I wanna talk a sec about CA, FB, and data science for a sec. I think we're badly mis-identifying the problem.
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Data science can be a process of squeezing blood from a stone. For as many things I've seen DS do, I've seen the equivalent insight that we ought to market khakis to land rover owners.
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Sometimes, data science is really about telling the obvious at scale. We all know which of our friends and family are the racisg conspiract theorists. We don't need data science to figure that out. That's not the insight, that's not the power.
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The power is having the data at scale in the first place. Cambridge Analytica probably didn't need to do some fancy algorithmic dance. They might have, it may have optimized it, but the algorithms didn't make the weapon.
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The weapon was built the very minute that FB aggregated the data and gave it an interactive frontend. The weapon is the raw, unprocessed information at scale. Not the neural network it's fed into. The weapon is the fact that a display mechanism is bolted to those data.
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Cambridge Analytica wasn't the smartest, most innovative. They were the most craven.
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The problem here is that facebook has access to this data at all. That they can parcel it out at will, uncontrolled. But then also that the flow can be reversed: you can push data of your own back to those same users.
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Being able to do one of those things at scale is hugely powerful. Being able to do both is unconscionable.
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Facebook itself is the weapon. The fact that data is strapped to a display engine is the issue. CA is the problem only insomuch as they were the first group willing to do the Bad Thing that we all have been screaming about for years.
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If it wasn't CA, it would have been someone else. Because the Bad Thing was too easy and too obvious to ignore.
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End of conversation
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