We use the erc20 contents of ethereum addresses to determine exactly which influencers someone is exposed to and will be exposed to
This is because nobody uses the best practice of avoiding address reuse
These are basically brands
Cambridge Analytica Used Fashion Tastes to Identify Right-Wing Voters
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Re: Cambridge Analytica Used Fashion Tastes to Identify Right-Wing Voters
#32Unfortunately, stereotypes have utility. No one likes being caught up as a false positive in a stereotype, but when you look at mass market politics / advertising / marketing they cater to charactures of their intended audience because for the most part it seems to work. Every once in a while someone takes it too far and a group gets offended, but let's not pretend that Cambridge is the only one doing this.
Stereotypes is just another name for abstractions and categorizing, which is how science works all the time.
It's just that there are reality (statistics) based stereotypes and bad stereotypes (e.g. jewish conspiracy and such).
Still, "all people are unique" is BS, more people within certain groups are more alike than different.
X DOES Y because X belongs to group G is always a bad use of stereotyping (except if Y and G are connected by logical tautologies).
But "X is MORE LIKELY to do Y because X belongs to group G" can be absolutely valid, and prove a great tool for marketing, policy decisions, threat identification, and such.
Re: Cambridge Analytica Used Fashion Tastes to Identify Right-Wing Voters
#33Unfortunately, stereotypes have utility. No one likes being caught up as a false positive in a stereotype, but when you look at mass market politics / advertising / marketing they cater to charactures of their intended audience because for the most part it seems to work. Every once in a while someone takes it too far and a group gets offended, but let's not pretend that Cambridge is the only one doing this.
It was hilarious as an engineer who needed to learn marketing 101 for a startup, its pretty much just stereotyping your customers. "Wendy is a 24-30 yr old professional, slightly insecure, straight, likes wine and dogs."
I covered stereotyping quite a bit in my university studies (I studied marketing) and the broad consensus was that stereotyping is a useful tool because it saves time.
As much as we "should" judge people on the nuance of who they are and their individual character, we are presented with an overwhelming amount of information and we need to make a quick decision.
This is why I've held the opinion for a while now that it's good to dress well. People are going to judge you and put a value on your time based on how you present yourself. Nothing wrong with maximizing your odds of that going well.
Re: Cambridge Analytica Used Fashion Tastes to Identify Right-Wing Voters
#34People who buy Wrangler and LL Bean might vote conservative. Hard hitting stuff right there. I suppose as per the article we could make a guess about the people that buy green hair dye?
Of course we can make guesses about people who buy green hair dye.
Re: Cambridge Analytica Used Fashion Tastes to Identify Right-Wing Voters
#35The whole article reads, to me, as "We can sell you ads on the most tenuous associations" as we're too stuck in our own marketing bubble. :) Stereotypical difference between a peace activist and Wall St banker, sure. No doubt some more subtle variations too. Comparing mainstream brands? That seems a stretch too far to say the least. Preferences in clothing and music are the leading indicators of political leaning Or…
>opting for Levi’s over Rag & Bone makes a statement about associations and history and opens one up to fashion profiling
Or you were born in the 50s and haven't, yet, heard of Rag & Bone, or you prefer Levi's fit, or they're heavier denim. Or you're British and prefer Rag & Bone, as they started here. Or one was on offer at Amazon.
Or all these objections just apply to this or that individual case, but in aggregate the observation is correct.
Re: Cambridge Analytica Used Fashion Tastes to Identify Right-Wing Voters
#36I don’t know if this is interesting. It is their job
Well, Eichmann just did his job too, but it was interesting enough for a trial, several movies and documentaries, and many books.
Re: Cambridge Analytica Used Fashion Tastes to Identify Right-Wing Voters
#37Unfortunately, stereotypes have utility. No one likes being caught up as a false positive in a stereotype, but when you look at mass market politics / advertising / marketing they cater to charactures of their intended audience because for the most part it seems to work. Every once in a while someone takes it too far and a group gets offended, but let's not pretend that Cambridge is the only one doing this.
That begs the question, IMHO:
Saying market analysis is nothing new is similar to the argument that police examining phone records is nothing new, therefore mass collection of metadata is not a problem. The changes in technology make the analysis associated with marketing far more powerful - with orders of magnitude more targets, more data, and more analysis applied to each individual - to the point where there is a risk to society of mass privacy violations and mass manipulation.
And when this risk is applied to the political sphere, it becomes much more consequential. As the the Cambridge Analytica whistle-blower Christopher Wylie was quoted in the article, it was used by "Steve Bannon [to] build his insurgency and build the alt-right". Do we want this power, and the people who control it, to control our countries and societies? Probably people buying LL Bean jackets didn't know it would be used in an attempt to manipulate them.
I'm not dismissing the fact that big questions remain: How effective is the manipulation (the biggest question in IT, IMO), and what makes some manipulation dangerous and some just regular persuasion? But these are very serious problems that might undermine things as fundamental as liberty and democracy.
Re: Cambridge Analytica Used Fashion Tastes to Identify Right-Wing Voters
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
Stereotype is probably the correct word, but it's overloaded here. Stereotyping someone by something that they did not choose is a gateway to prejudice: skin color, eye color, place of birth. Stereotyping someone by something that they did choose may be very useful for making inference about them, because it is a revealed preference: clothing tastes, food preferences, etc.
It's just pattern recognition, we have it because it's good for survival. Maybe that grizzly bear is nice but I'm not going to try and pet it to find out because the stereotype is that it will rip me to shreds
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Re: Cambridge Analytica Used Fashion Tastes to Identify Right-Wing Voters
#39Unfortunately, stereotypes have utility. No one likes being caught up as a false positive in a stereotype, but when you look at mass market politics / advertising / marketing they cater to charactures of their intended audience because for the most part it seems to work. Every once in a while someone takes it too far and a group gets offended, but let's not pretend that Cambridge is the only one doing this.
There is a large body of evidence suggesting that psychographic profiling is not effective [1] [2]. So I'm actually not sure that stereotypes do have utility when it comes to marketing. If they do have utility, the 2016 election is certainly not evidence of it. CA itself actually admitted that psychographic profiling - the technique referred to in this article by Mr. Wylie - wasn't even used by the Trump campaign [3]…
His technique is the same one that Netflix uses to recommend shows and movies afaik.
Products have a market fit, and those markets are typically segmented by stereotypes. Nothing nefarious here.
Edit: though his technique seems less impressive now. It was definitely effective and stretched ad dollars further. Which is targeting companies value add to begin with. So not sure what the complaint is. Perhaps it didn't alone swing the election it's still a variable. Similar to aviation accidents, it's typically never one big thing it's several small contributing factors. Here too this was one small thing, another is disenfranchised middle/lower class, list goes on.
Re: Cambridge Analytica Used Fashion Tastes to Identify Right-Wing Voters
#40Unfortunately, stereotypes have utility. No one likes being caught up as a false positive in a stereotype, but when you look at mass market politics / advertising / marketing they cater to charactures of their intended audience because for the most part it seems to work. Every once in a while someone takes it too far and a group gets offended, but let's not pretend that Cambridge is the only one doing this.
The more PC word is “heuristic”. Not much different than having to bin 240 students into 240 different placements.
A perfect optimization of their preferences would require going through 240! Combinations for each placement round. But that’s a massive number, so you take some shortcuts and get a “good enough” solution for a lot less computing power.