6 ms·

Simulating Democracy

62 points by samclemens 6y ago

veddox 6y ago
Fascinating history, reminding us once again how scary much of the tech we take for granted really is...
- PaulHoule 6y ago
  Is it? My uncle was the PR man for the Club Casino in Hampton NH (no gambling, but live entertainment.) His boss was an advocate for advertising in the Boston Phoenix but my uncle thought that Club Casino patrons didn't read the Phoenix. So my uncle got 3000 visitors to fill our a survey and I transcribed the cards into my TRS-80 Coco 3, printed out a crude report, and circled one number that he asked for. I got paid enough to replace the Coco 3 with a 286-based computer. My mom thought the report was ugly and not worth the money, but knowing how many thousands of dollars we saved, I should have held out for a 386. When politicians are building coalitions they have many discussions about things comparable to "do our customers read newspaper X?" and having data to work with definitely changes what you do.
  - RankingMember 6y ago
    > So my uncle got 3000 visitors to fill our a survey and I transcribed the cards into my TRS-80 Coco 3, printed out a crude report, and circled one number that he asked for. This can be read two ways: Did you give him the number he wanted, or did the survey end up being a favorable number to his cause without any influence by you? I think that's what the parent was getting at, that having reports can give an illusion of propriety regardless of whether someone is playing games with the numbers on the back end.
    - PaulHoule 6y ago
      The surveys had about 50 boxes that customers could tick, someone looking at it would have no idea that the whole survey project was motivated by the Phoenix question. I didn't until my Uncle told me the story years later. So, like the double-blind in medicine, we took a lot of effort to get a legitimate result. In the end my Uncle and his boss were not driven by ideology, but had different viewpoints and both knew that they could save enough money by stopping ads in the Phoenix that it was worth doing the study to prove it.
082349872349872 6y ago
TIL Punch beat The Onion to accidental newsroom. In the 1920's, not having the crunch for segmentation, marketers would exploit the social graph by seeding with association membership lists, doing push surveys, and asking who else ought to be surveyed.
- gumby 6y ago
  Apart from cartoons, this was the major content of Punch in its (lengthy!) heyday.
codesections 6y ago
> Asimov’s fictional future [in the Foundation series] didn’t need computers to predict its future—just geniuses, making magic with their formulas. The difference between Asimov and Simulmatics was that Asimov knew he was spinning a fantasy. People do not behave as predictably as billiard balls or water molecules. This so fundamentally misrepresents the Foundation series that it causes me to doubt the rest of the article. I realize that it's pretty tangential, but it's literally in a book. If the author doesn't get facts right when they can check them at their local library, it's hard for me to trust their accuracy when it comes to the genuinely hard stuff. Or, for that matter, forget checking their local library. Just reading to the end of the _summary_ of the Wikipedia article[0] would have gotten them this quote: > A key feature of Seldon's theory, which has proved influential in real-world social science,[3] is an uncertainty or incompleteness principle: if a population gains knowledge of its predicted behavior, its self-aware collective actions become unpredictable. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_series https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_series
- 627467 6y ago
  Agreed. I "blame" Seldon's 2nd foundation for my disbelief in the long term effectiveness of any predictive and recommendation engine. Long term, I'm not enjoying Spotify or youtube or netflix recommendations precisely because I know what they are trying to do.

62 points by samclemens 6y ago

veddox 6y ago

Fascinating history, reminding us once again how scary much of the tech we take for granted really is...

PaulHoule 6y ago
Is it? My uncle was the PR man for the Club Casino in Hampton NH (no gambling, but live entertainment.) His boss was an advocate for advertising in the Boston Phoenix but my uncle thought that Club Casino patrons didn't read the Phoenix. So my uncle got 3000 visitors to fill our a survey and I transcribed the cards into my TRS-80 Coco 3, printed out a crude report, and circled one number that he asked for. I got paid enough to replace the Coco 3 with a 286-based computer. My mom thought the report was ugly and not worth the money, but knowing how many thousands of dollars we saved, I should have held out for a 386. When politicians are building coalitions they have many discussions about things comparable to "do our customers read newspaper X?" and having data to work with definitely changes what you do.
- RankingMember 6y ago
  > So my uncle got 3000 visitors to fill our a survey and I transcribed the cards into my TRS-80 Coco 3, printed out a crude report, and circled one number that he asked for. This can be read two ways: Did you give him the number he wanted, or did the survey end up being a favorable number to his cause without any influence by you? I think that's what the parent was getting at, that having reports can give an illusion of propriety regardless of whether someone is playing games with the numbers on the back end.
  - PaulHoule 6y ago
    The surveys had about 50 boxes that customers could tick, someone looking at it would have no idea that the whole survey project was motivated by the Phoenix question. I didn't until my Uncle told me the story years later. So, like the double-blind in medicine, we took a lot of effort to get a legitimate result. In the end my Uncle and his boss were not driven by ideology, but had different viewpoints and both knew that they could save enough money by stopping ads in the Phoenix that it was worth doing the study to prove it.

082349872349872 6y ago

TIL Punch beat The Onion to accidental newsroom. In the 1920's, not having the crunch for segmentation, marketers would exploit the social graph by seeding with association membership lists, doing push surveys, and asking who else ought to be surveyed.

gumby 6y ago
Apart from cartoons, this was the major content of Punch in its (lengthy!) heyday.

codesections 6y ago

> Asimov’s fictional future [in the Foundation series] didn’t need computers to predict its future—just geniuses, making magic with their formulas. The difference between Asimov and Simulmatics was that Asimov knew he was spinning a fantasy. People do not behave as predictably as billiard balls or water molecules. This so fundamentally misrepresents the Foundation series that it causes me to doubt the rest of the article. I realize that it's pretty tangential, but it's literally in a book. If the author doesn't get facts right when they can check them at their local library, it's hard for me to trust their accuracy when it comes to the genuinely hard stuff. Or, for that matter, forget checking their local library. Just reading to the end of the _summary_ of the Wikipedia article[0] would have gotten them this quote: > A key feature of Seldon's theory, which has proved influential in real-world social science,[3] is an uncertainty or incompleteness principle: if a population gains knowledge of its predicted behavior, its self-aware collective actions become unpredictable. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_series https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_series

627467 6y ago
Agreed. I "blame" Seldon's 2nd foundation for my disbelief in the long term effectiveness of any predictive and recommendation engine. Long term, I'm not enjoying Spotify or youtube or netflix recommendations precisely because I know what they are trying to do.