Microtargeting groups has already been observed to cause preference drift over time leading to large consequences (e.g. Cambridge Analytica).
Reminder: no, it didn’t, as you can see by scrolling the relevant WP section about impact (ie. consequences), not the irrelevant scandal section. We know from actual political advertising experiments their data was far too crude to make any impact (not that anything they said wasn’t a tissue of advertising & lies), and they weren’t even used by the Trump campaign!
Thanks for pointing that out! It’s embarrassing that I made a mistake, but it’s also relieving in some sense to learn that the impacts were not as I had thought them to be.
I hope this error doesn’t serve to invalidate the entire post. I don’t really know what the post-publishing editing etiquette is, but I don’t want to keep anything in the post that might serve as misinformation so I’ll edit this line out.
Please let me know if there are any other flaws you find and I’ll get them fixed.
Anyone worth their salt here already knows that predictive analytics obviously works on humans, since the the human brain has zero days that can obviously be discovered with enough behavior data (e.g. by having multi-armed bandit algorithms run A/B tests, you don’t even need AI).
The Cambridge Analytica people knew that too, and took advantage of it.
Nobody should be persuaded in either direction by the clusterfuck that emerged as a result, nor by any of the people who ended up persuaded by it. This should be ABSOLUTELY BASIC operational security for anything related to researching persuasion technology.
Reminder: no, it didn’t, as you can see by scrolling the relevant WP section about impact (ie. consequences), not the irrelevant scandal section. We know from actual political advertising experiments their data was far too crude to make any impact (not that anything they said wasn’t a tissue of advertising & lies), and they weren’t even used by the Trump campaign!
Thanks for pointing that out! It’s embarrassing that I made a mistake, but it’s also relieving in some sense to learn that the impacts were not as I had thought them to be.
I hope this error doesn’t serve to invalidate the entire post. I don’t really know what the post-publishing editing etiquette is, but I don’t want to keep anything in the post that might serve as misinformation so I’ll edit this line out.
Please let me know if there are any other flaws you find and I’ll get them fixed.
I don’t think this invalidates the point that microtargeting can be very effective.
Anyone worth their salt here already knows that predictive analytics obviously works on humans, since the the human brain has zero days that can obviously be discovered with enough behavior data (e.g. by having multi-armed bandit algorithms run A/B tests, you don’t even need AI).
The Cambridge Analytica people knew that too, and took advantage of it.
Nobody should be persuaded in either direction by the clusterfuck that emerged as a result, nor by any of the people who ended up persuaded by it. This should be ABSOLUTELY BASIC operational security for anything related to researching persuasion technology.