound like a weird private quirk of our Civilization.  I sounds coherent with some of the most fundamental and important theorems about systems of multiple agents, which states that in principle they end up on a multiagent-optimal frontier, and in practice they end up very close to a multiagent-optimal frontier."

"Well, in a fundamental sense, advertisements aim to overcome obstacles posed by different reporting incentives to achieving common knowledge about product qualities!  That is, if I was good enough friends with somebody, such that I thought they knew me very well and had my interests at heart, they could just tell me they were very sure I ought to buy something, and I'd buy it!  In principle, the problem of advertising is posed when somebody who knows me less well still has justified belief that I, or a bunch of people in a class similar to me, ought to make a trade we haven't already made.  The basic difficulty of this problem class is that you can also imagine people who don't have such valid knowledge, but are incentivized to deceive themselves about how good their product is, because they capture a portion of the gains from trade.  And the basic danger of advertising is that if you have a group of people like that, they may be incentivized to burn all of their gains from trade on advertising - getting people to trade with them rather than somebody else.  Like, you and I are both producing flavored drinks, which are actually exactly as good as each other, and we each capture 10 dollars... that is not how large our monetary unit of account is, English, but fine, 10 dollars.  We each profit 10 dollars each time we sell a drink.  If I'm self-deceptive about my drink being superior, and I pay $5 to produce an advertisement promising that and thereby convince one consumer to switch from your drinks to mine, I gain net $5 but you lose $10 and the consumer is no better off and also pays switching costs or costs of cognition, so social surplus has been destroyed.  There's a mild tax on marketing, more symbolic than anything else at current levels, but it does remind people of how easily it can go negative-sum given the incentives and less than perfect information.  So the basic challenge in advertising is to convince the customer that you actually do know about a product that's better for them to buy - overcoming my skepticism about my conflict of interest with whoever wants me to trade with them."

"So, in practice, an ad might look like a picture of the product, a brief description of what the product does better that tries to sound very factual and quantitative so it doesn't set off suspicions.  Plus a much more glowing quote from a Very Serious Person who's high enough up to have a famous reputation for impartiality, where the Very Serious Person either got paid a small amount for their time to try that product, or donated some time that a nonprofit auctioned for much larger amounts; and the Very Serious Person ended up actually impressed with the product, and willing to stake some of their reputation on recommending it in the name of the social surplus they expect to be thereby produced.  Plus a Network trail to a much longer report from an old, even higher-reputation institution testing whatever the product's merits were.  And the upshot is that people can find out about things they didn't know they wanted to buy, but could validly use; without all of Civilization's gains from trade being dissipated in a negative-sum fight about who trades with who, driven by an arms race in deceptive advertisements.  To me, at least, this doesn't sound like a weird private quirk of our Civilization.  It sounds coherent with some of the most fundamental and important theorems about systems of multiple agents, which states that in principle they end up on a multiagent-optimal frontier, and in practice they end up very close to a multiagent-optimal frontier."

"Well, in a fundamental sense, advertisements aim to overcome obstacles posed by different reporting incentives to achieving common knowledge about product qualities!  That is, if I was good enough friends with somebody, such that I thought they knew me very well and had my interests at heart, they could just tell me they were very sure I ought to buy something, and I'd buy it!  In principle, the problem of advertising is posed when somebody who knows me less well still has justified belief that I, or a bunch of people in a class similar to me, ought to make a trade we haven't already made.  The basic difficulty of this problem class is that you can also imagine people who don't have such valid knowledge, but are incentivized to deceive themselves about how good their product is, because they capture a portion of the gains from trade.  And the basic danger of advertising is that if you have a group of people like that, they may be incentivized to burn all of their gains from trade on advertising - getting people to trade with them rather than somebody else.  Like, you and I are both producing flavored drinks, which are actually exactly as good as each other, and we each capture 10 dollars... that is not how large our monetary unit of account is, English, but fine, 10 dollars.  We each profit 10 dollars each time we sell a drink.  If I'm self-deceptive about my drink being superior, and I pay $5 to produce an advertisement promising that and thereby convince one consumer to switch from your drinks to mine, I gain net $5 but you lose $10 and the consumer is no better off and also pays switching costs or costs of cognition, so social surplus has been destroyed.  There's a mild tax on marketing, more symbolic than anything else at current levels, but it does remind people of how easily it can go negative-sum given the incentives and less than perfect information.  So the basic challenge in advertising is to convince the customer that you actually do know about a product that's better for them to buy - overcoming my skepticism about my conflict of interest with whoever wants me to trade with them."

"So, in practice, an ad might look like a picture of the product, a brief description of what the product does better that tries to sound very factual and quantitative so it doesn't set off suspicions.  Plus a much more glowing quote from a Very Serious Person who's high enough up to have a famous reputation for impartiality, where the Very Serious Person either got paid a small amount for their time to try that product, or donated some time that a nonprofit auctioned for much larger amounts; and the Very Serious Person ended up actually impressed with the product, and willing to stake some of their reputation on recommending it in the name of the social surplus they expect to be thereby produced.  Plus a Network trail to a much longer report from an old, even higher-reputation institution testing whatever the product's merits were.  And the upshot is that people can find out about things they didn't know they wanted to trade, but could validly benefit from trading, with their cost of information partially paid by somebody who also expects to benefit from the trade and already knows about it; without all of Civilization's gains from trade being dissipated in a negative-sum fight about who trades with who, driven by an arms race in deceptive advertisements.  To me, at least, this doesn't sound like a weird private quirk of our Civilization.  It sounds coherent with some of the most fundamental and important theorems about systems of multiple agents, which states that in principle they end up on a multiagent-optimal frontier, and in practice they end up very close to a multiagent-optimal frontier."

