Science is not a belief, nor is it a fact. It’s a set of tools for building knowledge by methodically separating models that work from models that don’t. Facts can certainly fall out of scientific work, but it’s a mistake to pick up any scientific work and label it “Fact”. It’s a constant work in progress.

Facts aren’t that difficult to define, the real problem is finding universally accepted sources to communicate facts. None of us are going to be able to critically examine every single claim made by every single scientific theory, journalist, blogger, podcast host, ChatGPT instance, preacher, prophet, etc. And did that politician mean to say the words that came out of their mouth, or did they actually misspeak and their real intention was something else?

I’ve certainly heard this said before. Lately I’ve been thinking more about it as ads seem to be infecting more and more aspects of my life and so I’ve started to question it.

I’ve started to think that the whole “it makes you subconsciously think about the product when you’re in the store” thing might just be made up by marketers. You know, the people whose jobs entirely depend on advertising being a good investment. That does kind of self-prove the point though, because if marketers just made it up and a bunch of people now think it’s true, it follows that people will just absorb “information” if it’s fed to them from the correct place.

I figured I’d see if I could find some science research on the subject. I managed to read through six studies (at least the abstracts and the methodologies) before my eyes glazed completely over and I needed to stop.

• https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7498694/
• https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8199559/
• https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23311975.2021.2000697#abstract
• https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02650487.2022.2143098#abstract
• https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0249457
• https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/21582440221093042

First I will say that none of them are able to draw links from advertising consumed to purchases made. The methodologies tend to focus on the immediate, how the ad makes a person feel in the moment. Generally this is done by asking people. Surveys and the like. The first one measured facial expressions and emotional responses. The PLOS one (fifth link) just asked marketing managers if their marketing was effective or not (and wow do they ever use a lot of words to say that, they turned their thesaurus up to 11). The second one is actually a bit of a side-bar in that it’s specifically looking at the effectiveness of gamified advertising, but it does investigate brand memory based on different exposures. Again, just brand memory, not actual purchase behaviour.

And all that makes sense. It would be extremely difficult to build a study that manages to track every motivation for purchasing a given product, especially if some of those motivations aren’t known by the purchaser. So what I’ll say is that while it’s likely that advertising can prod us one way or another, the wisdom that it’s an effective subconscious driver of sales is not evidence based.

Do with that what you will.

Whenever I think about Burnout Paradise I think about somebody (I think it was Yahtzee) describing the world of Burnout Paradise as a post apocalyptic nightmare world where cars have taken over, and one lone human hides out in his radio station broadcasting desperately to a murderous mechanical audience.

It was supposed to be. I have to admit I haven’t paid any attention to it in many years so maybe things have changed, but it had turned into more of a vortex of ego, fleecing a fanbase, and sunk-cost fallacy, than a spiritual successor to anything.

No, I think?

I don’t actually know what a “Tankie” is. I tend to try to steer away from labels; I consider them a form of intellectual laziness. People will use them to either try to gain a feeling of belonging by adopting a line of thinking shared by their peers, or they will use them to smear those who they have defined as “others” without consideration of why these “others” might hold opinions that they don’t. Labels and label-based thinking lead to tribalism and division.

If you want to know what I think about something, ask with specifics. If you want to convince me of something, present an argument with reason and evidence, and be prepared for me to pick it apart and look for flaws. There is nothing I respect more than somebody who takes a comment I make and considers it, researches it and then comes back to me with a response, or presents me with a perspective that compels me to do the same. I find both depressingly rare.

To keep my mouth shut more than it’s open.

Still working on that one, actually.

Dog in a Hotdog car, all the way.

For my personal life I use a password manager, like most people in this thread. For my master password I really want a secure password (LastPass really reinforced the value of that), so I use a passphrase that is then hashed using an algorithm I can do in my head, so it’s a long string of high entropy alphanumeric gibberish that I can remember easily.

At work my IT dept seems to be stuck 10 years in the past, so they have now implemented a policy that our passwords must be at least 16 characters. They keep ignoring my suggestions to get some form of corporate password manager, so I have my work passwords stored in a text file that I’m not allowed to have any form of file encryption so it just sits there in my documents folder. It’s probably not going to be the source of our company getting penetrated, but I don’t consider it secure.

I do like pass phrases because I find them easy to remember, but my current prime work one is really easy to make typos, so I now use the reveal password button more than I ever have before.

Nope. Yes, that search I just did for how to break my network security. They don’t need to know that, they can figure that shit out on their own.

true that is

I use both interchangeably. With no pattern. Much like how programs will spell check “colour”. Lives are changed in equal quantities.

And even then, that proof only applies retrospectively. It can’t predict future behaviours.

The arrogance lies in the claim of knowing the unknowable. I can’t know for sure how the universe formed. I can’t know for sure what happens when we die. I can’t know for sure that there is or is not a force guiding the world around me and the events that occur. But if you believe in a god (or any form of faith that has answers to these questions or questions like them) then you are saying “I don’t know, but I know who does”, or to simplify “I don’t know, but I know”.

On the other hand if you read a study, or a science article, that says it has found evidence of the big bang and you say “I read in an article that a research team has found evidence of the big bang.” well now you’re claiming that you know you read an article. That’s a claim that is easy to accept and contains no contradictions. It doesn’t take much convincing for me to say that I do think that you read an article. No arrogance, just a declaration of an action.

The nuance here is that there is a difference between reading a study about the big bang, and believing in the big bang. If you’re being completely scientifically honest, you know that there is a possibility it could all be wrong. It might be a slim possibility. But it is impossible for all of us to examine all of the evidence in all of science, so while it looks like belief, it is instead maintaining a perspective that the people who are studying it are doing their best, and so far their best is pointing in a direction. That’s all. No need to burn people at the stake, no need to write anything in stone. Just people looking for clues and reporting that the clues are all indicating a given conclusion. Or maybe the clues they’re finding are pointing all over the place. Or maybe they did the math and the math said that they needed nine spacial dimensions to make an idea work but if they had them, all the clues would point to a given conclusion. And then people living in reality said “how do we test something in nine spacial dimensions?” and all the shrugs eventually resulted in youtube videos that made me say “huh, that’s interesting, it looks like maybe nobody knows how that works”.

One last stupid question: Have you ever noticed how the faithful hate it, or at least express friction, when you bring up things that would bring their explanatory framework crumbling down? Meanwhile scientists are like “This poses fundamental questions about our theory of blabblegabble. I’m super excited, I might have some really serious questions to answer very soon, and we might need to really do some serious sciencing. Where’s my [insert stereotypical scientific tool here]?”

and 30C° is a typo