Ok, so people living outside major cities in UK voting against centralization of unaccountable power in the EU and unemployed, politically abandoned industrial workers in the US Rust Belt were just a bunch of idiot rubes tricked by click bait headlines. Does it occur o anyone they may have actually had real grievances against globalization? Maybe they were tired of being belittled by metropolitan and coastal elites ignoring those grievances and dismissing them as racists to be ignored.
I agree 100% that the working class people in America have been screwed over. But just because they've been wronged doesn't mean that their solutions are right.
Dumb ideas deserve to be attacked. Ideas that are an affront to practically every positive development that dragged us out from under the rule of the oligarchs of the 19th century and the fear-mongering ideologues of the 20th, deserve to be attacked.
If that hurts the feelings of those who are promoting them, that's unfortunate, but it's the price of admission if you're trying to exert influence in the public sphere.
> I agree 100% that the working class people in America have been screwed over. But just because they've been wronged doesn't mean that their solutions are right.
The problem is that no one is putting forward better solutions. "The left" is now run by educated elites, not the working class, "the right" might not represent the working class, but at least they don't ignore them.
They deserve better than to be just "not ignored". The whole game has to be changed so that everything isn't rigged toward the people who are already rich. That means rule of law, that means not fighting against your equally poor immigrant neighbour, that means getting your fair share of the benefits of globalization, not just trying to make it go away.
Trump and Co. is exactly opposite of that.
If the working class is holding out for great ideas so long as educated people don't propose them, I think that's an unwinnable game. The ideas that work against the concentration of wealth and power are the ones championed by academia, but they have been dismissed as "commies" not matter how unrelated their ideas are to Marxism, or as "elites" despite the fact that they have very little influence or money compared to the corporate class that just got installed in the White House.
Yeah, it's funny how so many people think all college professors are wealthy elites, when many are barely scraping by and have trouble affording health insurance.
Plenty of better solutions are being put forward. Nobody listens to them because they come from "educated elites" AKA those people with unique experiences and depth of knowledge necessary to come up with new ideas.
If you don't see better solutions, it's because you're actively avoiding them.
How much time, money, and effort was spent actually educating people so they can make a properly informed decision? Suggesting a new idea is only the first step. Having "unique experiences and depth of knowledge" doesn't mean anything if you can't explain the new idea to everyone else.
Why should anyone listen to your new idea if you aren't explaining it in a language[1] they understand?
> If you don't see better solutions, it's because you're actively avoiding them.
Not sure exactly what you're talking about but I've long been a proponent of UBI for instance. But new ideas like this aren't being adopting by the mainstream left and probably won't for some time. You never get any progress without a firebrand to sell the message. The mainstream left seems more interested in playing identity politics as a wedge than coming out with a positive action plan.
That has nothing to do with the "mainstream left", and everything to do with the volatile nature of holding political office in a sound-byte culture. Stop listening to professional campaigners and start listening to professional thinkers.
The fact that you even invoked the term "mainstream left" here makes it perfectly clear that you're more than happy playing identity politics. You speak in terms of political labels, not in terms of mechanisms for solving problems.
> That has nothing to do with the "mainstream left", and everything to do with the volatile nature of holding political office in a sound-byte culture. Stop listening to professional campaigners and start listening to professional thinkers.
Why? The greatest mind in the world might solve poverty tomorrow but unless they can convince the public they may as well keep it to themselves. Let's also not forget that professional thinkers are often incorrect and disconnected from reality. Support for communism was quite high amongst professional thinkers. Not to mention that professional thinkers these days includes the like of feminist studies professors that are about as regressive as they come.
I'm not sure why you feel inclined to dismiss the analytical value of historians, doctors, economists, and scientists because they might take seriously the opinions of feminists and communists.
So, yeah. Let's forget that. Because it's juvenile and petty.
PS: You're talking to a feminist and communist. I'm not sure why you'd imagine I'd object as you do to the points you raise. I doubt you've ever read any communist or feminist literature, or that you'd care enough to understand it if you did.
Your the intellectual elitists that Trump voters (and myself) hate. You're influence on the left is why they are losing elections and why there are very few left wing parties I would vote for these days.
You know nothing about me, and I certainly have no influence on the left. You do realize that you're talking to some random person on the internet, right? And I certainly don't give a shit who you'd vote for. I'm not surprised that I am hated. US Republicans have been sucking on a hate-spewing propaganda teat for almost a decade. I'm only asking that you understand the consequences of that. You'll suffer them either way.
But whatever. You're petty and can't avoid identity politics. And I would rather talk about actually relevant ideas, so have a good life.
> AKA those people with unique experiences and depth of knowledge necessary to come up with new ideas.
Statements like this make it sound like you believe that the middle American working class is not capable of coming up with there own solutions, or that there solutions are totally without merit. An even more uncharitable reading would imply that they cannot even enumerate the problems they face.
I don't assume you mean this, but so much of the division we face is due to the otherization that happens on all sides.
Middle America assumes that the coastal elite stopped caring about their problems and proposes actions that have negative consequences for them. This is definitely not intentional on a large scale. However if you look at the state of middle America's economy you can't argue that the is a huge room for improvement and the divide between them and the coast has become a chasm.
I'm not really talking about the middle American working class. They are certainly capable of coming up with solutions. But when someone says "nobody is providing solutions" I can only imagine that they live under a rock with a community of people who are incapable of coming up with solutions.