"Well, in a fundamental sense, advertisements aim to overcome obstacles posed by different reporting incentives to achieving common knowledge about product qualities!  That is, if I was good enough friends with somebody, such that I thought they knew me very well and had my interests at heart, they could just tell me they were very sure I ought to buy something, and I'd buy it!  In principle, the problem of advertising is posed when somebody who knows me less well still has justified belief that I, or a bunch of people in a class similar to me, ought to make a trade we haven't already made.  The basic difficulty of this problem class is that you can also imagine people who don't have such valid knowledge, but are incentivized to deceive themselves about how good their product is, because they capture a portion of the gains from trade.  And the basic danger of advertising is that if you have a group of people like that, they may be incentivized to burn all of their gains from trade on advertising - getting people to trade with them rather than somebody else.  Like, you and I are both producing flavored drinks, which are actually exactly as good as each other, and we each capture 10 dollars... that is not how large our monetary unit of account is, English, but fine, 10 dollars.  We each profit 10 dollars each time we sell a drink.  If I'm self-deceptive about my drink being superior, and I pay $5 to produce an advertisement promising that and thereby convince one consumer to switch from your drinks to mine, I gain net $5 but you lose $10 and the consumer is no better off and also pays switching costs or costs of cognition, so social surplus has been destroyed.  There's a mild tax on marketing, more symbolic than anything else at current levels, but it does remind people of how easily it can go negative-sum given the incentives and less than perfect information.  So the basic challenge in advertising is to convince the customer that you actually do know about a product that's better for them to buy - overcoming my skepticism about my conflict of interest with whoever wants me to trade with them."

"So, in practice, an ad might look like a picture of the product, with a brief description of what the product does better that tries to sound very factual and quantitative so it doesn't set off suspicions.  Plus a much more glowing quote from a Very Serious Person who's high enough up to have a famous reputation for impartiality, where the Very Serious Person either got paid a small amount for their time to try that product, or donated some time that a nonprofit auctioned for much larger amounts; and the Very Serious Person ended up actually impressed with the product, and willing to stake some of their reputation on recommending it in the name of the social surplus they expect to be thereby produced.  Plus a Network trail to a much longer report from an old, even higher-reputation institution testing whatever the product's merits were.  And the upshot is that people can find out about things they didn't know they wanted to trade, but could validly benefit from trading, with their cost of information partially paid by somebody who also expects to benefit from the trade and already knows about it; without all of Civilization's gains from trade being dissipated in a negative-sum fight about who trades with who, driven by an arms race in deceptive advertisements.  To me, at least, this doesn't sound like a weird private quirk of our Civilization.  It sounds coherent with some of the most fundamental and important theorems about systems of multiple agents, which states that in principle they end up on a multiagent-optimal frontier, and in practice they end up very close to a multiagent-optimal frontier."

"Well, in a fundamental sense, advertisements aim to overcome obstacles posed by different incentives to achieving common knowledge about product qualities!  That is, if I was good enough friends with somebody, such that I thought they knew me very well and had my interests at heart, they could just tell me they were very sure I ought to buy something, and I'd buy it!  In principle, the problem of advertising is posed when somebody who knows me less well still has justified belief that I, or a bunch of people in a class similar to me, ought to make a trade we haven't already made.  The basic difficulty of this problem class is that you can also imagine people who don't have such valid knowledge, but are incentivized to deceive themselves about how good their product is, because they capture a portion of the gains from trade.  And the basic danger of advertising is that if you have a group of people like that, they may be incentivized to burn all of their gains from trade on advertising - getting people to trade with them rather than somebody else.  Like, you and I are both producing flavored drinks, which are actually exactly as good as each other, and we each capture 10 dollars... that is not how large our monetary unit of account is, English, but fine, 10 dollars.  We each profit 10 dollars each time we sell a drink.  If I'm self-deceptive about my drink being superior, and I pay $5 to produce an advertisement promising that and thereby convince one consumer to switch from your drinks to mine, I gain net $5 but you lose $10 and the consumer is no better off and also pays switching costs or costs of cognition, so social surplus has been destroyed.  There's a mild tax on marketing, more symbolic than anything else at current levels, but it does remind people of how easily it can go negative-sum given the incentives and less than perfect information.  So the basic challenge in advertising is to convince the customer that you actually do know about a product that's better for them to buy - overcoming my skepticism about my conflict of interest with whoever wants me to trade with them."

"So, in practice, an ad might look like a picture of the product, with a brief description of what the product does better that tries to sound very factual and quantitative so it doesn't set off suspicions.  Plus a much more glowing quote from a Very Serious Person who's high enough up to have a famous reputation for impartiality, where the Very Serious Person either got paid a small amount for their time to try that product, or donated some time that a nonprofit auctioned for much larger amounts; and the Very Serious Person ended up actually impressed with the product, and willing to stake some of their reputation on recommending it in the name of the social surplus they expect to be thereby produced.  Plus a Network trail to a much longer report from an old, even higher-reputation institution testing whatever the product's merits were.  And the upshot is that people can find out about things they didn't know they wanted to trade, but could validly benefit from trading, with their cost of information partially paid by somebody who also expects to benefit from the trade and already knows about it; without all of Civilization's gains from trade being dissipated in a negative-sum fight about who trades with who, driven by an arms race in deceptive advertisements.  To me, at least, this doesn't sound like a weird private quirk of our Civilization.  It sounds coherent with some of the most fundamental and important theorems about systems of multiple agents, which states that in principle they end up on a multiagent-optimal frontier, and in practice they end up very close to a multiagent-optimal frontier."