For those who find this horrifying, the [typically unstated] assumption is that it works. I'm pretty skeptical of this. Think about it: what do you imagine the effect size is of seeing 10 articles like "4 Secrets to Losing Weight and Feeling GREAT While You Do It!" in your Facebook feed? I'd bet it's essentially 0. If seeing these kinds of articles is all it took to improve our body composition, then we'd all be absolutely shredded.
I'm not trying to argue that advertising doesn't work. Clearly it does. But there's a huge difference between being exposed to tens of thousands of Coca-Cola ads over a lifetime, and being exposed to 10 spam articles over the course of a month.
I'm also not trying to argue that this isn't creepy. Clearly it is. But the real 'target' of this scheme is the person buying the ads. I doubt this has any real effect on the person who sees them.
(do note that this research suffers a bit from p-hacking).
There is a good chance that you were already targeted before, since online manipulation is used by the big militaries. Think back about 2 years, reading about SJW, politics, neo-nazis, antifa, BLM, manspreading, immigrants, the deep state, etc. Good chance at least some of your perception about these subjects was molded by just a few individuals. For instance, remember that Russian girl throwing bleach on "manspreaders" in the metro? You may have had a strong reaction to that, and it would be the desired effect of Russian troll-factory.
Specifically, on the effect of manipulating the Facebook feed to control behavior, Facebook did some controversial research themselves, where they used sentiment analysis to make a feed more or less positive. People who were fed negative feeds, started using negative words in their own status update: https://www.forbes.com/sites/gregorymcneal/2014/06/28/facebo...
> The marketing study suggested companies should "[c]oncentrate media during prime vulnerability moments, aligning with content involving tips and tricks, instant beauty rescues, dressing for the success, getting organized for the week and empowering stories... Concentrate media during her most beautiful moments, aligning with content involving weekend guides, weekend style, beauty tips for social activities and positive stories." The Facebook study, combined with last year's marketing study suggests that marketers may not need to wait until Mondays or Thursdays to have an emotional impact, instead social media companies may be able to manipulate timelines and news feeds to create emotionally fueled marketing opportunities.
Long term priming, as opposed to short term with gaps of a second or so, was one of the prime victims of the replication crisis and seems to actually not exist.
Priming is one of the psychology topics worst afflicted by p-hacking. Almost every prominent priming study has gone down in flames during the replication crisis. Consistent, repeated propaganda has real effects, priming doesn't.
Like said by the other poster, long-term priming is not proven nor disproven: Science needs better and more experiments. So we don't yet scientifically know enough about long-term priming to make a judgment on its effects. Short-term priming is well-established and has real measurable effects though. The prominent priming studies you refer to are the "exotic" studies -- these looked at less defined aspects of priming, and were found to be lacking.
> Amidst the recent furor over failures to replicate some empirical results on behavior priming, it is important to emphasize that some basic behavior-priming effects are real, robust, and easily replicable even if others are much more problematic.
For instance, your reply contains too many words starting with "p" and "pr" for it to be a mere coincidence :). (syntactical priming is something that authors or editors have to guard against, as it can make for poor quality writing).
The prior for priming effects as strong as those claimed by psychology is, obviously, extremely low. After all, the only reason everybody knows about priming is that it got lots of press coverage, because it was surprising and unexpected. Now that we know the evidence for it is very weak, we can just go back to our original prior for it, which was very low.
In general this is true for almost all popular psychology results. They're all popular because they're surprising, which is what makes them interesting. And now we are learning that such surprises were only produced in the first place because the evidence for them was p-hacked. It turns out that there are no tiny hacks that radically change human behavior, beyond placebo effect.
I'm sure that psychology produces some real results, but whatever they are, they aren't what get reported in the New York Times, or TED talks, or bestselling pop science books.
Absence of evidence is no evidence of absence. You could put the Bayesian prior to be extremely low, but a zero chance would not make you a Bayesian anymore, it would make you a believer in that something is simply not possible (and no amount of scientific evidence would update your priors. It really is scientifically a mistake to claim: There exist no black swans. To proof that, one would have to observe all of existence. Now... should you worry about black swans, when all you see is white swans? Depends on you and the amount of risk managing. But that poster claimed all of priming is non-scientific, when we have clear replicated proof.
Suppose I run a fake investment company that pretends to double your money, but actually just steals it. Suppose you find out all my claims are lies, and demand your money back. How would you react if I said "The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence. The prior probability of my investment strategy working is nonzero. Now give me more money."
Just pointing out that priors can't be zero isn't a principled stance, it's Pascal's mugging. You can use it to justify literally anything.
It might have a low chance of success on one particular person ... but target ten or a hundred thousand, and there will be some statistically significant shift. Advertising isn't a sniper rifle. It's a cluster bomb.
You have to remember the majority of people are both not tech savvy and don't pay attention to things like advertising trends.
My mother for example is heavily affected by the ads she sees on Facebook and other places. All it takes is one or two articles and I've had to talk to her a few times about being careful about the sites she visits and what she reads online.
So this service? This would be remarkably effective on people like her. This service isn't for people like us who are a bit more aware of how advertising works. It's for the majority of people.
I mean, you can show people ads about "Are you an immigrant? Claim your government-sponsored house. We will help you to qualify even if you don't meet the criteria" and now you conceived the idea that the government is giving away free houses to immigrants and there's even a way to cheat the system and get a house even if you do not qualify.
As far as I remember they essentially divided people into categories through data gathered through facebook and targeted them with ads like this.
I guess if you can manage to put the cookie to identify your target you can run all kind of manipulative campaigns because you can change the perception of the reality.
You don't have to be honest and straightforward and speak directly to the target. Simply re-shape his/her reality.
