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Unfortunately, stereotypes have utility. No one likes being caught up as a false positive in a stereotype, but when you look at mass market politics / advertisi
by everdev 8y ago
Unfortunately, stereotypes have utility. No one likes being caught up as a false positive in a stereotype, but when you look at mass market politics / advertising / marketing they cater to charactures of their intended audience because for the most part it seems to work. Every once in a while someone takes it too far and a group gets offended, but let's not pretend that Cambridge is the only one doing this.
- carbocation 8y agoStereotype is probably the correct word, but it's overloaded here. Stereotyping someone by something that they did not choose is a gateway to prejudice: skin color, eye color, place of birth. Stereotyping someone by something that they did choose may be very useful for making inference about them, because it is a revealed preference: clothing tastes, food preferences, etc.
- inetknght 8y agoStereotyping someone by something that you assume they chose is also a gateway to prejudice. @NeedMoreTea said it right by mentioning cases where someone might not have chosen their particular attire.
- sosborn 8y agoIt works on a macro level though. You have to be ok with idea that the stereotype isn’t 100% perfect, it’s just used to get a majority of your target market.
- ben_w 8y agoOver the last two years, I have witnessed many demonstrations of normal people totally failing to understand “group x tends to be more y” — “but”, I have seen many retort, “I’m x and not y!”, as if the statement had instead been “all x are y”.
- lupire 8y agoYeah, you have to be OK with the idea that you are part of system that has systemic discriminatory effects. It still stinks.
- WillPostForFood 8y agoIt also begs the question of whether we have any more free will in fashion choices than we do skin color.
- inetknght 8y agoI can see an argument for that but I don't think it's a valid assertion. People can change opinions. They can't so easily change their skin color.
- WillPostForFood 8y agoYou can change opinions, but it is unclear whether you have free will over the change.
- beginningguava 8y agoIt's just pattern recognition, we have it because it's good for survival. Maybe that grizzly bear is nice but I'm not going to try and pet it to find out because the stereotype is that it will rip me to shreds
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- deogeo 8y agoLooks to me like both are prejudice (even if applied to things usually not called such), and both may be useful.
- threatofrain 8y agoWhy is one prejudice and the other inference?
- Jedi72 8y agoIt 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."
- seem_2211 8y agoI covered stereotyping quite a bit in my university studies (I studied marketing) and the broad consensus was that stereotyping is a useful tool because it saves time. As much as we "should" judge people on the nuance of who they are and their individual character, we are presented with an overwhelming amount of information and we need to make a quick decision. This is why I've held the opinion for a while now that it's good to dress well. People are going to judge you and put a value on your time based on how you present yourself. Nothing wrong with maximizing your odds of that going well.
- tejtm 8y agoTrue, I use it as a social filter to avoid my time being wasted those so easily deceived
- lupire 8y agoThere is something wrong with "dressing for success" -- it makes it easier for frauds to get jobs from talented people. but it's a locally optimal decision, and it's not your fault that people judge your work by your clothes, so it's defensible even though wrong as a broader social context.
- snowwrestler 8y agoI 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 typically there are multiple personas, which allows you to create a matrix of product features with personas and again, establish priority for which feature to develop when, and how much to invest. I'm using "product" and "feature" here broadly, so for example even in an ad campaign, each ad can be considered a "product" with "features" like where it appears, what's in the imagery, what the text says, etc. You can run into trouble with personas if you start believing that they cover the entire range of potential customers. They don't, and again, that's the point: focus. That's why personas are sometimes given names and photos and detailed descriptions, to make it clear they're supposed to be individuals not stereotypes.
- autokad 8y agoone interesting one was that I took 5000 twitter profile photos and averaged the pixel values by male / female. unsurprisingly, the male average had short hair while the woman long. but what did surprise me was that the shirt area of the males had a blue hue and the women had a red one. its not like anyone in particular was wearing red/blue by sex, but on average they were.
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- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- dvfjsdhgfv 8y ago> its not like anyone in particular was wearing red/blue by sex, but on average they were. A certain Google employee noticed a similar pattern somewhere else.
- hellbanner 8y agoSource?
- extra88 8y agoThey are their source: > I took 5000 twitter profile photos and averaged the pixel values by male / female.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- tejtm 8y agoYou can likely change the apparent gender by increasing/decreasing contrast with high contrast looking more F and low contrast looking more M would be fun to see if the high contrast M v.s the low contrast F maintained apparent gender
- tomrod 8y ago
- downandout 8y agoThere is a large body of evidence suggesting that psychographic profiling is not effective [1] [2]. So I'm actually not sure that stereotypes do have utility when it comes to marketing. If they do have utility, the 2016 election is certainly not evidence of it. CA itself actually admitted that psychographic profiling - the technique referred to in this article by Mr. Wylie - wasn't even used by the Trump campaign [3]: "...despite articles still featured on its website touting the role psychographic techniques played in Trump’s campaign, the statement added, “We have always stated on the record that Cambridge Analytica did not have the opportunity to dive deeply into our psychographic offering because we simply did not have the time...." In short, this Mr. Wylie is hyping up the efficacy of the techniques he developed so he can get paid to speak at conferences like the one he did here and extend his 15 minutes of fame. There would be nothing wrong with his being paid to speak at conferences if his techniques had been used in the event that made him famous, however that is not the case here. [1] https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/3/23/17152564/cambridge-analytica-psychographic-microtargeting-what https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/3/23/17152564/ca... [2] https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/20/17138854/cambridge-analytica-facebook-data-trump-campaign-psychographic-microtargeting https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/20/17138854/cambridge-analyt... [3] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/kendalltaggart/the-truth-about-the-trump-data-team-that-people-are-freaking https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/kendalltaggart/the-trut...
