Thursday, March 29, 2018

All the Available Means of Persuasion


About 2,500 years ago the ancient Greek teacher Aristotle taught his students how to communicate persuasively by identifying and deploying all the available means of persuasion.

Of course, Aristotle felt that persuasion ought to be ethical and therefore rejected as "sophistry" communication that disregarded moral codes.

Today, big data is deployed by advertisers to manage public opinion and win elections. The concern with ethics seems to have been dropped:
Sam Schechner, Jenny Gross, and Rebecca Ballhaus (2018, March 29). Firms’ profiling of voters didn’t’ work, clients say. The Wall Street Journal, p. A9
[Cambridge Analytica (CA) CEO Alexander Nix’s] sales pitch boiled down to two essential claims. First, he said CA has developed a way to use publicly available data –on demographics, purchases, voting history- to predict an individual’s personality traits. Second, Mr. Nix has said CA can make ads more effective by tweaking them to appeal to specific personality types – delivering an emotional ad, for instance, to someone disposed to resonate with that approach.

Mr Nix was quoted as saying at a talk on marketing that “We can use ‘big data’ to understand exactly what messages each specific group within a target audience need to hear”. . . .

4 comments:

  1. Cambride analyrica was also busted for blackmailing politiciana. Cambridge analytica targeted america with hateful bigotry. With hateful lies. With murderous talk, of repressing killing people of color and racism. The owner used money he got, from getting the brutal kakiocracy in power,to further rig the market and enrich itself, while ruining everything and everything else. They are mining uranium in tbe grand canyon, preparing for war, helping saudis build reactors,waging war. More unlimited money for antidemocracy. More purging of voter roles.more gerrymandering, more electronic vote flipping, more blocking of people of color to get to precincts.Not simple advertising .

    Intellectalization can be a form of propaganda.

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  2. Trump signs resolution to allow dumping of mining waste into waterways

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/videonational/president-trump-signs-resolution-to-permit-mining-waste-dumping-in-waterways/2017/02/21/cde426aa-f84b-11e6-aa1e-5f735ee31334_video.html?utm_term=.24020de34e62

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  3. In the following recent video is presented the sort of information which never gets into MSM because it leans in the wrong direction. It contradicts what we are supposed to believe. "Big Ocean Temperature Swings, Weather, Earthquakes and More GSM News" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ocCEK9CtjbQ
    This should be discussed on Science Friday at NPR. We live in societies where only a few people have access to real news; everyone else gets propaganda. This is similar to society when only the few could read. That phenomenon has recreated itself in a new form. You might think that people with high IQ's would at least catch on but that is not the case generally. It takes some other special attribute that alerts a person to the fact that what they are reading or hearing is not true and that they must search elsewhere. Supposedly education would turn on this ability and it might; but it might do just the opposite depending on the source of the education.

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