Those same individuals have warped, sheltered, and idealistic views/ideas. Just a thought, and as coming from someone that outright rejects a multitude of "ideas" from such "educated elites", have you considered that we actually "don't want" or "don't like" the ideas that they put forward? Some of them have natural consequences that we don't like, and some are based on premises we find incorrect.
That isn't the problem. In the US Sanders put forwards better solutions and in the UK Corbyn does.
>"The left" is now run by educated elites
The left is under constant and savage attack by the elite ruling classes from all sides, which is why when voters seek out an alternative they are left with the elite's 2nd choice - the far right.
The same dynamics occurred in Weimar Germany, who were, much like the UK/US establishment, both relatively socially liberal and incredibly economically repressive, and vicious towards the 'alternative' left wing (KPD).
A lack of better solutions of on offer (which isn't true by the way, but lets ignore that for a moment) doesn't excuse making terrible choices. The truth is that there are other solutions, but they're seen as troublesome for a number of reasons. Compounding that is the fact that people so dim they'd see value in the "solutions" offered by someone like Trump often aren't aware of the possible solutions that have been considered.
It's possible to be the victim of your own desperation, which is just what such people perpetually have been throughout history. Everyone sees that kind of person as a rube, Left, Right, and Center... it's always just a fight for their hearts and minds.
By the way the Right doesn't ignore the working class, but they actively hurt them. I somehow doubt that the working class wants that kind of attention.
If your attitude is to keep talking down Trump voters as being idiots don't expect any sympathy from me when Trump gets re-elected. In fact, the more you marginalise them the more radical and United they will get, before you criticize others for acting against their own self interest realise that you're doing the same.
> It's possible to be the victim of your own desperation, which is just what such people perpetually have been throughout history. Everyone sees that kind of person as a rube, Left, Right, and Center... it's always just a fight for their hearts and minds.
Yes, and the guy offering a bad solution looks better than the guy offering no solution.
>Yes, and the guy offering a bad solution looks better than the guy offering no solution.
People for whom a self-serving lie (what you call a bad solution) is better than no solution deserve what they get. It's just a pity that the rest of us are along for the ride.
Sorry about the edit, but I added this part: In fact, the more you marginalize them the more radical and United they will get, before you criticize others for acting against their own self interest realize that you're doing the same.
Your actions are just as self defeating as theirs.
no, that is a perfectly reasonable idea. However, an example of a dumb idea is trying to bring back the coal industry to give people back the jobs that they lost, when things like renewable energies are more cost efficient in the long run and better for the environment.
I mention H1Bs because it's a direct parallel to the broader immigration issue, yet many people have different opinions on the two.
People sponsored for H1Bs by sweat shops are to educated American tech workers as "illegal immigrants" are to American manual laborers: competitors for the same jobs willing to work under worse conditions for much lower wages.
I can, but that means I'm either not intelligent enough, lacking information or not well-intentioned, because why would there be disagreement otherwise? Only one of these can be fixed, and that is by exchanging information.
Or in other words: Yes, but you need good arguments to make me change my mind.
> just because [the working class has] been wronged doesn't mean that their solutions are right.
Reminds me of:
"...the old man is always wrong; and the young people are always wrong about what is wrong with him. The practical form it takes is this: that, while the old man may stand by some stupid custom, the young man always attacks it with some theory that turns out to be equally stupid."
-- Chesterton
The grievances are real, no doubt. Are they voting for the best person to solve those issues based on an understanding of possible policies? Or because they just got advertised "Vote Trump, ban immigrants, build $20 billion walls, and then you'll have a job!"
Keep in mind people voted in part based on a campaign promise to repeal "Obamacare" even when they depended on the ACA for their lives, without realizing they were one and the same. Anecdote does not data make, but there also have been a few prominent examples of families that were broken up when the U.S. citizen portion voted Trump and their relatives were then affected by the travel ban.
There are real economic grievances, no one is saying there aren't. Those grievances were there the election before this one, and the one before that (2008, remember? right now the economy and employment are objectively at their best since at least that time). But there is also an ideological, cultural component, which is ripe for being modulated by propaganda. See e.g. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/03/its-put... .
1. Public (online) discourse is vulnerable to manipulation by bad-faith actors (and this manipulation is impactful on a geopolitical scale).
2. The events of the US election and Brexit were symptomatic of unrecognized problems and unheard voices.
These ideas can both be true. Frankly, I find the notion that (1) isn't true too far-fetched to believe. It sounds like far too good of a business opportunity.
Running ads is a valuable activity not because every person who sees the ad becomes a customer, but because in aggregate x% of viewers will consider a purchase and y% will become good customers. Cambridge Analytica sounds to me like they're just applying the standard techniques of digital content marketing to a relatively unsophisticated realm (political advertisement).
1 has been true for a very long time, long before the internet existed, it's commonly known as astro turfing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astroturfing), the wikipedia articles cites Shakespeare is the first known (albeit fictional) example. The approach was instrumental in preventing action on climate change.
> Does it occur o anyone they may have actually had real grievances against globalization?
Your assessment might hold water except that they also sent back the congressmen responsible for the situation in record numbers.
So, even if I give them that they believed Trump was their champion, what are we to make of the fact that they sent everybody else responsible for the situation back?
> Maybe they were tired of being belittled by metropolitan and coastal elites ignoring those grievances and dismissing them as racists to be ignored.
Yet they bitch, complain and fight when said coastal elites attempt to help things: see Obamacare. Even a SINGLE moderate Republican senator driven by moderate constituents would have made the ACA a lauded national accomplishment and enabled compromise instead of a partisan war.
