41–50 of 138 posts
People 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?
I'd rather see unexpected/unexplained trends, things the average person wouldn't already assume.
Unfortunately, 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.
Unfortunately, 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's not a stereotype. It's a feature in a statistical model. The only reason it receives a lot of weight is that the empirical evidence aligns with it.
Honestly... who cares??
This isn’t sinister in any way, merely clever as it seems marketers had been behind the times.
There are entire magazines and television shows that have equally strong affiliation. If spend on fashion related stuff was smart, it was because it was a bargain compared to the many other methods.
Earlier 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.
Stereotyping someone by something that you assume they chose is also a gateway to prejudice. @NeedMoreTea said it right by mentioning cases where someone might not have chosen their particular attire.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 al…
The evidence seems to indicate that not only is the technique not effective, but that it wasn't actually used in the campaign. More than one article, in traditionally liberal publications that would normally be on his side, refers to Mr. Wylie's techniques as "snake oil".
Also remember that we only know about Cambridge Analytica because Mr. Wylie announced to the world that he had created "Steve Bannon’s psychological warfare mindfuck tool". That is a grandiose statement if I've ever heard one. His career since his announcement seems to have consisted of going around and being paid to talk about his claims. So we have one guy, who stands to benefit from such claims, saying all of this in the face of a mountain of evidence from credible news sources that shows that his techniques didn't work and weren't used. It's fair to say that his claims are suspect at best, which makes the idea that CA had any effect on the outcome of the election highly suspect as well.
Unfortunately, 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.
For example, if you wake up every day and see the sun rise, it’s safe to assume that it will always rise. But, without understanding the forces that cause the sun to rise (and the forces that cause those forces), you can’t really be sure. And, even then, an unaccounted and unknown force can come along and break the model (see: the black swan problem).
Induction is unavoidable and very important, but it also the root of many logical errors. In social science, there are so many unknown forces at work, theories are very fragile.
So it is a cultural war.