As much as we "should" judge people on the nuance of who they are and their individual character, we are presented with an overwhelming amount of information and we need to make a quick decision.
This is why I've held the opinion for a while now that it's good to dress well. People are going to judge you and put a value on your time based on how you present yourself. Nothing wrong with maximizing your odds of that going well.
The point of using personas is not to stereotype your customers but to establish focus sufficient to permit clear product decisions. In other words the idea is not "all our customers are like this" but "this is the type of customer we care about the most." Or more typically there are multiple personas, which allows you to create a matrix of product features with personas and again, establish priority for which feature to develop when, and how much to invest.
I'm using "product" and "feature" here broadly, so for example even in an ad campaign, each ad can be considered a "product" with "features" like where it appears, what's in the imagery, what the text says, etc.
You can run into trouble with personas if you start believing that they cover the entire range of potential customers. They don't, and again, that's the point: focus. That's why personas are sometimes given names and photos and detailed descriptions, to make it clear they're supposed to be individuals not stereotypes.
So either you have to literally prototype each touchpoint (for example) with every possible customer (even the ones who can't articulate what they actually need), or the design is going to have to be based on insight into human nature and (varying) capabilities. Luckily, most designed things are simple enough that generalizing about users in order to discover the "right answer" isn't an unachievable fantasy.
It's about humanizing the product design process, don't pay any mind to extraneous information like hair color etc. At the end of the day, personas should be representative of the people you are developing products for and that's inherently valuable to the product development process and all the people involved who don't have a chance to be in front of users and get a feel for their needs, which determine how successful your product will be when they are aligned with what you are coding.
Again, it seems you have a strong baseless bias against user centered design practices. You argue against a strawman of your creation.
Right. Personas should be backed up by research into real customers and potential customers. "Garbage in = garbage out."
That is another word for stereotypes.
If I'm selling gasoline, I'm going to target my marketing at people who own cars. I wouldn't call that a stereotype.
And this is a direct quote from a mate who works for a big 4 consultancy "gels" being the upper class young women who will be working there.
I suspect that Mr Bannon wearing Barbour isn't exactly taken well by their marketing team.
It's just that there are reality (statistics) based stereotypes and bad stereotypes (e.g. jewish conspiracy and such).
Still, "all people are unique" is BS, more people within certain groups are more alike than different.
X DOES Y because X belongs to group G is always a bad use of stereotyping (except if Y and G are connected by logical tautologies).
But "X is MORE LIKELY to do Y because X belongs to group G" can be absolutely valid, and prove a great tool for marketing, policy decisions, threat identification, and such.
Less malicious stereotyping doesn't have that history of being intentionally used to oppress or "other" groups of people in an organized way, and so doesn't have nearly as much offense to it. For example: "white men can't jump", or associating action movie stars or bodybuilders with Austrian accents.
Even reality-based stereotypes are bad, because they perpetuate social ills like racist discrimination. Slavery is reality-based economic system. Being true doesn't make it good.
A perfect optimization of their preferences would require going through 240! Combinations for each placement round. But that’s a massive number, so you take some shortcuts and get a “good enough” solution for a lot less computing power.
> I took 5000 twitter profile photos and averaged the pixel values by male / female.
would be fun to see if the high contrast M v.s the low contrast F maintained apparent gender
https://twitter.com/autokad/status/689897031414886400
keep in mind these profile pictures are not centered, some are group photos, etc. its not 'super strong' but it seems evident to me, let me know what you think
Stereotyping someone by something that they did not choose is a gateway to prejudice: skin color, eye color, place of birth.
Stereotyping someone by something that they did choose may be very useful for making inference about them, because it is a revealed preference: clothing tastes, food preferences, etc.
Maybe that grizzly bear is nice but I'm not going to try and pet it to find out because the stereotype is that it will rip me to shreds
Saying market analysis is nothing new is similar to the argument that police examining phone records is nothing new, therefore mass collection of metadata is not a problem. The changes in technology make the analysis associated with marketing far more powerful - with orders of magnitude more targets, more data, and more analysis applied to each individual - to the point where there is a risk to society of mass privacy violations and mass manipulation.
And when this risk is applied to the political sphere, it becomes much more consequential. As the the Cambridge Analytica whistle-blower Christopher Wylie was quoted in the article, it was used by "Steve Bannon [to] build his insurgency and build the alt-right". Do we want this power, and the people who control it, to control our countries and societies? Probably people buying LL Bean jackets didn't know it would be used in an attempt to manipulate them.