- miketery 8y agoHis 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 alone swing the election it's still a variable. Similar to aviation accidents, it's typically never one big thing it's several small contributing factors. Here too this was one small thing, another is disenfranchised middle/lower class, list goes on.
- downandout 8y ago
- coldtea 8y agoStereotypes is just another name for abstractions and categorizing, which is how science works all the time. It's just that there are reality (statistics) based stereotypes and bad stereotypes (e.g. jewish conspiracy and such). Still, "all people are unique" is BS, more people within certain groups are more alike than different. X DOES Y because X belongs to group G is always a bad use of stereotyping (except if Y and G are connected by logical tautologies). But "X is MORE LIKELY to do Y because X belongs to group G" can be absolutely valid, and prove a great tool for marketing, policy decisions, threat identification, and such.
- crooked-v 8y agoIt's also important to keep in mind that the history of "bad" stereotypes usually has somebody intentionally signal-boosting them for their own gain, often financial, like medieval kings cultivating negative public opinion about Jews so they could exile them and take their stuff, but sometimes more indirectly social, like the elites in pre-slavery American colonies portraying blacks as inferior to keep the indentured mistreated lower classes from joining together in rebellions. Less malicious stereotyping doesn't have that history of being intentionally used to oppress or "other" groups of people in an organized way, and so doesn't have nearly as much offense to it. For example: "white men can't jump", or associating action movie stars or bodybuilders with Austrian accents.
- lupire 8y agoIs the Austrian Bodybuilder a Stereotype, or is it an archetype based on Arnold Schwarzenegger?
- lupire 8y agoThat's not quite right. Abstractions are true but simplified and miss some detail. Stereotypes are correlations where the coefficient is treated as equal to 1 for convenience. Even reality-based stereotypes are bad, because they perpetuate social ills like racist discrimination. Slavery is reality-based economic system. Being true doesn't make it good.
- forapurpose 8y agoThat begs the question, IMHO: Saying market analysis is nothing new is similar to the argument that police examining phone records is nothing new, therefore mass collection of metadata is not a problem. The changes in technology make the analysis associated with marketing far more powerful - with orders of magnitude more targets, more data, and more analysis applied to each individual - to the point where there is a risk to society of mass privacy violations and mass manipulation. And when this risk is applied to the political sphere, it becomes much more consequential. As the the Cambridge Analytica whistle-blower Christopher Wylie was quoted in the article, it was used by "Steve Bannon [to] build his insurgency and build the alt-right". Do we want this power, and the people who control it, to control our countries and societies? Probably people buying LL Bean jackets didn't know it would be used in an attempt to manipulate them. I'm not dismissing the fact that big questions remain: How effective is the manipulation (the biggest question in IT, IMO), and what makes some manipulation dangerous and some just regular persuasion? But these are very serious problems that might undermine things as fundamental as liberty and democracy.
- Scoundreller 8y agoThe more PC word is “heuristic”. Not much different than having to bin 240 students into 240 different placements. A perfect optimization of their preferences would require going through 240! Combinations for each placement round. But that’s a massive number, so you take some shortcuts and get a “good enough” solution for a lot less computing power.
- cbsmith 8y agoIt'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.
- TeMPOraL 8y agoThat's pretty much a definition of stereotype. Humans too form statistical models in their head, even if they don't usually call them that.
- eeZah7Ux 8y ago"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.
- TeMPOraL 8y agoOf course it is. "Oversimplification" is like literally the definition of "statistical model" in layman's terms. Statistical models are useful precisely because they cut out almost all the details.
- eeZah7Ux 8y agooversimplification: "simplification of something to such an extent that a distorted impression is given."
- cbsmith 8y agoA stereotype needn't have a statistical significance. In fact, it often doesn't. You're right that it a human equivalent, but most people form their models from statistical samples that are woefully small, biased, and fail to control for other factors... and worse still, stereotypes aren't actually informed by their own observations, but mere hearsay.
- afpx 8y agoSure, Induction is the basis of knowledge. But, it can’t tell you why something is the way it seems to be. And, it also can’t tell you if it will always be that way. For that you need theories and models that can be repeatedly tested. For example, if you wake up every day and see the sun rise, it’s safe to assume that it will always rise. But, without understanding the forces that cause the sun to rise (and the forces that cause those forces), you can’t really be sure. And, even then, an unaccounted and unknown force can come along and break the model (see: the black swan problem). Induction is unavoidable and very important, but it also the root of many logical errors. In social science, there are so many unknown forces at work, theories are very fragile.
- chrischen 8y agoit is useful for the self interested. The game theory but is that if some stereotypr, they will come out ahead in the short term. If all stereotype then everyone loses due to the stereotype killing off any that buck the stereotype. That is, the stereotype forces its own truth, which may be bad by killing diversity and adaptation. Obviously allowing some to do it to get ahead in the short term will inevitably lead to everyone doing it, that’s why we should discourage all from doing it.
- pessimizer 8y agoStereotypes have some limited utility, because people who believe that stereotypes have value reward you for conforming to them, and punish you for deviating from them. For example, they may only market a product to you if you conform to a stereotype they have of people who would use that product, instead of materially analyzing whether the product would be a good investment for you and how to present the argument, which is harder than just going "you look like one of our customers, but your look isn't complete, let us fill that hole." Of course, if what you're selling is a look and not useful for anything else, this is a good way to market, but if your product is useful, you can do better. It's also important to add that CA's techniques didn't work.