But that image assumes we need to stop the momentum of this industry cold. personally, I believe that a course correction of a few degrees would be enough. Even that takes massive leverage though. I'd love to know who else is building in this space and what their approach is.

There probably is a bargain - however faustian - to be struck. Advertising optimises for money transferred immediately over long term positive-sum introductions. It's obvious why they do that, but adblocking could be the leverage needed to encourage something more long-term beneficial for all.

What I can't work out is who the counterparty even is. My own hope is that Google and Meta face a 'kodak moment' - with genuinely better advertising simply overtaking their business. What I'm unsure about is how advertising's equivalent of the digital camera finds buyers - plenty of us want to walk away from advertising, and it's possible to adopt something less mutually destructive as a user... but the free stuff advertising currently pays for is not so easily replaced. Anyone have an idea what disruption would even look like in that space?

I very much like the bias for action mindset, but I don't have a great answer for the problem of 'what if the things you want are bad for the world?' Your mention of destructive people makes me think there might be an angle with bias for action being helpful if it's building - some people will build the torment nexus, but newly built things are so inherently fragile that maybe we can absorb a certain amount of harmful building without serious damage, in a way we can't absorb much harmful destruction. Does that ring true?

I feel like there's a third way between 'regulate it' and 'stop using it'. Give the guy a reality check maybe. I heard the term 'make refusal legible rather than silent' and I think that applies to the situation very well, if Uber saw a more profitable - and less annoying - use of that space I'm sure they'd switch. Then again, I am working on an app that would do something like that so I'm probably biased towards seeing every problem with a matching shape.

If that kind of thinking were helpful, I think we'd have evolved to have a very accurate guess as to what the majority of our preferred demographic finds attractive - but apart from psychopaths, most of us don't. the optimal mating strategy doesn't actually seem to be to work to approach some generic ideal, but to be most authentically and extremely oneself, then filter out everyone who doesn't like that. It's intuitive why looking too seriously at averages distracts from that project.

I suspect a Copernican revolution of that nature would only happen with some kind of innovation that's too big to be ignored, people have been publishing rigorous experiments on magic for decades and they're just too easy to ignore. I hope we can see an outflow of noetic science into noetic engineering.