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His 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 s

His 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
> It was definitely effective and stretched ad dollars further. The evidence seems to indicate that not only is the technique not effective, but that it wasn't actually used in the campaign. More than one article, in traditionally liberal publications that would normally be on his side, refers to Mr. Wylie's techniques as "snake oil". Also remember that we only know about Cambridge Analytica because Mr. Wylie announced to the world that he had created "Steve Bannon’s psychological warfare mindfuck tool". That is a grandiose statement if I've ever heard one. His career since his announcement seems to have consisted of going around and being paid to talk about his claims. So we have one guy, who stands to benefit from such claims, saying all of this in the face of a mountain of evidence from credible news sources that shows that his techniques didn't work and weren't used. It's fair to say that his claims are suspect at best, which makes the idea that CA had any effect on the outcome of the election highly suspect as well.
- TheOtherHobbes 8y ago
  Everything you wrote is wrong - at least as far as CA's contribution to the Brexit vote. In reality CA used very specific targeted advertising on FB. https://mobile.twitter.com/Nealb2010/status/1059068463933743104 https://mobile.twitter.com/Nealb2010/status/1059068463933743... The point about these campaign structures isn't that they're generically effective. In fact they don't need to be generically effective. They just need to be able to swing a vote by a few percent to define the outcome. In the 2017 UK election, the Tory majority - such as it was - only survived because of a couple of marginals returned majorities of tens or hundreds. The adversarial zero-sum nature of representative democracy amplifies those tiny voter preferences into a monolithic national mandate which does not in fact exist. This how CA's snake oil works. Where a vote is close and uncertain, it only needs to alter the voting intent of an absolutely tiny percentage of voters. That turns out to be almost trivially easy to do.
  - downandout 8y ago
    I didn't mention Brexit, I was talking about the election that made this Wylie character famous. Nevertheless, again, despite the claims in random Twitter posts here and there, mountains of evidence point to psychographic profiling being largely ineffective regardless of what type of vote it is being used on. “Swinging the vote by a few percent” is a major undertaking. It is not “trivially easy to do,” as you put it, certainly not through scientifically dubious methods that (in the case of the 2016 election) are not even actually used. Mr. Wylie is a programmer that violated confidentiality agreements with his employer to try to gain notoriety and presumably raise his income. That will make him difficult to employ ever again in any traditional setting, even among those that are sympathetic to his political beliefs. He seems to believe, or at least wants others to believe, that he is today’s Edward Snowden - even though the two couldn’t be more different. I don’t know how well his monetization efforts are working out, but based on the fact that he is now making clickbait-type public statements that can be easily debunked to get media coverage, it seems that it may not have worked out as he planned.

downandout 8y ago

> It was definitely effective and stretched ad dollars further. The evidence seems to indicate that not only is the technique not effective, but that it wasn't actually used in the campaign. More than one article, in traditionally liberal publications that would normally be on his side, refers to Mr. Wylie's techniques as "snake oil". Also remember that we only know about Cambridge Analytica because Mr. Wylie announced to the world that he had created "Steve Bannon’s psychological warfare mindfuck tool". That is a grandiose statement if I've ever heard one. His career since his announcement seems to have consisted of going around and being paid to talk about his claims. So we have one guy, who stands to benefit from such claims, saying all of this in the face of a mountain of evidence from credible news sources that shows that his techniques didn't work and weren't used. It's fair to say that his claims are suspect at best, which makes the idea that CA had any effect on the outcome of the election highly suspect as well.

TheOtherHobbes 8y ago
Everything you wrote is wrong - at least as far as CA's contribution to the Brexit vote. In reality CA used very specific targeted advertising on FB. https://mobile.twitter.com/Nealb2010/status/1059068463933743104 https://mobile.twitter.com/Nealb2010/status/1059068463933743... The point about these campaign structures isn't that they're generically effective. In fact they don't need to be generically effective. They just need to be able to swing a vote by a few percent to define the outcome. In the 2017 UK election, the Tory majority - such as it was - only survived because of a couple of marginals returned majorities of tens or hundreds. The adversarial zero-sum nature of representative democracy amplifies those tiny voter preferences into a monolithic national mandate which does not in fact exist. This how CA's snake oil works. Where a vote is close and uncertain, it only needs to alter the voting intent of an absolutely tiny percentage of voters. That turns out to be almost trivially easy to do.
- downandout 8y ago
  I didn't mention Brexit, I was talking about the election that made this Wylie character famous. Nevertheless, again, despite the claims in random Twitter posts here and there, mountains of evidence point to psychographic profiling being largely ineffective regardless of what type of vote it is being used on. “Swinging the vote by a few percent” is a major undertaking. It is not “trivially easy to do,” as you put it, certainly not through scientifically dubious methods that (in the case of the 2016 election) are not even actually used. Mr. Wylie is a programmer that violated confidentiality agreements with his employer to try to gain notoriety and presumably raise his income. That will make him difficult to employ ever again in any traditional setting, even among those that are sympathetic to his political beliefs. He seems to believe, or at least wants others to believe, that he is today’s Edward Snowden - even though the two couldn’t be more different. I don’t know how well his monetization efforts are working out, but based on the fact that he is now making clickbait-type public statements that can be easily debunked to get media coverage, it seems that it may not have worked out as he planned.