And a more thorough debunking: http://civichall.org/civicist/will-the-real-psychometric-tar...
With this quote: "I have described them as the Theranos of political data: I think they have a tremendous marketing department, coupled with a team of research scientists who provide on virtually none of those marketing promises." :)
But on a second thought. Planting this story is a masterpiece of promotion - and isn't this kind of similar to promoting a politician?
One reason I didn't end up applying is, though I lean to the right politically, I'm not at all a Trump supporter and couldn't bring myself to work on getting him elected. The second reason is that, even if I was working on a non-Trump project, it wasn't clear that their product added that much value. Some media references to them agreed with this, pointing out that, e.g., their model requires campaigns to create multiple adverts targeting different personality profiles, but most don't have the resources.
"Kosinski has observed all of this from his office at Stanford. Following the US election, the university is in turmoil. Kosinski is responding to developments with the sharpest weapon available to a researcher: a scientific analysis. Together with his research colleague Sandra Matz, he has conducted a series of tests, which will soon be published. The initial results are alarming: The study shows the effectiveness of personality targeting by showing that marketers can attract up to 63 percent more clicks and up to 1,400 more conversions in real-life advertising campaigns on Facebook when matching products and marketing messages to consumers' personality characteristics."
Those are very real and do play a role in influencing targeted voters in elections, but the question is not about who do what and how it works. It is about how this way of campaigning is changing the way candidates convince voters ( I was gonna say democracy but there are no actual democracy anywhere right now ).
https://www.propublica.org/article/everything-we-know-about-...
I think this whole pro-data story is incorrect. Trump's huge unpopularity right now shows that what happened this election was Clinton messing up her own campaign by religiously following data and not doing basic things like visit Wisconsin. And from the journalism end, the NYT telling readers that Clinton had an 80+% chance of winning, sending a loud and clear message: Stay home if you wish to protest vote.
Even after massive, massive predictive failures, fortune-tellers always manage to give excuses and stick around.
YC made a request for startups targeting news and democracy the other day. I'd like to propose additional underlying unmet societal needs:
Emotional resiliency & nonviolent communication.
No, this shit needs to be regulated into the ground. No more of this opt in bullshit, no more selling data that was never yours to sell, we have to cut out immediately. We MUST limit the amount of datapoints that can be used for advertising and we must limit access to that data with much stronger privacy laws by outlining EXACTLY what data is being collected, providing consumers access to that data, and not allowing business to sell data that to other business. Internal use only, that has to be the rule.
Freedom of thought is at stake, we have to act fast or we are totally boned.
"Nonviolent Communication" - Marshall Rosenberg
"Mindsight" - Daniel Siegel
I've also been working on a new mathematical model (rooted in category theory) for how our brains, bodies, and minds work together with the goal of developing a natural language based way to generate practices for the sake of improving myself in targeted ways. I only just finished reading Mindsight & have been practicing some of the techniques in the book by accident for months prior after coming up with the practices myself through my model. I've found my other attempts at programming myself using the model also develop my ability to focus & direct my attention, as well. As a result, I've had initial successes with learning echolocation and learning a form of synesthesia I haven't heard of (seeing a stick figure that moves with my body), both in under 10 minutes of my first attempts.
I'm not an expert in any of this stuff. I'm an information addict in recovery who saw connections among various recent research findings in different fields and started making connections. If love to collaborate with any Neuroscientists or Category Theorists. My contact info is in my profile.
Your self improvement is related to the future too. Do you mind if I ask, what kind of tigers do you run from?
BTW. Thank you for the info, this might be worthy of a detour :)
How do we move to a less centralized internet and is it too late?
What big players could have an interest in this and why?
Big players don't necessarily have an interest in this, but some do. It's always a balancing act between too much centralization (single target/point of failure) and too much decentralization (impossible to control).
Data collection like this still occurs without the internet. In addition, decentralization of the internet does not necessarily prevent targeted ads. IE, now instead of buying an ad from facebook that targets everyone with interest x in geographic area y, now we buy an ad on a local website for interest x in geographic area y.
At least one core problem is that no one wants to read primary sources and make decisions themselves. We seem to prefer an illusion of independent thought when we're actually choosing from a set of prepackaged partitions that are neatly presented to us.
Network effects and there's nothing out there better than Facebook.
Freestanding sites lack this, and it turns out that behavioural costs matter.
The who really knows what is fake news? And what about the filter bubbles that keep the full picture hidden from you?
Its possible to be immune for such manipulaions, I believe. If you subject you thoughts to strict formal rules of rational thinking, than it would be hard to manipulate you.
But the first and most important thing is constant questioning own motives. So you are on the right track. ;)
If the brain was fundamentally a linear processor, you might have a chance. But the brain is almost entirely a pattern-machine, and linear, logical thought is mostly an artifact.
Humans can be programmed like any AI. It just requires the correct stimulus.
Oh great, divide et impera.
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-02-01/trump-s-s...
The original post is sensationalistic and massively overstates what's currently possible when it comes to micro-targeting.
> [Campaign] has also hired a firm specializing in big data and advanced intrapsychologic modeling. [Data firm] then takes data from Cookie Monster and analyzes it using their own proprietary Artificial Intelligence-powered (AI) algorithm, which allows the campaign to not only identify key voters, but to also identify key parts of their brains that are activated by certain messages.
> “Most campaigns only look at individual voters. We take it a step further and dig down into key parts of the voter’s subconscious. That way, we can say, ‘This meme penetrated a voter’s volitional association area of their prefrontal cortex — let’s double down on this message.’”
https://medium.com/soapbox-dc/every-political-reporters-camp...
I'm sure Cambridge Analytica would love us to think they had an unprecedented impact. I haven't seen any actual evidence though.
You can read a more detailed description by an insider for the software Vote Leave used at his personal blog, here: https://dominiccummings.wordpress.com/2016/10/29/on-the-refe...
1) Trump outsmarted Clinton (and the presumed technology advantage she inherited from the Obama campaign apparatus) with psychometric local targeted propaganda / communication
2) Some of that communication may have been deliberately targeted at discouraging democratic voters by putting negative articles about Clinton in their social media feed.
This is interesting in the context that Trump only won by a 70K voter advantage split over three states.
While she won the popular vote by 3 or so million people, trump's message was very targeted to areas that mattered. A republican with the slogan 'your fired' ended up being the pro worker candidate in many areas. That takes very skillful image manipulation and a gullible electorate.
PS: Don't forget he was predicted to have around a 40% win chance. That's far from negligible despite what people where thinking.
I'm not sure this claim can be backed up by data.
And that's not about Trump specifically, it gets asked after every election.
Things would be different if we actually voted for policies instead of oligarch strawman.
And then they just keep doing this at each election or referendum and claim each time to have been influential?
What if?
