
Algorithm can find a neighborhood’s political leanings by its cars - kshatrea
https://news.stanford.edu/2017/11/28/neighborhoods-cars-indicate-political-leanings/
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legostormtroopr
Not 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.

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matteuan
> of course its going to be pretty easy

even the existence of this correlation is not obvious

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noncoml
And 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.

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ggggtez
Blah blah blah, cars are a sign of material wealth. You could do the same
thing looking at the house themselves.

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throwaway613834
The 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.

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Banthum
Or, 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.

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King-Aaron
This 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.

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King-Aaron
I'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?

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throwaway613834
> 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?

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King-Aaron
I 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.

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throwaway613834
It's doesn't mean anything to just point at the source of an error though. You
need to show that the error results in a bias (edit: or variance) on a large
scale. My point here was that it seems pretty plausible for the law of large
numbers to take care of little variances like this, so if you want to claim
their collection was problematic, explain which errors could occur
_consistently_ so as to reach a wrong conclusion.

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bshimmin
_From the understated opulence of a Bentley_

I'm sorry, what? A Bentley is "understated"?

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MechEStudent
I 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.

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Tempest1981
Reading bumper stickers would be even more valuable.

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MechEStudent
So 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.

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dskrvk
According to the article, any car made before 1990.

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michaelt
I 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.

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MechEStudent
I 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.

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fny
Full article for those who are interested:

[http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2017/11/27/1700035114.full...](http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2017/11/27/1700035114.full?sid=2d5af382-1da4-4ffe-a9fd-16033af26746)

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LyndsySimon
I'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.

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matteuan
Hopefully, it won't be used to improve gerrymandering algorithms.

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p1itopre
This 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.

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nodesocket
Am 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.

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chillingeffect
You're right to feel snubbed.

Thus type of.machine learning is externalized, automated prejudice.

See also the gay detector.

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zimablue
You can't ban any statistical reasoning about humans because it's sometimes
wrong.

"We stopped testing the medicine because even though it cured 99% of cases
those that weren't cured were offended by the possibility that someone might
assume that it would cure them"

Statistical reasoning becomes prejudice when you act on it in a way that is
harmful to society or you overgeneralize it. If you try to ban it then you're
just avoiding emotionally uncomfortable truths.

