Mindf*ck
Mindf*ck goes deep inside Cambridge Analytica’s “American operations,” which were driven by Steve Bannon’s vision to remake America and fueled by mysterious billionaire Robert Mercer’s money, as it weaponized and wielded the massive store of data it had harvested on individuals—in excess of 87 million—to disunite the United States and set Americans against each other. Bannon had long sensed that deep within America’s soul lurked an explosive tension. Cambridge Analytica had the data to prove it, and in 2016 Bannon had a presidential campaign to use as his proving ground. Christopher Wylie might have seemed an unlikely figure to be at the center of such an operation. Canadian and liberal in his politics, he was only twenty-four when he got a job with a London firm that worked with the U.K. Ministry of Defense and was charged putatively with helping to build a team of data scientists to create new tools to identify and combat radical extremism online. In short order, those same military tools were turned to political purposes, and Cambridge Analytica was born. Wylie’s decision to become a whistleblower prompted the largest data-crime investigation in history. His story is both exposé and dire warning about a sudden problem born of very new and powerful capabilities. It has not only laid bare the profound vulnerabilities—and profound carelessness—in the enormous companies that drive the attention economy, it has also exposed the profound vulnerabilities of democracy itself.
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What Hacker News says
- Did you read Mindf*ck? Fascinating book. I'd be so so angry about Brexit after reading it if I'd been affected.
- Fiction
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Termination Shock - Neal Stephenson
Station Eleven - Emily St. John Mandel
Shards of Earth - Adrian Tchaikovsky
Project Hail Mary - Andy Weir
Gnomon - Nick Harkaway
The Gone Away World - Nick Harkaway
The Apollo Murders - Chris Hadfield
Nonfiction
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Mindf*ck - Chris Wylie
1776 - David McCullough
Apollo 8 - Jeffrey Kluger
- Another excellent review of the book
"Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America
by Christopher Wylie is at Goodreads:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52269471-mindf-ck
Once there, find the review by "J."* You'll have to scroll down to find it under "Community Reviews" (the text being unsearchable).
- Thiel funded Trump early in his first presidential bid: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/nov/11/peter-thi...
His company Palantir also threw one of their employee's under the bus, when it was published that this employee helped Cambridge Analytica with database development work. The work was to sort and query there psychometric data (harvested from Facebook) for people who scored high on a personality trait for neuroticism. These people are often highly addictive, and easy to influence with basic memetic warfare. Twitter, Facebook and Reddit are highly susceptible to influence operations of this type, and were the target of the Trump campaign. Christopher Wylie's book: Mindf%ck, is a great read on this.
After the election, Trump appointed Thiel to his presidential intelligence advisory board as quid pro quo for his campaign funding, furthering his access to secrets.
- I interviewed with them way back in 2006, but regrettably did not get the job. I was also interviewing with a lot of other banks and hedge funds at the time but these guys really stood out. I was impressed just how friendly and seemingly happy everyone was. It felt more like a university research lab than a trading firm. Everyone had their own private office and they ate lunch together at the cafeteria. One guy told me with eyes wide open: "If you get this job you'll never want to leave".
Interview questions were standard fare, the usual brain teasers; one guy was really obsessed with calculating covariance matrices. They had a wood-panelled library with all the scientific journals where I spent the time between interviews. The gentleman who was guiding me through the interview process told me how their brokers were constantly front-running their trades so a big issue for them was keeping their market impact minimal.
During the interview I offered some potential ideas for alpha: having done some research on these guys before the interview I knew they had experts on voice recognition so I suggested they could put a microphone in the trading floor and gauge sentiment via spectral analysis. They really liked the idea. Trading floors no longer exist so this alpha is long gone, if it ever worked at all!
But alas - their alpha is simply skill and hard work - there are no shenanigans or insider trading going on there. It's just time-series regression done perfectly. I bet at the time they were not using anything fancier than linear regression. But considering how large their data team was they probably had access to datasets (even today) which give them tremendous edge. Data is oil in this field.
The book "MindF*ck" [0] briefly describes a project within RenTec to build a statistical behavioural model of every individual citizen the USA, fed by enormous public and private databases. From this behaviour they could anticipate consumer patterns which could predict the markets way ahead of anyone else. The insane level of ambition in these projects gives you a clue as to the level of technology they potentially might have.
- In "Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America" Christopher Wylie described how Cambridge Analytica (CA) did the same thing on a large scale.
CA was active in both the Brexit campaign and the American presidential campaign. They set up fake websites, interviews, social media posts and even fake coffee shop meetings so people could see that they are working with "real" others who shared their beliefs. Astounding!
https://www.amazon.com/Mindf-Cambridge-Analytica-Break-Ameri...
