Bias: A parallel between predictive modeling and life.

A year ago, during the holidays, my family and friends discussed, debated, and questioned things they’d seen in The Social Dilemma (which came out in fall of 2020). I get asked a lot of questions about tracking and targeting because of my job, and the Netflix documentary sparked a lot of that. (For anyone who found this interesting or walked away with more questions than answers, I recommend The Great Hack as a follow up. This sparks the deeper conversations about politics, “echo chambers” and self-introduced bias that occurs within social networks, and often mirrors the same experiences in life.)

Fast forward to a week ago, as I was celebrating the holidays at home with my family. My grandma went on and on about a tree that will fluff itself if you flip it, then vitamins for her memory that she wasn’t sure she needed just yet. She seemed confused when I hadn’t heard of either product- I explained she saw those ads and I didn’t because of targeting and the difference in our geography, ages, preferences, and the content we consume. 

The result? Confusion and disbelief. Even though we had these conversations just a year earlier, people forget. We all forget. We easily settle back into our routines, in the comfort of our newsfeed where we all complain about *mostly* the same things. What we forget, is we’ve built this house and the voices that live inside it. It’s easy to block, mute, unfollow- narrowing the scope of voices we listen to.

So why do we allow bias to be introduced into our lives so easily?

If you’ve ever studied or leveraged statistics, you know bias can be introduced by exclusion OR inclusion of the wrong variables. Too much of the same introduces collinearity, not enough explained variance and you may have an angry stakeholder OR exclusion bias, giving too much credit to the wrong thing(s).

It would be nice to think your marketing dollars drove 300% growth, but if you forgot to include variables that capture inflation, weather, major social changes, promotions, etc. you aren’t doing yourself any favors. You may see a bigger budget next year, but you won’t improve at the same rate- and eventually, you’ll find out the hard way.

It would be nice to think we all agree on social issues, politics, business, etc…. because people don’t want to be alone, they want the protection and comfort of the herd.

But we don’t all agree, we don’t think the same. Thinking differently is what drives growth, innovation, science. As a marketer who believes in the alignment of values and needs, I don’t want to trick people. I will continue to explain technology to those who want to learn, are confused, or are being taken advantage of. 

In a world of homoscedasticity, be heteroscedastic.

In 2022, let’s be better marketers, better people, challenges ourselves with discomfort, and help those who ask.