I 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.
very appropriate analogy
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
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
That's pretty much a definition of stereotype. Humans too form statistical models in their head, even if they don't usually call them that.
"a widely held but fixed and oversimplified image or idea of a particular type of person or thing"
A statistical model is not an oversimplification.
Re: Cambridge Analytica Used Fashion Tastes to Identify Right-Wing Voters
#63I wonder what google or reddit know about my political ideas..
I often wonder what HN could infer from my positions on various topics based on my voting (eventhough I don't use it to signal (dis)agreement).
Re: Cambridge Analytica Used Fashion Tastes to Identify Right-Wing Voters
#64couple years ago i heard that adult content industry was selling pretty precise political profiling of their users. So it isnt just fashion.
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Re: Cambridge Analytica Used Fashion Tastes to Identify Right-Wing Voters
#65Are you telling me that people who buy camo clothes are more likely to be conservative? That's crazy talk.
Next thing you'll tell me is people who dye their hair pink or blue are more likely to be liberal.
Re: Cambridge Analytica Used Fashion Tastes to Identify Right-Wing Voters
#66Re: Cambridge Analytica Used Fashion Tastes to Identify Right-Wing Voters
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> It was definitely effective and stretched ad dollars further. 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 announc…
Everything you wrote is wrong - at least as far as CA's contribution to the Brexit vote. In reality CA used very specific targeted advertising on FB.
https://mobile.twitter.com/Nealb2010/status/1059068463933743...
The point about these campaign structures isn't that they're generically effective. In fact they don't need to be generically effective.
They just need to be able to swing a vote by a few percent to define the outcome.
In the 2017 UK election, the Tory majority - such as it was - only survived because of a couple of marginals returned majorities of tens or hundreds.
The adversarial zero-sum nature of representative democracy amplifies those tiny voter preferences into a monolithic national mandate which does not in fact exist.
This how CA's snake oil works. Where a vote is close and uncertain, it only needs to alter the voting intent of an absolutely tiny percentage of voters. That turns out to be almost trivially easy to do.
Re: Cambridge Analytica Used Fashion Tastes to Identify Right-Wing Voters
#68As much as I think Trump's idiotic anti-media rhetoric erodes our democracy, when I see the NY Times publishing articles like this, it makes me cringe. First of all, it's a complete non-article -- marketing firms used correlative data to make inferences about political affiliation? No way! Second of all, instead of being a smart and pointed analysis as to why this might be bad, it somehow draws political conclusions…
These news don’t make a big splash when other companies use profiling to identify people. This one did because those profiles were used to incite violence. It’s news, just not to your liking.
It's really not news, it's clickbait (because it's controversial). I understand NYT and their like needs to make ends meet, but they need to find a better way.
Re: Cambridge Analytica Used Fashion Tastes to Identify Right-Wing Voters
#69Not really surprising. I catch myself making assumptions about people's politics based on the clothes they're wearing. This data just allows one to confirm.
Re: Cambridge Analytica Used Fashion Tastes to Identify Right-Wing Voters
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 think you're talking about using personas. I'm not surprised that was your reaction, as personas are often misunderstood, even by marketing folks. The point of using personas is not to stereotype your customers but to establish focus sufficient to permit clear product decisions. In other words the idea is not "all our customers are like this" but "this is the type of customer we care about the most." Or more typica…
Maybe they’re supposed to be individuals, but the problem is that unlike real individuals, you made them up. You can’t learn anything from them that you didn’t put into them yourself. Only a real person with lifelong experience of being themselves can give you insight into what that’s like.