Want a rise? Stalk your boss with ads about developer jobs with salaries way higher than yours. Your boss might start getting the idea of pay rise due to the false reality you prseented.
quote: 'I mean, you can show people ads about "Are you an immigrant? Claim your government-sponsored house. We will help you to qualify even if you don't meet the criteria" and now you conceived the idea that the government is giving away free houses to immigrants'
I think I actually saw an ad similar to that - my takeaway was "damn, these slimy scammers are targeting desperate immigrants", so I guess that means they didn't hit their target?
The inability to quantify targeted advertising's worth at specific levels is probably seen as a benefit by those employed on both sides of the transaction (i.e. marketing side and serving side).
The atmospheric pressure and temperature on Venus are far too high for it to be habitable. Even if those problems were surmountable, there is no liquid water, and the days are very very long.
> (which lead to subsequently wiped out all our gains in a week)
This is the key point. Many strategies that yield above-market returns often do so only because they're taking on large amounts of risk, even if that risk isn't immediately apparent. Think about trading cryptocurrencies, buying penny stocks, selling naked options, etc. You _can_ make a lot of money doing any of these things, but you'll be exposed to quite a bit of downside along the way, and most people who try will end up in the red.
This is my first time hearing about art19. But after a quick visit to their site, I can guess at what GP was referring to. Looks like they do listener tracking, targeted ads, dynamic ad insertion, etc.
A lot of indices are something like "Top [N] stocks weighted by market cap in [industry/region/country]". You could call those stocks 'picked', but it's not as though someone is doing some deep analysis of the companies' fundamentals or trading history in order to decide which stocks make it into the index. I think that type of analysis is the kind of thing most people think of when they hear about 'stock picking'.
Yes, no index is perfect. But most of them provide more diversification than the average person would be able to achieve by manually managing a portfolio.
Thanks for sharing this infographic. Today is the first time I've ever heard about Kowloon Walled City. I was immediately intrigued, because it looks like something out of science fiction. It reminds me of just how breathtakingly diverse the human experience can be.
Its the other way around, science fiction drew inspiration from Kowloon. For example Ghost in the Shell is set in a straight copy of mid nineties Hong Kong.
Some scenes can even be traced shot for shot with real locations, including unreal Kai Yak airport landing approach over kowloon
https://vimeo.com/33731256
I first heard about it in a cyberpunk video game, Shadowrun: Hong Kong, and learned today that it is real. It felt like truly something out of science fiction back when I was playing the game.
I don't understand the connection to energy consumption. Humans have been able to extract increasing amounts of energy over time without correspondingly large increases in human intelligence. I don't see a strong reason to doubt that this will continue, so I don't see a strong reason to doubt that a >= human-level-intelligence AI could do it either.
The raw computing power of the human wetware has not increased appreciably over historical timescales, but the total intelligence of humanity, includes, for example, the increase in effective intelligence gained by storing knowledge in external devices like books. The gestalt organism that is "humanity" is much smarter than it was 500 or even 100 years ago, which correlates with our ability to extract resources. It's an extremely simplistic model, but since I was only after a very rough guess, I went with it.
This is probably a good criticism if it turns out that the right level of abstraction for most problems is Physics. And it seems like your argument would apply equally well against the idea of human intelligence. Luckily, our minds have developed other abstractions that allow us to solve problems much faster than if we had to simulate them as physics problems. For example, I don't need a physics-level simulation of my friend's brain when I want to predict how they'll react to a gift I'm giving them.
You're right, there are lots of problems where a simpler abstraction is possible.
But I don't think my argument applies to human intelligence, it just means that human intelligence is what you can get with all the data points you can get by observing the world (and some simulation done by our brains, but I'm under the impression that our brains don't perform accurate simulation, looks more like heuristics).
I haven't seen anyone argue that intentionality, qualia, or consciousness would necessarily be either a precondition or a result of developing AGI. In fact, thought experiments like the "paperclip maximizer" are often brought up to argue that a machine could be very alien in its internal experience or lack thereof, but still pose an existential threat.
Of course any powerful intelligence can understand that we wouldn't really want that. The question is why would it care about what we really want? Its core values would be that more paperclips is good, and doing what humans really want is evil if it results in less paperclips.
Currently, we don't know how to properly define "do what I mean / do what we really want" goal in a formal manner; if we had an superpowerful AGI system in front of us ready to be launched today, we wouldn't know how to encode such a goal in it with guarantees that it won't backfire. That's a problem that we still need to solve, and this solution is not likely to appear as a side-effect of simply trying to build a powerful/effective system.
The paperclip maximizer example starts with a human asking an AGI to make some paperclips. That turning into an all-consuming goal at the expense of everything else the AGI would understand humans to care about is the problem with the thought experiment.
However a more complicated example like having the AGI bring about world peace or clean up the environment could have undesirable side-effects because we don't know how to specify what we really want, or have conflicting goals. But that's the same problem we have with existing power structures like governments or corporations.
Maybe just commit to removing the most attention-grabbing apps from your phone? Seems like a good way to keep the aspects of your phone that you value while getting rid of the ones that you don't.
Yeah a time schedule or a really long and cumbersome unlock password for social media and web browser would really help. But then you need that recipe for dinner and you think "this is stupid, I'm an adult, I can handle this" and you remove it.
This was my experience - after removing apps / block there would be an initial period where I would stick to it, but eventually would fall back to the same old routine. Changing engrained habits is extremely difficult.
I'm not trying to argue that advertising doesn't work. Clearly it does. But there's a huge difference between being exposed to tens of thousands of Coca-Cola ads over a lifetime, and being exposed to 10 spam articles over the course of a month.
I'm also not trying to argue that this isn't creepy. Clearly it is. But the real 'target' of this scheme is the person buying the ads. I doubt this has any real effect on the person who sees them.