Name: If Then
ISBN: 9781631496103

If Then

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 campaign, the New York Times, Young & Rubicam, and, during the Vietnam War, the Department of Defense. Jill Lepore, distinguished Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer, unearthed from the archives the almost unbelievable story of this long-vanished corporation, and of the women hidden behind it. In the 1950s and 1960s, Lepore argues, Simulmatics invented the future by building the machine in which the world now finds itself trapped and tormented, algorithm by algorithm.

What Hacker News says

PaulHouleJul 2024

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.

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PaulHouleOct 2023

I think Wikipedia deletionists would love to open up a circle of hell just for video games and related topics because it seems quite hard for a book to be considered notable on Wikipedia but hard for a game not to 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 I don't want to be caught with my facts wrong.) but truly obscure games like

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_of_Princess

seem to not have to fight for notability at all. (Personally I kinda like that one, but I'm a serious weeb and even I'll admit that it is terribly balanced and too grindy)

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sgnelsonOct 2023

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.

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specialistFeb 2022

Just finished (audiobook) Projections by Karl Deisseroth. Each chapter a personal story about a distinct mental disease, using narrative and neuroscience to span the gulf between patient and caregiver. Deisseroth worked on innovative diagnostic techniques like optogenetics. A brilliant, deeply empathic writer. Left me both melancholic and weirdly optimistic.

https://www.amazon.com/Projections-Story-Emotions-Karl-Deiss...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optogenetics

After David 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 for the podcasts Know Your Enemy, Volts (David Roberts), 5-4 (fivefourpod.com), You're Wrong About, Capitalisn't, Corecursive. Really, there are so many worthy podcasts. These are most notable to me for how much they've influenced and changed my thinking.

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specialistNov 2021

Using polling to identify polarization originally caused by polling. Clever? Or unintentional irony?

I stopped reading when the authors identified Facebook's "like" button as the culprit of accelerated polarization (during Obama's 2nd term).

Um, what?

While I regard Facebook and Twitter as pure unalterated evil, they cannot be held more responsible for today's toxic polarization than corporate media. To believe Haidt's thesis, you'd have to completely ignore the slope of decades of build up.

I've read Haidt's prior works with great interest. Alas, his works amount to nothing more than self 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), how sorting and polarization inadvertently led to a "stacking" of our identities, creating "superidentities".

As for Facebook and Twitter, their unique crime is using ML -- finding the difference that makes the difference -- to weaponize disinformation and profiting from the resulting lies, hate, outrage, and death. Dorsey and Zuck implemented a totality of rot and destruction that Edward Bernay couldn't dare dream of.

PS: "Death" might be too strong. I'm not certain that Zuck directly profitted from genocide or teen suicide. Those might just be collateral damage vs intentional.

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specialistAug 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 wanted consumers.

https://www.amazon.com/If-Then-Simulmatics-Corporation-Inven...

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