Conversation

Notices

1. Embed this notice
   Paul Cantrell (inthehands@hachyderm.io)'s status on Saturday, 19-Aug-2023 08:44:41 JST Paul Cantrell

   OK, “harvest wheat” is bad enough (What, are other crackers made with •un•harvested wheat? Whole wheat plants made into crackers? Or they form the crackers around the wheat while it’s still in the field?!), but

   1/2

   • Embed this notice
     Paul Cantrell (inthehands@hachyderm.io)'s status on Saturday, 19-Aug-2023 08:48:23 JST Paul Cantrell

     in reply to

     …WTF is “Harvest Cheddar?” Are they suggesting cheddar grows on trees? They comb the fields of cheddar plants, looking for the cheesiest morsels still ripe on the vine?

     Or do they mean that they make this cheddar only in the autumn, then freeze it for year-round desiccation into cheesy powder that still carries with it the crisp chill of October?

     Marketing. 🙄

     2/2

   • Embed this notice
     Paul Cantrell (inthehands@hachyderm.io)'s status on Saturday, 19-Aug-2023 08:50:46 JST Paul Cantrell

     in reply to

     A few godforsaken economists still cling to the idea that humans are rational actors, and…

     …OK, fine, then why do marketing departments pull shit like this? Either we’re irrational beings who succumb to nonsense word-association games like “Harvest Cheddar,” which are basically the culinary equivalent of “colorless green ideas sleep furiously,” or companies are irrational for wasting money on those ads.

     3/2

   • Embed this notice
     Chris Adams (acdha@code4lib.social)'s status on Saturday, 19-Aug-2023 09:19:32 JST Chris Adams

     in reply to

     @inthehands at least it’s not pumpkin spice?

   • Embed this notice
     Paul Cantrell (inthehands@hachyderm.io)'s status on Saturday, 19-Aug-2023 09:19:32 JST Paul Cantrell

     in reply to

     • Chris Adams

     @acdha
     Don’t even get me started

   • Embed this notice
     Paul Cantrell (inthehands@hachyderm.io)'s status on Saturday, 19-Aug-2023 09:21:44 JST Paul Cantrell

     in reply to

     • Jesse Morris

     @aubilenon
     Yes, I’m sure this is the actual correct answer. A logical explanation will not stop me from mocking the word salad, however.

   • Embed this notice
     Jesse Morris (aubilenon@escaperooms.social)'s status on Saturday, 19-Aug-2023 09:21:47 JST Jesse Morris

     in reply to

     @inthehands Kelloggs also has a Harvest Wheat cracker. Both it and Pepperidge Farm's have wheat germ in them. I think in all three cases though the word harvest doesn't have any literal meaning, but it's meant to be evocative of rusticness. Rusticity.

     They're implicitly asking us to please imagine that the snack product in question is made near on or near the farm, from freshly harvested ingredients, and is definitely not the output of a factory with a bunch of complicated supply chains.

   • Embed this notice
     Paul Cantrell (inthehands@hachyderm.io)'s status on Saturday, 19-Aug-2023 09:25:39 JST Paul Cantrell

     in reply to

     • Jesse Morris

     @aubilenon Oh, and seeing that the reply was to the “godforsaken economists” post:

     Yes, I imagine this sort of purely connotative association is quite effective — and that effectiveness would seem to me to undermine arguments of economic rationality. To be influenced by purely connotative free association in packaging text (as humans sure seem to be) is at odds with a “rational actor” model.

   • Embed this notice
     Paul Cantrell (inthehands@hachyderm.io)'s status on Saturday, 19-Aug-2023 09:59:26 JST Paul Cantrell

     in reply to

     • Jesse Morris

     @aubilenon
     Yes, the frictionless spherical cow is a perfect comparison. And there is a line of thought (Chicago School, Milton Friedman, etc), increasingly discredited but once ascendant and still influential, that in my view amounts to “cows really are frictionless and spherical and if you think they’re not you’re just looking at them in the wrong way.”

     A skim here will give the flavor:
     https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_choice_theory

     It’s subtler than “people are perfectly rational,” but no less absurd in the end.

   • Embed this notice
     Jesse Morris (aubilenon@escaperooms.social)'s status on Saturday, 19-Aug-2023 09:59:28 JST Jesse Morris

     in reply to

     @inthehands Sure, but _obviously_ both consumers and companies behave economically irrationally all the time. Is there any economist who would earnestly claim that this is not true? That would mean branding doesn't matter! That dark patterns don't work! We can plainly see that they do.

     I don't know that much about how actual economists think about things but it's hard for me to imagine that the rational actor of economics is much different from the frictionless spherical cow of physics.

   • Embed this notice
     Paul Cantrell (inthehands@hachyderm.io)'s status on Saturday, 19-Aug-2023 10:11:05 JST Paul Cantrell

     in reply to

     • Jesse Morris

     @aubilenon
     Hole in one, basically.

     (“We know the cow is spherical, so the contours we observe tell us how it must bend space…”)

   • Embed this notice
     Jesse Morris (aubilenon@escaperooms.social)'s status on Saturday, 19-Aug-2023 10:11:07 JST Jesse Morris

     in reply to

     @inthehands I'm not going to read that, because your description makes it clear that it's dumb and I don't really care the exact way it's dumb. My guess is its contortions boil down to hiding the irrationality behind an impossibly complicated (and effectively irrational) utility function, because if I wanted to insist on that model beyond all reason or usefulness, that's how I'd do it!