Politicians, Polling, Google, Being Too Smart Or Sympathetic

Continuing my annual round-up of news you may not have seen … about
politicians, polling and Google, and being smart and/or sympathetic.

Have you ever wanted to know when politicians were telling the truth?  Fiona Zublin has proposed that
politicians be required to have on some wearable technology that will
continually assess their performance.  As she puts it: “We should be
spying on our leaders instead of them spying on us.”

Part of
what drives a request like that is the feeling that politicians seem to
be increasingly out of touch with the public.  Yet, one of the
complaints about politicians is that they are too dependent on polls to
determine what they’ll say and do.  Perhaps this contradiction can be
explained by the weakness of the polls they depend on.  

In the June issue of Campaigns and Elections magazine, Adam Schaeffer poses the question: “Is it time to pull the plug on traditional polling?
 He touches on just one of the ways that polls are not working, which
is their inaccurate predictions about who will actually vote.

And
if you think polling is off the mark, at least you can count on the value of
the actual election results.  But those
too can be easily influenced.  It’s been
known for quite some time that the order of names on the ballots has an effect –
perhaps a few percent – on how many votes go to each candidate.  With people looking for information about
their candidates online, we now have the situation where WIRED writes that Google’s Search
Algorithm Could Steal the Presidency
”. 

Robert
Epstein, a psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and
Technology who did the study of the effects of Google’s search algorithm provided
more detail in his article, “How Google Could Rig the 2016 Election: Google has
the ability to drive millions of votes to a candidate with no one the wiser” last
week in Politico:

“Google’s search algorithm can easily shift the voting
preferences of undecided voters by 20 percent or more—up to 80 percent in some
demographic groups—with virtually no one knowing they are being manipulated,
according to experiments I conducted recently with Ronald E. Robertson…

“Given that many elections are won by small margins, this
gives Google the power, right now, to flip upwards of 25 percent of the
national elections worldwide…

“What we call in our research the Search Engine Manipulation
Effect (SEME) turns out to be one of the largest behavioral effects ever discovered…

“Because SEME is virtually invisible as a form of social
influence, because the effect is so large and because there are currently no
specific regulations anywhere in the world that would prevent Google from using
and abusing this technique, we believe SEME is a serious threat to the
democratic system of government.”

With all the talk these days
about “smart” this and “smart” that, even “smart” politicians, it’s
worth reading James Hamblin’s piece, “100 Percent Is Overrated: People
labeled smart at a young age don’t deal well with being wrong. Life
grows stagnant.”  

Being focused on academic perfection all
the time may be overrated, but some experts see the need to train
children in social skills.  A summary of this argument can be found in a
NY Times article last month, “Teaching Social Skills to Improve Grades and Lives”.  

If many people grow up without social skills, then people may turn to other means, as the Times reported earlier this month, “For Sympathetic Ear, More Chinese Turn to Smartphone Program”.  

“She
is known as Xiaoice, and millions of young Chinese pick up their
smartphones every day to exchange messages with her, drawn to her
knowing sense of humor and listening skills. People often turn to her
when they have a broken heart, have lost a job or have been feeling
down. They often tell her, I love you.”

Perhaps
this also reflects a lack of social skills and empathy on the part of
Chinese political leaders as well.  I wonder if they’re also using bad
polling 😉

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© 2015 Norman Jacknis, All Rights Reserved
[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/127477650286/politicians-polling-google-being-too-smart-or]

Where’s Your Mind-Time Spent?

A few years ago, when my son was a high school teenager, he was totally absorbed in online multi-player games.  One day, I heard him talking to his friends during the game (using a form of voice over IP, like Skype).  So thinking these might be high school buddies, I asked who he was talking to.  He said there was one boy from Korea, another from Mexico and a fourth from Russia.

As I told the chief elected executive of our county at the time, my son’s body was there all day long, but his mind was spending lots of time outside of the county (even the country).  

This phenomenon is not limited to teenage boys.   People of all ages are generally more attentive to life online than they have ever been before.  In the US alone, three quarters of the people use social media

Think about where you spend your “mind-time”.

Not the old philosophical debate about a mind-body problem, but a new digital age version has emerged: a new kind of problem where body and mind are in different places.

Moreover, we are actually in the early days of the Internet because our communications with each other generally are not visual.  Without conversational videoconferencing, a major means of communicating fully and building trust is absent from online communities.  We’ll really see the impact when those visual tools are more widely used.

This situation poses an increasing challenge for public officials.  

With their attention focused in all kinds of places around the globe, people are virtually living in multiple jurisdictions.  To which jurisdiction does that person have primary loyalty or interest in? Could they be good citizens of more than jurisdiction? In any case, if their attention is divided, doesn’t that have an impact?  What if they just don’t care about local officials and their government?

Some cynical political advisers might well like a situation that reduces citizen attention and engagement since it makes the outcome of elections and lawmaking more predictable.  But smarter elected officials realize that eventually a lack of public engagement stands in the way of getting things done.  In other countries, lack of engagement, knowledge and trust for the government has led to failure to pay taxes or even physically leaving a jurisdiction forever.

Over the last few decades we’ve seen an erosion of trust in this country as well as the Pew Studies, among others, have shown.

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Some people attribute the lower trust to the time people spend online, which they view as another form of Bowling Alone, as Professor Robert Putnam titled his most famous book.  If anything, the causality may be the reverse – it might be the case that people seek to be engaged in online communities because their physical communities are no longer as inviting to them as a result of the overall decrease in social capital that Putnam portrayed.  But that’s a separate story.

Although this may strike many public officials as something new, the study of virtual communities and their implications go back at least as far as Howard Rheingold’s seminal book on the subject in 1993.  

Much of the research that has been done so far would indicate that online communities and physical communities have many characteristics in common – both positive and negative.  

Size is a good example.  Does a person have a greater sense of belonging to an online community of a few hundred or a physical, offline city of a million?

Unfortunately, there hasn’t been much research or data collection about where people are spending their mind-time and what its implications are, especially for government.  For that reason, the Algorithmic Citizenship measure is interesting to follow. 

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Please let me know if you’re aware of other attempts.  And I’ll keep track of the work of the Citizen Ex project.

© 2015 Norman Jacknis

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/123550014654/wheres-your-mind-time-spent]

Fantasy Politics

Fantasy Politics