If Then
by Jill Lepore · first published 2020
7mentions
3recommended by
3HN commenters
2021–2024first – last mentioned
100% recommend
The Simulmatics Corporation, founded in 1959, mined data, targeted voters, accelerated news, manipulated consumers, destabilized politics, and disordered knowledge--decades before Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Cambridge Analytica. Silicon Valley likes to imagine it has no past but the scientists of Simulmatics are the long-dead grandfathers of Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk. Borrowing from psychological warfare, they used computers to predict and direct human behavior, deploying their “People Machine” from New York, Cambridge, and Saigon for clients that included John Kennedy’s presidential cam
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…be. For instance only half of this author's books https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jill_Lepore are considered notable enough to have Wikipedia pages (and notably not the excellent https://www.amazon.com/If-Then-Simulmatics-Corporation-Inven... but maybe that is just my opinion as a computer nerd who works in the public opinion field... If you notice I try not to say things like "most people think that" because…
on “DSLinux – Linux for the Nintendo DS” ↗I literally just finished reading "If Then" by Jill Lepore, which was about Simulmatics, and computational simulation of human behavior. If you haven't read it, you may want to take the time.
on “Simulatrex – the open-source LLM simulation framework” ↗This book https://www.amazon.com/If-Then-Simulmatics-Corporation-Inven... describes the rise and fall of a would-be competitor to RAND that I enjoyed.
on “When RAND made magic in Santa Monica” ↗…satisfied just so stories, telling fellow concern trolls want they want to believe. An actual historian's take on the how polling toppled political parties and begat polarization is Jill Lepore's book "If Then", which details the role of Simulatics. For more context, read Ezra Klein's "Why We Are Polarized"; how academics advocated and then reformers inacted polarization to increase accountability (to voters),…
on “The Polarization Spiral” ↗…Graeber's Debt: The 5000 Years reprogrammed my brain, I've been binging on anarchistic-libertarian and adjacent ideas. Such as The Dawn of Everything by Graeber and Wengrow, everything by Jill Lepore such as If Then and These Truths. Next up is Mine! by Heller and Salzman. I'm slowly chewing thru the podcast The History of Philosophy without Any Gaps. Penance for ignoring this stuff in my youth. Highest recommendation…
on “Ask HN: What Books Do You Recommend Reading for 2022?” ↗Jill Lepore's book "If Then" covers the "why" justifying the early demographic modeling (friends of friends, social networks). Military types wanted to predict revolutions. Political types wanted to target voters. Marketing types…
on “Class action against Oracle’s worldwide surveillance machine” ↗…yielding k=7. -- I've also participated in politics (campaigns). But I have zero idea how our consultants do their profiling and targeting. Closely guarded secrets. I recently read Jill Lepore's book If/Then about the history of Simulatics Corporation and their initial voter behavior modeling efforts and opinion polling. One of my takeaways is that Cambridge Analytica is just the 2016's iteration of the evergreen…
on “How the World Went from Post-Politics to Hyper-Politics” ↗