There wasn't a SINGLE moderate Republican senator in the entire batch. Not ... one ...
You can't fight people when they attempt to help and then complain when they give up and tell you to get stuffed and go die in a fire. And, from what I can tell, the ACA was the breaking point where the left finally threw in the towel that there was any working with the right and that they should simply be left to rot.
> Ok, so people living outside major cities in UK voting against centralization of unaccountable power in the EU and unemployed, politically abandoned industrial workers in the US Rust Belt were just a bunch of idiot rubes tricked by click bait headlines.
Pretty much. Whenever I sit down an talk to people to explain the ACA stuff, I invariably get "Well, nobody ever told me that." Of course they didn't. Most things in the ACA are driven by the fundamental choices that most people agree with. If you agree with no exclusions for preexisting conditions, then you need to amortize the sick over the well. That implies sign up periods and getting the healthy to sign on when they really don't want to. etc.
Unfortunately, that's too subtle an argument to get through a wall of interference of "Obama's a muslim and wants to oppress Christians! They wanna take arrr gunzzzz! Mexicans took all arrr jerbs!"
First off, this comment should be flagged for its last paragraph
Second of all, Massachusetts, yes Massachusetts, elected a Republican senator a month before the ACA went to vote, in effect cutting out the filibuster-proof 60-senate seats held by the D's at the time. If a state the last elected an R in the 1940s decided to sabotage this bill, maybe its opposition was more widespread than simply those who "cling to their guns and religion".
They have radio programs, letters, etc. from roughly 100 years ago that are EXACTLY THE SAME RHETORIC as today.
The only difference is that the ethnic slurs have changed. And a Mexican Wall replaces closing Ellis Island.
> If a state the last elected an R in the 1940s decided to sabotage this bill, maybe its opposition was more widespread than simply those who "cling to their guns and religion".
As for Massachusetts sending an R being a rebuttal of Obamacare, I note that Massachusetts didn't repeal Romneycare. And I note that Brown didn't last more than one term even after fighting the single most expensive senatorial election race in history.
Maybe there were no, absolutely none, moderate Republican Senators. That's possible. It seems more likely, however, that you are defining "moderate" to mean "voted for ACA". That might not be a valid definition.
I get that you think that the ACA was a good answer, but it is in fact possible to view it as a horrible mess without being deliberately stupid.
A 2000-page bill. "You have to pass it to find out what's in it." People voting on a bill that they never read. Does any of that sound like it might be a bad idea (or at least a bad implementation)?
People knew quite well what was in the bill and it was on record. The issue was whether there might be unintended consequences and what they would be after the bill was enacted.
Now, will you admit you are wrong and change your stance? Or will you double down to a different talking point?
If someone on HN can fall for this kind of disinformation campaign, what chance does someone with far less access have?
And thank you for completely ignoring my point, and continuing to trumpet your own. Now, will you admit that you are a propagandist who's here just to argue? Or will you actually start to have a real conversation with us?
That is: Do you see how your style closes off conversation? Do you see how it results in closed-minded people just yelling at each other? And, seeing that, will you drop that style and have a reasonable conversation with us? Or will you continue to dismiss what others say as "talking points" whenever we disagree with you?
As to your actual criticism of my post: I was in fact unaware of the larger context of Pelosi's quote. That fact does not make ACA any better.
That is why they voted for who they voted for. But if you look at the track records of the people they voted for (in the US: the Christian Right in 2000, the Tea Party in 2012, and Trump in 2016), it's no better woth regard to privacy. And apart from some regional excepions it's not better in any other category either.
If you think a vote for Paul Ryan is a vote against unaccountable power you are badly deluded.
> If you think a vote for Paul Ryan is a vote against unaccountable power you are badly deluded.
Forget Paul Ryan. Does the billionaire President of the United States, brought to power (to almost everyone's surprise) by this populist wave, seem especially accountable to anyone? FFS, the man broke the long-standing traditions of releasing tax returns as a candidate, and has utterly failed to even give the appearance of separating himself from his business interests, and his broke working class base doesn't bat an eyelash. They're not looking for accountability. They're looking for someone to blame ("elites", "illegals", "muslims") and for someone to tell them it'll all be OK.
> Maybe they were tired of being belittled by metropolitan and coastal elites ignoring those grievances and dismissing them as racists to be ignored.
They could be. Or they could have been manipulated into believing that there was a cadre of elitist puppet masters out to get them.
It's obvious that there are issues all across the socioeconomic spectrums, all over the planet. I'm more apt to believe that for the most part that people all over are quite similar, but propaganda triggers and psychometric targeting make it seem like we are light years apart.
We should distinguish between techniques used and how they're applied. It's possible to use advertising to:
1) Sell soap.
2) Let people know about a new movie.
3) Scam people out of their life savings (find people who fall for a Nigerian prince scam).
4) Own devices (phishing).
5) Swing undecided, low-information voters in an election.
The techniques may be quite similar. The consequences, very different.
Ad tech is powerful technology that doesn't discriminate. Large advertising networks do have content policies preventing outright scammers, phishing, and often just things they don't want on their network, but there are always new techniques.
So this is just another example of why we can't have a nice libertarian-inspired Internet like we all dreamed of when the Internet was new. There are always bad guys and gray areas. Any popular service that attracts a large enough audience gets abused and the service providers inevitably end up policing it, so then they start making tough policy decisions about what's okay. (Or if they don't, customers and various interest groups will complain.)
