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Algorithm can find a neighborhood’s political leanings by its cars
- ggggtez 9y agoBlah blah blah, cars are a sign of material wealth. You could do the same thing looking at the house themselves.
- throwaway613834 9y agoThe sedan vs. pickup truck example (you read the article right?) didn't sound like a distinction of material wealth to me. It seems more related to what kinds of attitudes/values/views/etc. that kind of person has. e.g. the obvious (naive?) possibility here is that Democrats don't like gas guzzlers due to a bigger concern about the environment.
- Banthum 9y agoOr, more directly, what kind of job or hobbies that person has. E.g. If you work in construction, or you hunt, you'd be a lot more likely to choose a pickup truck for purely practical reasons.
- throwaway613834 9y agoI would be very curious if you'd see these distinctions even in neighborhoods where occupational reasons don't exist. My hunch is that you still would, but I don't know/haven't looked into it.
- King-Aaron 9y agoThis particular point wouldn't work in Aus.. Most people who drive V8 utilities or large 4x4 wagons like Landcruisers have them just because. I have to wonder sometimes if owning a certain kind of car "just because you like it" is as reasonable a reason for ownership as I consider it to be.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- nodesocket 9y agoAm I the only one who is a little offended that just because you own a pickup truck then you must be conservative, and if you own a Tesla you must be liberal? Seems to me that is more stereotyping than lot's of things that social justice warriors get outraged over.
- King-Aaron 9y agoYou most certainly aren't alone.
- throwaway613834 9y ago> just because you own a pickup truck then you must be conservative Could you point us to whatever sentence in the article that made or even suggested this? I didn't see any part of the article stating that everyone who has a pickup truck is conservative.
- nodesocket 9y ago> For instance, if the number of sedans in a neighborhood is greater than the number of pickups, there is an 88 percent chance that the precinct will vote Democratic. Transpose those numbers to have more pickups than sedans and there is an 82 percent chance a precinct will vote Republican.
- throwaway613834 9y agoHow do you deduce "Everyone with a pickup truck is conservative/Republican." from the statement "If P(sedans) > P(pickups) then P(precinct voting Democrat) >= 88%." ?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- ubernostrum 9y agoYou know that phrase "machine learning is money laundering for bias"? You just learned what it means.
- noncoml 9y agoAnd that’s, girls and boys, how a few PhDs back in the 10’s, either by stupidity or lack of ethics, laid the foundation for the big brother state we have today.
- King-Aaron 9y agoI'm skeptical of this. How do they ascertain that the cars belong to the suburb? Would a suburb be ranked differently if for a month there were civil works that meant a lot of contractor vehicles etc were parked up? What about if the local Ferrari club decides to go for a cruise and all meet at a coffee shop in the neighbouring suburb every week? What if the suburb was located in a cold region, where it's more practical for most people to drive a SUV in winter? What about the republicans who drive Civics, and the republicans who drive Audis? What about the democrats that drive Toyota Tacomas, or the democrats who drive Volts? I mean, what would it make of me? I have a toyota hilux for work, a mx5 (miata) for track days, and a subaru wrx sti for driving to the shops. I wonder what my political leaning would be considered to be?
- chillingeffect 9y agoThey don't, your doubts are real, but... All machine learning involves a cost function. How close do the results have to be to make a useful prediction in the context.
- King-Aaron 9y agoCertainly. My main concern is the line: "on par with some information that takes billions of dollars to obtain via census surveys"... As soon as you have a researcher make this sort of claim, a politician will inevitably see it as "Don't spend money on census research, do this instead" ...
- throwaway613834 9y ago> What about if the local Ferrari club decides to go for a cruise and all meet at a coffee shop in the neighbouring suburb every week? I presume they looked at more than one neighborhood? Or are you suggesting Ferrari owners have a conspiracy to do this in general?
- King-Aaron 9y agoI wouldn't put it past a group of Fezza owners to be conspiring about something at any given time :P But to be serious, my point was more about the way that they are collecting their data. If you were focusing on buildings and structures in a suburb to rate demographics, I would think that you would have more accurate results. Cars don't stay still though, and just because it's in a location at a particular time doesn't necessarily mean it lives there. The ferrari club going for coffee is just an example of affluent (types of) cars possibly throwing out results.
- Tempest1981 9y agoReading bumper stickers would be even more valuable.
- fny 9y agoFull article for those who are interested: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2017/11/27/1700035114.full?sid=2d5af382-1da4-4ffe-a9fd-16033af26746 http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2017/11/27/1700035114.full...
- legostormtroopr 9y agoNot that statistical analysis like this isn't interesting, but when you have two choices - Red team or Blue team - which are also highly clustered and a ton of variables to use to correlate - pickup, sedan, hybrid, minivan - of course its going to be pretty easy to build a model that will pick the correct team with high accuracy.
- matteuan 9y ago> of course its going to be pretty easy even the existence of this correlation is not obvious
- michaelt 9y agoI wonder if they've got access to historical streetview images, to test how stable the claimed relationship is over time. After all, when oil prices rise you'd expect people to choose more efficient cars - not necessarily to change their voting patterns. I can't see any mention in the original paper of how they calibrated for that.
- MechEStudent 9y agoI like the change over time part. I think in the last election the "lesser of two evils" dominated, and many people who would have liked to vote Democrat but deeply didn't like Hillary had to make a horrible choice. Two states "flipped" from "blue" to "red", didn't they? Those were "rust-belt" states, so I'm very sure that there wasn't change in cars.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- matteuan 9y agoHopefully, it won't be used to improve gerrymandering algorithms.
- bshimmin 9y agoFrom the understated opulence of a Bentley I'm sorry, what? A Bentley is "understated"?
- MechEStudent 9y agoI think that was using a cliche phrase that has come to mean the opposite of the literal meaning. Who is wealthy enough to own a Bentley? The 1%? The 0.1%? Not me.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- MechEStudent 9y agoSo what should my next car be in order to be useless to this algorithm. I don't like being categorized and sifted. Once that information is available, it is always abused. Humans never don't abuse the power they get, and I hate it. I hate being on the receiving side. It may be small abuses, but within a civilization those add up, and we are on the edge of dying a death of a thousand cuts.
- dskrvk 9y agoAccording to the article, any car made before 1990.
- p1itopre 9y agoThis is not surprising at all. Another interesting problem that you can solve is using your social media friends' cars to predict an individual 's political leanings.
- LyndsySimon 9y agoI'd like to see it take into account parking habits. In my experience, it seems to be much less common to find a vehicle backed into a parking spot in more liberal areas. I wonder if this observation is correct.