The Ghosts of Cambridge

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From The Los Angeles Review of Books:

IN THE 1960s, the Simulmatics Corporation sold a big idea: whirling IBM computers (the kind James Bond villains had) churning through your personal data in order to predict and influence your decision-making.

Simulmatics did several rather consequential things. It helped propel JFK to the presidency. It modernized the New York Times’s election reporting. It modeled the social effects of pandemics for the Department of Health. It launched a boardgame called Ghetto for teaching high school students about social advancement. It advised state police forces on predicting riots. It helped blue-chip companies sell more dog food, coffee, and cigarettes. And it developed the US Army’s counterinsurgency operations in Vietnam.

But then the company flopped and disappeared. You’ve never heard of Simulmatics. The name sounds like an awful line of protein milkshakes, or a one-room cryogenics firm hidden away in a suburban shopping center. Think again.

Jill Lepore, the award-winning Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer, retraces its incredible rise and fall in If ThenHow the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future. She tells the story of how data science went digital in the Cold War, turning research in behavioral psychology into big business. If Then reads as a kind of prehistory to Cambridge Analytica, the private consultancy that imploded in 2018 after revelations of its dubious use of Facebook data to elect Trump and win Brexit. Exhuming Simulmatics from the dustbin of history also recasts our own strange moment as a mystery story: Why did the company that “invented the future” fail? And why did we forget it ever existed?

. . . .

Simulmatics’s first project in 1960 was the People Machine, a system for converting demographic data into voter prediction for John F. Kennedy’s surprisingly close election against Nixon. Pool christened the People Machine a “kind of Manhattan Project gamble in politics.” He lured prestigious colleagues by offering them bigger salaries and, even more alluringly, with the promise of significantly upscaling their experiments beyond the lab. In an unguarded moment, Pool would excitedly exclaim to historian Fritz Stern that the Vietnam War “is the greatest social science laboratory we have ever had!”

The Manhattan Project imagery stuck. Harold Lasswell, doyen of communications theory, called the People Machine the “A-bomb of the social sciences” (he meant it positively), as did writer Mary McCarthy (she didn’t). Of the behaviorists’ increasing role in government policy, McCarthy presciently wondered: “[C]onceivably you can outlaw the Bomb, but what about the Brain?”

Link to the rest at The Los Angeles Review of Books

2 thoughts on “The Ghosts of Cambridge”

  1. Based on the list of “successes”, I think I’ll avoid this book – and stay skeptical about “big data”.

    Just to mention a few,
    There’s a very good probability that fraud was more important to JFK’s win than data science.
    The counterinsurgency tactics in Vietnam were a failure.
    If its pandemic modeling was anything like current modeling, it was a failure too.

  2. The biggest problem is that Simulmatics was busy reinventing the wheel without access to any of the lessons the prior inventors had learned… because they were then classified, and only declassified in the most broad outlines in the 1970s (in response to David Kahn’s The Codebreakers (1967), a book simultaneously worshipped and cursed throughout the intelligence community). Most of what Simulmatics “did” was anticipated ambitiously in the early and mid 1940s; they just didn’t have the Big Iron to make it work.

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