The concern here isn't about who won, in the UK or the US. The concern is about personalized propaganda. There's nothing new about propaganda. There's nothing new about astroturfing. There's nothing new about targeted advertising. What's new is how effectively Cambridge Analytics combined and leveraged them.
Then why is all the discussion in terms of who did win? People who don't like the result are "blaming" this phenomenon, without regard for the fact that this is something that everyone is presumably doing.
When Obama won, I seem to remember a lot of people around here praising the success of his social media strategy.
Yes, after Obama won, there was talk of using his social network to help drive his agenda. That didn't work out so well, I think. But the Brexit and Trump teams did a far better job of it.
So yes, we have an arms race, and those with the best AI will become the power brokers. I like the analogy to high-frequency trading. Neither market valuation nor democratic process are very meaningful when driven by machine learning.
People sure have been saying that a lot, and at first I believed it. However I'm becoming increasingly convinced that this isn't the case. These people do have grievances, sure, but I doubt they could actually even articulate most of these grievances, much less carefully consider solutions. The uneducated are famously easy to manipulate, and Trump just figured out how to manipulate them better than the GOP could. Same goes for the Brexiters vs the Tories. These people vote against their own interests because they don't know any better, not because they're making rational political decisions.
> politically abandoned industrial workers in the US Rust Belt were just a bunch of idiot rubes tricked by click bait headlines.
They had to be. Fake news, those sneaky Russians, a white-supremacist deep state conspiracy. It is what happens when people live in a bubble. They can pretend nothing else exists. Facebook posts all come from the same group of friends, those who don't agree are unfriended, and so on. News channel all pump the same reassuring message about an almost certain win and even show a map with all states filled in blue. Until of course the bubble pops then it just becomes too much.
There was certainly a surprise element but I am surprised how surprised some people were and how they overnight went from stoic intellectuals lecturing those Trump rednecks about integrity of our electoral system, and how they better not riot and get angry and agree with the results of the election, to irrational and angry conspiracy theorists.
> most clearly with pro-Trump campaigners and programmers who carefully adjusted the timing of content production during the debates, strategically colonized pro-Clinton hashtags, and then disabled activities after Election Day,”
That was interesting. The most visible example is probably "Fake News" it was a term appropriated and used to label mainstream media like CNN, NBC, NYT and WaPo. It had gotten to a point where Washington Post sent out an explicit request for everyone to please stop using that term because it has been taken over so to speak.
> According to Bloomberg, the Trump campaign sent ads reminding certain selected black voters of Hillary Clinton’s infamous ‘super predator’ line. It targeted Miami’s Little Haiti neighborhood with messages about the Clinton Foundation’s troubles in Haiti after the 2010 earthquake.’”
One thing I noticed Hillary organized a Jay-Z concert. I guess she heard that Black people like rap and paid Jay-Z to throw the n-word at them a few times. What an awkward way to connect. A while back I managed to find a speech Trump gave to a mostly Black community and he didn't do half bad. It was a very small gathering. It was probably never going to be a community that would vote for him as a block like they did for Obama. But at least he tried to talk about inner cities, inequality, crime, safety, jobs, education.
> Political analysts in the Clinton campaign, who were basing their tactics on traditional polling methods, laughed when Trump scheduled campaign events in the so-called blue wall -- a group of states that includes Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin and has traditionally fallen to Democrats.
I think there is a bit of the oscillation happening. Trump went from an arrogant stupid idiot to this super cunning and smart villain who used those evil AI bots to win. Why didn't Hillary try that same software and those same bots? Guessing by implication is because her campaign was honest and they played by the rules.
> I always find it funny when people say they're tired of being called racists.
You mean the people from the Middle America? Well it helps to live there for a while. I did for a about 10 years. You know what most people there don't think when they first wake up? That's right, racist thoughts. They think about getting groceries, hopefully kids did their homework, when the bills are due, why Steven is being a jerk at work and so on. They don't yawn and stretch thinking "I hope all the people with certain skin pigment different than mine fail!".
> they want people like them to succeed they're called racists.
I have never heard anyone say "I want people like me to succeed" based on race. Maybe I wasn't hanging out with a bad crowd. But I've heard them say "I want to succeed" or "I want my children to be successful" is that racist? I am an immigrant, is it wrong to say "I want immigrants to succeed". Am I racist now? Oh oh.
> always find it funny when people say they're tired of being called racists.
I am wondering. How do you expect people to respond when they are called racists. Let's imagine you walk down the street. Someone turns a corner wearing that stupid Trump hat, you yell out "You racist!". What would be a realistic positive outcome from that?
I believe calling large groups of people "racists" is counter-productive and doesn't help or do anything positive. Chances are unless we picked KKK some Eugenics Institute of America (I made that name up, btw) that characterization will probably be wrong.
Besides what does the term "people like them" even mean"? Are we referring to immigrants vs citizens, nationality, religion, political party? People from different groups big and small will unsurprisingly want other people from the same group to succeed. Are you sure it is all about the skin color and them all thinking one is superior than other? I gave an example about immigrants. It could be programmers. Or some religious organization. Same with people from a country and so on. Are all those instances of racism?
Wouldn't you say that the accusation of racism is rather serious and racism is a serious topic and not just something to be used when we disagree with things? I think it is. And because of that it is important to be very precise and sure when using it. Otherwise we are just mocking it and reducing its value.
> Or that I wander the streets calling people racist?
But the equivalent is to wonder around the internet and throw that term around. And I am sorry, I didn't mean to single you out specifically, I wanted to talk more to wider audience (since it is a public forum as well) because I have seen this happen too many times. Some here, the media, Reddit, relatives, friends, at work and so on.
