
Simulating Democracy - samclemens
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2020/10/08/simulating-democracy/
======
codesections
> 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
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.

------
082349872349872
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
Apart from cartoons, this was the major content of Punch in its (lengthy!)
heyday.

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

~~~
PaulHoule
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
> 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
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.

