Nick Beauchamp, an assistant professor in Northeastern’s department of political science, decided to analyze political arguments, sentence by sentence:
First, he needed to pick an issue. He settled on Obamacare because, he says, it’s an issue on which many Americans still have fluid opinions. He then skimmed 2,000 sentences from a pro-Obamacare website called ObamaCareFacts.com and fed it to a machine learning model. The system grouped the 2,000 sentences into individual topics, such as sentences related to costs or health care exchanges — and began mixing and matching.
After the machines took a swing at political discourse, Beauchamp turned to the human brains on Mechanical Turk, Amazon’s online community for crowdsourcing tasks. Using the formulations developed by the model, Beauchamp sent hundreds of Turkers in the United States various combinations of sentences, then asked them, on a scale of 1 to 9, whether they strongly approve or strongly disapprove of Obamacare. Based on their answers, the system would go back to the topic pools to find more and more favorable sentence combinations and send them out to a new group of Turkers.
“The goal is: Can you combine better and better collections of sentences such that after people read them they’re more disposed toward Obamacare?” Beauchamp says.
Within an hour-and-a-half, Beauchamp was left with a collection of text that had a 30 percent higher approval rating than the original text. He discovered that sentences about pre-existing conditions and employer-employee relationships tended to be viewed most favorably, while sentences about legal rights and state and federal rights were viewed least favorably.
The conclusion:
“Democracy has this inherent problem where if you do it right, you’re perfectly pandering to the audience,” he says. “We’re all worried by that, but we also, at the same time, all believe in democracy.”
If we’re more aware of how easily we can be manipulated, perhaps we’ll be more willing to question those who are trying to manipulate us.
Maybe we shouldn’t all believe in democracy?
Wonder if Nick read Hertling’s Avogadro Corp….