New Cambridge Analytica Leaks • Hacker News Board

Re: New Cambridge Analytica Leaks

#71

Post by makomk » Mon, Jan 06, 2020, 5:45 PM UTC

Moodles wrote: post #28

groundlessly wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s absolutely wild to me that, with the benefit of 2020 hindsight, we’re still drawing conclusions about the public based on the fact that the person who earned by far the most votes of any candidate in the race still technically lost the election. For people who pride ourselves so much on understanding how systems work, we’re consistently really bad at understanding this one. Maybe public opinion in the US is fick…

I agree the electoral college is not as good as a general public vote, however one counterargument to "side A won more votes than side B!" is that, both sides knew the rules ahead of time so if the rules were a general vote, then the campaigns would have been different so side B may still have won in that case. We will never know.

This is a particularly important counterargument when talking about the 2016 presidential election, since Clinton seems to have been the only candidate who was actually trying to win the popular vote. She put a bunch of campaigning resources into places like California which would increase her popular vote share but wouldn't affect the result. Trump's campaign, on the other hand, was by all accounts focused on simply getting enough electoral college votes to actually win. This was pretty obvious from their respective postmortems in the press.

The idea that a particular candidate was cheated because they won a symbolic but politically irrelevant victory that the competition wasn't even trying for is not a particularly good argument. In fact, it's positively Trumpian; he famously used the "popular vote" argument to discredit Obama's victory.

Re: New Cambridge Analytica Leaks

#72

Post by wayoutthere » Mon, Jan 06, 2020, 5:46 PM UTC

cm2012 wrote: post #67

SeanAppleby wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding is that the most significant nonconventional heuristic that Cambridge Analytica got from FB data and exploited was by using FB like data to approximate OCEAN personality scores for almost all voting Americans using this technique [1], and then targeting correlations between people's big five ratings and their succeptibility to differnet types of marketing, such as targetingpeople high in neuroticism…

I'm sure people claim you can find the best voters using their special astrology method also. The FB algorithm already takes in 1000s of black box factors that are going to work better than some unproven personality score hogwash.

It takes surprisingly few data points to draw small and detailed psychographic categories of people. This has been known in the advertising world since the 50s, we just didn't have the tools to make microtargeting practical at scale until recently.

Re: New Cambridge Analytica Leaks

#73

Post by takeda » Mon, Jan 06, 2020, 5:47 PM UTC

malvosenior wrote: post #38

shadowgovt wrote: post #8

Probably the most useful takeaway from CA's approach is that it's useful to realize how malleable opinions are of large swaths of "independent" voters. Ad experts and entertainment companies have known this for decades, but I get the sense the average American citizen still thinks of themselves as a free and independent thinker and not a product of their environment. Problem is, even if they are a free and independen…

> Probably the most useful takeaway from CA's approach is that it's useful to realize how malleable opinions are of large swaths of "independent" voters. What makes you think that people are malleable? This article doesn't say anything about the effectiveness of what CA did. It's impossible to say if people voted the way they did because of a FB ad. My >20 years of experience in the consumer technology (ad) industry…

> What makes you think that people are malleable? This article doesn't say anything about the effectiveness of what CA did. It's impossible to say if people voted the way they did because of a FB ad. My >20 years of experience in the consumer technology (ad) industry tells me that ads had little to no impact.

The difference here and ordinary ad is, that unlike ads which target people based on where they live, interests, gender, income and many other things, here they categorize people by a psychological profile and then use whichever triggers work best. They also use other information to trigger emotional responses. For example my family member is a veteran who is a Republican. He forwards plenty of messages that has intentions to scare him and make be even more to the right. For example some article of a parent of a soldier who got a note on his car from supposed liberal wishing him that his son would be killed, or liberals burning flags, or democrats not standing up and clapping when a widow of a soldier that died (it was in 2017 I believe) was honored by Trump etc. It is trivial to manipulate pictures or recreate scenarios that would trigger, but those things work really well on him, and he wasn't even a nut before.

> Clinton vs Trump wasn't an option people were waying. No one switched from Clinton to Trump (or vice versa) because of an ad or anything else. Those that hate Clinton voted for Trump, those that hate Trump voted for Clinton. It's really is as simple as that.

> Have you ever met or even heard of someone who supported one of those candidates but switched to the other? I haven't.

Yes if you're hardcore Democrat or Republican and only vote in party lines, it's unlikely that you will be changed, but then you would be classified as a different profile.

The effort was to discourage Democrats from voting or even make them vote 3rd party (for example there was a campaign that made Clinton look quite evil, and frankly it fooled me too), everyone else was encouraged to vote for Trump (in different ways depending on their profile).

Back in 2016 I saw on /r/AskReddit a question, someone was asking why Trump supporters were planning to vote for Trump. What stick with me was one response where person acknowledged that Trump was bad, but he still was going to vote for him, because he hated establishment and "it needs to get real bad before it gets better". People have different personalities and reasons but if you can categorize them correctly you can provide them reason they want to make them cast a vote for candidate you want.

Re: New Cambridge Analytica Leaks

#74

Post by basch » Mon, Jan 06, 2020, 5:47 PM UTC

shadowgovt wrote: post #8

Probably the most useful takeaway from CA's approach is that it's useful to realize how malleable opinions are of large swaths of "independent" voters. Ad experts and entertainment companies have known this for decades, but I get the sense the average American citizen still thinks of themselves as a free and independent thinker and not a product of their environment. Problem is, even if they are a free and independen…

>it's useful to realize how malleable opinions are of large swaths of "independent" voters.