I call specific people racist, when they do racist things.
Entertainingly, they're always horrified and offended, even if 5 seconds before they've been telling a story about how Indian woman have loose vaginas since they're all whores.
Your response leads me to believe you've been called racist, but couldn't internalize what exactly it was that you'd done wrong.
The article mentions a "groundbreaking study" from 2013 that a psychologist "spent years developing"...
It sounds impressive, until I looked at the actual study[0], which uses simple linear or logistic regression on 100 features obtained by low-rank approximation of an m users × n Facebook-likes matrix via plain-old singular value decomposition (SVD)[1], as shown here: http://www.pnas.org/content/110/15/5802/F1.large.jpg
I don't know how anyone could call this "groundbreaking," considering that lots of people in Silicon Valley have been using matrix factorization to predict consumer behavior and make recommendations for a couple of decades, give or take.
> I don't know how anyone could call matrix factorization "groundbreaking." I stopped reading at that point.
The article probably means the study was groundbreaking, not the mathematics. This is fairly common in science. The novel nature of the study may come from unique applications of existing technique, or applications of existing techniques to previously unavailable datasets. Focusing on the mathematical techniques used as an assessment of what is "groundbreaking" is a short-sighted way to approach it.
For example, many (probably most) studies in astronomy/astrophysics aren't developing and applying new mathematical techniques as part of the studies. I think folks would agree that detection of exoplanets via radial velocity wobbles is groundbreaking. But that's "just" application of classical mechanics. The groundbreaking nature was the instruments with high enough precision to make those measurements and the teams who thought up the idea and made the observations happen.
That being said, I'm not really qualified to assess the novelty of the study which is the subject of the article. But one should certainly look at more than just the tools used.
People in Silicon Valley have been using matrix factorization for the same or similar tasks (like predicting behavior, making recommendations, and categorizing users) for ages.[0] I updated my comment to mention this.
[0] For example, the Netflix $1 million competition in 2007 was won by a team that used an ensemble of methods, including a form of matrix factorization, to predict which movies people would like: http://www.netflixprize.com/assets/ProgressPrize2007_KorBell... -- and using matrix factorization wasn't a new idea back then either.
The big Silicon Valley tech companies (Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc.) have been using similar mechanisms for at least a decade to predict which ads people will click on and increase their likelihood of doing so. You can actually see what Facebook has predicted you're most interested in, based on their like/click/commenting/view behavior:
This is the first reported case of these techniques being used to influence an election, but that doesn't mean it's the first time it was used to influence an election. It's very likely that Obama's campaign used similar techniques, considering it was staffed by Google/Facebook/Twitter data scientists who were certainly familiar with these techniques. It just appears in the press now because the Trump campaign & administration leaks like a sieve.
It might be groundbreaking if no one else had the idea to use even plain old SVD to look at the problem. (And it would still look like a new method to some particular scientific subfield if the Silicon Valley ads and marketing people never published about the methods they are using in the journals these people read...)
And learning SVD if you start at zero background in required maths, especially if nobody is exactly telling you what to learn and how to learn it and how to use it (yes I'm stereotyping the word 'psychologist' heavily here) could plausibly take "years". I'm doing maths and while I had first encounter with eigendecompositions during the 1st year linear algebra (which remarkably many students find hard), I think it wasn't until the 3rd year when we covered SVDs in their full theoretically detailed glory in the class.
Lots of "groundbreaking" stuff involves 'simply' applying techniques developed elsewhere to new problem domains. There's still some low-hanging fruit left for applied maths and statistics.
However, I don't know enough about this particular area to really say if the statement of "groundbreaking" are really warranted, but that could be one plausible defense of the claim.
I don't know much about US elections in regard to facebook and fake news, but I did pay attention during Brexit. Most 'news' was fed to us through newspapers (online and offline) the TV and radio. I didn't see a single fake news site, I saw some crap forwarded on facebook most of which had lots of comments calling it out as crap.
that seems a strange way to classify 'groundbreaking' - surely the result, even if preliminary and needing confirmation peer review replication etc, is what makes something potentially groundbreaking? typically, asking new questions is hard enough without requiring the latest buzzword acronym to be used in parallel.
If the results are new and significant (in the qualitative sense) then it seems completely fair to call them "groundbreaking" even if they were arrived at without any sort of novel methodology.
Whether they actually fit this description, I do not know, and I make no claim either way.
It zooms past the now expected AI hype and doesn't stop until it is deep in science fiction. The correlation of Facebook-likes with personality traits is no more profound than the correlation of particular personality traits with watching NASCAR or buying opera tickets. Personalized political advertising/articles is at the same tech level as personalized advertising/articles in general. That is, still in its infancy.
> By leveraging automated emotional manipulation alongside swarms of bots, Facebook dark posts, A/B testing, and fake news networks, a company called Cambridge Analytica has activated an invisible machine that preys on the personalities of individual voters to create large shifts in public opinion
And somehow managed to overcome the constant "fact checking" by major cable networks, the Post, NYT and generally a large majority of the established media. Let's be serious. The narrative is ridiculous, but even if we were to take it at face value the cure is worse than the disease. Basically voters can no longer be trusted with making up their own mind in a democracy and they need to be automatically manipulated for the greater good:
> From now on, the distinguishing factor between those who win elections and those who lose them will be how a candidate uses that data to refine their machine learning algorithms and automated engagement tactics. Elections in 2018 and 2020 won’t be a contest of ideas, but a battle of automated behavior change.
