Verdict: my reluctance was justified, and I should have held firm.
It vastly exaggerates what CA did, takes several of their garbage, baseless claims at face value and ultimately makes a pantomime villain out of a minor character.
I've spoken to mathematicians who are adamant that "psychographics" simply doesn't work.
CA were selling snake oil. Nobody has ever been able to prove that any of it worked.
The Great Hack laps it all up.
Not to mention infuriating snippets like:
"CA would say you've gotta target this state, that state"
"How would they know that?"
"That's their secret sauce!"
Erm, any political science graduate could build a model to determine which states to target.
Ultimately I'm with @OwenGleiberman: it's understandable that people were shaken by Trump's win and sought desperately to find a bogeyman, to reassure themselves that without this one evil data firm, there's no Trump. But it's not true variety.com/2019/film/revi…
I'd also strongly suggest that anyone who still buys the vastly exaggerated version of CA's role and capabilities reads @Soccermatics's excellent book Outnumbered, which delves into the details of CA's claims and other cases of overhyped algorithms goodreads.com/book/show/3676…
Two final points:
• When Obama campaign used FB users' friend lists & behavioural nudges to persuade voters in 2012, it was written up as smart use of data docs.house.gov/meetings/IF/IF…
• Read this thread by an Obama campaign staffer explaining what they did
I'm not making value judgments on how either the Obama or Trump campaigns used FB data to try to persuade voters, but you cannot say one was smart and good, and the other was evil.
Right or wrong, they're both industry-standard ways of using personal data to attempt to persuade.
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Recent results from major international tests show that the average person’s capacity to process information, use reasoning and solve novel problems has been falling since around the mid 2010s.
What should we make of this?
Nobody would argue that the fundamental biology of the human brain has changed in that time span. People’s underlying intellectual capacity is surely undimmed.
But there is growing evidence that the extent to which people can practically apply that capacity has been diminishing.
For such an important topic, there’s remarkably little long-term data on attention spans, focus etc.
But one source that has consistently tracked this is the Monitoring The Future survey, which finds a steep rise in the % of people struggling to concentrate or learn new things.
NEW: The actions of Trump and Vance in recent weeks highlight something under-appreciated.
The American right is now ideologically closer to countries like Russia, Turkey and in some senses China, than to the rest of the west (even the conservative west).
In the 2000s, US Republicans thought about the world in similar ways to Britons, Europeans, Canadians.
This made for productive relationships regardless of who was in the White House.
The moderating layers around Trump #1 masked the divergence, but with Trump #2 it’s glaring.
In seven weeks Trump’s America has shattered decades-long western norms and blindsided other western leaders with abrupt policy changes.
This is because many of the values of Trump’s America are not the values of western liberal democracies.
NEW: updated long-run gap in voting between young men and women in Germany:
The gender gap continues to widen, but contrary to what is often assumed, young men continue to vote roughly in line with the overall population, while young women have swung very sharply left.
My wish for the next election is that poll trackers look like the one on the right 👉 not the left
This was yet another election where the polling showed it could easily go either way, but most of the charts just showed two nice clean lines, one leading and one trailing. Bad!
Pollsters and poll aggregators have gone to great lengths to emphasise the amount of uncertainty in the polls in recent weeks...
But have generally still put out charts and polling toplines that encourage people to ignore the uncertainty and focus on who’s one point ahead. Bad!
The thing about human psychology is, once you give people a nice clean number, it doesn’t matter how many times you say "but there’s an error margin of +/- x points, anything is possible".
People are going to anchor on that central number. We shouldn’t enable this behaviour!
We’re going to hear lots of stories about which people, policies and rhetoric are to blame for the Democrats’ defeat.
Some of those stories may even be true!
But an underrated factor is that 2024 was an absolutely horrendous year for incumbents around the world 👇
Harris lost votes, Sunak lost votes, Macron lost votes, Modi (!) lost votes, as did the Japanese, Belgian, Croatian, Bulgarian and Lithuanian governments in elections this year.
Any explanation that fails to take account for this is incomplete.