At the end of the day, one of two people almost always win. Either the person who spent more, or the person who was more outrageous. Democracy largely reduces to a competition to be louder, and those are the primary means to the ends.

Re: New Cambridge Analytica Leaks

#75

Post by nooron » Mon, Jan 06, 2020, 5:49 PM UTC

cm2012 wrote: post #67

SeanAppleby wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding is that the most significant nonconventional heuristic that Cambridge Analytica got from FB data and exploited was by using FB like data to approximate OCEAN personality scores for almost all voting Americans using this technique [1], and then targeting correlations between people's big five ratings and their succeptibility to differnet types of marketing, such as targetingpeople high in neuroticism…

I'm sure people claim you can find the best voters using their special astrology method also. The FB algorithm already takes in 1000s of black box factors that are going to work better than some unproven personality score hogwash.

I also work in this and strongly agree.

Re: New Cambridge Analytica Leaks

#76

Post by Zigurd » Mon, Jan 06, 2020, 5:50 PM UTC

Moodles wrote: post #28

groundlessly wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s absolutely wild to me that, with the benefit of 2020 hindsight, we’re still drawing conclusions about the public based on the fact that the person who earned by far the most votes of any candidate in the race still technically lost the election. For people who pride ourselves so much on understanding how systems work, we’re consistently really bad at understanding this one. Maybe public opinion in the US is fick…

I agree the electoral college is not as good as a general public vote, however one counterargument to "side A won more votes than side B!" is that, both sides knew the rules ahead of time so if the rules were a general vote, then the campaigns would have been different so side B may still have won in that case. We will never know.

[flagged]

Re: New Cambridge Analytica Leaks

#77

Post by SpicyLemonZest » Mon, Jan 06, 2020, 5:51 PM UTC

war1025 wrote: post #55

paganel wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the Democrats don’t want to hear that they lost because they chose Hillary to run instead of almost anyone else. That “it’s her turn now” was complete BS that messed up things even for us people who have never set foot in the States. I can see the Democrats making the same mistake again with Michelle Obama in 4 years’ time if they don’t win this round, I only hope she’ll be smart enough to stay out of it. On…

I thought it was interesting how many of the people who opposed the "dynastic politics" of the Bush era were more than happy to back the same sort of thing when it came to the Clintons. And further that they thought the fact that Hillary was a woman should override any misgivings someone would have about her. 2008 was the first election where I was eligible to vote (I didn't). But the number of people I talked to who…

Being a mascot is a major aspect of the president’s job. For example, all presidential candidates have new laws from Congress as part of their campaign platform, even though presidents have no formal power to make Congress do anything. What they mean is that they’ll be a good mascot for the legislation and get Congress to do it that way. It doesn’t seem unserious to me if someone wants a mascot for broader issues too.

Re: New Cambridge Analytica Leaks

#78

Post by JackFr » Mon, Jan 06, 2020, 5:53 PM UTC

shadowgovt wrote: post #8

Probably the most useful takeaway from CA's approach is that it's useful to realize how malleable opinions are of large swaths of "independent" voters. Ad experts and entertainment companies have known this for decades, but I get the sense the average American citizen still thinks of themselves as a free and independent thinker and not a product of their environment. Problem is, even if they are a free and independen…

> Ad experts and entertainment companies have known this for decades,

Ad experts and entertainment companies have claimed this for decades, and who knows, it may even be true. But it is true that it's how they justify getting paid.

Re: New Cambridge Analytica Leaks

#79

Post by valvar » Mon, Jan 06, 2020, 5:55 PM UTC

pier25 wrote: post #50

shadowgovt wrote: post #8

Probably the most useful takeaway from CA's approach is that it's useful to realize how malleable opinions are of large swaths of "independent" voters. Ad experts and entertainment companies have known this for decades, but I get the sense the average American citizen still thinks of themselves as a free and independent thinker and not a product of their environment. Problem is, even if they are a free and independen…

The biggest issue in democracy is that the majority of people vote irrationally. For example a lot of people will vote the same party no matter what or will vote for a candidate because they like him/her regardless of the program.

First of, I think you are confounding irrationality with being misinformed. The only irrational voters would be those who are clinically insane or similar. Secondly, it's not really much of an issue as such, as votes are aggregated and groups tend to act in an informed manner - c.f. wisdom of the crowds.

Re: New Cambridge Analytica Leaks

#80

Post by malvosenior » Mon, Jan 06, 2020, 5:56 PM UTC

takeda wrote: post #73

malvosenior wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Probably the most useful takeaway from CA's approach is that it's useful to realize how malleable opinions are of large swaths of "independent" voters. What makes you think that people are malleable? This article doesn't say anything about the effectiveness of what CA did. It's impossible to say if people voted the way they did because of a FB ad. My >20 years of experience in the consumer technology (ad) industry…

> What makes you think that people are malleable? This article doesn't say anything about the effectiveness of what CA did. It's impossible to say if people voted the way they did because of a FB ad. My >20 years of experience in the consumer technology (ad) industry tells me that ads had little to no impact. The difference here and ordinary ad is, that unlike ads which target people based on where they live, interes…

What you're basically saying is that if a candidate tailors a message to an individual, then that individual will support them. Yes! That's how it should work. The candidates have to earn the support of the voters. They should be trying to craft messages that resonate with them. If people can flip voters with ads alone, then where does it end? Who has the better ads?

What we say was a constituency that was upset with the status quo. When given a chance to vote for an outsider, they jumped on it. I think advertising played little to no role in the 2016 election and I've yet to see data to suggest otherwise.