I think at this point the losing side needs to accept that they didn't make their case properly ("the other guy is worse" only gets you so far) and stop chasing ridiculous scapegoats. American democracy has endured through secession, yellow journalism and Joseph McCarthy. It will survive Facebook and sentiment analysis bots.
> And somehow managed to overcome the constant "fact checking" by major cable networks, the Post, NYT and generally a large majority of the established media.
A person's consumption of media will dictate their voting patterns. Someone who reads the Post and NYT will probably vote differently than someone consuming primarily Conservative news and memes on Facebook.
> American democracy has endured through secession, yellow journalism and Joseph McCarthy. It will survive Facebook and sentiment analysis bots.
Many Americans read news exclusively on Facebook. If peoples' political opinions are influenced by their friends', then content on Facebook benefits from a halo of social proof.
Regardless, in a system where media consumption is dictated by what is shared, then content which evokes strong emotional reaction will have a strong sharing advantage. Journalism and McCarthyism existed in an age before ML. If smart algorithms could optimize share rates, then a professional team could gain a lot of influence with highly curated media.
> Basically voters can no longer be trusted with making up their own mind in a democracy and they need to be automatically manipulated for the greater good
That sounds very much like Noah Chomsky.
The pretext of Media Control is that the general public is a bewildered herd that needs to be kept entertained and divided, less they engage in unwelcome "activism". Namely, democracy.
i may be wrong, but its my understanding that the Clinton campaign was more demographics based and Analytica's was more personality / individual targeting.
I also read that boots on the ground were begging for resources and refused because what they were seeing did not fit the models - thats bad analytics no matter how you wash it. especially since the same models predicted landslide wins over Sanders where she had lost.
Yes, that's my understanding. And the Trump team just had the more effective methodology and systems. Next time around, the Democrats will do a better job, targeting women, minorities, etc.
There is a much better cure: abolish elections in favor of a sortition-based system. Selecting leaders by lottery seems counterintuitive, but it has a lot of advantages. It prevents the creation of cabals and a political class, reduces the impact of propaganda, and prevents demagogues from rising to power. It's hardly a new idea either. It's been used since ancient times and is still occasionally uses today. Ireland selected 40% of the delegates to its 2012 constitutional convention by sortition.
> And somehow managed to overcome the constant "fact checking" by major cable networks, the Post, NYT and generally a large majority of the established media.
Well a big part of the campaign was delegitimizing the establishment as "fake news" that is in bed with Hillary. Combined with a bombardment of headlines that confirm their biases, targeted by personality, it could have a big impact.
> Well a big part of the campaign was delegitimizing the establishment as "fake news" that is in bed with Hillary.
This would've been far less effective if CNN wasn't caught red-handed cheating at the debates, then lying about it afterward. In my view, we need news with less opinions and more facts, better sourcing, and more complete coverage and no rumors allowed.
Then again, I think the CS Monitor was founded more or less to confront the original plague of yellow journalism and somehow they've vanished without a trace from Google News, which always tries to feed me the clickbait versions of every story, despite the fact that I don't click on those.
So maybe the real problem here is that the market has spoken and people prefer junk food news? A depressing thought :/
Except the delegitimizing was done to the point where fact checking actual lies and falsehoods were simply ignored. This targeted approach didn't have to "overcome" that, as the parent claimed, just make people ignore it entirely.
I think the news media largely delegitimized themselves to supports of Bernie Sanders by almost completely ignoring his campaign and showing favoritism to Clinton in debate coverage, and at the same time delegitimized themselves to everyone who isn't a Donald Trump supporter by covering Trump's campaign in such meticulous detail that the other candidates of both parties (including Clinton) got only the barest minimum of coverage.
The media didn't give Trump free publicity because they love him; a lot (perhaps most) of that coverage was negative. It was good for ratings, though, and I think that's something Trump understood and took full advantage of. The long term consequences of this is that it was a contributing factor to Trump winning the primary and later the general election, but also many progressives and independents that previously saw the media as a benign entity have adopted the default assumption that every news article is either a veiled advertisement, a stunt to raise viewership, or propaganda with some motive other than informing the public.
(I think the Trump supporters and Tea Party types have mostly already believed this, so whatever they think of the media being pro-Hillary, it's something they believed all along; nothing changed there.)
This puts a large proportion of the public in the awkward position of wanting to know what's going on in the world, but having no reliable source of facts since the major players have largely disqualified themselves. Hence the rise in fake news, but fake news is just a symptom of a general lack of trust (deserved, in my opinion) of the so-called mainstream media.
And so, the media join a long list of important institutions that are perceived by many (including myself) to either be in decline or have somehow gone off the rails, including Congress, the court system, the police (in some areas), intelligence agencies, higher education, the democratic process, the major political parties, the financial services industry, unions, and so on. I know it's practically an American tradition to believe that society is falling apart and that we're on the verge of catastrophe, but still, it seems like we've got more things than usual coming apart at once and no obvious fix for any of them within reach. I would have felt a little better if Clinton had prevailed, but still there's a lot of problems I'm concerned about that are deeper and have been around a lot longer than the election of president Trump.
"Their" meaning the people being targeted in this way. Sure, both sides target specific demographics or biases, but I think this personalized approach is certainly novel.
Many of us, myself included, have worked on technologies that were meant to profile and manipulate users. Many more of us worked for companies who did this or did similar things through traditional means (eg, psychologically manipulative ads). We've not only allowed, but encouraged technology to have a manipulative and addictive relationship with users. We took the paycheck and played red team against humanity. (This is common -- red team is sexier than blue team, and has an easier time of it, pretty much in any field.)
