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New Cambridge Analytica Leaks

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Re: New Cambridge Analytica Leaks

#111

Post by GreeniFi »

cm2012 wrote: post #27
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…

I'm a professional FB marketer and have managed both large budgets for private companies and also done political campaigns. I guarantee the trump campaign doesn't use the low quality Cambridge Analytica scraped data in their targeting. They either use voter file records or lookalikes (like everyone else does). All CA data so released so far has been useless, untargeted stuff. Think about where the data originally cam…

I’m really at a loss to understand how to judge between those who say it does and doesn’t work: but this is super helpful, don’t use CA’s crappy partial dataset, use FB’s!

But one question I wanted to ask is, which is very non-expert: was the value of the CA dataset that you can see how people are linked? I understand that you’re far more likely to believe a message if it comes from someone you know. So if CA could identify “sharers”, they could simply hit them again and again and again with information that would be forwarded. Or does FB give this functionality too?

Re: New Cambridge Analytica Leaks

#112

Post by shadowgovt »

JackFr wrote: post #81
pier25 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> The biggest issue in democracy is that the majority of people vote irrationally. That is to say, they don't vote in a manner consistent with how you perceive their interests.

I believe the term, when used in the literature, is more to mean "they don't vote in a manner consistent with how a dispassionate observer with access to global information state perceives the path to achieving their interests."

There's quite a lot of literature on the topic, and it's quite fascinating. For example, higher education has a tendency to change people's answers to a variety of survey questions (summary of this and other phenomena in the book https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myth_of_the_Rational_Voter).

Re: New Cambridge Analytica Leaks

#113

Post by tomxor »

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, 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.

I feel like I've just experienced an extreme microcosm of this: I recently treated myself to an expensive power amplifier... and reluctantly embarked on the painful process of choosing appropriate audio cables. Through the other side I am still in disbelief over how entrenched the market and consumers are in their pseudo scientific BS - so much craziness - and almost every successful cable manufacturer and professional reviewer is in on the game (of which there are countless).

I'm usually of the opinion that within healthy competitive markets, capitalism tends to provides a kind of democracy, hopefully with emerging attributes such as honesty which naturally push the consumer towards making good decisions without being deeply informed - but clearly that is not always the case.

It's relatively simple to become informed about the basics of audio cables such as speaker wire [0], but that's not enough, you need a strong disposition of skepticism to wade through the sea of nonsense claims based on (real) electrical properties plucked from the science of general EE and sprinkled irrelevantly all over audio cable marketing and reviews and then echoed by it's users... that's the easy bit, next you will have another sea of anecdotal ABX reviewers that start to persuade you that the science could be missing something, now you enter the world of improper ABX tests, and the psychology of greater_cost+any_change = perceived as improved (e.g improving sound through simply disturbing wire connections, causing destabilisation of older amps by increasing the wire capacitance and hearing the added artificial oscillations as "detail").

TL;DR

It's possible to wade through all this, just like it is with political BS by looking up or testing every single claim - but it's exhausting! especially when there are so few people doing it.

I think we need to somehow fundamentally change people's attitude towards new information: with a high degree of scepticism... at some point it will become easier when the balance between BS generated and people debunking BS makes it undesirable and risky to bother generating BS.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speaker_wire

Re: New Cambridge Analytica Leaks

#114

Post by pier25 »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #54
pier25 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hard to say what's 'rational' when voting. Lots of metrics; lots of theories. Vote for the person (character etc) vs their promises? Vote for the organization that will guide them (party) instead of the person? I'd say its entirely irrational to vote for the program as outlined by the candidate speeches. Because they rarely happen. It's not a problem with democracy. Its a problem with people and power.

> Hard to say what's 'rational' when voting

First step you examine all the available options objectively, like any other decision.

Do you think the majority of voters do that?

> I'd say its entirely irrational to vote for the program as outlined by the candidate speeches. Because they rarely happen.

Right, but this another problem altogether.

I'm getting some cynic vibes from your comment. Are you against voting?

Re: New Cambridge Analytica Leaks

#115

Post by wayoutthere »

hdrujvw-4579 wrote: post #104
wayoutthere wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> This has been known in the advertising world since the 50s Any reference from the 50s? Also, anyone care to recommend modern references that go into these topics? (David Ogilvy comes to mind but that's from the 60s).

Psychographic segmentation is an evolution of psychoanalysis; in particular Jaques Lacan, whose work in the 50s took the general ideas of Freudian psychoanalysis and applied them to larger phenomenon -- namely how language and symbolism can be used to pluck emotional strings and influence the minds of groups of like-minded people. An ad man in the 1950s would certainly have been aware of his work. The folks from CA have gone on record about the influence of Lacan, so it's not remotely a stretch.

Edit: For a reference, https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/75bb/e8a5de1fef2b9da44ca1ed... (dense as heck, but imagine you're an ad man from the 50s when reading it)

Re: New Cambridge Analytica Leaks

#116

Post by GreeniFi »

rossdavidh wrote: post #9
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…

While I agree with "how malleable opinions are...", the actual answer is, "not very malleable". Every well-designed study of political advertising I've ever seen has shown that it's impact is very small, in some cases unmeasurably small. Thus, for example, the 2016 Clinton campaign raised a lot more $$ than the Trump campaign, whereas the Sanders primary campaign out-fundraised the Clinton one. Now, the impact on the…

I understand that it is difficult to change opinion, and targeted ads do not do this; they seek to either mobilize or suppress voters to attend or not attend the ballot box.

Re: New Cambridge Analytica Leaks

#117

Post by cwkoss »

bart_spoon wrote: post #98
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. 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. I would dispute this claim, as it has yet to be…

Marketers are most effective at selling their own industry

Re: New Cambridge Analytica Leaks

#118

Post by shadowgovt »

JackFr wrote: post #78
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.

Given the time scales in question and the law of averages, I believe it is safe to assume that there is real value in exchange for money received in that transaction. To claim otherwise is to approach conspiracy-theory levels of people having to "buy into a scam and not give the game away" for those industries to have not collapsed.

Re: New Cambridge Analytica Leaks

#119

Post by pier25 »

jfengel wrote: post #82
pier25 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Single-party voting is not necessarily irrational. A vote is a compromise. In a democracy, you need a majority to achieve anything, and with many options available, it's going to be rare for any single option to pass 50%. You get things done by making bargains with other voters. And those bargains have to be durable over time: I'll vote for your thing today if you'll vote for my thing tomorrow. A party is a semi-form…

> a party can be a rational long-term decision

Only assuming that there is something like a constant ideology that party members adhere to over the decades.

Re: New Cambridge Analytica Leaks

#120

Post by shadowgovt »

Zigurd wrote: post #76
Moodles wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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]

One assumes if the Democrats were defeated by those rules, they failed to grasp them, given the parties raison d'etre is to win elections.
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