I'm not dismissing the fact that big questions remain: How effective is the manipulation (the biggest question in IT, IMO), and what makes some manipulation dangerous and some just regular persuasion? But these are very serious problems that might undermine things as fundamental as liberty and democracy.
For example, if you wake up every day and see the sun rise, it’s safe to assume that it will always rise. But, without understanding the forces that cause the sun to rise (and the forces that cause those forces), you can’t really be sure. And, even then, an unaccounted and unknown force can come along and break the model (see: the black swan problem).
Induction is unavoidable and very important, but it also the root of many logical errors. In social science, there are so many unknown forces at work, theories are very fragile.
The game theory but is that if some stereotypr, they will come out ahead in the short term.
If all stereotype then everyone loses due to the stereotype killing off any that buck the stereotype. That is, the stereotype forces its own truth, which may be bad by killing diversity and adaptation.
Obviously allowing some to do it to get ahead in the short term will inevitably lead to everyone doing it, that’s why we should discourage all from doing it.
Of course, if what you're selling is a look and not useful for anything else, this is a good way to market, but if your product is useful, you can do better.
It's also important to add that CA's techniques didn't work.
A statistical model is not an oversimplification.
You're right that it a human equivalent, but most people form their models from statistical samples that are woefully small, biased, and fail to control for other factors... and worse still, stereotypes aren't actually informed by their own observations, but mere hearsay.
"...despite articles still featured on its website touting the role psychographic techniques played in Trump’s campaign, the statement added, “We have always stated on the record that Cambridge Analytica did not have the opportunity to dive deeply into our psychographic offering because we simply did not have the time...."
In short, this Mr. Wylie is hyping up the efficacy of the techniques he developed so he can get paid to speak at conferences like the one he did here and extend his 15 minutes of fame. There would be nothing wrong with his being paid to speak at conferences if his techniques had been used in the event that made him famous, however that is not the case here.
[1] https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/3/23/17152564/ca...
[2] https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/20/17138854/cambridge-analyt...
[3] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/kendalltaggart/the-trut...
Products have a market fit, and those markets are typically segmented by stereotypes. Nothing nefarious here.
Edit: though his technique seems less impressive now. It was definitely effective and stretched ad dollars further. Which is targeting companies value add to begin with. So not sure what the complaint is. Perhaps it didn't alone swing the election it's still a variable. Similar to aviation accidents, it's typically never one big thing it's several small contributing factors. Here too this was one small thing, another is disenfranchised middle/lower class, list goes on.
The evidence seems to indicate that not only is the technique not effective, but that it wasn't actually used in the campaign. More than one article, in traditionally liberal publications that would normally be on his side, refers to Mr. Wylie's techniques as "snake oil".
Also remember that we only know about Cambridge Analytica because Mr. Wylie announced to the world that he had created "Steve Bannon’s psychological warfare mindfuck tool". That is a grandiose statement if I've ever heard one. His career since his announcement seems to have consisted of going around and being paid to talk about his claims. So we have one guy, who stands to benefit from such claims, saying all of this in the face of a mountain of evidence from credible news sources that shows that his techniques didn't work and weren't used. It's fair to say that his claims are suspect at best, which makes the idea that CA had any effect on the outcome of the election highly suspect as well.
https://mobile.twitter.com/Nealb2010/status/1059068463933743...
The point about these campaign structures isn't that they're generically effective. In fact they don't need to be generically effective.
They just need to be able to swing a vote by a few percent to define the outcome.
In the 2017 UK election, the Tory majority - such as it was - only survived because of a couple of marginals returned majorities of tens or hundreds.
The adversarial zero-sum nature of representative democracy amplifies those tiny voter preferences into a monolithic national mandate which does not in fact exist.
This how CA's snake oil works. Where a vote is close and uncertain, it only needs to alter the voting intent of an absolutely tiny percentage of voters. That turns out to be almost trivially easy to do.
Mr. Wylie is a programmer that violated confidentiality agreements with his employer to try to gain notoriety and presumably raise his income. That will make him difficult to employ ever again in any traditional setting, even among those that are sympathetic to his political beliefs. He seems to believe, or at least wants others to believe, that he is today’s Edward Snowden - even though the two couldn’t be more different. I don’t know how well his monetization efforts are working out, but based on the fact that he is now making clickbait-type public statements that can be easily debunked to get media coverage, it seems that it may not have worked out as he planned.