So, personally, I think it's time we spent some of our effort undoing that damage and playing blue team.
I don't know what that looks like in full -- though I have some ideas -- but I do know that allowing the weaponization of psychology against humanity to continue unabated will end in disaster.
In some ways, that's the struggle of the 21st century: will technology serve the public or enslave it.
...which is why that's basically what I suggested.
"Red team" and "blue team" are referencing offensive and defensive teams using standard security lingo. In this case, red team is trying to manipulate and control the public. As another commentator pointed out, it's a little unclear what blue team even should be doing.
I avoided just saying "help people avoid manipulation", because the implementation of a defensive strategy might be self-directed manipulation overriding the other manipulation you're exposed to, as it's not necessarily possible to avoid manipulation entirely. (Or even a deairable goal, as you might want to adjust your existing habits.)
My main point was that we need to start developing defensive tactics and strategies, because the offense dominated present situation will end in catastrophe.
>As another commentator pointed out, it's a little unclear what blue team even should be doing.
If the primary tools of offence are making use of addictive technology and manipulation, the defencive move is making technology available to help people overcome addiction and give direction to their own lives.
As you say, self directed manipulation, and I would add introspection. Maybe FOSS tools for cognitive behavioral therapy.
I generally think there are a few aspects we can do:
* Allowing people to intentionally program themselves, as a means of overwriting and weakening offensive programming. In some ways, this cements the status quo, but in others, it allows your interest in "human values" (eg, wanting to be able to converse with family who disagree) to effectively fight back against centralized radicalization.
* Collating and rewriting news/information with intentional bias added, but things like dog-whistle phrases removed. Think averaging across a wide set of news to get a "fact sheet", then using something like style transfer to rewrite it in several tones/styles/biases. We can't (and shouldn't) eliminate the spectrum of perspectives, but we can probably clean some of the crap the channels are carrying. The organizational structure to manage that process, though, is a very open question. (My vote is a panel of enemies -- can we get WaPo/NYT and RT and China's people to agree on a system?) Also, people subscribing "across the spectrum" probably are harder to program.
* Education and organization. It turns out people are able to do some of these things on their own, if they know they should. I think there's really a range here -- from basic awareness campaigns to things like organizing trade groups and lobbying for ethical guidelines. Arguably, many of the professional psychologists at places like Facebook are engaged in mass-scale, unregulated psychiatry on non-consenting persons. We should call them out on that.
* Sort of a subpoint of the previous one, but theoretically you can use red team tactics to forcibly inject awareness of red team tactics. The ethics of this are questionable, so I put it last, and mostly to highlight the need to have a real conversation about ethics, guidelines, and organization.
Honestly, I know how to do much of that myself (and would really like to work on it), but "just do it alone" isn't a good solution here because that's just projecting my view on the situation. So my post was partly reaching out to see if other people felt the same and might want to organize. (And particularly people who don't share my views on most issues!)
Making this networks transparent would be a pretty good first step. So, maybe when you see a sponsored FB post or "news" article it will say who is sponsoring (traversing shell companies on a best effort policy), why is it being targeted to you (at least based on which selectors) and how many variants of the ad exist.
Silicon Valley spent the last ten years building platforms whose natural end state is digital addiction. In 2016, Trump and his allies hijacked them.
I wouldn't call it "hijacking" when that was already the intended purpose of those sites. Just because neo-liberals lost their perceived power (I'm neither liberal nor conservative) in said industries from years of abuse of said systems doesn't make it somehow more nefarious now.
So yet another culprit for the DNP defeat in the last election?
I'm definitely not a Trump supporter (I'm not even American), but if I remember correctly the DNP also had a gargantuan apparatus of traditional media and social networking tools working 24/7 to help Hillary win the election.
I've seen "Fake news" in both sides of every election I followed (Brazil and US since ever and UK in the last 4 years). The big difference now is that, aside from the fact Trump is a scary individual, this time the "big media" side lost. Not that it is any advantage in the case at hand.
If you read Bernays, he doesn't have a negative opinion of public relations and advertising, and clearly lays down why they are in fact a service rendered to the public.
It makes as much sense to say: propaganda is rooted in advertising and public relations.
Bernays unabashadly used PR and advertising to vile, vile ends, in his professional heyday.
He seems to have had something of a change of heart late in life, to the point that he advocated licensing of PR officials, in marked contrast to those he held earlier (also mentioned in this obit):
[I]n an interview in 1991, when he turned 100, he said: "Public relations today is horrible. Any dope, any nitwit, any idiot can call him or herself a public relations practitioner." He said he was still consulting with clients and regarded public relations loftily as a "social science."...
Around his 100th birthday, he campaigned unsuccessfully to get legislation passed in Massachusetts and other states that would have required the licensing of public-relations practitioners.
Begs the question is a term that comes from formal logic. It’s a translation of the Latin phrase petitio principii, and it's used to mean that someone has made a conclusion based on a premise that lacks support. (1, 2) It can be a premise that's independent from the conclusion (3) or in a simpler form, a premise that’s just a restatement of the conclusion itself. (4,5)
...
Begs the question is used wrong a lot. It took me about two seconds to find examples of bad usage in the news. Many people mistakenly believe it's OK to use the phrase to introduce a clever or obvious question.
The question being begged is whether "propaganda" is a bad thing in itself. The way I read your argument, you were summoning Bernays to show that since PR and advertising come from propaganda, they're bad by association.
