Clinton's data-driven "ground game" sucked in exactly the same way "targeted ads" suck, for the same reason

Tom Ewing rails against the Clinton campaign's reliance on "micro-modelling preference at an individual voter level to tell [volunteers] who to turn out where with what message and where to allocate resources."

The point is though that this micro-targeting technology is also why you see the shitty Facebook ads you do, and why businesses think they can 'serve' you just the right video, and why web pages load so fucking slowly because they're scraping all the data they can for better targeting. And it doesn't work! It really publicly doesn't work, since those idiots at Votecastr who Slatepitched the entire election used very similar micro-modelling techniques. This ought to be a wake-up call for all this stuff, but I bet it won't be.


Polls etc. [Tom Ewing]

(via Super Punch)


(Image: Data Science Logo, Calvin.Andrus, CC-BY-SA)