I watched the documentary and had two major issues:
- CA was said to be able to identify swing voters, and then swing them. I thought about this a bit. How would you even collect data about this? Do you just assume that people who have voted both ways are swing voters for this election? Ok, so suppose that's what a swing voter is and you somehow have a dataset of people who've done this. You have the labels, what are the features? Postcode? Age? Race? Gender? Income? (scary shit that you have this btw). But aren't those things going to tend towards well known facts already? As in old white male in the countryside, like Rep? What are you really getting that isn't already well documented? Anyway supposed you then write a nice RF or similar model that is good at finding swing voters. What do you even show them to make them swing your way? How will you ever know if that actually worked? It simply seems like a stretch to think CA provided anything useful.
- What is it about CA's methods that were so effective? Would there not be some team on the other side of both the presidential and Brexit campaigns using exactly the same methods to the same end? Wouldn't there be Hilary and Remainer people who could buy/collect the same data, identify the same voters, and then send them something to push the other way? Why didn't the journalist look for someone like that? After all someone had to do something similar for Obama.
- CA was said to be able to identify swing voters, and then swing them. I thought about this a bit. How would you even collect data about this? Do you just assume that people who have voted both ways are swing voters for this election? Ok, so suppose that's what a swing voter is and you somehow have a dataset of people who've done this. You have the labels, what are the features? Postcode? Age? Race? Gender? Income? (scary shit that you have this btw). But aren't those things going to tend towards well known facts already? As in old white male in the countryside, like Rep? What are you really getting that isn't already well documented? Anyway supposed you then write a nice RF or similar model that is good at finding swing voters. What do you even show them to make them swing your way? How will you ever know if that actually worked? It simply seems like a stretch to think CA provided anything useful.
- What is it about CA's methods that were so effective? Would there not be some team on the other side of both the presidential and Brexit campaigns using exactly the same methods to the same end? Wouldn't there be Hilary and Remainer people who could buy/collect the same data, identify the same voters, and then send them something to push the other way? Why didn't the journalist look for someone like that? After all someone had to do something similar for Obama.