The problem is that it's a mischaracterisation of the concept of propaganda as understood by Bernays, who saw it as what we see today as PR, which is much less controversial than what "propaganda" has come to mean through accidents of history.
Essentially, that argument is akin to saying "PR (today) is bad, because PR (back then) is bad." Ergo, I see that as begging the question, due to equivocation on the term "propaganda."
No, that's still raising the question of whether or not propaganda is bad. Though that's a fair question.
I'll disagree with your assertions and premises, though detailing why is going to take more time and space than I can devote here. I've been researching the question heavily for the past few months and should, the gods willing, be posting something to https://reddit.com/r/dredmorbius ... eventually.
So. Much. Clickbait. Isn't the article itself an example of such "weaponized" propaganda?
On a slightly meta point I'm starting to notice that a much larger portion of the population is prone to conspiracy theories than I previously suspected. It might be another one of those broken design things. The propensity to see patterns in everything naturally gives rise to conspiracy theory galore.
This seemed inevitable. People lamented the growth of fake news and niche circles reinforcing extreme attitudes on the internet. Ads exist because they effectively target increasingly small and specific groups of people. Its concerning enough when the motive is profit, but the same techniques can be applied to much greater effect as propaganda. The real concern is when those reinforcing themes are applied to individuals, instead of large swaths of people.
Using Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, and other data aggregators exposes you to manipulation. It can be convenient when it shows you relevant ads and the motivation is clear (money). But by the time you realize you're being manipulated for greater causes, like electing officials to power, its far too late to revert those changes.
An election is a war of opinion, and whoever wields the strongest memes wins. Ten times as many people subscribe to Trump's subreddit as Clinton's, and Trump memes circulate other anonymous Internet culture hubs like 4chan.
At stake is the position of the most powerful man in the world. It has been shown to be possible that a group of skilled programmers / hackers could influence the election. Why wouldn't, say, an expert team be hired to program ML that optimizes a candidate's size of web presence? Cheap price for a lot of political power.
A "weaponized propoganda machine"? Maybe not. But if it's really that easy to game the system, you can't ignore the possibility.
There is a BIG difference between using analytics (whether demographic, psychological, or what-have-you) to target voters (individually nor in groups) with a campaign message clearly marked as such in order to sway voters to some action, and using the same or similar techniques to create targeted "news" articles not labelled as campaign materials for the same purpose.
Not disclosing the campaign affiliation on those articles is illegal. If even a fraction of what this article is alleging concerning how the Trump campaign spent it's money is true, the FEC may have quite a bit to say about it: http://www.fec.gov/pages/brochures/notices.shtml
I'm comparing interpretations of what amounts to the same action by Trump and Obama. Admittedly I'm generalizing, but the analogy is more valid than a comparison of apples to oranges. Both Trump and Obama outsourced campaign analytics to professionals, and in both cases there were articles explaining the innovation. In Trump's case, this article (and others I have seen), has a distinctly negative tone. For Obama, the articles praised his data scientists and boasted of their high post-campaign salaries.
I challenge you to find an article describing Obama's campaign analytics with similarly negative tone to this article about "weaponized AI propaganda."
The differing interpretations of two similar scenarios are worth observing, since the variability represents evidence of bias on the part of the journalists writing the articles.
There is a difference in quality in using analytics (whether demographic, psychological, or what have you) to target a state, county, block, or individual with a campaign message (clearly marked as such) in order to try and sway voters to some action, and using the same or similar techniques to create targeted "news" articles not labelled as campaign materials.
People will keep explaining it with regular explanations.
But the rise of AI threatens all our systems that rely on the inefficiency of an attacker.
The first one to go is trust in the media.
Look at facebook and how it uses big data to manipulate people into spending more and clicking more and posting more and checking notifications more. Even if it means echo chambers. Think about your own experience. Are you more addicted today than, say, 5 years ago?
People think that they make their own decisions but when the best ideas are aggregated then it's you vs an entire big data server farm crunching numbers. Soon your willpower won't be enough, because peer pressure, media stories and even laws will bring you back to increasing their metrics. They can micromanage more and more interactions, get dossiers on everyone, and they will outmaneuver old media more easily every year.
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I'm using Firefox 51.0.1 with Privacy Badger 2017.1.26, NoScript 2.9.5.3 and Adblock Plus 2.8.2.
Edit: OK, so I had doubleclick.net, facebook.com, google-analytics.com and mxpnl.com untrusted in NoScript. After trusting them all, Privacy Badger still reports no tracking, but lists these trackers:
Well, I did trust/allow domains in NoScript. But I gather that NoScript does other stuff by default. And there's also the fact that I'm blocking WebRTC.
Mostly I was just worried that Privacy Badger was failing.
Not entirely sure. Could be a side effect of the combination of extensions. On iOS I tend to simply disable javascript. Blocks much of what needs blocking.
> From now on, the distinguishing factor between those who win elections and those who lose them will be how a candidate uses that data to refine their machine learning algorithms and automated engagement tactics. Elections in 2018 and 2020 won’t be a contest of ideas, but a battle of automated behavior change.
If anyone has a copy of the main paper Cambridge Analytica were using please link here.
I know that's vague, but to narrow it down on a previous article there was a picture of an individual reviewing said paper. Someone noted it and linked to the original paper.
I made a copy, but deleted it while cleaning things up.
This is painfully naïve, as though the careful selection and omission of stories to craft narratives on the more popular "real news" sources is somehow less concerning.
